Yes We Are. But No We’re Not
This came across my Facebook stream just now, by way of Craig Kennedy in the Gay New York 1970s and 80s page, accompanied by a photo of Richard Gere in Martin Sherman’s play Bent…
I went with my bf shortly after the opening, end of 1979. From the opening moment when Rudy crosses the stage naked, we knew we were in for a wild ride. (The 2nd act “sex scene” with Max and Horst facing forward motionless 10 feet apart in the Dachau concentration camp is nothing short of brilliant.)
A quote from the playwright:
“The gay world then was somewhat brutalized–it was enormously sexualized,” Sherman recalled. “New York was absolutely wild. People were just [having sex] all over the place, literally. But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. I did not see a society that was progressing. It was extremely commercial; people were making a lot of money out of it. It was in its way not dissimilar, I thought, to what Germany was like in the Weimar era.”
But nobody was actually free; it was all an illusion. The laws were terrible. Yes. At least in the urban enclaves like New York City.
Larry Kramer wrote a novel about that period in NYC, titled Faggots. It got a lot of static but he had a point, distilled down to this one line toward the novel’s end:
The fucking we’re getting is not worth the fucking we’re getting.
You could understand why the freedom to be our sexual selves was so important. The sodomy laws practically defined us as criminals, sexual deviants, that needed to be isolated from the rest of our communities. If many of us fixated on sex it was because that’s what we were told was all that was all there was to us. But there was a necessary element of Yes We Are defiance to it. Progress is made by the unreasonable man. And woman.
It was never just about sex. We needed wholeness. Getting the sodomy laws off our backs was a big fight, but there was still the rest of it. Making that space for our sexual lives was important. But also the space for our love lives. Our whole lives. We couldn’t be neighbors so long as we were criminals. We couldn’t be people so long as we were sodomites.
