Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (PDF)

. Interviews with scores of Yeomans's friends and co-workers, and, most significantly, his own incisive analysis, permit Schanke to define Yeomans's achievement and the meaning of his life within the broader cultural evolution of gay culture in America. Schanke unspools Yeomans's life and times in engaging and intimate prose, illuminating that extraordinary era in the process. For those interested in LGBT theatre and its history, or in the personalities of a still too little-known era, this book is a page turner . . . The recovered accomplishments of Yeomans strengthen our common understanding of a complex, rapidly changing period in which gay artists and writers challenged American society to reconsider its values and its means of expressing them . . . In short, Schanke's book is an essential volume in the on-going and as-yet incomplete reconstruction of the LGBT foundation of contemporary American theatre." - Theatre History Studies

"Schanke . . . scrupulously details [Yeomans'] tumultuous life and career, never hesitating to elaborate for the sake of balance and fairness . . . [and] goes to great lengths to give us a genuine feel for Yeomans' personality, without stooping to adoration or character assassination . . . His unapologetic approach fundamentally challenged the attitude and expression of the Queer American Theatre of his contemporaries. Robert Schanke's biography is an engrossing, melancholy, though ultimately optimistic text that suggests a compelling, alternative way of gauging a writer's success." - Lambda Literary Review

"Schanke weaves the threads of this complex and conflicted life to give a fascinating portrait of Yeomans in the context of his times." - Lavendar Magazine

"Schanke's fascinating, meticulously researched, well written biography of Cal Yeomans gives us the life of a small-town Southern gay man who lived through the early years of gay liberation and the heyday of radical queer theatre. Yeomans was a complex, sometimes difficult man and a controversial playwright even among his peers. This book is a must-read not just for students of gay theatre, but for anyone interested in the history of gay men in America." - John M. Clum, Professor of Theater Studies and English, Duke University, USA

"Robert Schanke's Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans tells the fascinating, long overlooked story of a pioneer in sexually explicit gay male theatre. Yeomans came of age in the conservative American South of the 1950s, a white, gay man from a religious background who continually found and remade his own community to survive his life. Schanke describes how Yeomans frequented sexual subcultures on both coasts, searching for pleasure and peace as he suffered an often debilitating bipolar disorder. The cast of characters here reads like a 'who's who' of early gay American theatre and literature, including novelist Andrew Holleran and gay playwrights Lanford Wilson, Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick, and Robert Chesley. Yeomans was never as popular as his contemporaries because of his frank attention to sexual detail. His plays required full male nudity and sometimes graphic sexual practices, which were performed live rather than simulated. When Yeomans worked with Ellen Stewart at LaMama in the 1970s, she scolded him for writing plays she found too crass and crude. But he persisted, intent on grounding his representations of gay male experience in the sexual practices that made their lives revolutionary. Yeomans's career ended prematurely when the AIDS crisis began in the early '80s, as sexually explicit material became too taboo to handle in the theatre or in real life. He died of HIV/AIDS in 2001, at 63-years-old. Schanke's book is a recovery project, a gesture that remains necessary for all the gay men of the theatre whose stories have yet to be unearthed and shared. Yeomans' important life-story deserves to be told. Schanke does him justice, crafting a narrative that pulls you along from its hopeful beginning to its sad end, and giving the reader a vivid taste of the power of Yeomans's plays along the way." - Jill Dolan, Director, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Annan Professor in English, Professor, Theatre Program, Princeton University, USA