Tony Kushner 's A Gay Fantasia

While many will agree that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is critically acclaimed to be one of the most entertaining and well-liked pieces that he has written, there tends to be a discrepancy over how the characters in the play are portrayed when it comes to the importance of gender roles. After reading James C Bulman’s article over the Globe’s more recent performance of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s original written version, I realized that there are many ways that this famous piece has been portrayed and each has its own pros and cons.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a homosexual subculture, uniquely Afro-American in substance, began to take shape in New York’s Harlem. Throughout the so- called Harlem Renaissance period, roughly 1920 to 1935, black lesbians and gay men were meeting each other [on] street corners, socializing in cabarets and rent parties, and worshiping in church on Sundays, creating a language, a social structure, and a complex network of institutions.” Richard Bruce Nugent, who was considered the “perfumed orchid of the New Negro Movement” said, “You did what you wanted to. Nobody was in the closet. There wasn’t any closet.”

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, society wasn’t the most accepting of places for people who were different from the “social norms”. Now I know, people today still struggle with trying to fit in and be “normal” but it was different. Being a gay man living in San Fransisco at the time, which had a large gay population, Richard Rodriguez had a hard time dealing with the discrimination he faced. Richard Rodriguez was an American journalist who wrote and published a memoir about his life as a gay man. In October of 1990, Rodriguez published his memoir “Late Victorians” in Harper’s Magazine, a critically acclaimed publication of the time. In his memoir, Rodriguez describes what it was like to realize he was gay and watch as the country changed to become a more accepting place. He does this by setting up how things can change and then explaining the actual ways things change for the gay population.

Throughout the 1950’s, the United States belonged to the Leave It To Beaver era. Families were structured around a strong, hard working father and a wonderful homemaker mother. Children were brought up with solid ideologies on what society expects from them and were warned about living a different and dangerous life. Only one-year separates Tennessee William’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room from there publishing dates during this decade of unwavering beliefs. These texts were seen as extremely controversial during their time due to their themes of homosexuality. Sexual orientation was an awkward topic during such a “to the book” time period and these texts pushed the limits, making them remarkable and memorable works. Both Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin explore the panic men experience while trying to comprehend what sexual orientation they belong to and highlight the masculine gay man. These texts also examine the woman’s role in the mist of it all.

 In the plays female sexuality is not expressed variously through courtship, pregnancy, childbearing, and remarriage, as it is in the period.  Instead it is narrowly defined and contained by the conventions of Petrarchan love and cuckoldry.  The first idealizes women as a catalyst to male virtue, insisting on their absolute purity.  The second fears and mistrusts them for their

In society the purpose of gender roles is to group people into two opposite categories, men and women. These categories however, encourage toxic masculinity and gender inequality. In movies or books characters tend to fall into one category, when in reality most people don’t fit into just one. Shakespeare explores the idea of conformity and categorization in Macbeth. In Macbeth, the characters conformity to gender roles are the root of all their problems.

“Sex was something mysterious which happened to married couples and Homosexuality was never mentioned; my mother told me my father did not believe it existed at all ‘until he joined the army’. As a child, I was warned about talking to ‘strange men’, without any real idea what this meant. I was left to find out for myself what it was all about.” Mike Newman, who was a child during the 1950s America recalls how homosexuality was perceived during the post-World War II era (F). This sexual oppression was not only in Newman’s household, but in almost everyone’s. While the civil rights movement began in the mid-1950s and ended late 1960s, the LGBT community started to come out of the closet slowly. The gay rights movement stemmed from the civil rights movement

As a general public, it's outlandish for us to investigate our own particular internal certainties without acknowledging in some capacity that our value isn't managed independently from anyone else alone. The ideas of bias and judgment in light of the characters that are the most unpreventable twirled to a head in this period of retribution, race, and sexuality specifically. The way we see underestimated sexuality delineated and potential HIV+ status in Six Degrees mirror the normal experience of the time, feeling as an individual like some piece of you is a creature disguised on display. Despite the fact that we see through, Paul, Trent, and Rich, the narrow-minded way that this world sees homosexuality, being gay are neither denounced nor is it commended specifically by the play itself. It is introduced like everything else in Six Degrees, a subjective and complex reality that requires additionally understanding before falling back on suspicions. Correspondingly, the twofold edged nature of well-meaning bigotry is analyzed. For instance, amid Flan, Ouisa, Paul, and Geoffrey's first destined supper together, the white characters swing to Paul for his feeling on politically-sanctioned racial segregation, as though his thoughts as the token dark individual in their essence will settle the undertaking for the last time. He performs commendably to their wants; his reaction is thoughtful to human rights however not apparently definitive, and doesn't present any specifically disquieting test to the way of life in which Ouisa, Flan, and Geoffrey as of now work. This presence of acknowledgment just through osmosis is an expansive idea for Six

Two Diaries, Donald Vining’s A Gay Diary Vol. Two and Martin Duberman’s Gay in the Fifties look into the everyday life of gay males in the post-World War II Era. While World War II increased freedom for men to sexually explore within the male community, post-World War II extended the freedom of exploration but also created a subsequent backlash against homosexual practices. Vining and Duberman’s diaries document an extension of gay freedoms in the post-World War II period. Although Vining and Duberman give contrasting accounts of their lives as gay males in the postwar period, common themes could be drawn in the form of friendships, sexual activity, relationships, and backlash by heteronormative society.

George Chauncey’s Gay New York Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940, goes where no other historian had gone before, and that is into the world of homosexuality before World War II. Chauncey’s 1994 critically acclaimed book was a gender history breakthrough that gave light to a homosexual subculture in New York City. The author argues against the idea that homosexual men lived hidden away from the world. Chauncey’s book exposes an abundant culture throughout the United States, especially in New York. In this book Chauncey not only shows how the gay population existed, but “uncovers three widespread myths about the history of gay life before the rise of the gay movement which was isolation, invisibility, and internalization.” Chauncey argues against these theories that in the years 1890-1940, America had in fact a large gay culture. Chauncey book is impactful in the uncovering of a lost culture, but also works as an urban pre-World War II history giving an inside view of life in the city through sexuality and class.

Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. (hb). ISBN: 0-226-35471-7.

The AIDS epidemic has become an impacting plague that has expanded across multiple countries as well as communities. As it continues its identity as a gay mans disease, its stigma generates a negative connotation that has appealed to figures who are seen as second class individuals. In the essay “Gay Latino Histories/ Dying to be remembered: AIDS obituaries, public memory and the queer latino archive”, author Horacio Ramirez provides evidence of the difficult challenges that came across homosexual latinos as they died in silence from AIDS. His argument is established through the ideal subject of the queer latinos, as their lives went unrecognizable concerning the AIDS crisis. With the growing

Within modern society when a character strays away from what society depicts as morally right, the individual is frowned upon as if he or she doesn't belong. In “Angels in America” a gay fantasia on National themes, characters struggle to be themselves upon fear of whether or not society will accept them as an individual. The characters not only struggles with whether or not society will accept them, but they also struggle with their inner demons, and ultimately the question of what is truly good or evil. In this paper several characters will be analyzed and discussed from several different viewpoints.

This drama study will argue for the acceptance of homosexuality as a primary theme in Goodnight Desdemona by Ann-Marie MacDonald. The main character, Constance, is a modern woman that is transported through time to play a new character in Romeo and Juliet and Othello. MacDonald allows Constance to become female and male characters, which explore the duality of genders roles, which challenge accepted homophobic assumptions about sexual relations in Shakespearean plays. Constance’s observations about Elizabethan society provide a uniquely accepting view of homosexuality through a modern evaluation of the Constance/Constantine gender role shift. Therefore, Constance provides a validation of homosexuality in the commentary as a method of opposing sexism and homophobia in the original Shakespearean platys. The social construction of supporting gender/homosexual identity will be examined in relation to the modernity of Constance’s influence on Elizabethan characters. In essence, an argument supporting the acceptance of homosexuality will be defined through an analysis of Goodnight Desdemona by Ann-Marie MacDonald.

In his novel The Hours, Michael Cunningham creates a dazzling fabric of queer references managing to intertwine the lives of three different women into one smooth narrative. In this essay, I will discuss what makes The Hours queer literature, how the novel has contributed to the queer genre, the cultural significance of the novel, and I will discuss several points made in Jeanette McVicker’s critical article “Gaps and Absences in The Hours.” My aim, however, is not to say that Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is strictly a queer novel, but to highlight what makes the novel queer and to discuss Cunningham’s idea of sexual orientation as a fluid entity.