Until 1900, there was no recognition of men who love men as a distinct subculture. The responsibility of male children was to ensure continuance of the family name; procreative duties, once discharged, allowed those preferring the off-duty company of their own sex to pursue their own interests outside of the female-centered domestic sphere. This is why Some Men, Terrence McNally's Dickensian account of gays in the United States, can tie together three generations by lineage, despite wedlock and parenthood existing only as wistful fantasies until very recently.
McNally's non-linear chronicle offers glimpses of a Jewish millionaire's son cavorting with his immigrant Irish chauffeur on the Long Island shore in 1922, and a torch song by a cross-dressing Harlem nightclub hostess circa 1932. In 1969, a band of effete West Village piano-bar regulars is interrupted by an angry drag queen bringing news of the revolution. In 1971, a white-collar husband comes out of the closet and finds himself shunned by his family and peers—not for his sexual proclivities, but for making them public.
In 2007, a disabled soldier confronts an old-guard father at a funeral, and, in 1989, an AIDS patient's brother pays a reluctant visit to a hospital ward. We sit in on Internet hook-ups, bathhouse sybarites and therapy groups. Oh, and we hear students express indignation at veterans of the "pre-Stonewall, non-liberated, repressed" years not conforming to the expected images of martyrdom.
The real lessons, though, are not in the specific dates and places (the latter restricted to New York and environs), but the little personal details related by an author who witnessed many of them firsthand: the importance of physical distance in consummating cyber-liaisons, the enclaves of intolerance within what was not yet a "community" and the enduring hope of a future when same-sex dynamics would enjoy a full range of social approval.
Ten actors playing 55 characters over a timeline spanning 90 years could easily dissolve into chaos in a matter of minutes, but under the co-direction of David Zak and Derek Van Barham, the characters remain distinct and assemblages never become a faceless swarm. (McNally is smart enough to have his personnel address each other by name at the top of every new episode, and to include in his cast a pianist to provide tunes to establish the individual locales.) If the results are more pageant than play—a wedding kiss draws applause from not just the onstage guests, but the audience as well—McNally's photo album attests to the diversity of the gay experience while celebrating its progress.
