Items

• Forty-deuce : a play
  This dark play was first performed Off Off-Broadway in 1981 and gave Kevin Bacon (seen here on the cover) an early, award-winning role. The play’s title is a riff on both the tennis score and a junction at New York's 42nd Street known as ‘the Deuce’, where sex shops, porn cinemas and peep shows were clustered. The play, by Alan Bowne (1945-1989), depicts the death and exploitation of a young boy alongside a critique of commodity culture and was published by Felice Picano’s Sea Horse Press. Sea Horse Press was one of the Gay Presses of New York collective, which worked to increase the visibility of gay books.
• Gay Theatre Alliance directory of gay plays
  This book was the first to list plays where gay men and lesbians are the “main, primary, or at least, very important focus”. As part of the criteria for including a play, the key emphasis was on the sexuality of the characters not the playwright, so works authored by straight writers are listed. The four hundred plays are organised alphabetically by title, alongside information such as number of male and female characters and date of first performance. The appendixes list '“Lost” Plays’ and names of gay theatre companies. Terry Helbing (1951-1994) was co-founder of the Gay Theatre Alliance, which supported and promoted gay theatre, and the book is published by his JH Press, which was one third of the Gay Presses of New York. He died from AIDS in 1994.
• If this isn't love! : (two men--twenty years--in three acts)
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, this was one of the most successful plays performed at The Glines, a not-for-profit gay theatre company in New York. Written by Sidney Morris (Fineberg) (1929-2002), the play follows couple Eric and Adam across three acts representing three decades of gay life and experience, entitled ‘The Fearful Fifties’, ‘The Seeking Sixties’, and ‘The Succulent Seventies’. As the men age, they respond to increasing societal liberation and changes in their own relationship. Morris, whose own youth was in the 1950s, wanted to ensure that the gay community did “not forget our dark and absurd past”. Morris wrote a number of other plays with gay male themes. Terry Helbing from JH Press, the play’s publisher, was also the general manager of the play’s first run. Morris died from AIDS in 2002.
• Street theater : the twenty-seventh of June, 1969, in two acts
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, the play is set on Christopher Street on the eve of the police raids on the Stonewall Inn bar which led to the Stonewall Uprising, in which Doric Wilson (1939-2011) was a participant. The “street theater” of the title is created by the characters including a “flower child”, “street queens”, a “vice cop”, a “student radical” and a “politically incorrect lesbian”. First performed in 1982 in San Francisco, the play later moved to New York. Wilson also worked as a barman, the tips from which helped support his theatrical endeavours, including TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) an Off Off-Broadway theatre space.
• Torch song trilogy : three plays
  ‘Torch Song Trilogy’ has three acts titled ‘International Stud,’ ‘Fugue in a Nursery’ and ‘Widows and Children First!’ Each deals with a different phase in the life of Arnold Beckoff, a gay, Jewish drag queen and torch singer in 1970s and 1980s New York. Receiving criticism from some for upholding ‘family values’, for others, the trilogy’s exploration of gay marriage and adoption was radical during a time of conservative backlash. Harvey Fierstein (1954-) won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1983 as well as for Best Performance by a Leading Actor. First published in 1981 by the Gay Presses of New York, this edition was published in the UK to tie in with its West End premiere at Albery Theatre (now the Noël Coward Theatre) in 1985. Fierstein has since blazed a trail for queer representation on stage and screen.