Vogel and Nottage illuminate a vital point: regardless of their shared position as individuals holding a marginalized identity, the gay male critic still holds the power of his status as a man over the women that he critiques, and therefore there is no practical difference in his ability to perpetuate misogyny. This is a prime example of a “one up-one down” identity complicating a moment of social inequity, and the community response was fierce. The same year, advocacy group Critical Mass wrote an essay entitled “A Collective Call Against Critical Bias” which addresses this incident, community response, and steps for moving forward towards more equitable structures of criticism.
In the comment thread on that essay and in Twitter threads that Vogel’s original tweet inspired, people argue that the critics deserve a more forgiving eye. As a result of their identities as gay, the argument goes, they have a “more complicated relationship with the patriarchy” (from Chris Jones, the longstanding chief theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune). Chris Jones’ comment, though thoughtful and by no means antagonistic, highlights the thinking that runs up and down our theatre ecosystem: that a queer man’s positionality alleviates their responsibility to further anti-misogyny practices in their spaces.
It’s a golden age for fresh, joyful, critical, and intersectionally-minded storytelling that centers marginalized experience, which should not be overlooked in favor of work that fails to ask bigger questions about queer experience.
Men being the dominant voices in every room, regardless of their sexuality, presents a hurdle for equity that the industry repeatedly ignores. Men still held more than a 60 percent share of design and directorial roles within the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) network in 2020, according to Porsche McGovern’s “Who Designs and Directs in LORT Theatres by Pronoun.” That number cannot simply be written off as arbitrary or as indicative of applicant pools. According to “The Count 2.0,” only 28 percent of plays produced in the 2016-2017 season were written by women, and to date, only five Tony awards for best play have been awarded to plays written at least in part by women, with only two women having won for a sole authorship (though Yasmina Resa has won twice). The last time a woman won the Tony Award for Best Play was in 2009. This is all to say: the inequity exists, it is glaring, and there is no looking the other way.
This critique is not meant to diminish the value of performances about gay experience throughout history. Recent history has offered us a flourishing of brilliant queer art in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States, one that was explosive to the social politics of the time. Plays like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, as well as work by visual artists like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres gave the world a window into the layered oppression that gay communities were facing, paving the way for more widespread recognition of the massacre within American society. Yet in the 2010s and beyond, it’s hard not to feel as though gay-led shows on Broadway has become more sanitized, with shows that heavily feature white gay characters. Broadway is not the be-all and end-all of American theatre, but it’s a good metric for the culturally prevalent work that reaches the largest audience. Let’s take three musicals on Broadway from the last decade: The Prom, Be More Chill, and Mean Girls. These works all contain major queer characters but fail to stage meaningful conversations about how their identities affect the lives of their characters. Mean Girls relegates its queer characters to a sidelined friend role, and Be More Chill upholds the harmful stereotype that those perpetuating violence against queer people may just be in the closet themselves (so therefore deserve more grace). The Prom, arguably the most progressive of the three, never addresses wider-spread inequities that affected, and continue to affect, the people involved in its feel-good plot. All three are white-led and center on suburban teenagers. They do not aim to interact with anti-oppressive practices in a way that reaches beyond a sort of blanket statement that homophobia is bad. None of this is to say that the work is not good or valuable, only that it can’t be the single narrative of queer experience on our stages.
