Sexualities Before Sex Education: Queer Acts from the Page to the Stage
Recent Netflix drama series, including the highly popular account of American trans lives in Pose and British sexualities in Sex Education have built on the success of Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes first televised by HBO in 1994 and the British and American series Queer as Folk and The L Word in the 1990s and 2000s.
Recent though it may seem, the LGBTQ+ drama, which brought queer words from the page to the stage, does not begin with television series in the 1990s or the 2000s. In 1968 Mart Crowley wrote The Boys in the Band, a moving account of the closeted social life of American gay men. In 1978 British playwright Caryl Phillips’s Cloud Nine parodied sexual-social norms in Victorian England by introducing gay and lesbian sexuality in a conventional British family. And Scottish-Nigerian author, Jackie Kay, has been writing about the lives of black lesbians and trans people since the 1970s well before Kushner’s Angels in America was hailed a bringing pressing concerns such as AIDS and homophobic responses to the epidemic into the national limelight. Later in the decade Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (1999) was based on interviews of Laramie, Wyoming citizens, in the aftermath of the murder of a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, and subsequent trial of his killer.
In this course we will examine queer drama and film (from the US, Britain, India and South Africa) to emphasize how queer drama has played a crucial role in changing the way LGBTQ+ lives have been represented since the 1960s. Our focus will be on a selection of plays, film, and life-narratives in connection with key concerns in LGBTQ+ studies.