Interview footage with Palmer Wells, founder of the Marietta Theatre in the Square, discussing the theater's opening in 1982. Courtesy of Kennesaw State University. Department of Archives, Rare Books and Records Management, Kennesaw State University Archives Oral history project, 2014-.

LGBTQ+ Georgians have created their own theatrical communities, spaces, and narratives throughout the twentieth century. Savannahians Harry Hervey and his partner Carleton Hildreth were in-demand writers who co-authored multiple plays, although one—The Iron Widow—was reportedly deemed too homoerotic and was withdrawn from its intended Broadway production in 1930. Among the most famous queer playwrights of the century was Rebecca Ranson, whose 1984 play Warren was among the first major works to respond to the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the illness and death of Ranson’s friend Warren Johnston, the play allowed audiences to identify with a range of emotional responses as its characters wrestled with Warren’s AIDS diagnosis and ultimately formed a support system for him and for each other. Ranson would return to the subject in 1988 when she wrote Higher Ground: Voices of AIDS, a series of monologues drawn from interviews with over forty individuals. Of the twenty-eight interviewees who acted in the play, twenty-three were living with AIDS, and many narrated their own stories. Directors and theater managers have also played a key role in bringing LGBTQ+ issues to public view. Palmer Wells and his partner Michael Horne founded Marietta’s Theatre in the Square in 1982, and later weathered local conflict after Cobb County’s residents took exception to a 1993 performance of Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart. Criticism of the performance anticipated the Cobb County Commission’s condemnation of the “gay lifestyle” the following year, but the young theater proved resilient, surviving and producing many LGBTQ+ dramas before its closure in 2012.

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