Jonathan Larson created a Broadway musical, Rent. In doing so, he plagarized Sarah Schulman's novel People in Trouble. He told other people that he used Schulman's novel. Then he died. His heirs made $1 billion from Rent. They refused to give Schulman even the smallest of royalties, 2.5%, which would have meant that with $2.5 million, one of the best novelists of our time would have been independently wealthy and writing more books for us to enjoy. Instead of suing, which would have ended her career as "The Girl Who Sued Rent," Schulman wrote Stage Struck, Theatre, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America.
With Stage Struck, Schulman is not making self-pitying lemonade. She tells us what she tells us in all of her books, that lesbians are important, that we are not just the same as anyone else, and that "dominant culture" silences us is so many ways, that even our allies can't hear it.
Although she did not sue Rent, the heirs vindicated her morally. In last of limited contact she had with the estate's lawyers, they admitted that although Larson used "theme, plot, and stock characters and settings" of People in Trouble" he did not use her "expression of ideas."
While the theme, plot, and stock characters of Rent is taken directly from People in Trouble--which is obvious--Larson used those ideas to express something very different from Schulman's book, something very ugly, and something that Stage Struck makes obvious: the vibrant culture that finally came to corporate America's attention in the early 90s, had become, by the late 90s, what Schulman names "fake, public homosexuality."
In the book's conclusion, she writes;
We are in a very tender moment when society is making a transition in its understanding of AIDS from a lived experience to packaged image... when Rent is selected over a novel with the same characters, events, and dynamics that does not lie about the power differentials between heterosexuals and homosexuals. As we have shown, the existence of homosexuality is no longer being denied. Instead, a fake public homosexuality has been constructed to facilitate a double marketing strategy: selling products to gay consumers that address their emotional need to be accepted while selling a palatable image of homosexuality to heterosexual consumers that meets their need to have their dominance obscured. Rather than elevating the centuries-old underground gay and lesbian culture to the level of mainstream visibility, straight people have invented their own homosexual culture and placed it front and center.
The fake, public homosexuality of the late 90s has rules, Schulman writes, which are not only followed by straight media and society, but also by national gay press and organizations.
The public homosexuality rules, as Schulman sees them, are:
1. Gay and lesbian celebrities are allowed to emerge as long as they become famous while they are in the closet and then come out.
2. Gay content is permissible if it focuses on romance.
3. Mild homoeroticism in heterosexual paradigms is permissible. Preference is given to "gender-bending," where one or more heterosexual party thinks they have a gay attraction but their object d'mour ends up being straight, or in drag.
4.Homophobia is unmentionable. Nothing that would express anger at straight people or illuminate the pain that straight people have caused, or that would show straight people's complicity or responsibility in relation to homophobia is permitted.
5. Gay people are rarely allowed to be the heroes unless they are tragic heroes, rescued by straight people. Straight audiences must not be expected to universalize to a gay or lesbian protagonist unless they already have built a relationship with that character, thinking they were straight. The most appropriate role for a gay or lesbian characters is as sidekicks.
Even with popular
television (not premium cable) shows since the publication of Stage Struckhave obeyed these rules. Ellen Degeneras had
a hit TV show until she flirted with Rule 4, and was cancelled after violating
Rule 5. Her second series was about an "out lesbian" with obsolutely no
lesbian life or community. This didn't even show us the permissible parts
of the five rules. Out lesbians are not allowed to exist, even as the comic
hero of their own lives.
The other "gay"
TV show, Will and Grace, never breaks the rules, and worse, has never shown
a lesbian in a sympathetic role. They don't even have any lesbian friends.
But then again, would I be friends with a Will and Grace? Ee-yuu.
Stage Struck is a sad book. Not falsely sad like an Oprah book club book, but personally said to me and every other lesbian because it spells out what our place is in the world, authentically. Even the best and most successful living novelist, who writes lesbians as central characters, can't make a living on her books, and can't defend her best books from theives.
Stage Struck is sad because Sarah didn't get 2.5 million dollars, so instead of spending her days writing new books for me and you to enjoy, she is teaching writing to undergraduates in Staten Island.
Schulman's book
chronicles a transitionary period in gay culture where straight people have,
once again, defined who we are, and made our true selves invisible. It's happened
again and again, and this time, we should have seen it, and in fact many
of us did. Sometime in the ninties it was no longer polite to say "gay" or
"lesbian" in mixed company. The lesbian community became the "lesbian/bisexual
women's" community. The gay community became gaylesbianbitransintersexedallies."
I don't have a problem including allies, but ALWAYS?
The story of how
People in Trouble became Rent is, like all the best stories,
about something specific and about something general. Straight people took
Schulman's gay novel, made its world their own, telling us over and over that
that world is the Real World. And Gay men and Lesbians and all our so-loving
Straight Allies bought tickets.