Controversy and Resilience in the Theater
WSB-TV footage covering the Fulton County Commission's refusal to allow Atlanta Arts Alliance funding for a production of The Boys in the Band in 1970. Courtesy of Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, WSB-TV newsfilm collection.
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On January 15, 1963, the UGA Dean of Students Daniel J. Sorrells requested that University of Georgia newspaper The Red & Black print a copy of Tulsa Tribune editor Jenkin Lloyd Jones's 1962 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In the speech, Jones complains of a moral "calamity" in American education and entertainment, an umbrella under which he includes the presence of homosexual people working in theater production.
Courtesy of Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
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7 Stages 2013 program for Topher Payne's dark comedy Angry Fags, in which a gay campaign aide and his best friend, fed up with the refusal to recognize and act against anti-gay violence, embark on a path of revenge.
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, 7 Stages Theatre (Atlanta, Ga.) Records.
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7 Stages 2014 program for transgender modern dance choreographer Sean Dorsey's The Secret History of Love, which draws on oral histories of LGBTQ+ elders to portray the ways queer people found love amidst persecution in the twentieth century.
Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, 7 Stages Theatre (Atlanta, Ga.) Records.
The emergence of queer theater in Georgia was not without controversy. When the famed play The Boys in the Band was staged in the Black Box Theater at the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center in March 1970, the Fulton County Commission threatened to cut public funding from the Atlanta Arts Alliance due to the play’s “filthy” content. Nevertheless, the play continued its two-week run and would be staged again at Buckhead’s Academy Theatre in 1976. While the commercial theater industry in Georgia negotiated the allowance of queer content, LGBTQ+ productions were simultaneously being staged outside of public theaters. Actor and director Howard Brunner staged plays with queer themes in gay bars like Sweet Gum Head and Magic Garden. When 7 Stages Theatre opened in 1979, director Del Hamilton announced the theater’s aim to produce work by Atlanta writers that commercial theater companies might overlook, and 7 Stages has since been a ready home for major queer productions. Topher Payne, the playwright behind 2013’s Angry Fags, said that “7 Stages is the sort of theater that is unafraid to put Angry Fags on a marquee” and “start a tough conversation in an unexpected way.”