Performance plays an integral part in creating and sustaining queer public cultures, serving as a method of artistic inquiry, a mode of sexual expression, and a means of social protest. Sexual minorities have a rich legacy of entertaining audiences (straight and gay) in bars, cabarets, bathhouses, and "legitimate" theatres, but historically they have been most skilled in the art of crafting
... [Show full abstract] personas that enable them to survive the drama of compulsory heteronormativity. "All of us who are queer can loosely be described as solo performers," note David Román and Holly Hughes, "insofar as we have had to fashion identity around our gender and sexuality, drag being only one manifestation of this process" (6-7). Homosexuals learn to pass as straight to avoid insult, injury, and prosecution, often before they are old enough to be conscious of what they are doing or why. Unable to express deviant desires publicly, many lesbians and gays seek solace in the arts. The theatre has long been a haven for queers. It is a site of yearning and fantasy, a liminal world where almost anything is possible. Unconventional liaisons, aberrant behaviors, masquerade, and powerful emotions are the cornerstones of dramaturgy. Desire, including same-sex eroticism, motivates characters and audiences alike. Trafficking in magic and metamorphosis, glitter and glamour, which is to say in the possibility of transformation, the theatre provides both a respite and a resource for society’s maligned and marginalized.
