Items

• Burning : a novel
  Jane Chambers (1937-1983) was an award-winning poet, screenwriter and playwright, who broke new ground by bringing happy, well-adjusted lesbian characters to the stage in plays such as ‘Last Summer at Bluefish Cove’. In ‘Burning’, Cynthia and Angela are on holiday in a New England farmhouse when they are possessed by the spirits of two women persecuted for their love some two hundred years earlier. ‘Burning’, Chambers’s first novel, was originally published by Jove in 1978 before being published by JH Press, one of the Gay Presses of New York. In 1981, Chambers received a Human Fund for Dignity Award with Harvey Fierstein (actor and writer of ‘Torch Song Trilogy’, also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). In the same year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died two years later. Since 1984, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award has been offered in her name.
• 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.