Gay comedy of manners is now so refined that Terrence McNally can adapt to a gay milieu the traditionally heterosexual plot of a weekend in the country--with its resulting misalliances, farcical revelations, and witty banter--for a mixed Broadway audience (Love! Valour! Compassion!, 1994).

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AIDS and the Comedy of Manners

Unfortunately, the AIDS epidemic followed so closely upon the Stonewall revolution that such gay social concerns as handkerchief codes and tea dances, the pecking order of houses at Fire Island, and the etiquette of cruising while at a gay-pride march take on a nostalgic ring in novels such as Christopher Coe's Such Times (1993) and Brad Gooch's Golden Age of Promiscuity (1996).

AIDS has created its own comedy of manners, as when characters in David Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed (1989) and Spontaneous Combustion (1991) and in Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1994) debate the proper moment to alert a potential partner that one has anal warts and the polite way to query another's HIV status.

One of the features of post-AIDS culture are the new lifestyle choices, with their resulting social comedies--living as a celibate male, raising the child of one's heterosexual roommate, siring a child by one's heterosexual female best friend--all of which are gently skewered in novelist Stephen McCauley's Object of My Affection (1987), Easy Way Out (1992), and Man of the House (1996). A new gay age fosters different social relationships whose affectations, manners, and trends must be documented in comedy.

Comedy of Manners and Camp

The arch, yet humorous, self-awareness of social foibles that characterizes all of the above-mentioned texts allows comedy of manners to border on camp. Samuel Steward's Phil Andros novels feature a hustler who is wryly aware of the roles that his johns expect him to play and appreciative of the absurdity of the situations he sometimes finds himself in, but is nevertheless unflaggingly exuberant in his indulgence of himself and others.

Steward's novels are the antithesis of John Rechy's sexually serious Numbers (1967) and Sexual Outlaw (1977); Andros possesses a humorous self-awareness that escapes Rechy's protagonists, who invest their promiscuity with portentous existentialist significance.

Similarly, the comic indulgence of behavioral excess brings a camp element to the novels of Ronald Firbank, the drawings of Tom of Finland, the plays of Doric Wilson and Robert Patrick, and the self-proclaimed "ridiculous theater" of Charles Ludlum.

In the twenty years since its first appearance in the West, AIDS has been the subject of a large body of literature, most of it written by gay men and much of it designed to expose readers as closely as possible to the emergency of the epidemic and the suffering of affected individuals.

Although largely invisible to the general public, a large body of twentieth-century gay male literature by American authors was published prior to Stonewall, some of it positive but most of it tinged with misery or bleakness as the price of being published and disseminated.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

Combining elements of incongruity, theatricality, and exaggeration, camp is a form of humor that helps homosexuals cope with a hostile environment.

Since Stonewall, gay and lesbian drama has flourished, especially in the United States.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

Like other minority groups, gay men and lesbians have had to develop both a particular sense of humor among themselves in order to make their marginal social status endurable and also a defensive awareness toward the rest of the world in order to disarm their adversaries with laughter.

Before Stonewall, censorship of the theater caused authors to encode homosexual content in publicly-presented plays.

The musical has been a significant aspect of American gay male culture, manifesting itself both in diva worship and, more recently, in the presentation of openly gay characters and shows written by gay writers primarily for gay audiences.

There has always been homosexual involvement in American musical theatre and a homosexual sensibility even in straight musicals, and recently the Broadway musical has welcomed openly homosexual themes and situations.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Born of an elite Victorian family, E. F. Benson was a prolific, often campy, writer of biographies, autobiographies, and novels, many of which were informed by homoeroticism.

Actor-writer-director Charles Busch has distinguished himself through his virtuouso performances of "grand dame" characters and through his writing of dramatic vehicles for these roles.

The bisexual Lord Byron treated many of his homosexual love affairs in his poetry, encoding them by the use of classical references or by purporting that they were affairs with women.

Truman Capote's fiction and autobiographical works helped establish what might be called the quintessential homosexual writing style of the 1950s and 1960s.

Although Coward's plays are about heterosexual couples, they are written in the language and spirit of camp and reject traditional domestic values.

"Not merely a self-confessed homosexual, but a self-evident one," actor, writer, performance artist, and wit Quentin Crisp left as his most significant legacy an example of courage.

In his novels anatomizing gay life at the peak of the AIDS epidemic, David Feinberg used humor as a defense mechanism, a means to avoid madness and despair in a world that had become nightmarishly absurd.

Award-winning Harvey Fierstein is one of the finest gay male playwrights currently working in the American theater.

Ronald Firbank's witty, campy novels mock the dominant homophobic, materialistic culture of early twentieth-century England.

English novelist Patrick Gale draws on his own varied background to explore gay men and lesbians in complex, often dysfunctional family units set within the worlds he finds most meaningful: London, Winchester, and Cornwall.

A proponent of the "diva musical," Broadway composer and lyricist Jerry Herman made homosexuality the undisguised subject of La Cage aux Folles but he did so just as gay culture lost its need of a diva to voice its concerns.

An innovator in the "Theater of the Ridiculous," actor and playwright Charles Ludlam drew on many elements of camp and farce, but never allowed them to obscure the seriousness of his themes.

A sharp social critic, novelist Armistead Maupin places his gay characters within a large framework of humanity, creating a social history of San Francisco during the tumultuous decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Texas-reared Terrence McNally, whose first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, was one of the great scandals of the 1964 New York season, emerged in the 1990s as America's most important gay playwright since Tennessee Williams.

A master of the modern comedy of manners, novelist Stephen McCauley has been praised for his shrewd observations about contemporary morals, his tart dialogue and ironic tone, and his charming, self-deprecating gay male protagonists.

Best known for his four volumes of short fiction comprising a series of interconnected stories about gay life in New York City, Ethan Mordden is also the author of novels and over twenty works of nonfiction on opera, film, and musical theater.

The gay British playwright Joe Orton, an important precursor of the queer literary movement, is perhaps the finest writer of farce in the twentieth century.

Robert Patrick is a founding father of gay drama in America and an influence in the development of gay drama in England.

Petronius' Satyricon is both the best evidence for homosexual behavior at the height of the Roman Empire and one of the most bumptious homoerotic picaresque narratives ever written.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

In his novels about hustling, preeminently City of Night and Numbers, John Rechy moves from the world of homosexual behavior into the world of gay identity.

In his poetry and his dramatic farce Sodom, the Restoration rake Rochester depicts heterosexual love as imperfect or incomplete and offers homosexual intercourse as a natural alternative.

Out American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick brings a gently subversive wit to all of his projects.

Playwright and screenwriter Del Shores explores the intersection of Southern culture and glbtq culture with empathy and humor; he has also been active in championing equal rights.

One of the most innovative talents of the musical theater in the second half of the twentieth century, Stephen Sondheim has only indirectly reflected his homosexuality in his work.

Defiantly rejecting the invisibility, homophobia, and indignities of pre-Stonewall life, the men in Tom of Finland's drawings reflect a hyper-masculine, working-class version of homosexual manhood that proved important to the emerging gay rights movement.

Novelist John Kennedy Toole expressed sympathy for the socially marginalized and animosity towards the powers that enforce conformity, but he was never comfortable with his own homosexuality and presents sexual non-conformity in highly conflicted ways.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.

A pioneer in the development of contemporary gay theater, Doric Wilson has been instrumental in Off-Off-Broadway theater in New York City since the early 1960s.