#1
Posted: 12/17/06 at 2:26am
The New York Times
December 17, 2006
Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.
Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)
The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.
In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”
At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.
Read on...
Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
December 17, 2006
Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.
Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)
The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.
In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”
At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.
Read on...
Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
"Winning a Tony this year is like winning Best Attendance in third grade: no one will care but the winner and their mom."
-Kad
"I have also met him in person, and I find him to be quite funny actually. Arrogant and often misinformed, but still funny."
-bjh2114 (on Michael Riedel)
-Kad
"I have also met him in person, and I find him to be quite funny actually. Arrogant and often misinformed, but still funny."
-bjh2114 (on Michael Riedel)
