On the Normalization of Queer-themed Theatre

HowlRound: As a maker of plays about queer things, I’ve grown increasingly mistrustful of the trend toward homonormativity and sexual assimilation, a trend initiated by the gradual disremembrance of AIDS, and hastened further by the highly politicized pursuit of marriage equality. While the latter should certainly be celebrated as beneficial to those who seek its protections, the exaltation of traditionally heteronormative institutions is unsettling. These institutions are not wrong, but they seem to have propelled us with greater force down the potentially amnesic path that the writer Sarah Schulman ominously refers to as the gentrification of the mind. The erasure of identity, and its replacement by something more acceptably jejune, or in the case of queer theatre, more commercially palatable and “straight-acting.”