by Alan
Gordon
I am a gay playwright. A playwright who is gay. A man who likes
writing plays and also likes other men in the
more-than-friends-kinda-way. Whatever way you want to spin it, it's
who I am, and for that very reason, I was asked to write about the
playwriting experience in whatever form I saw fit, to celebrate
LGBT History Month, or February as it is known to many. I could
write (and plug the Hell out of) the new LGBT play I am currently
working on with the amazing support of Playwright Studio, Scotland.
I could write about all of the great queer influences I have gained
from gay writers who have trailblazed the way before me. I could
spend a page discussing how Tom Wells can write the beejesus out of
a gay character or how Stef Smith is basically a genius (because
trust me, she is). I haven't done that though. Sorry 'bout it. I
tried to, honest (there were, like three drafts), but in doing so,
I realised something that I have been too complacent to notice
before, and that is just how closely entwined my gayness and my
writing have always been.
You see, I knew I was a playwright before I knew I was gay, or
at the very least I accepted I was a playwright before accepting I
was gay. People who knew me? Not so much. I have had people
question my sexuality since I was old enough to know what it meant;
from concerned mates who wanted only the best for me, to
less-concerned peers who shouted less-than-cultured obscenities at
me in the street owing to the fact I had opted to jazz up my
shirted look with a dapper bow tie. Funnily enough, folk were far
more interested in the gender I swayed towards than the dramaturgy
of the first script I'd written, (a cutting-edge episode of Saved
by the Bell since you asked.) No matter the circumstance however,
whenever I was questioned on my apparently glaringly obvious
gayness, my answer always remained firmly the same, a curt 'no'…or
the less mature, 'eh, shut up'. It was just utterly ensconced
in my head that, come lusty thoughts watching Gary Lucy on late
night Hollyoaks or an unbridled love for the Steps back catalogue
(seriously, I could lip-synch Better Best Forgotten in its
entirety), I was unwaveringly heterosexual. I still don't fully
understand this abject refusal. I never suffered severe homophobia,
I didn't have to wrestle with in-built religious beliefs, I've
always had the support of my family and I managed to surround
myself with theatre people who are basically the most accepting
wonderful weirdos you could ever ask to meet. The simple fact was;
I just couldn't hang with the idea of being the one thing I'd
decided I definitely didn't want to be.
That's a lot of self-denial and deflection right there, so
having an output to get my subconscious out of my head and onto
paper was essential when it came to clearing away the dark clouds
that tended to form in my tiny confused mind. Playwriting was just
that. Eventually, 23 years into being me, it would be playwriting
that lead me from the glorious depths of Narnia, through the closet
and out into the light of self-acceptance and the darkness of one
or two Edinburgh gay bars. On a particularly dark December
night, battling against a barrage of insomnia and self-loathing, I
took pen to hand and I did the one thing that came most natural to
me, I wrote. A monologue. One draft. And just like that, sleep
came. Upon waking, I read the previous night's stream of conscious
monologue only to have the inner most recesses of my mental make-up
race past my synapses. And the last line? 'I am gay.' It was the
first time I ever allowed myself to say it, coming as both an utter
shock and an inevitable realisation. That monologue became the
emotional climax of my first produced play, Fetch; a story of a
country boy returning to his roots and forced to confront the
sexuality he had always repressed. Sound familiar? Turns out, that
a bit of honesty had unlocked some untapped creative potential.
Through telling friends, acquaintances, and one poor soul
who sat next to me on the bus, about my grand revelation, one quote
startled me. When a lecturer from my uni course was enlightened
with my coming out they simply replied, 'I know. I've read your
plays.' What? I didn't write about 'gay things'. My plays were well
butch, they were like the alpha male of plays, in fact, my
plays were such lads that people need only glance at Scene One
to find themselves pregnant. Or so I thought. This simple response
sent me on a journey of exploration through my back catalogue of
work and it was like turning on a long dormant light. Turns out
every play I had ever even started, was chalk-full of lost wee
guys, repressed beyond reason, and well, not very good. I'd
once considered that if I was gay then I simply wouldn't be, just
keep it all down and ignore it like an impending deadline.
How much damage could it do? Turns out loads. Because being gay
isn't just about gender and love and sex…it's a fundamental part of
who I am, and actively ignoring that part of me involved putting up
blocks from one end of my brain to the other. Now, anyone who has
ever tried to sit in front of a blank Microsoft Word document and
type creative words onto it knows that you need every single corner
of your brain you can muster to get from inciting incident to
resolution. Playwriting aint for softies! Coming out for me was
freeing, as a human obviously, but just as importantly, as a
writer. I had new stories I could consider, new characters to pick
apart, new themes I could tear open for exploration and an
unclogged brain to process it all. You can literally chart a graph
between the depth and quality of my writing and my coming
out.

Alan Gordon
|

Teach Me by Alan
Gordon
Photo Credit: Ivon Bartholomew (Courtesy of Strange Town)
|

The Wall by DC
Jackson
Photo Credit: Douglas Robertson
|

Mancub by Douglas
Maxwell
Photo Credit: Tim Morozzo
|
So here I find myself, a gay playwright now proud enough to blog
about the experience of being a gay playwright. That's growth right
there. So what now? Well, that leads me to one last quote regarding
my writing, a quote that didn't send me on a journey of
self-exploration but made me realise the importance of my voice as
part of the LGBT community. Upon viewing a play I had written for
the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a former colleague (who shall remain
nameless) said, 'I really loved it, but I don't understand, aren't
you gay?' The play,Teach Me, is a sex farce that deals with first
loves and first times between a younger guy and an older woman, and
therein lies the rub. It seems my colleague was confused as to why
I, a gay man, would or should write about a straight couple and the
sex they did or didn't have. This got me to thinking. Was she
right? Should I write what I know and leave the rest to the folk
who knew better? In a word, no. There are great LGBT themed plays
out there. Absolutely classics. Take Tony Kushner's Angels in
America or Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, both great but neither
my personal favourite play. My favourite plays had nothing to do
with LGBT life, they were Douglas Maxwell's Girvan-set wonders and
D.C. Jackson's small town comedies, because those plays feel like
they are speaking to me. And that's the thing about playwriting,
it's not about just putting your particular experience onstage, but
rather about your personal voice. Coming out and being honest
with myself undoubtedly freed me up to write plays that dug deeper
and worked harder. So whether I'm a gay playwright, or a playwright
who happens to be gay, the responsibility I feel I have to the LGBT
community isn't to write exclusively about the gay experience, but
rather just to write, as me, just the same as a man who likes women
in the more-than-friends-kinda-way would.
Alan
Gordon is a New Playwrights Award recipient for 2017.