Canadian Theatre Encyclopedia

Gay and Lesbian Theatre

Michel Tremblay , Audrey Butler (before gender reassignment completed in 1999), Brad Fraser , Sky Gilbert ; some of the playwrights who are out and writing about it.

Although consensual relationships between members of the same sex were not rendered officially legal in this country until 1968, there had been depictions of Gays and Lesbians in the theatre prior to this.

Though the most famous of them is probably John Herbert 's prison drama Fortune and Men's Eyes , academics have turned up material, some of it of a "religious" nature that suggests that homosexuality and the theatre have not been strangers to each other.

The earliest in this country is probably the case of Jonathas et David by Fr. Brumoy which played in Montreal in 1776 and was the first or second book published in the land. Adapted from the Biblical tale of the friendship between Jonathan and David (now sometimes interpreted to be more than platonic), it includes the typical proclamations of love between the protagonists. Now, one might be taking all of this out of historical context, but the good priest who wrote the piece obviously felt that there were enough sniggerers around even at that time to publish in his prologue the warning that the play was a matter of: "Tender friendship, holy friendship and not of [that friendship] which resides in the hearts of those who are slaves of crime." The era is rife with plays of this nature but not all preceded by a prologue like this one.

Flash forward to the present century (1920) and Julien Daoust's religious work, Le Triomphe de la croix which shows two Christians in their cell awaiting martyrdom, a man and a woman. The man asks the woman what gives her the strength to resist. She replies, "My guardian angel," whom she goes on to describe in near-erotic detail. Well, propriety couldn't allow that, so the young woman was changed into a man who went on to describe his (male) guardian angel in near-erotic detail!

Propriety continued to goof around with religious theatre until the Quiet Revolution approached in Quebec and the theatre in the rest of the country began to liberate itself from Protestant morality. Writers, before 1968, were already starting to look at homosexuality if only as a mental aberration or to colour an otherwise dreary landscape. Paul Toupin in his Brutus (1952, premiered at Salle du Gésu ), in a scene between Brutus and Caesar, has erotic descriptions that remain determinedly gender-unspecific with Caesar saying, "You know the malicious song they sing that I am the husband of all women and the wife of all husbands."

With the changing of the law, however, all things changed. Theatre came out and, more importantly, so did the playwrights. Perhaps the most-produced playwright in Canada, Michel Tremblay , reportedly came out quite publicly in a television interview as early as 1971. His early plays, Hosanna and Duchesse de Langeais are both tales of Gay transvestites (unless read purely as metaphors when they become tales of Quebeckers in Canadian/British/French clothing).

Canada now has a magnificent list of playwrights who are or were unabashed about their identity: Ronnie Burkett , Tomson Highway , Daniel Macivor , Steve Galluccio , Sky Gilbert , Marie-Claire Blais , Michel Marc Bouchard , Brad Fraser , Gaëtan Charlebois , the late Maxim Mazumdar , and the emerging David Gobeil Taylor and Linda Chen. Emerging as voices of the transgendered are Alec Butler and Mohawk artist Aiyyana Maracle. Simply by looking at the list one can see the wide variety of experience and artistic approaches inherent in a movement that is not truly a movement (but a slate of incredibly talented artists who each push a little each time).

What is interesting about Gays and Lesbians in the theatre in Canada is that they need no longer rely solely on Gay and Lesbian theatres (like Buddies in Bad Times ) or feminist companies sympathetic to Lesbian issues (like Nightwood Theatre ). The mainstream theatre, a little more each year, is embracing theatre with Gay and Lesbian themes. Sometimes the move forward is furiously parsed by Gays and Lesbians (like for the various performances of [straight] Vivienne Laxdal 's Karla and Grif which many Gays and Lesbians found offensive for its stereotypical Lesbian characters and others found refreshing for its depiction of the fluidity of sexuality - a subject hotly debated in the community; or the works of Fraser, which are sometimes denounced as monstrous depictions), sometimes works are simply accepted into the literary history of both straight and Queer communities (like the works of Tremblay or Bouchard, which are staples of the Quebec repertory). Too, some "straight" companies, like Workshop West , stage events like their Loud 'N Queer Cabaret to celebrate Queer culture.

Perhaps part of the acceptance of Gay and Lesbian theatre is the urgency (and yet the clarity) with which it is written. It is hard to determine exactly what effect the AIDS pandemic has had on writers here, but it is clear that the disease has hit the theatre community especially hard. Theatre artists (Mazumdar and Tommy Sexton to name just two) are dying and perhaps that is bringing Gays and Lesbians and their concerns into focus for even the straightest artistic director and encouraging an openness in the theatres that was not there before. One sign of this is the many Canadian productions in 1996-97 of American Tony Kushner's Angels in America (subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes") which treats the issue of AIDS very directly.

Like feminist theatre, there is still room for growth in one direction: the continued active courting of people of colour into the theatres. A virtual consensus had been reached on the necessity of this - time will show if Gay and Lesbian theatre will evolve in this direction.

(Additional information provided by Morag Carnie, Frank Moher and Anton Wagner)

Last updated 2009-04-02