“The Temperamentals”: My Personal Thoughts on the Play and the Gay Journey

I saw the play “The Temperamentals” off Broadway in New York last Thursday night. I’ve needed a little time to digest it before posting and commenting.

The title of the play is drawn from a time when one could not even say “gay” or “homosexual” in public.  There had to be code words and phrases such as:  “Is he temperamental?” ” Is she a friend of Dorothy?” or “Is he musical?” to  ponder someone’s sexuality in public.

As a piece of theatre, it is a great play. It educates while entertaining. I don’t know what more you can ask. The entire cast is brilliant. It is the kind of theatre I most enjoy: It has a story, the characters develop and change, it has a heart and it has a message.

The show deals with the founding of the Mattachine Society in California in the early 1950’s. This was one of the first Gay Rights groups ever founded and the first Gay organization to stand up to the blatant persecution of Gays by the police and the Establishment.

For context, in my mind there are four key periods in Gay History:

1. The Mattachine Society’s founding and open challenge to the establishment with the Jennings Trial in the early 1950’s.  This was the first time Gay people publicly admitted they were gay and fought back in the Courts.
2. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 when Gays- and Drag Queens- fought back against Police harassment at the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village.
3. The AIDS epidemic and founding of ACT UP in the 1980’s.  This tragically blew open the closet door, not by choice, but also forced us to fight to be treated, legally and medically, like everyone else.  We would never be invisible again.
4. The success of “Will and Grace” that mainstreamed Gay Men as the sexless pet’s of straight women, but made them socially visible for the first time to mass culture.  Unfortunately, this also led to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the infliction of Carson Kressley on America.

“The Temperamentals”, as a play, is important on many levels.  First of all, it delivers a history lesson with compelling characters.  One of my chief concerns for both Gay people and African-Americans is that we/they are forgetting our history and how far we have had to climb.  Fifty years ago, Black people in the South could be murdered for “sassing” a white person and Gay people could be arrested for just touching the shoulder of another person of the same gender.  This is so foreign to the younger generations.  They forget and can’t seem to comprehend this.

Secondly, “The Temperamentals” is just plain good theatre:  A well written and performed play.  Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly rare also.

People now forget how scary it once was to realize you were Gay and what that meant to your life.  The choices the characters in “The Temperamentals” make vividly illustrate this challenge.  People forget most Gay people once had to make the choice to either marry and “pass” for straight and/or live their lives in the shadows.  They had to give up any chance at a career and financial success if they wanted to be true to themselves and, thus, didn’t fit the societal norms of the era.  For some, this is still the case– look at Alabama, Mississippi and even in some small towns in North Carolina and Virginia.

This theme in the play resonated with me.  I am old enough to remember when one had to make this choice.  This is a choice I had to make.  Thankfully, I live in an era and in a city and work for a Company that made the choice so easy.  I live in a very accepting bubble.  One of the main reasons I consider Danville, VA, my home town, a horrible little town is that it was made very clear to me that I could not be out and successful there.  There was and is not a place for me there.  And I’m very okay with that.  But, people still have to make this choice and not everyone has the options I had.  We forget this…and thank God I had the ability to choose to leave and build a life in a freer climate that my predecessors made possible.

I live the happy, fulfilling life I do because I stand on the shoulders of the brave Gay men and women who preceded me.  Thanks to “The Temperamentals” and the  Mattachine Society fighting back for the first time in the 1950’s and to the other milestones noted above, it is now relatively easy for me to be a happy, out Gay man in Greensboro, NC.

We, as Gay people, still don’t have an easy ride.  Legally, we can still be fired just for being Gay.  We can be denied housing just for being Gay.  We can’t serve openly in the Military if we admit we are Gay.  Our relationships are not legally recognized.  We don’t have legal hospital visitation or inheritance rights–without lots of expensive legal documentation.  We are demonized and used politically by the Religious Right just for asking for equal– not special– rights.

But we have come so far from the days of the “The Temperamentals.”  We have to be thankful for this…

We just have to help our friends remember where we came from…And that we still have a long way yet to go…