Faggot With a Gun
In recent years the quantity of semiautobiographical coming-out/coming-of-age stories on Chicago stages has rivaled the number of stars in the Milky Way. If you’ve seen even a quarter of them, you may be convinced that gay men talk about little but themselves–their confused upbringings, their intolerant families, their adolescent sexual escapades, and their ultimate discovery of gay pride. And when it comes to solo gay performers, the autobiographical impulse seems even stronger, as inexorable as a black hole.
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It’s curious that so many gay monologuists use coming out as a metaphor for claiming their individuality, yet tell pretty much the same story. Mark Davis in Faggot With a Gun and Anthony Whitaker in I Was a Teenage Judy Garland Fan typify this trend–although both also avoid predictability in promising, satisfying ways. Each fights against a repressive, conservative upbringing in a small town, imagining himself to be the only gay kid on the planet. Each tastes boyhood love at 14–Davis with a young hustler, Whitaker with a farm-boy neighbor who shows him, among other things, “how to make a Miss Universe crown out of just a little bit of glitter and a turned-up sun visor.” Each recounts the thrill of going to a gay bar for the first time, of inheriting a community. Each moves to a liberal urban center where his identity as a gay man matures. And each ultimately expresses gay pride through subversive outrageousness; Davis plays the outlaw, waging guerrilla war against archconservatives and Christian fundamentalists, while Whitaker plays the rebel priest, worshiping Judy Garland in a new Eucharist of Blue Nun, Seconal, and Lorna Doones. We’ve heard these entertaining but unsurprising stories in a hundred different permutations; they’re half archetype and half formula.
About three-quarters of the way through, however, he shifts gears, taking aim at the gay community rather than defending it–and showing what a genuine iconoclast he can be. He says he refuses to wear a red ribbon, the enforced gesture of solidarity in the AIDS community, because “I won’t trivialize my grief with an accessory.” After describing “gay day” at Disneyland, where he watched a long line of moneyed gay men “trying to buy their civil rights with a MasterCard,” he asks the decidedly middle-class audience in the evening’s most impassioned moment, “Don’t you see that the American dream is just as poisonous to us as it is to straight people?” Here is a truly urgent gay voice, challenging rather than flattering his audience, questioning the belief that every problem in the gay community comes from without. By the end of Faggot With a Gun Davis shows just how insightful and courageous an artist he can be.
