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Ghosts Haunt 'The Inheritance,' From E.M. Forster, To The Generation Lost To AIDS

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Ghosts Haunt 'The Inheritance,' From E.M. Forster, To The Generation Lost To AIDS

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One of the most anticipated Broadway plays of the season is a two-part, seven-hour epic, called The Inheritance, inspired by E.M. Forster's novel Howards End. The first sentence of E.M. Forster's novel is: "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister."

And the story of The Inheritance may as well begin with playwright Matthew Lopez's introduction to Howards End - when his mother took him to see the 1992 film adaptation.

"I was this 16-year-old Puerto Rican kid in the panhandle of Florida," Lopez recalls. "And I'm watching this story about a group of Edwardian Brits haggling over real estate and inheritances. And there wasn't anything that really should have spoken to me about the film - and yet everything did."

Now, Lopez has turned that inspiration into a play that looks at different generations of gay men, and the legacy they pass on to one another. The legacy Forster passed on to Lopez was personal.

"The thing that drew me to Forster most specifically, I think, looking back on it, was I was picking up on what I would call 'the vibrations,' " says Lopez. "And 'the vibrations' were a closeted gay man in the early 20th century, at that time, speaking to a closeted gay boy at the end of the 20th century."

Lopez thought, why not use Howards End as a starting point for a play that looks at gay life in the early 21st century and have Forster's spirit help guide a group of young men to tell their own stories?

In the play, Forster's middle-class Schlegel sisters become boyfriends, the upper class Wilcoxes become a billionaire gay couple who survived the AIDS crisis, and the lower-class Leonard Bast is split into two characters - Adam, a young aspiring actor, and a street hustler named Leo.

Lopez says you can't adapt Howards End without writing about class. "Even when you take these characters - and change the milieu, and change the century they live in, and change who they fundamentally are - the structure of the novel demands that you deal with class," says Lopez. "And so I decided that that would also be one of the guiding influences in the play."

But it's not just class that drives The Inheritance - it's generational perspectives. Kyle Soller plays Eric, who inherits a rent-controlled apartment in New York City and eventually, a country house upstate. But Soller says "inheritance" means much more in this play.

"There is also the inheritance to younger gay men, of the generation that is coming up right now, of a responsibility and a debt to the generation that came before them," Soller explains. "The generation that fought tirelessly to be able to walk down the street and hold your partner's hand, to kiss your husband in public, to get married, to just truly be accepted for being who you are and loving who you love."

For actor Samuel H. Levine, 24, who plays both Adam and Leo, learning about the AIDS crisis from the play and the older actors in it, has been eye-opening. "I had no idea about this massive loss of a whole generation of people ..." Levine says. "We're not taught about that in school. No one talks about that, really."

In one scene, one of the older characters spells it out.

WALTER: Tell me the name of one of your closest friends.
ERIC: Tristan
WALTER: Imagine that Tristan is dead. Name another.
ERIC: Jasper.
WALTER: Jasper is also dead.
ERIC: Jason.
WALTER: Jason has been at St. Vincent's for two weeks ...

I grew up as a young gay man feeling absolute alienation from the generation that came before me. And I think that part of the attempt of writing The Inheritance was a way of finding compassion for a generation of gay men that I didn't really understand.

Actor Paul Hilton plays Walter. He says when he does this scene, he can hear people in the audience weeping. "There is an audible rumble," Hilton says. "It's a palpable feeling of grief that one feels in that section of the piece ... because we're dealing with so many ghosts and lost spirits."

Lopez invoked those ghosts out of his own sense of responsibility.

"I grew up as a young, gay man feeling absolute alienation from the generation that came before me," Lopez says. "And I think that part of the attempt of writing The Inheritance was a way of finding compassion for a generation of gay men that I didn't really understand."

Lopez says the generation before him endured the "great trauma" of living through the AIDS epidemic.

"When I came to New York in 2000, it had just happened to them," Lopez says. "And I needed to find compassion for what was experienced in those years. I needed to force myself to not just understand what that was, but to feel what that was."

As E.M. Forster famously wrote in Howard's End, only connect: "Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height."

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Ghosts Haunt 'The Inheritance,' From E.M. Forster, To The Generation Lost To AIDS

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One of the most anticipated Broadway plays of the season is a two-part, seven-hour epic, called The Inheritance, inspired by E.M. Forster's novel Howards End. The first sentence of E.M. Forster's novel is: "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister."

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How Matthew Lopez Transformed "Howards End" Into an Epic Play About Gay Life

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"The Inheritance," opening soon on Broadway, reimagines E. M. Forster's novel as a lovingly wry portrait of New York's gay community.

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One may as well begin with Matthew Lopez, sitting in the Sheep Meadow, in Central Park, and rereading " Howards End." It is 2008, and Lopez, recently turned thirty, has kept returning to E. M. Forster's novel of Edwardian England ever since he was introduced to it, in 1993, in the form of the Merchant Ivory film adaptation. Lopez, then a slight, isolated sixteen-year-old, begged his mother, an elementary-school teacher, to take him to see the film during its brief run in his home town of Panama City, in the Florida Panhandle. There was a vast disparity between his circumstances and those of Forster's calm, earnest heroine, Margaret Schlegel-who lives in London, on income from an inheritance, with her tempestuous sister Helen, and whose celebrated inward injunction, "Only connect," provides the novel's moral core. Nonetheless, Lopez had the uncanny sense that Forster, writing almost a century earlier, had intended the book just for him.

Now Lopez thinks about a strain of repression underlying the narrative. He's recently learned that Forster was a closeted gay man, who found the impossibility of writing truthfully about his desires so crippling that he stopped publishing novels in his forties, suppressing his one explicitly gay-themed book, " Maurice," until after his death, in 1970, at the age of ninety-one. Lopez, too, is gay, a fact that he resisted reckoning with in his teens. By 2008, he has been a New Yorker for eight years, wholly partaking in the city's gay culture: drinking vodka-tonics at Splash, in Chelsea, and at Wonder Bar, in the East Village; clubbing at the Limelight; hooking up, sometimes recklessly. His stated ambition for moving to the city-to become an actor-has languished. Various stints as an executive assistant, initially intended merely to support his audition-going, have led to what he has to admit is a real job. He has started writing plays, but feels that he has little to show for his three decades. Amid the bright animation of his social life, he wrestles with loneliness and self-loathing.

In Central Park, an idea for a drama stirs. What if Forster's plot were transposed to contemporary New York, with gay men from different generations standing in for Forster's straight people from different classes?

Not bad, Lopez thinks.

He isn't ready to write it yet. Only after several more years-during which he will hone his playwriting craft, and nearly be undone by alcoholism-will he be able to pick up a notebook and write on its cover the title of his putative adaptation: "The Inheritance."

"The Inheritance" is a two-part, seven-hour epic centered on a group of gay New Yorkers, two decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic. The play begins previews at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, on West Forty-seventh Street, on September 27th. It arrives on Broadway after a sold-out run in London, where it originated at the Young Vic.

"The Inheritance," which is directed by Stephen Daldry, played to rapturous audiences in the U.K.; the Telegraph called it "perhaps the most important American play of the century." It won four Olivier Awards, including Best New Play and Best Director. The Best Actor award went to Kyle Soller, who is onstage for nearly all of "The Inheritance," in the role of Eric Glass. At the play's outset, Eric is a thirty-three-year-old facing the imminent loss of a rent-controlled apartment, on the Upper West Side, that he has inherited from his grandmother, a German refugee and a Holocaust survivor.

Eric Glass is Lopez's stand-in for Margaret Schlegel, Forster's socially progressive and sometimes naïve heroine, whose dispossession from her family residence is key to "Howards End," and whose encounters with disparate Londoners-from Leonard Bast, a struggling clerk, to Henry Wilcox, an affluent industrialist-shape her understanding of her obligations to others. Like Margaret, Eric provides a center of gravity for the characters swirling around him. Among them are Eric's boyfriend, a charismatic but tormented writer named Toby Darling, who is Lopez's version of Helen Schlegel; Adam McDowell, a seductive social climber, and Leo, a homeless sex worker, who together approximate Leonard Bast; and Henry Wilcox, a billionaire real-estate developer, who brings Eric into conflict with his moral convictions, just as Forster's Henry Wilcox does with Margaret.

Through a chorus of minor characters-such as Jason 1 and Jason 2, who are giddily expecting a baby, with the help of a surrogate mother-"The Inheritance" creates a lovingly wry panorama of gay life in New York that echoes Forster's depiction of the comfortably bohemian, intellectual London society of the Schlegels. Lopez conjures a familiarly urbane world in which men attend lavishly prepared brunches, are oppressed by their season tickets to BAM, and feel the necessity of having an opinion on German Expressionism. The play offers the pleasure of eavesdropping on a clique constantly engaged in competitive, virtuoso conversation.

For all its verbal ebullience, "The Inheritance" also explores serious questions about sexual identity, and measures what the gay community has lost, and gained, in recent decades. Lopez captures an era in which marriage equality has been secured while gay signifiers have been blandly absorbed by the mainstream. In one scene, Tristan, an African-American doctor, rails against his teen-age niece for claiming that the phrase "Yas, kween" comes from " Broad City." "They have appropriated a phrase from drag culture," he thunders. "And they've built a brand off it!" Eric mournfully notes, "I miss the feeling that being gay was like being a member of a secret club. . . . In order to fully join, you needed people to help bring you in." ("You've just described Soho House," Jason 2 shoots back.) Through Eric, Lopez asks how, in the age of Grindr, a young man can find not just sex but community-"a connection with something that helps him understand himself."

"The Inheritance" also raises alarms about the potential reversal of the legal advances that have been made in L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Audience members of any age or sexual orientation may feel a nightmare being replayed when, in Part 1, the friends gather to watch the 2016 election returns. ("Nate Silver still has her at eighty-six per cent," Jason 1 remarks. Then: "Sixty-seven per cent." Then: "Fuck you, Nate Silver!") In a bravura aria in Part 2, Tristan, who is H.I.V.-positive, characterizes President Trump 's effect on the American body politic, declaring, "You could say that he is H.I.V., and that he's attached himself to American democracy and is now destroying the American immune system. . . . He's replicating his genetic material from tweet to tweet, from person to person." In London, the tirade elicited applause; on Broadway, it should bring the house down.

"Howards End" provides many underpinnings for Lopez's drama: the passing of a beloved home from one person to another; the thorny difficulties of social privilege. In one particularly deft transposition, Lopez reimagines the wife of Henry Wilcox, a spiritual mentor to Margaret Schlegel, as Walter Poole, Henry Wilcox's partner. Walter illuminates gay history for Eric (and for members of the audience too young to remember Pride Marches without corporate sponsors). Through Walter's memories, "The Inheritance" summons a not too distant past when gay men were not just marginalized but reviled, because of AIDS. Part 1 culminates in a coup de théâtre that represents the generational loss wrought by the epidemic. Even in buttoned-up Britain, it reduced theatregoers to sobs.

Though Lopez preserves Forster's moral seriousness, his play breaks free from its literary scaffold. One bold liberty Lopez takes is to make E. M. Forster himself a character. Referred to, with warm familiarity, as Morgan-Forster's middle name-he appears as a kind of empathetic counsellor, guiding the chorus of young men through the recounting of their stories. Thanks to Lopez's artful structuring, only in the final scenes does the audience realize that "The Inheritance" is not just a play about gay life, or AIDS, or politics, or the imparting of heritage; it is also a work of art about the making of a work of art-about the degree of growth, and the depth of loss, that an artist may have to go through before he can create something truthful.

Matthew Lopez and his husband, Brandon Clarke, a private-school administrator, live in a spectacular penthouse residence atop a new luxury building in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The apartment, which they have rented since 2018, has lofty ceilings and a vertiginous terrace, towering above farm-to-table restaurants and picturesque brownstones. It is the kind of place a Hollywood location scout might select to signify the apogee of metropolitan sophistication.

For Lopez, the view is more personal. From his windows, he can see both the Fort Greene housing projects, where his father, who is Puerto Rican, lived as a child, and Greenpoint, where his mother, who is of Polish-Russian descent, grew up. Lopez's parents initially lived in New York, but his father, an elementary-school teacher, had been stationed in Florida after serving in Vietnam, and he proposed moving to Panama City, which he thought would be a good place to raise children. "I feel like what was taken from me without my consent-before I was born-was my birthright, which was being a New Yorker," Lopez told me, when I visited his apartment this spring. Lithe and compact, he curled up in an armchair across from an open kitchen, which Clarke had decorated with a vase of quince branches. In the course of two days, Lopez spoke for hours at a stretch, with clarity and unguardedness; having spent years in psychoanalysis, he is practiced in poring over his experiences. "There was a period where I felt a lot of resentment for having been robbed of who I could've been if I'd been raised here," he said. "My time in the South was basically an eighteen-year-long hostage crisis."

Lopez, the older of two brothers, felt like a misfit from his earliest years. Panama City was religious-Lopez's family attended an Episcopal church-and socially conservative. His high school banned the teaching of " The Catcher in the Rye," because of its profanity; when Lopez asked to study ballet, it proved impossible to find a teacher who countenanced having boys in class. The city was also racially bifurcated between black and white, which left no place for someone of Latino descent. "There was nobody like us around," he said. "I went through a very shameful period where I didn't like my last name." Lopez was soon labelled in another way: "People would say, 'O.K., we don't know where you belong on a racial spectrum, but we can identify the fact that you are one queer little kid.' "

When Lopez was four, and on a family visit to New York, he saw Sandy Duncan perform in "Peter Pan." Lopez's family had a connection to the theatre through his father's sister, Priscilla Lopez, who originated the role of Diana Morales in "A Chorus Line." (In 1961, as children, Priscilla and her brother successfully auditioned to play extras in the film of " West Side Story "; in an early dance sequence, Lopez's father can be seen standing, self-consciously, in a doorway.) A few days after seeing "Peter Pan," Lopez saw his aunt play Harpo Marx in "A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine." Lopez told me, "We visited her dressing room, and I remember hearing people warm up, and I watched her put on her makeup and wig. It was this amazing thing of 'We're going to strip away all of the magic of theatre, and show you how it's made.' " His life's course was set, he said: "It was like being given really high-class drugs for your first time, instead of really cheap pot."

Lopez started performing in community theatre, playing, among other roles, Michael Darling, in "Peter Pan." In school, however, he shrank from the limelight, because bullies targeted him. "In class, I would position myself so that I wasn't in their line of sight," he said. "I would literally hide behind another kid, and move with their movements, to become invisible." (In a draft of "The Inheritance," Lopez gave Toby Darling-a New York native who is transplanted to the South as a child-some of his own experiences, including having sunflower seeds spat at him on the school bus. Lopez writes, "No one knew what to do with . . . this sensitive, effeminate, sing-songy, twinkle-toed, wide-eyed, smiling, brokenhearted naïf who actually believed that people had his best interests at heart.") To cope with the stress, Lopez began drinking, and by his junior year in high school he was going home at lunchtime for a few glasses of wine. "I'd drive back to school and float, in a moderately intoxicated state, through the rest of the day," he said.

Lopez was attracted to men, but tried to push this knowledge away. "I already had enough going on that marked me as an outsider," he recalled. The dawning of his sexuality coincided with the AIDS epidemic. "There was a lot of learned trauma in my generation-though we did not live through the epidemic, we saw it happening as kids, as teen-agers, when we were learning that we were gay, and knowing that our sex lives could kill us," he said. In Panama City, many people said that AIDS was God's retribution for sin. "The headline was 'Don't go there. And if you do go there, keep it a secret,' " he said. While still underage, he started frequenting the only local gay bar, hanging out with drag artists who performed there. (He later drew on that experience to write " The Legend of Georgia McBride," a comedy about a straight man who, because of economic hardship, begins to perform in drag; the play was produced in 2015, at the MCC Theatre, in Manhattan.) Lopez attended college at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, where he majored in theatre. He didn't come out until he was twenty-one. "My mother, for weeks afterward, looked as if there had been a death in the family," he said. (He now has a good relationship with his parents.)

Lopez has a heightened consciousness of belonging to a generation of gay men that has lived through a sea change: his cohort is old enough to remember the experience of being homosexual as a secret, and perhaps a shameful, identity, yet young enough to have escaped a lifetime in the closet. "In my generation, a staple of conversation was 'How did you come out?' " he said. "What I've discovered, over time, is that the younger generation doesn't have coming-out stories. Or, if they do, it seems as commonplace as making dinner plans." He and Clarke were married in upstate New York, at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in June, 2015, five days before the Supreme Court effectively legalized same-sex marriage across America. "We were sort of the last pioneers," Lopez said. Clarke told me that he shares a nostalgia for "that liminal period when gay culture hadn't completely been co-opted"; not long ago, he wanted to take an out-of-town friend to gay bars, and had to research which of his and Lopez's former haunts remained open. (Not many.) In part, "The Inheritance" is a celebration of the sense of community often found in a marginalized population. The play also offers validation of the different forms that love between men can take. One draft included a long ode to rimming: "Adam found himself irresistibly drawn to Kip's ass, to his muscled cheeks splayed before him like an unwrapped gift. . . . To Adam's surprise and utter enchantment, it smelled almost sweet, like cookies cooling on a rack." The passage was cut, for length, but "it's still the ethos of the play," Lopez said, adding, "Maybe I'll publish it, as an appendix."

Gay men have found that watching "The Inheritance" in a theatre filled with both older and younger generations is a charged experience. Terrence McNally, whose 1994 play, "Love! Valour! Compassion!," reckoned with the AIDS crisis while it was ongoing, saw "The Inheritance" at the Young Vic. (His husband, Tom Kirdahy, is one of the show's producers.) McNally told me that he has never had such a strong response to a play: "As an eighty-year-old survivor, observer, and participant of the many years covered in the play, it was as if someone were telling the story for the first time-so hot are its passions-and for the last time, with the compassion and wisdom we seek from our artists." He added, "Matthew's play is not about the AIDS experience-it is about the human experience. Only a stunted soul would not rise, soar, and expand to it." Paul Hilton, who plays Walter Poole and Morgan, said, "I've never felt that sense of a communion with an audience-it's the closest that I've ever felt to church in a theatre."

Lopez says that, because of AIDS, embracing his sexuality entailed accepting an inheritance of grief. But this mourning felt abstract. He said, "It is so unimaginable for people of my generation, and certainly subsequent generations-how do you contemplate loss on that level?" Eric Glass, as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, has a personal connection to generational catastrophe, and is therefore better primed to comprehend the history of the gay community's devastation. In one sequence, Walter tries to convey to Eric the scale of the tragedy by naming all his friends, a recitation that rises to a litany delivered by the chorus of men: "Daniel is dead. Stephen is infected. Brian's partner has peripheral neuropathy. He screams in pain at the slightest touch. Scott is in Paris, hoping to get HPA-23. Javier went home to die in his mother's house. Jonathan's family won't take him back. Brandon is dead. Matthew is dead."

Lopez told me, "For my generation, it is as if a sibling had died before we were born-you are never quite sure why Mom and Dad are so sad. That person isn't real to you-they are only real as a figment and a spectre. You only know the negative space. You don't know what once filled it."

In May, a work session for "The Inheritance" was held at a rehearsal studio in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. The intention was to tweak the show for the Broadway production, and, in particular, to clarify the narrative of Toby Darling, Eric's boyfriend, who is played by Andrew Burnap. One of Lopez's first inspirations in adapting "Howards End" was to turn the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, into boyfriends. Like Helen, who acts on sentiment, Toby is impetuous and often inconsiderate. In the play's first scene, he recounts a party that he's just attended in the Hamptons, where he got drunk and projectile-vomited on Meryl Streep: "You've seen 'Sophie's Choice'-I am so humiliated."

Much of the body language that Burnap uses to convey Toby's character-the way that, in greeting, he saunters over with a raised arm, anticipating an embrace-echoes Lopez's own mannerisms. "Every time I see him, that is what happens, unless he is mad at me," Burnap told me. Burnap plays Toby with a manic, exhilarating energy: he dances, stripped to a Speedo, at a rave in the Pines; he caustically challenges Morgan for hiding his sexuality. ("The great E. M. Forster, beloved by all the world. And secretly the gayest daisy in the field.") While Eric Glass provides the play's steady, slowly evolving center, Toby Darling's orbit becomes increasingly erratic.

At the work session, Lopez and Stephen Daldry honed scenes in which Toby's backstory is revealed through encounters with other characters. Toby, who initially appears to be a man of effortless confidence, has in fact strenuously constructed that identity. Lopez once told an interviewer, "Charm I can write in my sleep-honesty takes more effort." This line could easily be delivered by Toby. Lopez told me, "We are trying to carve out Toby's journey very clearly through the play-deepening Toby's internal crisis before it becomes an external crisis." He was sitting at a table next to Daldry, with sheaves of typescript in front of him. The actors were gathered at tables arranged in a horseshoe shape. The principal cast of the London production is being imported to Broadway virtually intact, and there was an atmosphere of fraternal reunion, as well as a sense of excitement that the play was finally coming to New York, where it belonged.

On a makeshift stage, Burnap and Samuel H. Levine, who plays Adam McDowell, Toby's calculating protégé, ran through an early scene in which Toby, in order to escape a rainstorm, goes home with Adam, and discovers that Adam lives with his wealthy parents in a glamorous apartment near Lincoln Center. (After Toby spots a photograph of the McDowells with Barack Obama, Adam explains, "My mom went to law school with him. It broke her heart when I went to Yale." Toby replies, "Yes, I'm sure that's every mother's nightmare.") Adam, who aspires to be a famous actor, has read Toby's seemingly autobiographical novel, "Loved Boy," about Elan, a rich, sarcastic seventeen-year-old living on the Upper West Side. Daldry explained to the actors that Toby's book is mediocre: "It's a Y.A. novel-you could possibly read it in two minutes on the toilet." The novel is to be adapted into a play, and, as Lopez put it, "Adam has his eyes on the part of Elan." Lopez and Daldry wanted the scene to lay the groundwork for an eventual twist: Toby's youth was drastically different from Elan's charmed life.

"There was a line-we did it in the West End for a couple of performances, but then we cut it, because we thought we were belaboring the point," Lopez said. "But maybe we need to belabor the point." Using a laptop to flick through an earlier draft, he supplied the lines to the actors:

A dam: Your book is fairly autobiographical, isn't it?

T oby: Well, what isn't?

Lopez said, "The trick is to keep hammering in that Toby's world is about as far away from Adam's as possible."

Lopez is an unusually active presence in the rehearsal room. David Lan, who was the Young Vic's artistic director when "The Inheritance" had its première, told me, "During rehearsals, he was rewriting all the time. Every night, he would go back to his room and come in the next morning with new pages." For the New York work session, Lopez had written a new scene to experiment with, for the beginning of Part 2. Leo, the indigent sex worker (also played by Levine), whom Toby once summoned by app and then forgot about, is fleeing the Strand after being caught shoplifting, and collides with Toby on the sidewalk. Later that day, Leo shows up at Toby's apartment, ostensibly looking for a notebook that he dropped outside the bookstore. Toby, though, assumes that Leo wants to offer himself sexually:

T OBY: Do you want to fuck?

L EO: I'm not actually-

T OBY: Gay?

L EO: No, I'm just not-

T OBY: Into me?

L EO: No, you're very-

T OBY: Thank you, so are you.

Lopez listened as the actors ran confidently through the swift, almost Sorkinesque dialogue. (In 2013, Lopez was a staff writer on " The Newsroom," Aaron Sorkin's HBO series; working in TV, Lopez said, taught him the importance of getting drafts down quickly, and not to be precious about his ideas.) As Burnap and Levine performed, Lopez interrupted them to trim lines. "We're trying to streamline, which is important with a seven-hour play-the audience needs to know that someone's flying the plane," he said. "I always say, 'I don't care if you miss your train. I do care if you're worrying about missing your train.' "

When, in 2012, Lopez proposed an adaptation of "Howards End" to Darko Tresnjak, at the time the artistic director of the Hartford Stage, he imagined that it would be straightforward. "My goal was so simple-all I wanted to do was to take my favorite novel and dive into it," Lopez told me. But it soon became clear that Lopez's exploration of Forster's ideas, and his own, demanded a capacious form. "The Inheritance" reaches back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and looks ahead to the end of the twenty-first. The writing adopts multiple registers, from snappy dialogue to sprawling monologues. At one point, Walter Poole recounts his and his lover's pasts, almost without interruption, for eighteen hundred words. It's more like a section of a novel than like a speech in a play: "Henry was born in Ohio, in the late 1950s. He was a star of track and field. First in his class and president of the student body association. As American as an Aaron Copland symphony. He married Patricia Fitzgerald while still in college. Two sons arrived soon after and Henry was on his way to a life of success and diligence and robust Episcopalianism. And if strapping, ascendant young men with bright futures and beautiful families have secret desires and shameful urges, they hid them from the world, from themselves."

In 2015, Lopez sent a draft of Part 1 to Elizabeth Williamson, Hartford's associate artistic director. "I reached the end in tears-it was incredibly long, and very compelling," she told me. The play seemed too ambitious to be presented in Hartford on its first outing-and it needed an accomplished director. Lopez's agent, Olivier Sultan, sent the script to Daldry, who has directed everything from "An Inspector Calls," on Broadway, to " The Crown," on Netflix. Daldry told me, "It is very rare that you get an unsolicited script and you go, 'This is something I would like to do.' It happens just a few times in your life. This was one."

Lopez finished a full draft of "The Inheritance" before Trump became President. Daldry suggested that he incorporate the election into the plot: addressing contemporary politics offered opportunities for exploring how the activism of the past might inform the present. "People had come to accept the idea that rights were rights," Daldry told me. "And what we understand now is that they can be taken away from you really easily. 'Act up, fight back' is not a slogan from the eighties and nineties-it's an active slogan that we need now."

Because of its structure, ambition, and themes, "The Inheritance" invites comparison to " Angels in America," Tony Kushner's two-part epic of gay life in New York. "The Inheritance" was staged at a nonprofit theatre in London before moving to New York, as "Angels" had been; the choice gave Daldry and Lopez the chance to experiment without Broadway's commercial pressures, in front of audiences less judgmentally familiar with the milieu depicted onstage. Although Lopez insists that he didn't name Walter Poole for Prior Walter, the H.I.V.-infected protagonist of "Angels," and that he wouldn't have dared to emulate Kushner's play, the debt is clear. The play's final words-an injunction, "You live"-echo the blessing that Prior Walter bestows at the end of "Angels in America": " More Life. "

"The Inheritance" is less intellectually demanding than "Angels," Kushner having endowed his masterwork with a complex cosmology drawing on Jewish mysticism and leftist political theory. Lopez's play strikes an upper-middlebrow tone, with knowing remarks about " Jules et Jim" and Constantine Cavafy, the Greek poet, who was a friend of Forster's. ("Ooh, which translation?" "Mendelsohn." "The best.") One book that isn't mentioned, but might have been, is " A Little Life," Hanya Yanagihara's recent gay-trauma novel, with which "The Inheritance" shares a compulsive and, at times, lurid urgency-"The Inheritance" has a lot of sex and drugs, in addition to brunch and books. But Lopez is also unafraid to be stirring: of the Upper West Side home of Eric's grandmother, he writes, "She watched John Kennedy's death, Richard Nixon's resignation, and Barack Obama's election from the living room of this apartment. It was in this apartment that Miriam Glass became an American." Theatregoers may sometimes feel that their emotions are being manipulated a touch too sure-handedly, but the play earns its cathartic amplitude.

Lopez says that the biggest theatrical influence on "The Inheritance" is " Gatz," the two-part, eight-hour adaptation of "The Great Gatsby," by Elevator Repair Service, in which the entire novel is read aloud and enacted by an antic cast. Lopez saw it in 2010, and calls it "the greatest thing I've ever seen onstage." "Gatz" helped inspire the use of what Lopez calls "self-narration" in "The Inheritance." He said, " 'Reporting' is a terrible word in drama-reported action is the most uninteresting thing. But characters can also report on what they're feeling, and in ways that they wouldn't share with another character. Eric and Leo do it a lot. Toby doesn't-he almost always reports on action, not feeling, because it is too dangerous for him to do it."

At the work session, Burnap and Levine continued reading aloud the new scene between Toby and Leo. In one of Lopez's signature pivots, the arch banter transitions to something darkly moving: what Leo wants is not to turn a trick but to take a shower and do laundry. The chorus of actors narrates Toby's seesawing interior thoughts: "Toby likes to be wanted but he hates to be needed"; "But Toby, drawn to both beauty and to danger, was helpless to resist"; "Toby knows how easily he could have shared this boy's fate if Eric hadn't rescued him all those years ago." Finally, Toby shuts down this self-examination, saying aloud, "Toby pushes all thoughts of Eric to the back of his mind."

When Lopez came home from his desk at the Brooklyn Writers Space, after a day working on "The Inheritance," his husband could tell by his mood which character he'd focussed on. "Brandon would say, 'It was a Toby day today, wasn't it?' " Lopez told me. "On Toby days, I was a lot of fun to be around-a little much, but great dinner conversation." Still, Toby was an unnerving creation: the very first scene of "The Inheritance" that Lopez wrote concerned Toby's capacity for self-sabotage, his ability to wreck whatever stability he has achieved in his relationships. "I could write Toby because Toby's me," Lopez said. "I could get into his skin."

Lopez moved to New York City on January 5, 2000. He'd written plays at the University of South Florida but was intimidated by graduates of the élite drama schools: Yale, Juilliard, N.Y.U. "Writing was this exalted thing, done by classy people," he said. "I didn't think I was smart enough to be a writer, and certainly not well enough educated." But Lopez was a committed reader, and one of his first conversations with Clarke, which took place online, was about books they'd recently finished. "I may have said something about Anne Carson, whose ' Autobiography of Red' I had just read," Clarke told me. "Matthew talked about Larry McMurtry." Several characters in "The Inheritance" share an aspirational yearning for a cultural education in literature, classical music, and art-knowledge necessary to enter a certain kind of gay intellectual conversation. (At the New York work session, Lopez asked the actors to make sure they'd read Alan Hollinghurst's notoriously explicit 1988 novel, " The Swimming Pool Library," so that they'd appreciate the play's sly reference to it.) In Part 2 of "The Inheritance," Toby buys an entire library of books for Leo, their authors listed by the chorus of men: "Jane Austen. James Baldwin. Emily and Charlotte Brontë. Italo Calvino. Joan Didion. Charles Dickens. Ralph Ellison. F. Scott Fitzgerald. E. M. Forster. . . . Leo opened 'Howards End' and from the first sentence, his life forever changed."

Lopez lived in Jersey City at first. He landed a few small acting jobs, but mostly he partied. "I loved being here-it was like an extended vacation," he said. "I was of legal drinking age, and I had sort of figured out sex." His preferred drug was alcohol, but he soon found a way to stay as alert as his friends who preferred cocaine: "When Red Bull came out, that was very exciting. I would be, like, 'Just put Red Bull in it!' My twenties were a bit of a blur."

Lopez began writing in his spare time, and his début play, " The Whipping Man," was staged in Montclair, New Jersey, in 2006, when he was twenty-nine. Set in Richmond, Virginia, at the end of the Civil War, it concerns a Confederate soldier, Caleb, who returns home, wounded, and encounters two of his family's former slaves, Simon and John, who have converted to the family's faith, Judaism. The play was staged at a number of regional theatres, and was produced Off Broadway in 2011. When the Times asked Lopez why he'd chosen to write about Jewish culture in the nineteenth century, he replied, "I don't know if you need to belong to a certain group to tell a story. If you did, I would only write about gay Puerto Rican guys who live in Park Slope and have an obsession with stinky cheese." In fact, he told me, the play has plenty of himself in it, for anyone who cares to look: "John is me. He's angry, he's rebellious, he's certainly not where he wants to be. He has thwarted ambitions. He's an alcoholic."

After "The Whipping Man," Lopez quit his day job and began writing full time. "Somewhere" (2011) is set in Hell's Kitchen around 1960, during the demolitions that permitted the building of Lincoln Center, and draws on his family's experience with the filming of "West Side Story." He said of Leonard Bernstein's musical, "I don't know if that creative team could get away with writing that show today-there would be a hue and cry all over social media. But I don't know a single Puerto Rican who doesn't hold 'West Side Story' dear. It's our story, and I don't care that it was written by a bunch of white guys." Lopez worked in a more contemporary vein with "Reverberation," a drama about the relationship between two New Yorkers, Jonathan, a bereaved gay man, and Claire, a heterosexual woman. That play premièred at the Hartford Stage, in 2015. "I'm proud of the plays I wrote before 'The Inheritance,' and some of them are good, and there's a lot of me in them," he told me. "But it's perhaps more storytelling, and less revealing."

Making the transition from office worker to writer was not altogether easy for Lopez. Clarke, whom Lopez met in 2004, told me, "One of the things that he discovered is that writing is an intensely lonely career-you spend a lot of time with your own thoughts, sometimes in a dark room-and drinking became a more obvious outlet for some of his frustrations."

Lopez soon spun out of control. Once, on the subway home after a binge, he was so out of it that a stranger helped him up to the street, hailed him a cab, and gave the driver twenty dollars for the fare. "I could just about remember my address," Lopez said. "Dangerous stuff like that. There was a lot of waking up and not knowing what I did the night before." He was living a dual existence: "On the one hand, I was finally getting to do all the things I'd been denied the chance to do-be a New Yorker, be unapologetically out, have fun, live with reckless abandon. But, on the other, I was dealing with the trauma of what I had left behind." Lopez uses the word "trauma" advisedly, insisting that he didn't have a terrible childhood. "But there was trauma, and, in the end, it almost exclusively had to do with my sexuality, and my feelings of otherness."

Lopez alienated friends by becoming belligerent while drunk, and his alcohol abuse also strained his relationship with Clarke: he'd promise to cut back, make a short-lived effort to do so, then backslide. "I couldn't be compassionate-to myself, or to other people," Lopez told me. "It was a spiritual bankruptcy." He felt that he had no identity outside of drinking. "I just hated myself. I liked living, but I hated my life." One night in 2010, Lopez told me, he stumbled home at four in the morning: "I was maybe eighteen or twenty drinks in, and Brandon said, 'That's it-I'm done. One of us is moving out of this apartment.' " Lopez started calling friends, desperate to talk to someone, and eventually reached his younger brother, in Florida. "Later, he told me he thought Brandon had died, I was sobbing so much," Lopez recalled. "My brother was the first person to whom I said the words 'I'm an alcoholic.' I was sitting on the kitchen floor, spilling Johnnie Walker Blue Label all over myself-going out in style." Lopez didn't enter rehab. Instead, he shakily embarked on a life of sobriety; he hasn't had a drink in nearly nine years. "There was no going back after that scene," he said. "Once you've played Lady Macbeth, you can never play Juliet again."

During the London rehearsals for "The Inheritance," Lopez spoke frankly about the ways in which his life informed his characters' paths. John Benjamin Hickey, who plays Henry Wilcox, told me, "The play is about addiction, and how some people can recover and some cannot. In the same way, during the epidemic, there were a lot of people who died, and so many of the people left behind asked themselves, 'Why not me? What did I do, or not do?' I think Matthew's way into the generational themes of the play are through the very specific lens of somebody who has suffered his own calamity and has come out the other side." David Lan, of the Young Vic, says, "Matthew has invented himself in the writing of this play."

Lopez told me, "I needed to write, for the first time ever, really, what it means to me to be a gay man. I wanted to write about that specific question, and that question only." For critics who have noted that "The Inheritance" lacks any explicitly Latino characters, Lopez has a snappy answer: "If you want a play about what it means to be Puerto Rican and deal with housing in New York City, I invite you to explore my play 'Somewhere.' " In his view, "The Inheritance" is informed by his experience as a Latino. "My Puerto Rican-ness distanced me from other people," he said. "So 'The Inheritance' is a search, a desire, for a place in the world, and for identity." But he finds the expectation that he will incorporate explicitly Latino themes demeaning. "They don't just let Sonia Sotomayor only decide the Puerto Rican cases," he said. "She decides all the cases." As for taking inspiration from E. M. Forster, he said, "I don't get to just do Lorca-I have as much right to access the canon as any white writer does."

Not long ago, Lopez visited King's College, Cambridge, where Forster spent most of his post-fiction-writing years, and whose Fellow Librarian, Peter Jones, administers Forster's copyright. Jones told me, "I was pretty convinced on reading the play that this was something that Forster would have been very interested in. It presents Forster as he would have liked to see himself-as a guru to the young, and an adviser on their affairs." Lopez was permitted to examine the manuscript of "Howards End." He recalled, "It was one of the most moving experiences of my life to see his words, in his own hand." In a coincidence so apt as to seem contrived, when Lopez turned to a random page his eyes fell on the words "Only connect." "I broke down in tears," Lopez said. "I pushed the manuscript away-I didn't want to leave my physical mark on it."

Lopez also looked at Forster's so-called "locked diary," in which the author inscribed his inner thoughts, and elliptically catalogued his sexual experiences, for sixty-odd years. "In 1967, he writes about how angry he is at society for causing him to be false-the obfuscation that he has to live through," Lopez told me. Immersing himself in the text of "Howards End" felt strangely like reading a family history, Lopez said; claiming it for his own purposes, and reordering and restructuring it, felt like a kind of restitution. "We're so far apart, and yet when I read his diaries-that's me," he said. "That's me, a hundred years ago, as a closeted white man in England."

Earlier this year, Lopez flew to London for the final West End performance of "The Inheritance." Having developed a migraine, he was unable to watch most of Part 1, but by late afternoon he felt better. As the audience took a two-hour dinner break, he was in the Royal Room, a silk-lined suite off the mezzanine, chatting with friends who had also flown across the Atlantic for the occasion, and laughing about the fact that the box office had sold his seat. "I have such a good producer-'Look, we're a hundred and twenty pounds closer to recoupment!' " he said. " 'Lopez isn't in? Great, sell that ticket.' You have to admire it."

In the manner of a Victorian triple-decker novel, "The Inheritance" has multiple endings and codas, and imagines one character in 2079-two hundred years after Forster's birth. As the seven-hour mark drew near, Lopez sat with Stephen Daldry on a staircase at the rear of the orchestra, sobbing. After the curtain fell, Lopez and the cast and crew gathered in an upper lobby to raise a glass-Lopez stuck to club soda. In a speech, he said, "This whole year has been amazing, but what I cherish most of all is those first two months in the rehearsal studio, wrestling with this play, with you all." He explained how he was coping with the aftermath. "The show has never ended," he said. "The show is ongoing. The show is not the thing that is being torn apart on the stage. The show is the work that we did. The show is the year that we spent together. The show is the friendships that we have made, and the things we have learned."

By the play's end, Eric's relationships with the other characters have reached a satisfying, novelistic resolution, and Eric has grieved and matured. "If Toby is who I was, then Eric Glass is who I am working to become," Lopez told me, when we spoke in Brooklyn. "The Inheritance" concludes on a hopeful note, with a suggestion that, despite the current political darkness, a future exists in which gay men will still be free to be themselves. "I am not an idealist, but I am hopeful," Lopez said, as we neared the end of our two-part marathon conversation. "I can't not be, because, if I'm not hopeful, then what's the point? Think of the epidemic. It must have been impossible for those living through those years to think that things would ever be good again. How do you put the world back together after that calamity?"

This had been the central question of all his work, he observed: "How, after the calamity of slavery and the Civil War, do you put a nation back together? In 'Somewhere,' after their home is destroyed, how does the family survive as a family when part of how they identify themselves is gone? How, in the midst of calamity, can you even perceive the future? That is something that has always interested me as a writer." At the conclusion of "The Inheritance," Lopez hopes to leave the audience in a state of grace. "We're very proud of how we end the play, even though we know we do something that might be seen as indulgent," he said. "There's a lot of endings in this play. But there are a lot of endings in life." ♦

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How Matthew Lopez Transformed "Howards End" Into an Epic Play About Gay Life

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"The Inheritance," opening soon on Broadway, reimagines E. M. Forster's novel as a lovingly wry portrait of New York's gay community. One may as well begin with Matthew Lopez, sitting in the Sheep Meadow, in Central Park, and rereading " Howards End." It is 2008, and Lopez, recently turned thirty, has kept returning to E.

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Matthew Lopez: What I Wanted to Say in THE INHERITANCE. And What I Didn't.

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Matthew Lopez: What I Wanted to Say in THE INHERITANCE. And What I Didn't.

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What I Wanted to Say in ‘The Inheritance

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E.M. Forster with his love Bob Buckingham c. 1934

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E M Forster Talks About Writing Novels - 'Only Connect'

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E M Forster Talks About Writing Novels - 'Only Connect'

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E. M. Forster biography and other articles

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E. M. Forster biography and other articles

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In 1969, police raids of gay bars in Manhattan followed a template. Officers would pour in, threatening and beating bar staff and clientele. Patrons would pour out, lining up on the street so police could arrest them.

But when police raided the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, things didn't go as expected. Patrons and onlookers fought back-and the days-long melee that ensued, characterized then as a riot and now known as the Stonewall Rebellion, helped spark the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement.

Each June, Pride Month honors the history of Stonewall with parades and events. In the years since the uprising, LGBTQ activists pushed for-and largely achieved-a broad expansion of their the legal rights, and in June 2015, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling guaranteeing same-sex couples the right to marry.

Before these gains, however, LGBTQ people had long been subject to social sanction and legal harassment for their sexual orientation, which had been criminalized on the pretexts of religion and morality. By the 1960s, homosexuality was clinically classified as a mental disorder, and most municipalities in the United States had discriminatory laws that forbade same-sex relationships and denied basic rights to anyone suspected of being gay. Altough some gay rights groups had begun to protest this treatment publicly, many LGBTQ people led their lives in secret. (Listen to testimonies from Stonewall and beyond.)

New York City, however, was home to a large LGBTQ population and a thriving gay nightlife. Gay bars were...

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How the Stonewall uprising ignited the modern LGBTQ rights movement

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In 1969, police raids of gay bars in Manhattan followed a template. Officers would pour in, threatening and beating bar staff and clientele. Patrons would pour out, lining up on the street so police could arrest them. But when police raided the Stonewall Inn in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, things didn't go as expected.

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The Very Gay History of Fire Island - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

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How did one particular summer settlement on Fire Island become a 'safe haven' for gay men and lesbians almost ninety years ago, decades before the uprising at Stonewall Inn?

This is the third and final part of the Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island. (Check out the first part on Gatsby and the Gold Coast and the second part on Jones Beach.)

Fire Island is one of New York state's most attractive summer getaways, a thin barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean lined with seaside villages and hamlets, linked by boardwalks, sandy beaches, natural dunes and water taxis. (And, for the most part, no automobiles.)

But Fire Island has a very special place in American LGBT history.

It is the site of one of the oldest gay and lesbian communities in the United States, situated within two neighboring hamlets - Cherry Grove and the Fire Island Pines.

During the 1930s actors, writers and craftspeople from the New York theatrical world began heading to Cherry Grove, its remote and rustic qualities allowing for gay and lesbians to express themselves freely - far away from a world that rejected and persecuted them.

Performers at the Grove's Community House and Theatre helped define camp culture, paving the way for the modern drag scene.

In this episode, Greg and Tom head to Cherry Grove - and the Community House and Theater - to get a closer look at Fire Island's unique role in the American LGBT experience.

And they are joined by Parker Sargent, a documentary filmmaker and one of the curators of Safe Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, a new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, highlighting photography from the collection of the Cherry Grove Archives Collection.

FEATURING: The Great Hurricane of 1938! The Invasion of the Pines! The indescribable Belvedere! And the surprising origin of Fire Island's name.

Listen Now: The Very Gay History of Fire Island

The Official Bowery Boys
Fire Island Playlist

Your soundtrack for the summer - whether you're on Fire Island or just want to relive a retro experience from Cherry Grove or The Pines. Here's a collection of songs inspired by our podcast on the history of Fire Island.

Find it on Spotify or listen to it from here.

Our big thanks to Parker Sargent from the Cherry Grove Archives Collection for joining us on the show this week and giving us such a marvelous tour of the Community House and Theatre.

Go see the show Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove at the New-York Historical Society. Details here.

Greg Young joins Kyle Supley & Michael Ryan on a special 'virtual' walking tour of the great GAY BARS THAT ARE GONE: Special Pride Edition on June 10th, 2021, at 7pm. Get your tickets here!

From discos and dive bars to piano bars and cabarets, this live virtual tour looks at the shifting typology of the gay bar in New York City. Long the center of cultural evolutions and political activism, gay bars are critical locations to understand queer history in America. You'll bar hop through stories of community, protest, artistic achievement, and plain old intrigue.

All this, in the name of sparking a conversation about how to properly preserve and celebrate New York City's "lavender landmarks" during one of the hardest times for nightlife venues in recent memory.

And everyone is encouraged to join in this exploration of NYC history, so pour yourself a drink and come ready to share stories of your favorite gay bars that are gone.

Images courtesy the Cherry Grove Archives Collection, taken by the men and women of Cherry Grove in the 1950s:

The Beachcomber, 1950s ferry to Cherry Grove. Photographer unknown. Cherry Grove Archives Collection

A few images from the exhibition, courtesy the Cherry Grove Archives Collection:

Patricia Fitzgerald & Kay Guinness, Cherry Grove Beach, September 1952

Lincoln Kirstein and Fidelma Cadmus with dog on Fire Island, 1952. New York Public Library

Newsday, September 28, 1956

The Emporia Gazette, June 1968

Then Tribune from Scranton, July 1968

And a column from Robert Moses, 1969

Video about the exhibition from Safe/Haven curator Brian Clark:

Photographs of Tom and Greg in Cherry Grove (Photos courtesy Greg Young):

Behold - the Belvedere!

FURTHER LISTENING:

After listening to this show on the history of Fire Island check out these shows with similar themes and historical moments:

The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you .... by you!

We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We're also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways - publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!

We are now a creator on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.

Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you'd like to help out, there are six different pledge levels. Check them out and consider being a sponsor.

We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Very Gay History of Fire Island - The Bowery Boys: New York City History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How did one particular summer settlement on Fire Island become a 'safe haven' for gay men and lesbians almost ninety years ago, decades before the uprising at Stonewall Inn? This is the third and final part of the Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island .

# data[].attributes.headline
The First Invasion of the Fire Island Pines

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The First Invasion of the Fire Island Pines

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The First Invasion of The Fire Island Pines.

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From the Cherry Grove Archive Collection

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As the Cherry Grove Archives Collection acquires content donated by our community members, we find ourselves looking through the intimate, colorful and proud lives of our gay contributors.

In building our library of material, we are also faced with images that are sexual in nature, ranging from artistic to erotic...leaving us to contemplate how we as archivists and historians document this subject matter with respect and celebration.

Noted archivists Chris Rudisill and Sharon Thompson discuss the delicate nature of documenting sexuality in LGBTQ history.

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Remembering Michael Fesco — The Saint Foundation

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Remembering Michael Fesco — The Saint Foundation

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Michael Fesco was a legend and pioneer in New York LGBTQ nightlife.

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Emerald City TV 1977#19Larry Kramer/more Lynne Carter

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Emerald City TV 1977#19Larry Kramer/more Lynne Carter

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HIV/AIDS Timeline

Content courtesy of amfAR, CDC, and HIV.gov. For HIV/AIDS information and resources in New York City, please visit the New York City Health Department. Use their NYC Health Map to find services in New York for HIV testing, HIV services for people living with HIV/AIDS, and NYC Condoms.

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HIV/AIDS Timeline - New York City AIDS Memorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Content courtesy of amfAR, CDC, and HIV.gov. For HIV/AIDS information and resources in New York City, please visit the New York City Health Department. Use their NYC Health Map to find services in New York for HIV testing, HIV services for people living with HIV/AIDS, and NYC Condoms.

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1982 - 1992 News Clips On HIV/AIDS (The First Ten Years)

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Kansas City artist, Joe Bussell, discusses his Apartment series. 

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Joe Bussell Discusses His Art Series: The  Apartment

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From CHRONICLE OF A PLAGUE, REVISITED: AIDS AND ITS AFTERMATH (2008) 

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Andrew Holleran’s piece on AIDS and the bath houses

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Andrew Holleran’s piece on AIDS and the bath houses

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Michael Abramson/ The Life Images Collection via Getty Images

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ACT UP members carrying a sign at a Gay and Lesbian Pride march

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© Curators of the University of Missouri. DMCA and other copyright information. University of Missouri-Kansas City | Kansas City, MO 64110 | (816) 235-1000 UMKC is an An Equal Opportunity/Access/Affirmative Action/Pro Disabled and Veteran Employer. Issue with this website?

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The idea asks if people can be haunted by ghosts of lost futures

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2016 Has Been A Mixed Bag For LGBT Politics

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The Hillary campaign and LGBTQ politics 

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The Hillary campaign and LGBTQ politics 

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast

At just about every Hillary Clinton campaign event this year, and much of last, you could find lots of rainbows and posters with the letters "LGBT" on them in the crowd. The average Hillary Clinton event has a healthy amount of gay, lesbian and transgender Clinton supporters in attendance.

This past Thursday at a rally co-headlined by Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama, Charlotte resident Matt Hirschy wore a rainbow-print "H" sticker and a wedding ring. Before the rally, he was still celebrating the achievements of last year, namely the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which made same-sex marriage legal throughout the country.

"If you would have asked me growing up that my parents would accept me for being gay or that I'd be able to get married, I'd probably laugh," Hirschy says. "Well, I probably wouldn't do anything, I'd run away scared because I wasn't out yet, but I'd probably be very skeptical of it."

Hirschy, a Hillary Clinton supporter, says that in spite of the massive gains his community won last year, he still feels under threat. "I've been kicked out of establishments because I'm gay before, for holding hands with my partner," he says. "I've been denied the opportunity to lease a certain home or apartment because of the fact that I'm LGBT."

He also pointed to HB2, a North Carolina law which which prevents transgender people from using bathrooms corresponding to the gender they identify with.

Hirschy's state of mind - celebration mixed with trepidation - sums up a reality for many gay, lesbian and transgender people this year. In the aftermath of Obergefell, the fight for LGBT rights didn't end; it only changed.

"The issues that affect the LGBT community are less national issues in this election than they are state-specific issues," says Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president for external affairs at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "In about 30 states, LGBT people can be legally married, but still be at risk of being fired from their job, denied a loan, evicted from an apartment, or thrown out of a restaurant. And that is not a theoretical problem."

Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, told NPR that in the past year, his group has tracked 204 bills in 34 states deemed "anti-LGBTQ."

And while HB2 in North Carolina has drawn national attention, some gay rights advocates fear the Supreme Court's marriage ruling last year allowed many people to assume all the work was done.

"This is always a challenge when a group's issue gets defined really narrowly," says Miriam Yeung, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum (NAPAWF). "This is the trade-off to having a condensed but also focused campaign that becomes winnable. And the challenge then [is] of broadening that analysis so that folks don't think we're done now that we've just won marriage."

Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, noted how that trade-off has resulted in a drop in financial support for LGBT causes. "Some of the LGBT infrastructure, particularly equality organizations that had marriage as their main issue, closed shop," he says. "At some organizations that have played a big role in the marriage equality victories, up to one-third or at least one-quarter of the funding was at risk."

On the national stage this campaign season, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have voiced support for the LGBT community. Several gay rights groups say Clinton has the most progressive, thorough platform on LGBT issues ever. (Clinton's LGBT "fact sheet" on her website is over 2,700 words.) She's won the endorsement of most LGBT rights groups as well.

Trump made history during his speech at the Republican National Convention, becoming the first GOP nominee to pledge support to the LGBT community in a nomination speech. He pledged to protect LGBT people from terrorism after a shooting that killed dozens of people at a gay club in Orlando.

Yet his words came just after his party passed a platform that activists called extremely regressive on gay rights issues, with language that defined marriage as "the union of one man and one woman" and language that activists interpreted to support conversion therapy for gay youth.

For that reason, even the Log Cabin Republicans refused to endorse Trump. Gregory T. Angelo, president of the group, says: "Would he be governing as a President Trump who stood idly by as the GOP passed what I term the most anti-LGBT platform in the party's 162-year history? Or would he govern as the candidate we saw the following week, at the convention, presiding over the most pro-LGBT convention in the GOP's 162-year history? We really don't know."

(The Trump campaign did not respond to NPR's interview request for this story.)

The Human Rights Campaign's Chad Griffin says regardless of Trump's gesture toward gays and lesbians at the convention, other things he's said and done throughout the campaign show him not to be an ally.

"Perhaps what Donald Trump doesn't actually understand is the LGBT community is as diverse as the fabric of this nation," Griffin says. "We are black. We are Asian. We are Muslim. We are immigrants. We are people with disabilities. So, when he attacks any one of us, he's attacking our entire community."

Hillary Clinton has maintained about the same level of LGBT support Barack Obama did in 2012. A September NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll found 72 percent of registered LGBT voters supporting Clinton, with only 20 percent supporting Trump. Exit polling showed Obama captured about 77 percent of the LGBT vote in 2012.

Despite those numbers, Clinton has still faced criticism over her record on LGBT issues, namely being slow to evolve on gay marriage, having not come out in support of marriage equality until 2013.

Miriam Yeung says this should not be held against her. "We obviously wish more of our allies came to our side sooner," Yeung says of Clinton, drawing parallels to family members and loved ones of LGBT individuals who were late to accept them after they came out. "I don't think it serves us to continue to hold it against them. Now that they're on our side, be 100 percent with us."

We are black. We are Asian. We are Muslim. We are immigrants. We are people with disabilities. So, when he [Trump] attacks anyone of us, he's attacking our entire community.

Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal urges Americans to keep working on LGBT issues regardless of who wins the election. And he thinks the challenge will be in finding support and resources for issues little discussed on the campaign trail and not as simple as marriage equality. He cites HIV/AIDS and protections for transgender people, particularly transgender people of color.

"We don't talk about the needs of these communities that are at the intersection of oppression, because it's not as sexy," Espinoza-Madrigal says. "It doesn't have a white picket fence attached to it. It doesn't have a wedding ring attached to it."

But Yeung is hopeful that one aftereffect of the marriage fight can help keep those types of issues at the forefront: She says the activist infrastructure the push for marriage created has started to adopt other issues and inspire LGBT activism elsewhere.

"[The marriage fight] trained up this very elite crew of folks who know how to run on-the-ground campaigns, who are now deployed in other issue areas," Yeung says. "So we see queers of color running the immigrants' rights movement. We see queers of color and low-income folks running economic justice and 'Fight for 15' minimum-wage campaigns. Even the Black Lives Matter movement - two out of three women [founders] are queer-identified."

And, Yeung says, for activists like her all those issues are connected.

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2016 Has Been A Mixed Bag For LGBT Politics

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subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast At just about every Hillary Clinton campaign event this year, and much of last, you could find lots of rainbows and posters with the letters "LGBT" on them in the crowd. The average Hillary Clinton event has a healthy amount of gay, lesbian and transgender Clinton supporters in attendance.

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Matthew Lopez Interview on THE WHIPPING MAN

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Matthew Lopez Interview on THE WHIPPING MAN

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Interview with Matthew Lopez writer of "The Whipping Man"

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What Queer Theatre Trailblazers Gave Us and What We Owe to Them

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What Queer Theatre Trailblazers Gave Us and What We Owe to Them

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Mart Crowley and Larry Kramer were born eight weeks apart in 1935. Terrence McNally, fashionably late, was born three years later. All three redefined American theater and ushered in the first wave of mainstream queer theatrical expression. All three died 12 weeks apart this spring, dealing a painful blow to the theater community, which was already reeling from the devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mart Crowley's "The Boys in the Band" was a revolutionary act of exposure for a community that had, up to that point, been nearly invisible in American society. While many were troubled by Crowley's depiction of gay men, it is undeniable that he was the first queer American dramatist to create a sensation with what for him was an honest portrayal of the community he belonged to. In writing the play, Crowley insisted that we will be the authors of our own stories, and they will be told on our terms. It was a risk that paid off. The play was a hit, running 1,000 performances Off Broadway.

While Crowley's play prefigured AIDS by 15 years (and even Stonewall by 13 months), both Kramer and McNally wrote their most enduring work amid that crisis. With "The Normal Heart," Kramer channeled his rage not just at the nation's indifference to the epidemic, but also its history of antipathy to and violence against queer lives.

McNally's "Love! Valour! Compassion!" as well as "Lips Together, Teeth Apart" looked at the epidemic from the perspective of those who were living with and alongside it as well as those who mourned the dead. If Kramer wrote about the war from the battlefield, McNally wrote about its impact on the homefront.

Together, the lives and the work of these three men helped define for a generation what queer theater could be. They created indelible impressions on the minds of so many young queer writers and, particularly for Terrence, supported and helped amplify the voices of those artists who would follow them.

Terrence was the first writer to take me seriously and encourage me. I wouldn't be a writer today if it hadn't been for him. It's possible I wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for Larry. And it's possible none of us would be celebrating Terrence's or Larry's work if it weren't for Mart.

Their passing in quick succession felt like a cruel trick of timing, but it also can be viewed from a hopeful perspective: 30 years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine reading obituaries for gay men dying in their 80s.

It's important to mention that, as essential as they are to the legacy of queer theater, the fact that all three were white men is itself a legacy not just of queer theater, but of American theater. The average American theatergoer has likely seen or at least heard of the work of these men. But ask the average theatergoer who Jane Chambers or María Irene Fornés was, and they're likely to not have heard of them.

It is no surprise that the doors of opportunity first opened for white gay men. The writing of Crowley, Kramer and McNally - at once blistering and humane, highly comical and deadly serious - demanded an equal place at the table for queer stories to be told. And too many voices in the decades that they worked remained unheard or silenced, and the journey toward visibility for lesbian writers, trans writers and queer writers of color has been maddeningly slow and painfully imperfect. Thankfully, that journey is finally hastening, and there has been an explosion in recent years of works that challenge and expand our notion of what queer theater can be - and by extension what American theater can be.

Whether reexamining American history like Donja R. Love, Azure D. Osborne-Lee or Ricardo Pérez González; or defining 21st-century America like Jordan E. Cooper, Jeremy O. Harris or Geraldine Inoa; or creating singularly personal works like Michael R. Jackson, C.A. Johnson or Haruna Lee - the21st century is nurturing artists who are continuing the revolution that Crowley, Kramer and McNally helped start 50 years ago.
Matthew López is the award-winning playwright of "The Inheritance."

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What Queer Theater Trailblazers Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally and Mart Crowley Gave Us & What We Owe to Them

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Mart Crowley and Larry Kramer were born eight weeks apart in 1935. Terrence McNally, fashionably late, was born three years later. All three redefined American theater and ushered in the first wave of mainstream queer theatrical expression.

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The Walter Project- Matthew López and the AIDS Memorial 

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The Walter Project- Matthew López and the AIDS Memorial 

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The Walter Project - Matthew López & The AIDS Memorial

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1. Howards End (1910) by E. M. Forster

2. Maurice (1971) by E. M. Forster

3. Faggots (1978) by Larry Kramer
4. The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (1997) by Daniel Harris
5. The Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley
6. Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995) by Terrance McNally
7. 100 Boyfriends (2021) by Brontez Purnell
8. Mortal Embrace: Living with AIDS (1988) by Emmanuel Dreuilhe
9. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and its Aftermath (2008) by Andrew Holleran
10. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (2010) by Wendy Moffat

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Excerpts from REBEL LOVE: HOMOSEXUALITY by Camille Paglia

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Excerpts from REBEL LOVE: HOMOSEXUALITY by Camille Paglia

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I’M SO POPULAR- THE BEAUTY OF MEN with Kyle

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I’M SO POPULAR- THE BEAUTY OF MEN with Kyle

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GAY PEOPLE II: THE BEAUTY OF MEN with kyle

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Listen to this episode from I'M SO POPULAR on Spotify. Dear friend Kyle returns to join Chi Chi for a very special sequel to GAY PEOPLE AND BRANDING and the first in a trilogy of Pride episodes, discussing homosexual men and Andrew Holleran's DANCER FROM THE DANCE and THE BEAUTY OF MEN, nine months later and further sunken into the silt of bland homosexual misery.

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I’M SO POPULAR- AN ARMY OF LOVERS MUST NOT DIE with Harry Tafoya

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I’M SO POPULAR- AN ARMY OF LOVERS MUST NOT DIE with Harry Tafoya

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AN ARMY OF LOVERS MUST NOT DIE with harry tafoya

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Listen to this episode from I'M SO POPULAR on Spotify. Writer and art critic in exile Harry Tafoya joins to find a new way through discussion on Larry Kramer's seminal 1978 masterpiece FAGGOTS and his 2005 speech, THE TRAGEDY OF TODAY'S GAYS, in the continuation of Chi Chi's Pride trilogy.

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Quentin Crisp and the Impossibility of Homoerotic Fulfillment 

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Quentin Crisp and the Impossibility of Homoerotic Fulfillment 

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Quentin Crisp, the British aesthete, came to fame in the 1940s for being one of very few publicly vocal flamboyant gay men. In a manner similar to De Sade, Crisp understood his own homosexuality not as a morally neutral mode of self expression. Instead it was a means to subvert both cultural norms and the design of nature.

Crisp was constantly in search of a "Great Dark Man": a mythical figure that homosexual men grasp at who embodies everything "they wish they themselves were: young, frail, beautiful, and refined"...a kind of platonic, Adonis complex, if you will. "The exotic had for them a great lure based on its rarity." Crisp eventually came to the conclusion that he will never find this exotic, mysterious figure.

"Even under an exterior as rugged as a mountain range, there lurks the same wounded, wincing psyche that cripples the rest of us." Though most homosexual men will take on a variety of "roles" or positions in their sexual encounters, they are in "search perpetually for a real man who desires passionately another man."

"This being, if he exists, is so rare that one might as well enter a monastery on reaching puberty." Crisp saw the gay man's attempts to find true love with another "real" man to be grasping for the impossible.

Crisp posits that homosexuality is predicated on an unfulfillable desire for the impossible, and thus he accepts that he will never find complete sexual fulfillment. This almost Augustinian sentiment brings him to face his mortality.

"I can never get it into my head that I shall one day die," he says to his friend's Polish lover. "Neither can I," she replied, "but I practice like mad." Their "progress toward the grave" became mirror opposites of each other: the Polish lover converted to Catholicism and became a nun, and Crisp "took to sex" which "became a time-filler and ceased to be the pursuit of an ideal."

One day the nun came to visit Crisp and her former lover. "The trouble with human nature is that you're stuck with it," she told them. "Every hour has been agony, but I could not have done otherwise."

Crisp responded that he found it to be "much the same with sex," except that in pursuing the mythical Great Dark Man, rather than the Mystery of the Divine, "for the ennobling influence of anguish I was substituting the degrading effects of discomfort and exhaustion."

The unfulfillable desire to be loved by a real heterosexual man turns the gay man into a sort of prophet, or as Paglia puts it a shaman of our times. The gay man's desire testifies to the inherent tension in all human beings between themselves and some mysterious, "impossible" fulfillment. Homoerotic desire is in constant tension between the unnatural and the super natural, the truth and lies, but god forbid the ordinary or conventional.

Upon visiting a Post-Stonewall America, Crisp criticized the attempt to normalize that which is inherently subversive, to reduce it to a merely neutral form of self expression, which to him amounted to annihilating its cultural significance, thus rendering it utterly dull and boring. One could only dare to imagine what Crisp would have to say were he alive to watch the passing of Obergefell or the baby photos of the atrociously bourgeois Mayor Pete.

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Quentin Crisp, the British aesthete, came to fame in the 1940s for being one of very few publicly vocal flamboyant gay men. In a manner similar to De Sade, Crisp understood his own homosexuality not as a morally neutral mode of self expression.