Cooked Down to Nothingreading about this man? Two reasons: thevoluminous papers and photographs Yeo-mans left to the University of Florida pro-vide the material that makes a biographypossible; and the fact that sometimes gayhistory is most vividly brought to life in thestories of minor artists. Yeomans's life isthe saga of a man who grew up in a smalltown and came out at a time when manygay people were flocking to the cities to be

free, where they collided with certain difficulties, not least ofthem the relationship between sex and the rest of life.

Sex was as crucial to Yeomans as it was to Steward-"oneof the great mysteries & motivators of life," he wrote to a friendoffended by the frankness of one of his plays, "filled with humor& splendor & pathos." At the same time, he knew an opportu-nity when he saw one. "So many gay theatres opening," hewrote to a fellow playwright, "that I do advise you to go gayquick if you want to get put on. I stay busy submitting all my oldhomersexual gay plays that used to be sneered at by variouscunts like the WPA .... So thus we begin the 80's which is thefirst decade in recorded history when it is anywhere near o.k. tosuck dick. Praise God Almighty, free at last! ... Wonder if Ellen'sready?" Ellen was Ellen Stewart, the founder of LaMaMa, awoman with whom Cal had what could be called a complicatedrelationship, which might be summed up with the words shewhispered in his ear even before the applause had died downafter Cal had read what he called his Daddy Poems at his failedcomeback in New York: "Some beautiful images, but the sub-ject matter: No."

Yeomans was a writer, however, who saw no difference be-tween his art and his life, a man who, though fully aware of theembarrassment he caused others - and himself-by writingwhat he did, seems to have been compelled to say things thatwere forbidden. The Florida town in which he grew up-wherehis childhood seems to have been a blend of Eudora Welty andWilliam Faulkner-demanded he be Christian and straight.Now he wanted to portray his gay life as it was. Ellen Stewartwas not the only person who found this distasteful: the actressDana Ivey, whom Cal had known since their days in Atlanta,found Cal's plays equally off-putting. Even the gay theatre com-munity was reluctant to put them on.

It's no surprise that Yeomans, who directed Harvey Fiersteinin a play that was his first assignment at LaMaMa, did not thinkmuch uf turcn Sung Trilugy when n carne atcug. IL was, hewrote to the playwright Robert Patrick, "nothing but a quag-mire of sentimentality, an Okefenokee Swamp of the trite andsappy. Oh well ... they would lock us ALL up if I was telling itlike it is." Angels in America he walked out on at first inter-mission, later writing to a friend: "stereotypical Aunt Jemimapatronization of the suffering of a people. Not since Torch SongTrilogy has any play pandered to the hetero power structure with

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NOTMANY PEOPLE, I suspect, Ihave heard of the playwright ICal Yeomans, but then not '------------------,---------------'many had heard of Samuel ,----------------'----------------,

Steward before last year, when Secret His-torian, Justin Spring's biography, was pub-lished and nominated for the National BookAward. The similarities between the twoare striking. Both Yeomans and Stewardwere writers whose lives were full of thedifficulties of homosexuals of their generation; both lived onthe margins of artistic success; both were obsessed with sex;and both left behind a treasure trove of papers.

Both men, to continue, grew up in a small town and movedto a big city-Chicago in Steward's case, New York in Yeo-mans's-and both failed to achieve their dreams. Steward endedup writing porn and Yeomans wrote mostly unproduced gayplays. They did belong to different generations. Steward wasborn in Ohio in 1909, Yeomans in 1938 in a small town on thecentral Florida coast, from which, once he'd gone to college,he kept running as far as he could-first to Atlanta, where hefound work as an actor, director, fashion model, and ultimatelyas the man in charge of the windows at a department store calledRich's, and then as a member of LaMaMa, the experimental the-atre company on New York's Lower East Side.

In New York, Yeomans encountered not only the theatricalavant-garde but also the world of S/M, which led to a relation-ship that destabilized his already shaky personality (Yeomanswas apparently bipolar), which culminated in a nervous break-down that sent him back to Florida and his mother, and the smalltown whose conservative values he had fled. But it was therethat he began writing the plays that are his claim to fame-par-ticularly Richmond Jim (the initiation of a young man into S/M),and Sunsets (lost souls in a men's room on a Florida beach).These were first produced by a gay theatre group in San Fran-cisco called Theatre Rhinoceros, which is what drew him to thatcity, along with a friendship with the playwright Robert Ches-ley (.Jerker,Night Sweats)-a welcome bond, since Cal's earlierattempt to befriend the writer James Purdy in Brooklyn hadbeen a disaster. Then, learning that his mother was ill, he re-turned to Florida. After her death and an attempt to revive histheatrical career that went nowhere, he took up photography be-fore returning to New York in order to get medical care for HIV,and then moved part time to Amsterdam because euthanasia wasavailable there. However, he ended up dying of a heart auack inNew York while being prepared for an operation for a congen-ital heart problem.

Those are the facts, which, however interesting, still leave uswith the question raised by this new book, Robert SchankesQueer Theatre and the Legacy oj Cal Yeomans: why are we

I

ANDREW HOLLERAN

Queer Theatreand the Legacy of CalYeomans

by Robert Schanke

Palgrave/MacMillan239 pages, $85.

Andrew Holleran s latest book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited.

January-February 2012 33

i,:l~l~\i

Isuch fatuity and sure knowledge of what it takes to please a so-ciety eager to expiate their real human rights abuses with to-kens of liberal acceptance and apology - but with no real effortto accept and understand our culture as it really is." Or, as he putit in a letter to Dana Ivey: "Tripe. One more rip-off scam nightin the theatre. Hokum. Malarkey. Bat crap. Another coffin nailfor a dying art." One wonders why he got so worked up; it'stempting to think Schanke is right when be appends: "Suchharsh reaction to the acclaimed play perhaps revealed Cal's jeal-ousy and resentment that his plays had never been as success-ful." It may also have been because they fell short of what hewas after in his own work.

What was he after? Of his own work's reaching the stage heeventually despaired; his chief outlet became his journal, nowat the University of Florida. Yeoman's journal shows, the waySteward's did, that a minor artist, an obscure life, sometimes re-flects the issues- gay people face even more starkly than the fa-mous can. The discomfort Yeomans always seemed to feel inhis own skin-the guilt, the sense of worthlessness - may beone that many gay people carry, but rarely has it been expressedas vividly as it was in his journal. Like many of us, Yeomansfound it difficult to combine love and sex in the same personfor very long; nor did it take him long, after coming out, to seethe predatory aspects of what is called making love: "He mayrob me, he may kill me, but until then I drink of his young viril-ity & sap his manhood. I steal all I can as I have none myself. Isuck it from him & violate his body in total hatred." But afterusing someone else as "our toy, our object of amusement," hethinks: "I longed, somewhere in my deepest being, for a bit ofa touch, of a gentle hand, a kiss."

Yet he never gave up his belief in sex, which meant thatAIDS was both a physical and ideological blow that not onlymade his plays, which had finally begun to gain notice, sud-denly undesirable (gay theaters were not looking for anythingcelebrating sex in 1985), but led, when he himself was diag-nosed, to even more self-loathing. "Look at this body" is anentry that appears after a bout of shingles, skin cancers, pneu-monia, and a detached retina. "Look at it! I have to live in this112 dead, mangled corpse. This mutilated, scarred, putrid car-cass." HIV was the ultimate insult. "There is no place or func-tion for me on this earth," he confided to his journal. "My birthseems a mistake. My death will be a relief." Finally: "I wasbomat the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong body to thewrong family."

The sense of having disappointed everyone plagued Yeo-mans long before the plague itself, however, which is one rea-son his biography is so moving. "One of the great sadnesses ofmy life," he wrote to Robert Chesley's mother after Chesleydied of AIDS, "is that I was unable to share my little successesin the theatre with my mother .... She could never bring herselfto talk about any aspect of sexuality let alone the homosexual-ity that is rampant in my plays and in my life. Therefore, in a lifethat has been noteworthy mostly for its failures, I never couldsay, 'Look! I did this in gay theatre. Now that's something, isn'tit?''' Schanke's biography would be riveting if it were only thestory of a relationship between mother and son.

And yet, though Queer Theatre and the Legacy oj Cal Yeo-mans contains so many issues all gay people face that it amountsto a representative life, I doubt that Schanke's biography will get

34

the attention that Justin Spring's did. For one thing, Secret His-torian was published at an accessible price, while Yeomans' (at$85) is apparently directed at theatre collections of university li-braries. But it's an absorbing gay history=psychological, so-cial, sexual, and cultural-expertly informed by Schanke'sknowledge of the theatre.

I say this, however, hoping I can be objective-becausethere is, for this reviewer, one other difference between thisbook and Secret Historian: I knew its subject. We met in 1983in a gay bar in Gainesville, Florida, and remained friends foralmost twenty years. I couldn't believe I'd found someone sosimilar to myself - a gay writer whose life was divided betweenFlorida and New York, where, I learned, we had been livingonly a few blocks apart. There are things about Cal l.did notfind in his biography-how could any biographer get every-thing? But these are far outnumbered by the revelations. I didnot know that growing up Cal slept in the same bed as hismother and his father, who would get up and walk around to

.make love to his mother while Callay there, or that Cal's fa-ther chewed tobacco as he drove the family car, spitting it outso that it-splattered his wife and son sitting in the back seat. Nordid I know just what Cal meant when he would say, "I left Man-hattan on a stretcher." He meant his nervous breakdown, whichSchanke describes with pitiless specificity.

As for the sound of the subject's voice, the charm, the ges-tures, the fear a lot of us had of Cal's "lethal" tongue, his loveof life, his unpredictability, what can one say? The printed word.abstracts. Biographies are like mummies: in exchange for per-manence, the vital fluids are removed. Fortunately, Cal's giftwas verbal, which means the journals and letters Schanke usescapture him well-like the diary May Sarton kept in her old agethat Cal so admired. Then there is the fact that Cal seems tohave gone through the mill of gay life as few people did.

Schanke (whose previous subjects include Mercedes deAcosta and Eva Le Gallienne) has used Cal's plays, journals,and letters, plus the interviews he conducted with Cal's friends,and put them together in unobtrusive, readable prose-and gotit right. This book is not just about gay theatre and gay libera-tion, but also about gay childhood in the small-town South andgay adulthood in cities at a time when liberation turned to hor-ror. It's an amazing story. There is something heroic, if nottragic, in it, which I did not see at the time, perhaps because inlife Cal was nothing if not a lot of fun. "Cooked Down to Noth-

. ing" was the title, he used to joke, that he wanted for his auto-biography; but Schanke's book is the opposite. Short of havingknown Cal Yeomans, this is the closest one can come. -==

The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE