Cambridge Contributor: Robin Bernstein

Today we profile Robin Bernstein, who has written the chapter “Staging Lesbian and Gay New York” for the Companion.

Robin is a cultural historian who focuses on U.S. performance and theater, race, gender, sexuality, and childhood during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She holds a doctorate in American Studies from Yale and is currently Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of History and Literature. Her most recent publication is Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press, 2006), which includes memoirs and interviews by Edward Albee, Cherry Jones, Peggy Shaw, Craig Lucas, George C. Wolfe, and others. She is also the editor of Generation Q (Alyson Press, 1996) and the author of a children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! (Kar-Ben, 1998).

Robin’s current project, “Racial Innocence: Performing Childhood and Race from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the New Negro Movement,” is under contract to New York University Press. Her most recent article, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” which appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal Social Text, develops a new methodology by which to analyze material items so as to uncover otherwise inaccessible evidence of past performances.

Here’s an excerpt from Robin’s chapter:

The critical and popular acclaim for Angels in America was extraordinary but not isolated. During the fi nal decade of the twentieth century, a small coterie of lesbians and gay men including Kushner, Margaret Edson, George C. Wolfe, Jane Wagner, Charles Busch, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, Lisa Kron, and Craig Lucas authored plays – some with queer characters, some without – that enjoyed substantial runs in major theaters. The public comings-out of well-known performers such as Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen Degeneres, Sir Ian McKellan, Rupert Everett, and Lily Tomlin suggested to some that the twenty-first century would constitute a “post-gay” period in which sexual identity was irrelevant.

The 2003 Tony Awards Show appeared, to some, to inaugurate this “postgay” era: in that year, gay men nearly swept the Tony Awards, prompting Frank Rich, critic for the New York Times, to call the Awards ceremony the “first live gay network reality show.” Openly gay men and lesbians had won Tonys before (Cherry Jones, for example, thanked her partner while accepting a Tony for Best Actress in 1995). In 2003, however, the openly gay awardees reached critical mass for the first time. That year, actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein was named Best Leading Actor in a Musical for his drag role in Hairspray (which earned the title of Best Musical, as well as six other Awards); and the Tony for Best Play went to Take Me Out, the story of a gay ballplayer. It was Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, however, who stole the show when they accepted their award for Best Original Score for Hairspray . The two men lingered in a loving kiss on the lips. Then Shaiman said to Wittman, his partner of twenty-five years: “I’d like to declare in front of all these people, I love you and I’d like to live with you the rest of my life.” The New York Times serenely described the Awards show kiss as  theatrical “business as usual,” and most audience members seemed to agree. Of the eight million people who watched the Tony Awards that year, only ten telephoned CBS to complain about gay visibility at the ceremony, and only sixty-eight emailed the network.

Tomorrow: Elizabeth L. Bradley.