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Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Todd Barry University of Connecticut - Storrs, [email protected]

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University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 3-24-2016 From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Todd Barry University of Connecticut - Storrs, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Barry, Todd, "From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 1041. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/1041 From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Todd Barry, PhD University of Connecticut, 2016 This dissertation examines how theatre and law have worked together to produce and regulate gay male lives since the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials. I use the term “gay legal theatre” to label an interdisciplinary body of texts and performances that include legal trials and theatrical productions. Since the Wilde trials, gay legal theatre has entrenched conceptions of gay men in transatlantic culture and influenced the laws governing gay lives and same-sex activity. I explore crucial moments in the history of this unique genre: the Wilde trials; the British theatrical productions performed on the cusp of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act; mainstream gay American theatre in the period preceding the Stonewall Riots and during the AIDS crisis; and finally, the contemporary same-sex marriage debate and the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The study shows that gay drama has always been in part a legal drama, and legal trials involving gay and lesbian lives have often been infused with crucial theatrical elements in order to legitimize legal gains for LGBT people. i From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Todd Barry B.A., Princeton University, 2000 J.D., University of Connecticut School of Law, 2006 M.A., University of Connecticut, 2008 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut 2016 ii Copyright by Todd Barry 2016 iii APPROVAL PAGE Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Presented by Todd Barry, B.A., M.A., J.D. Major Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Brenda Murphy Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Margaret S. Breen Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Mary M. Burke University of Connecticut 2016 iv Acknowledgments My advisory committee generously gave their time and expertise throughout this process. The deepest debt of gratitude goes to my major advisor Brenda Murphy, whose patient support and excellent advice have sustained me throughout a decade in graduate school. I’m particularly grateful that she stuck with me even as the years dragged on and the project was delayed. Mary Burke has also been an important mentor for me in graduate school, always providing unique insights and suggesting further connections that could be made in my work. Finally, Margaret Breen has always given immensely helpful feedback and constructive criticism on this project, aiding in crucial conceptualization and teaching me some important principles of scholarly writing. I am deeply grateful to all of them. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895- 2015 1 Chapter 1 Resolving and Transcending the Trauma: Literary Interventions in the Wilde Trials 15 Chapter 2 Re-imagining the Law: Coward, Orton, and 1960s British Gay Legal Theatre 66 Chapter 3 Domestic Spaces in American Gay Legal Theatre: The Boys in the Band and Angels in America 108 Chapter 4 A Case Study: Same- Sex Marriage in the United States 154 Works Cited 217 Barry 1 From Wilde to Obergefell: Gay Legal Theatre, 1895-2015 Introduction Since the trials of Oscar Wilde, how have theatre and law worked together to shape constructions and regulations of gay men? This interdisciplinary study attempts to provide some answers to that central question. As they have emerged over the last several hundred years, sexual minorities have had a substantial relationship with legal and theatrical stages.1 Specifically, the representation of gay male lives has often been through a hybrid genre, legal theatre. Gay legal theatre has a hybrid composition that potentially includes dramatic texts, theatrical performances, and legal texts and trials that involve representations of gay characters. Since at least 1895, dramatizations of gay characters have been inevitably enmeshed in legal regulations or implications; such dramatizations have also potentially shaped laws related to homosexuality and gay lives. Moreover, gay men have been performing in a theatrical history of legal trials that began with seventeenth-century sodomy trials. This multi-faceted, legal-theatrical tradition has evolved and culminated in the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and the United States. On an abstract level, law and theatre perform essential rituals that are collective acts of judgment within a community: punishing criminality; demanding atonement; granting absolution; allowing forgiveness. These are the rituals that bestow or withhold 1 Alan Sinfield claims, “Theatre has been a particular site for the formation of dissident sexual identities” (Out on Stage 1). Barry 2 humanity from individuals and groups. Legally, these rituals can encompass simply written language, such as statutes, a judicial opinion, or a Constitutional Amendment; but legal rituals also rise to the level of performative ceremony in the courtroom, ranging from lawyers arguing motions in front of a judge, to the full-blown theatrical spectacle of a trial performed for a community of spectators. The structure and function of theatre in many ways mirror the rituals of a trial. Theatre also consistently capitalizes on emotions that arise only in a small number of legal trials: imagination, compassion, and empathy. Gay legal theatre consistently presents gay characters and issues in an inextricable and culturally captivating web of legal and theatrical discourse. In The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (2002), Shoshana Felman presents an interdisciplinary study of law and literature that has opened up scholarly possibilities in the field of LGBT dramatic criticism. This dissertation was inspired by Felman’s book because I saw how her approach could be productively applied to gay drama, something she did not specifically address. When Felman interpreted moments in twentieth-century trials as a form of literature, I felt liberated to explore the interdisciplinary paths of this dissertation. Felman’s categorization of what law and literature try respectively to accomplish is also helpful for my purposes in this dissertation. She argues that law, especially significant trials, works to “bridge over” and resolve the “abyss,” as she calls it—irresolvable conflicts and traumas of race, gender, and sexuality—while literature revels in and exploits those conflicts that ultimately have no certain solutions (95). If, according to Felman, law attempts closure and literature exploits indeterminacy, I am claiming that gay drama, because it is often obsessed with and Barry 3 infiltrated by the law, achieves status as a hybrid discourse. It is also queer in its dynamic orientation toward the law: potentially reinforcing, potentially destabilizing. Thus, gay drama has always been a form of legal theatre that can be performed in theaters or courtrooms, but it is never wholly within or outside of legal and theatrical discourse. Even when performed in a theater, these texts function in certain ways as authoritative discourse, especially with regard to delimiting the cultural parameters of sexual minorities. In turn, many of the contemporary trials involving gay and lesbian lives, as I argue in Chapter Four on the same-sex marriage cases, utilize theatricality to compel cultural attention and justify the law’s authority. In this sense, I am exploring a particular genre that circulated most powerfully in the period between the Wilde trials and the contemporary transatlantic legalization of same-sex marriage. Most of my analysis focuses on gay male playwrights and dramatic representations of gay men. The selected texts share important commonalities related to the production, representation, and regulation of mainly gay male lives. LGBT, the contemporary acronym meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, is an admirably inclusive term, and I use variants of the term strategically when I think they can apply, but I try to be as specific as possible in every instance. I undertake a brief reading of a lesbian drama, The Children’s Hour (1934), and in the final chapter my analysis focuses on the gay and lesbian movement for marriage equality in the United States, reading the landmark marriage equality case Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) as a form of gay and lesbian theatre. To this extent, “gay and lesbian legal theatre” might also be an appropriate title for this dissertation, but I think the specific history of lesbian theatre and law deserves development in a future study. Bisexual characters do not play a large role Barry 4 in the study, except I suppose for some of the characters in Joe Orton’s plays, but there is nothing in my analysis that would exclude bisexuals or bisexuality. Although I do not engage with any plays that address
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