Robert Chesley: An Address
An excerpt from Chesley’s address presented at ‘Epidemic, Center Stage: A Forum on the Role of Theater in AIDS Prevention’, organised by Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Fund for Human Dignity.April 27th 1987.
“What does it mean to be gay-identified in the 80’s?
Well, individually and as a people we’re going through a lot. We’re living — and dying — in extraordinary and terrible times. There is no doubt that we as a community are taking the brunt of this disease, while the rest of America, for the most part, looks the other way. Each of us is dealing with massive grief, daily fear for ourselves and those we love, and horror — I don’t think I need to spell out how horrible this disease is in so many ways.
We are also dealing with the effects of AIDS on our sex lives, and the repercussions of this on our relationships, our psychological wellbeing, and our identities. We are dealing with great confusion about what we as a people stand for and where we are heading.
In the 70’s we built a community of joy and pride in openness, a community which celebrated sex and which rightfully defied the conventions and the stupidity and the lies of an anti-sex society which had oppressed us. Now we have a community based largely on common grief and on caring for the ill and the bereaved. We can and should be proud of our response as a people to AIDS - but the joy has certainly gone in many ways.
Well, as a playwright I don’t pretend to have all the right answers in these times of confusion, and I tend to be suspicious of those who say they do. I do hope, however, that my plays raise some of the right questions. And I am reasonably certain of my ideals as a playwright. I’ll try to express these ideals briefly as four basic, interrelated points.
First, I try to write with sympathy and love for gay men. I subscribe to the down-home wisdom of the saying that “You have to love things to understand them.” I think gay writers and their friends should fight the stigma on gay men by humanising lives which society otherwise disregards, despises, or (from time to time) destroys.
Second, I try to be sex-positive in my writing. I think this is crucial, even in these confusing times.
Third, beyond fighting the stigmas on sex and on gay sex in particular, I try to write with pride in gay men and the culture we created. I hope that my work speaks for those gay men who know that the communities we built in the 70’s were good in many important and wonderful ways. Pride is surely the best basis for fighting for our rights and our lives. A major contributing factor to the course of this disease has been a resurgence of sex guilt and moralism; an increased gay self-hatred, or an underlying feeling that we deserve to die for having sinned. I think assertiveness of the goodness of our sexual lives is a necessary part of our fight for our lives.
Fourth, I try to consider the broad range of gaymale experience, and to see what is happening to individual lives across many differences of class, culture, values, politics, modes of intelligence and styles of living. This is because the Authorities - those people who say they have the answers and who issue Imperatives for Our Times - say a great deal about what gay men ought to be doing and what is supposed to be happening; but it is not the same thing as what actually is happening. I feel I have an obligation to explore and express individual predicaments, and to report back how gay men are doing, and what they are doing - and to do so with sympathy. Authority can be wrong. I hope that my writing increases understanding of human situations, so that in this crisis we can find answers which are both humane and effective.
I would like to close by saying that I think gay men have a great deal of importance to give to society at large. This is not just because we have been confronting this disease for years now, and have worked a considerable way towards humane and effective ways of dealing with it. It is because we are still at the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution. Contrary to popular opinion, the Sexual Revolution is not over; it is still fairly young, and it is more important than ever. We must raise our voices in the theater and elsewhere, to fight for honesty about sexual matters. America’s dishonesty about sex is costing lives. Sexual prudery kills. We know this, but America at large seems not to.”