Faerie Tales

ON A HOT SUMMER’S DAY, in a cramped Manhattan apartment, Leslie Bright totters between the telephone and the dresser, complaining of old age and heartache.

- Alastair Curtis

Two characters named Boy and Girl, ghostly conjurings of his feverish imagination, torment him with happier memories of the male lovers who would, in days past, sign their names above his bed. ‘I grow brittle and break,’ Bright cries out in desperation. ‘Can’t you see I’m losing my mind?’

The Madness of Lady Bright (1964) was 27-year-old Lanford Wilson’s breakthrough play, a tragicomic monologue for a lonely drag queen, inspired – he later claimed – by one of his gay co-workers at the reception desk of the Americana Hotel in New York. To write a queer character as fiercely outspoken and sympathetic as Bright was still taboo in those pre-Stonewall years. Little did Wilson realize, however, when his one-act play premiered 60 years ago this month, on 19 May 1964, at Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, that it would represent the birth of queer theatre.

The Cino, as it was called, had been established six years earlier in a small storefront on 31 Cornelia Street, the brainchild of Joe Cino, a retired Sicilian-American dancer from Buffalo who nurtured dreams of running a coffee shop. During the 1960s – on a tiny, two-and-a-half-metre stage built out of recycled milk cartons, old rugs and fairy lights – the Cino hosted a series of late-night readings of homoerotic plays by Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams. To avert a possible raid, Cino paid sizeable sums of money to the local police and, by the mid-1960s, the venue had become a regular queer hangout, a safe and fashionable alternative to the nearby bars and bathhouses.