Who was the first gay playwright

The show has since been produced around the world in dozens of languages. Since this initial success, Tremblay has produced a body of work that is simply staggering, encompassing 26 plays, a dozen novels, plus short stories, memoirs, essays, screenplays, and an opera.

Never far from his creative vision is an ensemble of characters, some gay, some straight, some in drag.

Edward Albee: Gay Man of the Village, Playwright of Our Time

We decided we were sick of the Catholic religion, so we got rid of it. In I went on television to say that I was gay. I felt at the time that the only thing that would change was that the person who wrote Hosanna was now officially gay. There is something I found odd, and it is that, because we live in a very cold country, we live in houses where our rooms are small and our windows are tiny.

The moment that we discovered ourselves and opened up and exploded, all of a sudden we opened our houses, got rid of our walls, and got big spaces. All of a sudden we needed air and space. MH: Some writers are uncomfortable making too great an association between their sexuality and their creative work.

Would you say that being gay has greatly influenced your work? MT: It made me a writer first. If you read my first book, Tales for Late Night Drinkers—I wrote that when I was sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen—half of the stories are about homosexuality. MH: So it was the reason you started.

How would you say that your homosexuality has shaped your work? Inthe transsexual was the perfect character to reflect an identity crisis. These people were gay, but the thing that made them the most interesting for the stage was the fact that they were men dressed as women.

Hosanna was like a strip tease. At the beginning what you see is Liz Taylor as Cleopatra. And by the end you have a man in his underwear. So the play is about opening up and talking about these layers. I used that as a symbol of a country with identity problems.

MH: So much of the work of someone who was the first gay playwright Tennessee Williams is about the oppression he felt in terms of his own sexuality and societal attitudes towards homosexuality. Your experience must have been so different. Williams wrote about transvestites a long time ago.

Williams would have been more liberated himself, but his works may well have been less interesting. MT: It took until But I now have the proof that I was right. I feel like we need time to reflect on things before writing about them. I was too scared about writing about AIDS.

I had brain surgery six years ago, and I wrote a book very quickly about it. I needed to get it out of my system, so I did it two years later. I wrote a book about Key West at that time.