Robert Chesley
(1943-1990)“No matter where he began, in fairy tale or phone sex, Robert Chesley always took his audience someplace new. He could shift from the silly to the dangerous to the tender in the blink of an eye. His plays are not period pieces, but startling glimpses of a recent past that tell us things we badly need to know about our present and future.” —Christopher Bram
Photo: Rick Gerharter
Robert Chesley was a San Franciscan playwright, theatre critic, composer, gay activist and sexual outlaw, who used his plays to celebrate sexual liberation and dramatise the toll of HIV/AIDS on the queer community.
He was born March 22nd 1943 in Jersey City to a divorced single mother who taught him to take to the streets for Vietnam, gay rights and socialism. After majoring in music at Reed College, he taught in several private schools in upstate New York and composed the music to over five dozen choral works to texts by poets like Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather and Walt Whitman.
His life was transformed in 1976 when he first had sex with a man. “I was a very good boy,” he later reflected: “I had been doing what I was supposed to do. The trouble was that I was not really what I was supposed to be.” He swiftly came out, divorced his wife of twelve years, and resigned from his teaching role to move to New York City, where he began penning theatre reviews for local gay papers and immersed himself in the growing gay liberation movement.
All his life Chesley took aim at those who sought to restrict or censor the joys of gay sexuality. “We have to declare war on prudes,” he once said; “we must stop being tasteful lest we offend.” During the first years of the AIDS crisis, he became embroiled in a war-of-words with Larry Kramer after the activist urged men to stop having sex. Chesley penned an outraged response for The New York Native:
Read anything by Kramer closely. I think you’ll find that the subtext is always the wages of gay sin are death... I am not downplaying the seriousness of KS, but something else is happening here, which is also serious: gay homophobia and anti eroticism.
Stray Dog Story (1982), a gay fairy tale, was his first full-length play. In its opening scene, a “lonely faggot” named Jon wishes that his dog Buddy was human and his lover. “If people were as good-hearted as dogs”, he sighs, “we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in, that’s for sure.” No sooner has Jon left his room than Buddy’s Fairy Dog Mother suddenly appears and Jon’s wish is granted: Buddy is transformed into a ‘darling man’, naked except for his dog collar.
His 1984 play Night Sweat was the first full-length play about the AIDS crisis to be produced in New York. It follows Richard, a young man with HIV who pays $10,000 to join Coupe de Grace, an assisted suicide sex club where gay men arrange to die during their wildest fetish fantasies. Despite its grim subject matter, the play was billed as ‘a romantic comedy’. As San Francisco’s Bay Times reported, “the play is often very funny. Don’t ask me how Chesley does it, but he does. Despite the death surrounding them, the characters live and love.”
Phone sex, or ‘dial-a-porn’, rose in popularity during the 1980s as a way for men to practise ‘safe sex’ during the AIDS epidemic. Chesley wrote about his experience of dirty-calling in Jerker (or the Helping Hand), which premiered in Los Angeles in 1986. Set in San Francisco, it follows two so-called ‘San Francisco Faggots’, J.R. and Bert, as they engage in anonymous phone sex, bringing each other to orgasm every night through fantasies of bondage, water-sports and incest. In the process, however, they grow to care for each other. The play’s subtitle ‘the helping hand’ is ironic: the men cling to their anonymity to guard against the possibility of discrimination and rejection, even as they fantasise about touching every night.
The broadcast of the play on Hollywood radio generated controversy when a right-wing minister filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. They eventually ruled that the broadcast was “patently offensive” and compelled the government to bring in restrictions on the distribution of queer material. Chesley’s impassioned response highlighted the dangerous consequences of this censorship.
A speech on the AIDS crisis by Robert Chesley at ‘Epidemic: Centre Stage’, 1987.
On April 27th 1987, Chesley made a powerful appeal for sex positivity and acceptance at a fundraiser run by Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
Video: Lylani Devorah
After his HIV diagnosis in 1988, Chesley bore his status proudly, often wearing a pink triangle pinned to his jacket. His partner Mark I Chester photographed him naked, erect and in lycra. This confrontational photo series, titled “Robert Chesley-KS portraits with harddick & superman spandex”, was published in San Francisco’s Bay Times in 1989 in an effort to remove the stigma surrounding People with AIDS.
Chesley passed away on December 5th 1990, at the age of 47. His career was relatively short, spanning no more than a decade, but he created 10 full-length plays and 21 one-act plays, most of which were never produced in his lifetime. The plays Private Theatricals: Morning, Noon and Night and Dog Plays, both written during his final years, have been performed posthumously.