O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance

Gay men and lesbians have always taken front and center stage in the theater. From Shakespeare's cross-dressing love interests to Oscar Wilde's witty comedies of mismanners to Eva Le Gallienne and Mary Martin's portrayals of the androgynous Peter Pan, homosexuality and gender blending have found many manifestation in theater. In the mid-1980s, as the New York performance-art scene began to flourish, scores of queer artists launched careers in tiny storefronts, church basements, and empty lofts. By breaking down traditional ideas of "acting," and by being unafraid of dealing with queer sexual content, they changed the style, form, and substance of alternative and mainstream theater. O Solo Homo is a collection of scripts and texts by the most important of these performers. Some of the material is overtly sexual, as in Tim Miller's "Naked Breath" or Holly Hughes's slyly titled "Clit Notes." But the performers are often as interested in politics and culture as in sex. The late Ron Vawter's exploration of art, betrayal, and the cult of personality in "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith" is brilliant, and Peggy Shaw's treatise on what it means to be butch in a world that celebrates manliness in "You're Just Like My Father" is both deeply shocking and hilarious.

O Solo Homo, with witty and informative notes by Hughes and Roman appearing throughout, is a fine introduction to the new queer theater as well as the politics and artistic theory that fuels it. --Michael Bronski