GLR July-August 2024

nal French title, Arrête avec tes mensonges , literally “Stop with your lies,” was changed. I suggest it might be because “Lie with Me” is a much more clever and appropriate title. The English version, with its double mean ing, better reflects the double life that both characters were leading as teenagers. In my estimation, it’s simply a better title. John DeMoss, Topeka, KS A Photo Misiden ti fied To the Editor: Having done a fair amount of research on William Dorsey Swann, the African-Ameri can man documented as the first publicly recognized drag queen, I can assure your

them to pull their punches. The late Bay Area artist Richard Caldwell Brewer, roughly the same age as Brown and Wonner, grabbed the bull by the horns with explicit homoerotic imagery and paid the ultimate art world price: obscurity and erasure. Ber nice Bing, with three strikes against her— Asian, lesbian, and female—is only now getting the belated recognition she deserves. Robert Brokl, Oakland, CA Was the Transla ti onaLie? To the Editor: In his review of the film version of Lie withMe [May-June 2024], Allen Ellen zweig says that it’s not clear why the origi

readers that the photo contained in Vernon Rosario’s insightful piece in the March April 2024 issue is not of Swann. Well doc umented as he was, there is no known image of him. It is, instead, Jack Brown, an American from Virginia, in drag, dancing the cakewalk in France, in 1903. There is a wonderful clip of the dance on the web. Robb Dimmick, Providence, RI Correc ti on In the May-June 2024 issue, in a review of Soula Emmanuel’s WildGeese , theU.S. publisher should have been listed as Feminist Press (not Footnote Press, which published the UK edition).

IN MEMORIAM

that “private morality must be publicly enforced.” One of Sister’s former students, Gary, is a gay man in a lov ing relationship, but he’s still haunted by the guilt and shame instilled by his religious upbringing. When Sister accuses him of “doing that thing that makes Jesus puke,” the best he can muster is: “I don’t think I’m so bad.” In contrast, Durang’s most widely produced play, the screwball romantic comedy Beyond Therapy (1981), features a gay character more in line with the ethos of the Liberation era. Bob is upset when his bi sexual lover starts to date women, so he goes into therapy. Christopher Durang, Satirist of Everything Holy J ORDAN S CHILDCROUT P LAYWRIGHT CHRISTOPHER DURANG, who passed away on April 2, 2024, at the age of 75, was one of the American theater’s most celebrated satirists. His plays could be hysterically funny and deeply disturbing, in a style he described as “absurdist comedy married to real feel ings.” Among the targets of his Obie Award-winning works were religious dogma, psychoanalysis, and dysfunctional fam ilies, all critiqued from a distinctly queer perspective.

When the therapist learns that Bob is gay, she asks what he does in bed and then re peatedly, gleefully, screams out “ COCK SUCKER !” In response, Bob pulls out a gun, declares “It’s people like you who’ve oppressed gay people for centuries,” and shoots her several times. It turns out to be a prop pistol, but the therapist is thrilled that Bob has connected to his feelings and considers the session a success. An intriguing motif in Durang’s plays is the gay character who stumbles out of the closet by accident, not consciously in tending to disclose his sexuality. Durang himself was at first reluctant to discuss his homosexuality publicly, concerned that he would be diminished by the label “gay playwright.” However, by the late 1980s,

Born in New Jersey in 1949, Durang was educated in Catholic schools, gradu ated from Harvard, and then studied play writing at the Yale School of Drama, where his collaborators included class mates Wendy Wasserstein and Albert In naurato, as well as the acting students Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. In fluenced by the dark absurdism of Joe Orton and Edward Albee, Durang’s early plays included queer characters ranging from a conflicted and closeted priest in The Idiots Karamazov (1974) to a pair of aristocratic twin brothers who seduce de livery boys in Death Comes to Us All, MaryAgnes (1975). Durang’s first substantial hit was Sis ter Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You

a few events changed his feelings about coming out. He gained acclaim for The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985), his most di rectly autobiographical play, in which Durang played a version of himself as the play’s narrator, and this success led to more work as an actor. When he took a small role in the Michael J. Foxfilm The Secret of My Success (1986), he met the actor and writer John Augustine, who became his lifelong partner and, in 2014, his husband. In addition to feeling more secure in his career and his per sonal life, Durang was motivated to come out by the rise of anti-gay hostility in American society and politics. In 1988, he

(1979), an outrageous satire on Catholic teachings in which a ludicrously severe nun is confronted by her former students. The Off-Broadway production, which ran for over 1,000 per formances from 1981 to ’84, drew protests from Catholic or ganizations, creating additional publicity for the play. Phil Donahue dedicated a full episode of his talk show to the con troversy, and Durang appeared as himself on Saturday Night Live to defend the play against Dana Carvey’s disapproving Church Lady. In Gay Community News , critic Michael Bron ski lauded Sister Mary Ignatius as a necessary critique in an era when religious zealots gained political power and insisted

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