Diapers on Old Cisgender Men
Taylor Mac’s Hir and Reconciling Bigotry with Acceptance
The world has abused queer people. We are not alone in this, and many queer people of color would say they had it four times as tough.
But what happens when the tables are turned? Is retribution just as immoral? Do the abused have a responsibility to educate the abuser? Or do they owe it to the ones who fought in the past and must continue fighting even if it gets gory?
When Isaac returns home from war in Taylor Mac’s 2015 Hir, his house is in disarray. Isaac’s father, Arnold, who was often violent with Isaac’s mother, suffers from severe dementia. His sister Max is no longer his sister but his genderqueer and transgender sibling. The lawn has not been cut in months, and laundry and dishes are strewn across the house. But his mother, Paige, wants it exactly this way.
I read Hir half-expecting its message to be one of “heroic” straight white men: that the boy who sacrificed so much in war, even suffering from PTSD from the horrors he witnessed as a military mortician, must now come back and fix up his home. That genderqueers, women, and liberals still need a strong man in the end.
But the playwright then reveals that the sound of a blender makes Isaac puke uncontrollably, that he was dishonorably…
