THE SILENCE OF THE HETEROSEXUALS

When Shelagh Delaney died last week I was suddenly struck by the recollection of Geoff, the gay art student in Delaney's remarkable play, A Taste of Honey. This memory haunted and disturbed me the more I considered it. And while I was so haunted I went off to see We Were There , a revelatory, new American documentary about the way in which four gay men and one (presumably lesbian) woman in San Francisco tell the story of how they reacted to the devastation, discrimination and death of the AIDS epidemic in that afflicted city before Combination Therapy cut the mortality rate. There is a connection between the two events and it's a vital one.

For anyone watching a revival of A Taste of Honey today there is nothing exceptional about Geoff - after all he is true to one of the gay stereotypes you can encounter in plays anytime between the early 1930s and late 1950s. He comes on dejected, sad to be gay and his lack of traditional masculinity looms large. He's lonesome and unloved too. The play's nastier characters, whom we are invited to despise, malign him as "that queer" "a pansified little streak" and " a bloody little pansy." But Geoff, who gradually forms a sort of loving, asexual relationship with the pregnant Jo who is determined to find out "What you do " and "why you do it", emerges by the close as a fine, altruistic man - the only one determined to look after Jo who has been deserted by her boyfriend after she becomes pregnant.

Until A Taste of Honey was put before him, the Lord Chamberlain, the official of the Royal Household who had to approve every word and physical action of plays performed in public theatres, always banned homosexual characters and discussion of homosexuality from the stage. Playwrights had to smuggle gay characters into their dramas. They resorted to code-words, hints, innuendos and signs to signal that a character was gay. If a stage direction said a man was sensitive, musical, well-dressed, aesthetic, nervous, highly-strung or even slim - the play director would jump to the right conclusion, though neither the text nor the character would be allowed to allude to the taboo fact of gayness.

Delaney, at a time when the once unspoken subject of homosexuality had been pitched into the limelight (thanks to a huge rise in prosecutions for the then illegal acts) was the first playwright allowed to put an openly gay character on stage. The Lord Chamberlain's staff quarrelled among themselves over whether the play was filth or serious. The Chief Examiner thought Delaney dealt tactfully with the forbidden subject. Just a few months after her memorable Taste of Honey had gone down a treat with the critics and public alike the Chamberlain announced he would partially relax his ban on gay characters in plays.

In his seminal book 1956 and All That, the young academic Dan Rebellato betrays his ignorance of what gay life used to be like by describing Geoff as "a very strange homosexual" . Why so? Well the student seemed interested in starting a relationship with Jo and was "cut off from the queer community". He betrays a quaint belief that in the late 1950s every town and village boasted such outposts of gay relief. In fact there were plenty of sweet, generous, displaced, effeminate young men feeling lonely and cut-off. They were not all happy, drag queens with a killing quip at the ready and a proud flounce about town. The heterosexual Delaney put a forbidden truth on stage.

Delaney's sexuality is crucial and atypical. Looking back at the British plays over the last ninety five years that have given us impressions of the changing face of gay life - from ordinary persecution to the witch-hunts of the 1950s and the hysteria and terrible back-lash visited upon men with HIV in the 1980s - you will find that all of them, with a few notable exceptions, are written by homosexuals and lesbians. Nothing strange about that you may think. Why bother about the long silence of the heterosexual playwrights in the context of queers? Why should the heteros be concerned about the problems of people who have nothing to do with them? It's certainly an attitude which has long been officially respectable.

Arthur Miller's greatest play The Crucible shapes a fine analogy between the witch-craft accusers of bygone America and the McCarthyite 1950s. He himself, after all, was caught up in the accusatory experience. The fact that McCarthy gave his name to a witch-hunt which was in fact principally directed against not suspected reds but thousands of gay men and lesbians in the public service was of course of no significance to him. And when he finally raised the forbidden subject in his play A View from the Bridge it was with the depiction of a mocking kiss planted on the lips of a young man wrongly suspected of being queer.

I don't impugn Miller for the nature of his concerns as they manifested themselves in two memorable plays. What is interesting, though, is that his stance is characteristic of several generations of straight, Anglo-American playwrights who never thought that the persecution and stigmatisation of gays and lesbians involved civil rights issues too important to be left just to interested queer and lesbian dramatists. So where were they when they were needed in those years? Did a single heterosexual playwright argue that the gay witch hunts of the 1950s, whose victims were primarily working class, were inhumane? Certainly not.

Why, I wonder, did they not bother to make gays and lesbians seem ordinary, almost normal you might say? Why were we not made to seem less than menacing and more likeable by introducing the likes of us into their plays? How many gays and lesbians make the smallest appearance in Ayckbourn country? It was left to the soap operas and superior American series to do this humane work.

The thought provoked by We Were Here is this. During the horrors of the AIDS first phase, when many actors were doing terrific, charitable work to raise money for the victims of the epidemic who were outcast and cut off from their families and friends, how did hetero playwrights respond? They didn't. We were not relevant. The same conviction still holds true. Gay and lesbian playwrights do not write just about their world, but which straight British dramatist would want to take on a gay theme? Yes the glorious odd one might: I think of Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, but few more. David Hare's South Downs, the one-act piece he wrote to play with Terence Rattigan's The Browning Version at Chichester Festival Theatre, depicts a teenage public school boy, an unhappy outsider who mightily dislikes himself and is himself disliked. In those far-off times such teenagers were most usually queer or believed they were. Hare's character just happens to be not quite the right class. For him I would deduce gayness today poses no interesting or significant issues and he is typical of the male, liberal playwrights of his generation. Meanwhile in the Muslim world to be queer can be a death-sentence. But that of course is strictly a subject off bounds to hetero dramatists.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of OffWestEnd.com.

BRING ON THE BANKERS >> November 1st 2011