Learning How to Love (or Not to Hate)
A 19-year-old’s reflection on “Torch Song Trilogy” and “The Boys in the Band”
In his author’s note to Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein writes, “like an old familiar half heard song playing on a jukebox you might just catch a line that reaches out and touches something going on inside of you. And for that instant you are relieved of the isolation. That is the worth of a Torch Song. That is the goal of these plays.” Reading this, I was reminded of sitting alone in my room, wondering what my queerness meant, and dreading the day I might have to come to terms with it, but unable — and maybe unwilling — to keep it inside of me.
I had just read Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which was released in 1968, one year before the Stonewall Riots, so I assumed I would have had a similar experience reading Torch Song Trilogy, which premiered in January 1978, nine months before the CDC first coined the term Autoimmune Deficiency Syndrome. Both plays are on the brink of moments that changed the way gay people saw the world and the world saw them back, and Crowley’s Boys emphasizes how awkward and confining gay stereotypes are. By placing Alan, a straight man, in a room of gay men and effectively stripping him of his privilege, Boys offers us the hypocrisy of heteronormativity through gay protagonists whose insecurities and self-hatred combine with liquor to produce a night of hurt feelings and teary monologues.
Boys was certainly written for a 1960’s straight audience that wanted to explore gay life from the comfortable vantage point of stereotypes they knew and loved. But Crowley also showed this audience the effects of discrimination on men who cannot choose to not love other men. It’s a story that offers homosexuality as a beautiful but challenging life sentence — one you must take on with pride but still suffer its consequences. While I don’t think Crowley blames any of the men for their vices, Boys does not directly call out hate and its ill effects. Still, The Boys in the Band inspires empathy for gay men by taking on deep themes with reverence — I found myself relating to this artifact of pre-Stonewall gay life surprisingly deeply. But at times, Boys was overly self-hating (for me, at least)… and in comparison, Torch Song Trilogy was unapologetically itself.
At its core, Torch Song Trilogy is a show about Arnold, a drag queen, but really just a gay man, finding love in a world that believes that “queers don’t love! And those that do deserve what they get!” (145). The trilogy, obviously, is three plays: The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!, and they all take place at different points in Arnold’s life.
It’s easy to gloss over how much courage it takes to write, produce, and perform a play like Torch in 1978. Queer people are masters at building up walls around themselves — isolating their sexuality and community to minimize the harm done by bigots (and often themselves). But when a queer person faces the world, and the violence and hatred within it, making art and music with each stride, it is captivating. Yes, Torch Song Trilogy is Arnold’s Torch Song, a ballad about unrequited love to his ex, and to his mother, and to his murdered boyfriend. But still, it is a Torch Song to the queer people who never could tell their story. It carries on its shoulder a sobering understanding of what being queer in 1978 means. It resists that reality by still showing gay men loving each other.
Arnold, played by Fierstein himself on Broadway and in the 1988 film adaptation, meets the bisexual Ed in The International Stud, who leaves him for a girl, Laurel. In Fugue in a Nursery, which is set one year later, Arnold falls for the model Alan. Early in the play, Laurel invites the couple to Ed’s country house in upstate New York. One thing I love about Fugue in a Nursery is that the entire play is on a long bed, where both couples sit, talk, eat, love, and fight… with each other, themselves, and each other once again. Don’t misunderstand me; the two couples are not literally sleeping together, and as Fierstein writes, “the desired effect is of vulnerability not obscenity” (52). Then, in Widows and Children First! audiences learn that Alan was murdered by teenagers, likely for being gay, Ed has moved in with Arnold after a falling out with Laurel, Arnold has adopted the gay and delinquent David, and Arnold’s mother is coming into town! It’s quite a play. What follows is Fierstein’s masterpiece — an intricate weaving of angry tragedy with hopeful redemption.
What is this tragedy I speak of? Yes, it is sometimes death at the hands of bigoted straight people or a society that criminalizes and ostracizes non-straight love. This all happened (and happens — it’s still illegal to be gay in 69 countries) and is certainly worth writing about. But, Fierstein and Crowley focus on a much more pernicious and devastating form of hate — a hatred directed at oneself because social cues teach you to hate yourself… to hate how and why and who you love. I’ve always felt that queer kids (and I think this is true for low-income kids or kids of color, too) had to grow up quicker than other kids. Arnold even alludes to this in Torch, admitting, “When I was thirteen I knew everything. Senility set in sometime after” (116).
So much of this accelerated growing up is due to the reality of coming out. First and foremost, coming out is a process of realizing, acknowledging, and accepting one’s own queerness. The prerequisite for bearing it to the world is deciding to not hide it from yourself anymore… to break down the walls you built within your psyche, and finally see this fundamental part of who you are. And after all of that comes the part where you tell other people. It is a defining moment, for better or for worse, in the lives of many queer people. It is also where self-acceptance undergoes its metamorphosis into either pride or self-hatred or, often, an uneasy mixture of the two. Even though Torch Song’s Arnold came out to his mother as a child and is often the play’s sage when it comes to being oneself, the two still argue about how openly gay he is:
MA: You haven’t spoken a sentence since I got here without the word “Gay” in it.
ARNOLD: Because that’s what I am.
MA: If that were all you could leave it in there (points to bedroom) where it belongs; in private. (150)
Ma believes that while being gay is permissible, it is still sinful and must at all costs only exist in private. It’s not something to be proud of — you can’t just go around loving your boyfriend as a straight girl would. Ma may be proud of Arnold for bearing his soul, but she doesn’t like what she sees, and she tells him that she and the world are in agreement: it is disgusting and disgraceful.
What this results in is gay men who hate themselves… except Arnold rises above.
As Arnold learns that Ed is seeing Laurel in The International Stud, Ed tells him, “I’ve got to be proud of who I am,” to which Arnold replies, “How can sleeping with a woman make you proud of yourself if you know you’d rather be with a man?” Although Arnold faces the same challenges Ed does, he turns the toll of his victimization into the stuff of his four-hour-long sermon (yes, Torch Song Trilogy has a four-hour run time). Fierstein offers us Arnold and Ed not because Arnold is good and Ed is bad, but because they are two different places to start. Both Ed and Arnold are imperfect people, but they are an option: to either deny yourself the ability to love who your body tells you to love or to rebel against a society that tells you that your humanity is sinful. Both choices carry their risks. But in Ed’s desire to be proud of who he “is,” he denies himself of just that. And he ends up back at Arnold’s house six years later.
In their own way, Torch and Boys offer advice to queer people that I think will be useful for at least the rest of my lifetime: it is pathetically futile to hate your queerness, even if that is what the world tells you to do.
To rebel and to not hate yourself for being queer, you are a domino that falls unaware of what that action may lead to down the line. Crowley and Fierstein wrote their plays uncertain of what lay ahead and could only give us hope that a path would emerge. For Arnold, this path is when his mother gives him advice for managing the grief he feels for Alan or when she finally refers to David as his “son.” But, for Boys, I think Crowley wants us to be even more uncertain. He doesn’t leave us with a finale that is especially happy or satisfying.
As The Boys in the Band’s Michael grows progressively intolerant, cruel, and intoxicated, the quiet but ethereal Harold gets up and offers one of the most memorable lines of the play:
HAROLD: You may very well one day be able to know a heterosexual life if you want it desperately enough — if you pursue it with the fervor with which you annihilate — but you will always be homosexual as well. Always, Michael. Always. Until the day you die. (103)
Harold knows that to pursue the fantasy of a heterosexual life is to pursue annihilation. It is self-destruction.
But even if Harold is right, it’s not Michael’s fault to harbour hope of living a life that is not second-class — where your best friends and parents do not abandon you for being who you are. This is a struggle I am fortunate to have been spared of, as I have had the privilege to find queer spaces in a world that is still not fully accepting of queer love. However, when Michael breaks down in Donald’s arms at the end of the play, realizing the destruction his drunk self wrought, I cannot help but hear Michael speak to me:
MICHAEL: If we could just learn not to hate ourselves quite so very much. (106)
I think that’s the best that any of us can do. Learn. Or at least try to.
