Born in Texas in 1937, raised in various places in the South and Southwest, Robert Patrick's real life began when he arrived in New York in the mid-1960s and found his way to the Caffe Cino, where both off-off-Broadway and gay theater in America were born.

Sponsor Message.

Patrick, then known to his friends as Una O'Connor, worked by day as a typist in the city morgue but after dark threw himself body and soul into the Cino, as actor, stage hand, publicist, comanager, and playwright. His first play, The Haunted Host, was produced at the Cino in 1964.

After Joe Cino's death in 1967, Patrick, who had already written dozens of plays, moved his base of operation to the Old Reliable Tavern Theatre in the East Village and, occasionally, to La Mama, the center of downtown theatrical experimentation.

By the late 1960s, he was produced off-Broadway and once, with Kennedy's Children, briefly on Broadway. When London's Gay Sweatshop began presenting plays in 1975, two of Patrick's plays, One Person and The Haunted Host, were included in the first season. (Kennedy's Children had been produced in London in 1974.)

Patrick's early work reflects the restless experimentation with theatrical form of the late 1960s. Monologues, musical extravaganzas, television parodies, nudity, drag, and camp humor fill his varied early work. Yet Patrick is at his best in his more conventional plays, which satirize the many ways gay men, trained to hate themselves, avoid the possibility of love.

Patrick's best work offers the most hilarious, savage satires we have of gay life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. He was, in his heyday, Greenwich Village's Ben Jonson.

T-Shirts (1978) pictures the sexual marketplace of gay society as "a conglomerate as heartless as Con Ed," in which youth and beauty are the only currency. In T-Shirts, Patrick dramatizes a conflict between a handsome hunk and a cynical, flamboyant queen that results in a tie in which both learn about the compromises they have made.

In The Haunted Host (1964), a playwright, determined to avoid repeating a disastrous past relationship, is visited by the spitting image of his beautiful ex-lover and realizes that he has shut himself off from the possibility of love.

Patrick can also, as he does in the one-act plays contained in Untold Decades (1988), celebrate the ways in which gay men have managed to love in times of repression and, recently, epidemic.

Patrick's self-portraits appear throughout his work, never more poignantly than in his best-known play, Kennedy's Children (1973), in which, in alternating monologues, five denizens of a bar recollect where they were the night John F. Kennedy was murdered. Sparger, a sometime drag queen and gay actor in a welter of experimental theater events, recounts the history of a thinly disguised Caffe Cino, which for him represented the 1960s.

Patrick now lives in California and still writes constantly. His latest work is a novel, Temple Slave (1994), which chronicles the years of Caffe Cino.

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.

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

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.

Gay and lesbian theater companies attempt to create their own communities, while also fostering a sense of solidarity with the glbtq community and educating the larger society.

Playwright and poet Ben Jonson was probably never himself involved in same-sex sexual relationships, but he deserves attention for his depictions of same-sex relationships in both dramatic and nondramatic works.

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.

A trailblazer in post-Stonewall gay theater, Cal Yeomans explored sex and sexuality so directly in his critically-acclaimed plays that it made his work difficult to produce even in the gay community.