Young, Troubled, and Queer: Gay and Lesbian Representation in Edward Roy's The Other Side of the Closet and Sara Graefe's Yellow on Thursdays

Abstract

This paper considers how a queer ideology can challenge heteronormativity in TYA by comparing two plays that have emerged from Canada in roughly the past decade: The Other Side of the Closet (1997) by Edward Roy and Yellow on Thursdays (2002) by Sara Graefe. The Other Side of the Closet is an anti–gay-bashing play that reinforces heteronormativity by omitting homosexuality in favor of discourses of troubled gay youth, coming out/outing, and homophobia. Yellow on Thursdays similarly employs restrictive discourses but also moves beyond them by incorporating expressions of same-sex desire and attraction, thus providing a starting point from which to theorize the possibility of queer TYA.

Notes

¹I purposefully use the male-gendered word “gay” throughout this article to reflect the disproportionate amount of research regarding gay men as opposed to other forms of queer sexuality. In doing so, I acknowledge that the troubled gay youth image emerged from a male-centric context and its prevalence continues to eclipse lesbian, bisexual, and transgender experiences.

²For an extended discussion of these issues in the context of the United States and an appendix of gay and lesbian TYA plays see van de Water and Giannini.

³Butler does not define “gender” as a construction in opposition to “sex,” rather she points out the constructed relationship of the terms: “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts … This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender” (Gender Trouble 10).

⁴Additional methodological factors contributing to the troubled gay youth image include the separate study of gay youth from heterosexual youth, which obscures similarity between the two groups, not looking for same-sex attraction within heterosexual groups, and inadequate examination of circumstances that lead to problems beyond sexual identity (Diamond 492–93).

⁵ The Other Side of the Closet originated in Toronto in 1997 and won the Canadian Dora Award for Theatre for Young Audiences in 1998. It was produced by the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in 2000 and 2007 (Rowland H9; “New Conservatory”).

⁶This assertion follows Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's call for “a strong, explicit, erotically invested affirmation of some people's felt desire or need that there be gay people in the immediate world” (238).

⁷The tile refers to a folk saying, dating at least as far back as the 1960s, that gay men wear green or yellow on Thursdays to signal their homosexuality (Newall 126).