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| Yeomans, Lee Calvin "Cal" (1938-2001)
In 1981, Yeoman's Sunsets: A Beach Trilogy was produced by both the Stonewall Repertory Theater in New York and the 544 Natoma Performance Gallery in San Francisco. The New York production was selected to play at the Third National Gay Arts Festival in Chicago in 1982. All three plays of the trilogy are set outside a public toilet on a deserted beach in Florida and reveal lonely men searching for love. In the first, an ex-drag queen offers "mercy sex" to all comers--"to perform fellatio on the masses." In the second, a woman's sexual needs are not satisfied by her husband. In fact, he brings her to the men's room to service men while he gets off by watching. The final act illustrates an affair between John, an intellectual gay man, and Dan, a married working-class man who is fearful of his homosexuality. As it ends, the two are wrestling nude on the sand until John begs, "Now fuck me." James M. Saslow called the trilogy "intriguing, fresh and a welcome change of focus from the predominant urban (and urbane) subjects of gay theater." Yeomans had more plays produced (Poiret in Exile, Somebody's Angel Child), but he felt betrayed when directors and actors sometimes changed them because they were too pornographic. He completed numerous other scripts (Malibu Canyon, Swamp Play, A Conversation for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, One Two Boy Man, Wet Paint, Stool Play, Prologue and Seven Dialogues, Tony and Jim, The Reverend, Hibiscus, Autumn Dialogue, Eleventh Street Lady, and Rest in Peace, Queen, or Berma Returns to the Stage), but since he was independently wealthy, he had no economic need to have them produced. Instead, after the mid-1980s he turned his attention to poetry and photography, usually of male nudes. In collections he titled The Daddy Poems, 10 Poems for Luna Park, and Bootless Cries: Cock Poems for a Rainy Day, his poems, like his plays, are often pornographic. Nevertheless, several were published in Amethyst magazine in 1987. When Christopher Street published ten of his photographs, they proclaimed that his plays had "helped establish gay theater in New York City and San Francisco during the last decade." Yeomans added, however, "My pictures say it better than my words ever did." During the last twenty years of his life, Yeomans lived much of the time in and around Gainesville, Florida, where he often attended meetings of the University of Florida's gay and lesbian organization. In 1996, after he learned that he had contracted AIDS, Yeomans donated forty acres of land for a nature park in Citrus County, Florida. He also made arrangements to endow, upon his death, several funds at the University of Florida: the Lee C. Yeomans Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Fellowship Fund in honor of his father, the Vada Allen Yeomans Fellowship Fund in memory of his mother, and the Calvin Yeomans Special Collections Enrichment Fund for the university library. When he died of heart failure on October 31, 2001, he willed $1,000 to each of his several friends and over a half million dollars to the University of Florida to establish the Vada Allen Yeomans Term Professorship.
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literature >> Overview: Contemporary Drama literature >> Overview: Erotica and Pornography literature >> Overview: Modern Drama arts >> Overview: Photography: Gay Male, Post-Stonewall literature >> Overview: Poetry: Gay Male arts >> Overview: Theater Companies literature >> Albee, Edward arts >> Crowley, Mart literature >> Gide, André literature >> Patrick, Robert arts >> Wilson, Doric literature >> Wilson, Lanford
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| Bibliography | ||
Chesley, Robert. "Who Took Richmond." The Advocate (June 28, 1979): 39. Hasbany, Dick. "Revelations: Wanted or Not." The Advocate (June 24, 1982): 51-55, 63. Saslow, James M. "Reviews: 'Sunsets: Three Acts on a Beach.'" The Advocate (November 26, 1981): 46. Yeomans, Calvin. "CS Portfolio." Christopher Street No. 114 (1986): 40-47. ______. "The Daddy Poems." Amethyst (Spring 1987): 30.
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| Citation Information | ||||
| Author: | Schanke, Robert A. | |||
| Entry Title: | Yeomans, Lee Calvin "Cal" | |||
| General Editor: | Claude J. Summers | |||
| Publication Name: | glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian,
Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture |
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| Publication Date: | 2007 | |||
| Date Last Updated | September 21, 2007 | |||
| Web Address | www.glbtq.com/arts/yeomans_l.html | |||
| Publisher | glbtq, Inc. 1130 West Adams Chicago, IL 60607 |
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| Encyclopedia Copyright: | © 2002-2006, glbtq, Inc. | |||
| Entry Copyright | © 2007 glbtq, Inc. | |||
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