When I did my first shows in NYC in ’68 ’69 there was no positive heading of queer anything. It was not a nice description. It stood for something to be hated, taunted or avoided. It was not a secret nickname that me and my friends used or anything like that. And certainly no kind of theater movement. It was theater or a show or just an entertainment. History and writers and critics gave the titles later.
I was a queer doing theater and having come from my hometown and early experience, I was amazed at what was being presented. Not from any sense of being radical but from being at all. I was all of 19 and so, in a sense this ”movement” and I grew up together. I was coming from winning speech tournaments with the wall scene from Midsummer Nights Dream-all the parts. Then I won a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, so coming to NYC in 1967 everything was shiny new, all of it was like presents about to be unwrapped. Some were more revealing than others and some more personal too. Most of us learned about the trade papers and auditioning. I had a friend so he took me around. This was at the time that men stopped wearing white shirts and a tie and girls stopped wearing little hats and gloves. We were telling our teachers all this and they couldn’t relate. Hair came along and it really changed everything. I was out of school by then seeing anything anywhere. I enjoyed the fact that one night you could see something based on Camille with a drag Marguerite Gautier and the next night see a gender-bending fantasy with men in dresses and glittered beards cooing like school-girls over the quarterback. Then the next night watch a Greek tragedy on a fire escape. Or I might appear in a dark fantasy of ‘kill the authority figure’ and leave the audience cringing in fear. The word GAY was creeping into the reviews. I learned what store front theater was and how to set up a show in 10 minutes after the late-night showing was over. It was a lot of Guerrilla Theater, a lot of hit and run. I was brought to the Old Reliable and Theater Genesis Theater For A Lost Continent and La Mama when all of if it was fairly new. Around this time Stonewall happened and GAY was everywhere.
Some of this became famous, some infamous and some forgotten all together. Many off-shoots came and went. Some went quickly, some died a slow death and some remain to this day as vivid memories of a kinder time when everything had potential. Angels of Light, Cocketts, Hot Peaches, School of Gargoyles, Blue Lips, Playhouse of the Ridiculous remain as sweet memories. Others, after all these years, still assault the senses as they did back then. This was my NYC growing up story, my genesis of a movement.
