Berto_Tony_201307_PhD .pdf - University of Guelph

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express sexual desire between men. They were selected because of the availability of
material related to their productions, including: scripts, advertising, reviews, and designs,
among others. Furthermore, the plays were selected to represent a wide set of conditions
created by the location of their production: from the minimal conditions found in a
conservative area in the interior, to opulent features of a tourist area, to the “national
disgrace” of Vancouver’s downtown east side (Cameron).
It is important to understand what is meant by the term “gay play.” I arrived at
criteria for selecting what constitutes a "gay play" by using ideas from Clum, Heinze,
Sinfield, and Wallace. These scholars have considered and classified staged, gay
representations in various academic volumes. Robert Wallace takes "issue with the idea of a
gay play" and argues that "a gay text is problematic" as he considers texts' meanings
specific to their readers or "reading communities" (Wallace, Making 20). Wallace instead
chooses to define plays that he collected as plays by gay men, commenting that gay
playwrights "by publicly declaring they are gay, contribute as much to the social sense of
gayness as do the gay characters they create." (Wallace, Making 12-13). As my study looks
at the wider, material conditions that inform how plays mean, I took these considerations
into account and chose plays written by men who openly declared their identity as gay,
either through their own publications or in other media.
In Out on Stage, rather than focus on playwrights, Alan Sinfield instead finds and
looks at “the production and circulation of concepts and images, with the sense of the
possible lives they may create" (Sinfield, Out 3). He explores staged, gay representations to
examine how they "establish, consolidate and challenge notions about lesbians and gay men
which were held both by them and the society at large" (4). John Clum also looks to gay