Queer Theater, Straight Plays

Catalog description

If, as scholar D.A. Miller argues, musicals are 'a somehow gay genre, the only one that mass culture ever produced,' where does that leave queer plays? This course surveys US queer theater from the early twentieth century to today. We will study how theater, identity, and LGBTQ+ political movements intersect. We will read plays both well-known and obscure to see how queer writers skirted censors through coding and camp before Stonewall, how Gay Liberation made coming out possible in the 1970s, and how HIV/AIDS impacted theater. Queer theater's expansiveness since the 1990s in the age of equality continues to challenge, subvert, and reinforce norms and push boundaries.