Homosexuals & the Stage

New York Times Broadway Critic Howard Taubman last week nervously cleared his throat and wrote: "It is time to speak openly and candidly of the increasing influence and incidence of homosexuality on New York's stage . . . The public is deluded and misled if polite pretenses are accepted at face value."

Taubman's complaint was only incidentally an impatience with all the private jokes that reach the stage when homosexuals are involved in a production --for example, slices of extraneous dialogue that provoke twitters among the knowing, or a female chorus line that seems to have been deliberately dressed unappealingly, while in the male chorus "more skin is visible than art or illusion require."

His real objection, wrote Critic Taubman, is thematic. He finds no fault with plays that honestly and openly deal with homosexual themes and dilemmas. What worries him is that all too often, homosexual playwrights, in deference to the public's preference for normality, seem to be writing about heterosexuals, but do so in a homosexual way. In such plays, he writes, the female is frequently "a fantastically consuming monster or an incredibly pathetic drab." and the male is "a ragingly lustful beast or a limp, handsome, neutral creature of otherworldly purity." The homosexual's view of human relations distorts normal man-woman situations, and "the audience senses rot at the drama's core.''

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