DRAMA QUEENS: PART 5: 18TH & 19TH CENTURY GAY THEATRE

June 15, 2011

David McGillivray’s new history series continues this week…

CUT THAT OUT!

By the 18th century, theatre in England had become so popular that it had to be controlled. The Licensing Act of 1737 required every play script to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for censorship. ‘For over 200 years’, writes critic Irving Wardle, ‘censorship effectively stifled all sexual, religious and political debate on the English stage.’ Nevertheless the theatre remained a magnet for gay men and just about managed to reflect London’s growing gay subculture. 17th century gay actor James Nokes, who played female roles and also ran a toyshop popular with ‘mollies’, ‘may be the first identifiable example of a queer actor making a career of stage drag’, claims Laurence Senelick. Historians Mander and Mitcheson propose that the word ‘camp’ may ultimately derive from the character Tom Campley, who not only drags up but becomes very camp in Richard Steele’s The Funeral (1701). Great actor David Garrick (1717-79) liked foppery and drag so much that he was mocked for his lack of manliness. William Kenrick’s 1772 poem Love in the Suds satirised Garrick’s relationship with playwright Isaac Bickerstaffe, who had to flee to France after allegations of guardsman sex. How did the general audience react to all this effeminacy and cross-dressing? Senelick again: ‘Few Englishmen identified everyday homoeroticism and any ensuing acts as the crime of sodomy…therefore a kind of tolerance, arising from wilful ignorance, prevailed.’ Then as now, theatregoers were also much more broadminded than the general public. Carl Miller tells us that by 1783 the boxes at Drury Lane were ‘a nest for prostitutes of both sexes.’

Effeminacy has also been cited as the cause of New York’s worst theatre riot.

AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES!

Throughout the 19th century, effeminacy was swept under the carpet. But cross-dressing became a stage cult, not only in England, but throughout Europe. (In Germany a female impersonator was a Damenimitator). The traditions of English pantomime, which have been traced back to 1807, seem to have developed because straight men liked to see actresses in ‘breeches parts’, which revealed the women’s ankles; while actresses didn’t like to play old women, and so men took these roles. As with ‘camp’, we can’t be sure about the derivation of the word ‘drag.’ But it was well-known gay slang by the 1870s, when it turned up in the love letters of transvestites Boulton and Park. Drag went legit with Brandon Thomas’ 1892 farce, Charley’s Aunt, still performed all over the world.

Effeminacy has also been cited as the cause of New York’s worst theatre riot. British actor William Macready had appeared in the US since 1826, but his style was popular mainly with American society.
The working class regarded him a fop and preferred the more rugged American actor Edwin Forrest. (It later transpired that Forrest had a secret lover, James Oakes). In 1849 Macready’s and Forrest’s supporters clashed outside New York’sAstor Place Opera House. Mounted troops fired into the crowd and 22 people were killed.

It now seems likely that two of the most popular playwrights of the late 19th century had a torrid gay affair. Clyde Fitch (1865-1909) was a prolific American writer who churned out around sixty plays in less than twenty years. In 1889 he came to London determined to have sex with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Judging by Fitch’s passionate love letters, he succeeded. This is how Neil McKenna interprets Fitch’s final communication with Wilde: ‘Oscar has penetrated Clyde, emotionally and physically; and he bears the ‘strangely shaped wound’ inflicted by Oscar’s anal penetration.’

In 1891 the first attempt was made to circumvent the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had banned Ibsen’s Ghosts. The Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, Soho, became a members only club in order to premiere the play; and this legal loophole was used many times over the next seventy years in order to present everything from great drama to striptease. 19th century gay plays to use the ruse include John Todhunter’s The Black Cat (1893), featuring the Wildean aesthete Cyril Vane; and The Blackmailers (1894) in which there’s something gay going on between a blackmailer and his young protégé. (This play was the work of a gay couple, Marc-André Raffalovich and John Gray, both from Wilde’s circle). Born at the turn of the 20th century, Noël Coward was destined to be passed around the remains of Wilde’s coterie before becoming the next major gay playwright.

GREAT GAY PLANS

Spring Awakening (1891)

From now onwards this series concentrates on English-speaking theatre. But German writer Frank Wedekind’s play, about sexually adventurous children, is just one example of drama from the rest of Europe that was more explicit about gay issues. Two of the boys, Hansy and Ernst, realise they’re gay. The play didn’t reach London until 1963. The 2006 musical won awards in New York and London.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Wilde’s most popular play, still regarded as one of the world’s finest comedies, is also thought by some to be his gayest. Although there are no overtly gay characters, the dialogue is said to be full of code words, e.g. ‘Bunbury’, the name of a non-existent invalid whom Algernon pretends to visit. Such theories are disputed. But there remains the central theme of deception; and this now seems to mirror Wilde’s double life.