“There is no such thing as a gay play”

Canadian Theatre Review and Gay Politics in the 1970s

Abstract

This article examines the first CTR volume to address sexuality and, significantly, not gender: CTR 12, titled Homosexuality and the Theatre, edited by David Watmough and published in 1976. In doing so, the author positions this issue as an important flex point in the journal’s history—what is, arguably, the first time the journal addressed an identity politics other than Canadian or Quebec nationalisms. Examining the issue and its reception in the gay press, we see the politics of theatre and performance at a moment of stress, at a time when a liberal humanist understanding of art based firmly in playwriting and a canon of ‘great’ plays—central tenets of CTR’s early mission—is both asserted and questioned. In this moment, received assumptions about theatre and performance were beginning to be challenged by new theoretical questions about representation, politics, power, and the purposes of a journal like CTR. CTR 12 represents an early sign of a still-ongoing process at the journal, which unfolded very slowly over the next few decades: a process that questioned the politics of representation, most often led by marginalized ‘others’ who took greater control over their own representation and participation within art, culture, and politics, and within the pages of CTR; a process whereby the journal would more overtly theorize its own conceptions of theatre and performance and its position vis-à-vis the construction of ‘Canadian theatre.’