Eli Zuzovsky

[Note: The following is an excerpt from a novella]


The first one appeared on May 14. The world was approaching its point-of-no-return at the speed of light, proving from day to day how damn right prophet Malachi was (For behold, the day is coming, blazing like a furnace), and Earth was becoming the steaming, racist inferno in which we’ll all perish. In Tompkins Square Park, it was raining like hell.

Before we begin, I would like to preempt any misunderstandings: This is no love story. Nor is it some cautionary tale about the Clash of Civilizations or the Downfall of the West. This is the story of two men who led their unimportant lives in the Big, Rotten Apple. These men happen to be the best friends I’ve ever had.

To avoid any surprises—or, as we call them in the U.S. of A., potential lawsuits—let me give you the full pitch. I’m giving you this pitch as a courtesy, a content warning. Like those small red pepper icons they use in menus of Indian restaurants to warn old, white people that the food could burn their taste buds, so they might as well order some extra chapati with that curry.

So here goes:

A gay couple faces an impossible dilemma, when a mysterious offer appears in their inbox: If they agree to create a homemade pornographic film, they will receive $120,000 that will allow them to realize their long-standing dream of becoming parents.

Norma, third seat on the left at my screenwriting class, says my pitch sucks. I say, let me see the man who thinks that naming your daughter Norma is a legitimate thing to do after 1967.

You have a decent hook, she tells me. Your characters are refreshing and surprisingly well-rounded. But if I may, Jordan dear, you are robbing your pitch of its narrative potential.

And as much as I hate to admit it, she is right. Cause I neglected to mention one crucial detail: this ain’t no typical story. This baby happens to be the living nightmare of any bigot—it’s both homosexual and bi-racial.

The heroes of our story are two men whose hearts lie deep in the cursed ground of the Holy Land. Don’t get me wrong: they’re both Americans, proud residents of the urban jungle known as Alphabet City, Manhattan (Proud? Daud would probably say. I’m not proud of this country, world champion of racism, both overt and covert, 243 years and counting. But he is proud, trust me. You should see his face at our Fourth of July picnics, nibbling his vegan chicken wings all shining. He’s just playing hard to get).

And you know what they say. A Jewish soul still yearns and all that jazz. Although only one of our protagonists is Jewish. The other is—surprise, surprise—Muslim, Palestinian. And that’s the complication in our story. That’s our tragic punchline, our comedic catastrophe, my friends. That’s what makes our story sound like the beginning of a joke that Neo-Nazis tell each other at their underground conventions.

You see, my fellows here in La La Land usually laugh at me. They dismiss my story, calling it a hippie fairytale. They say that if I pitch it anywhere in Hollywood I will be blacklisted—and not in the Let-Me-Buy-The-Rights-In-A-Million-Dollar sense of the term. Producers will avoid my calls, ignore my messages, slam doors in my face.

Thing is, it’s real as shit. And get this: throughout the first week of their dangerous liaison, neither of the gentlemen in question was aware of the other’s ethnicity, or of the tragicomic potential of their entire fling (And let’s face it, it all started as a fling, as they both admit today).

There are other crucial details I left out of my pitch. That was actually on purpose. You see, I’m trying to build dramatic tension. That’s what you should do if you ever want to make a living writing, my screenwriting tutor Seth always says.

I didn’t tell you when and where Daud and Yoni met each other. How they fell in love. And what exactly happened after they received that crazy email.

But have no worries, hevre. You will find out all you need to know in due course. For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, King Solomon said in some secret dialect of ancient Hebrew, if my memory of Bible Camp doesn’t fail me. Haste comes from the devil and patience from the merciful God, Queen Scheherazade responded in her ancient Arabic, centuries later.

For everything there is a season. Yes. I’m pretty sure that, having lived through the events I’m about to unfold on these very pages, despite everything that’s happened, Yoni and Daud would both agree on that.

It has never taken me so long to hit the send button. I write five drafts of the email, asking to meet him in July when we’re both in Saratoga Springs. I stare at the screen of my laptop for over forty minutes. Eventually, I work up the courage to send the version that I find least embarrassing. “I wanted to let you know,” I write, “how life-changing your words have been for me.”



The response arrives after one hour and twenty minutes. My heart’s aflutter; “I’d love to do an interview.” He gives me his number and warns me that he’s “a night person,” so breakfast and lunch are off the table.



Two weeks later, I pick him up from his hotel with an Uber. The driver doesn’t know him, so I give her a quick brief of his oeuvre. When he enters the car, she asks if she could have his autograph. He chuckles. “Well of course,” he says, “but I’m not sure who you think I am.” She smiles. “What do you mean? You’re Frank Bidart. You’re very famous. I just Googled you.”



He is, indeed; one of America’s most celebrated poets, recently turned eighty. Born in 1939 in Bakersfield, California, he fell in love with poetry as an undergrad at UC Riverside. After his graduation, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study literature at Harvard, where he became a student and a close friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. In 1972, he started teaching at Wellesley College, where he still works; a year later, he published Golden State, his first book.



Bidart’s range is immense—from intensely personal poems about his family and homosexuality to dramatic monologues of characters like the necrophiliac murderer Herbert White, the anorexic woman Ellen West, and the tortured ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. He has received some of the most prestigious literary honors, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—both for Half-Light, his most recent collection.



We drive to his favorite bakery in town. After repeated insistence on his part, I concede to break my veganism and eat a vanilla macaron with him. We sit at a corner table. Every once in a while, he pauses and takes on the part of the interviewer. He poses thoughtful questions about my life and looks at me with wide eyes that beam with care, compassion, and attentiveness—three long-standing trademarks of his poetry.



*This conversation has been edited and condensed.*



***



“For each gay kid whose adolescence



was America in the forties or fifties

the primary, the crucial



scenario



forever is coming out—<br>

or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.”



(Excerpt from “Queer,” 2012)

***



**I grew up in Tel Aviv, which was a pretty good place for gay kids, very different from Bakersfield, California in the ‘40s. Yet, when you write “or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not,” I feel like it reflects precisely my experience. Does that make sense?**



Of course it does. Absolute sense. But I'm sure every person’s experience is also different. I only really know what I and my friends have experienced. I don't know anyone for whom coming out was easy. Or if it was, no one has ever said that. Sometimes we live under the impression in this country that a lot of the conflict about these things is over, but I think it's not. One thing that's great about the internet is that there are all these short videos of people talking about coming out. And they are usually stories about how difficult it is. Extremely difficult. Even if their parents turn out to be very supportive.



**Surely. Growing up, I was surrounded by gay people, including some of my friends and teachers. And yet, “the crucial scenario…”**



Openly gay?



**Yes.**



I certainly had teachers that I thought were gay, but none of them would talk about it.



**And you didn’t feel like you could talk to them?**



Surely not in high school. Absolutely not. And even in college, none of my professors were openly gay. It was really only one who I thought might have been. But he was never candid about that. And in fact, to this day I still don't know if he was or wasn't gay. But, you know, I'm talking about the ‘50s, and it was a different world.



**What part of it?**



I think teachers are open about it now. I'm definitely open about it with my students, and other teachers at Wellesley are. I'm not sure exactly when that changed. I don't think it happened even in the 60s, it probably changed in the late ‘60s, mid-’70s. I remember very vividly the first time I stayed with Robert Lowell and his wife in England. I’d been there for about a week and a half, two weeks. I liked them very much, we got along very well. And I said, “I have to be candid with you about something, and that something may affect our friendship and the way you think of me. And that is, I'm gay.” And they said, “Oh, we just assumed you were.” But I didn't know that.



**Were you surprised?**



I was. This was in England, and the English were using the word “queer” to designate people way before it became acceptable in America. And it had more edge. You really couldn’t tell how much negativity there was in it. And I just did not know if Lowell and his wife would want a gay friend. It turned out that it was not an issue at all. Lowell once said to me, “I don't assume that what I want to do in bed with a woman is more moral than what you want to do in bed with a man.” This explicitness was very rare. It also meant that Lowell had thought about this. Even though he had been a Catholic, he clearly decided that making it a moral issue was stupid. But I didn't know that before I told him.



And it was unclear in his own work too. The reference in “Skunk Hour” to “our fairy decorator,” for example. You can't quite tell what the tone of that is. You probably know that “fairy” means gay there, but you don't know how negative it is. It's the part of the poem in which he speaks as if he’s unaffectedly part of that small Maine town. Then, describing his actions, he suddenly says that that he can’t trust his own mind. “My mind’s not right.” But that's a late break in the poem. Before that, he’s part of the community and its attitudes. It turns out that there's desperation behind that. He recognizes that he is so much not part of the community. He’s like the skunks.



**And what was it like, coming out to Elizabeth Bishop?**



Well, she was lesbian, so I think it became part of the ground of our friendship. Because I was someone that she could be candid with, and she liked that.



**Was that clear from the outset?**



It was very clear from the first moment, I'm not sure how. I was certainly not hiding it. But she, in general, was not candid about being gay. So it actually became some kind of ground for communication. And it was still a world in which she absolutely was not open with people. I have no idea what would have happened had she lived much longer. I doubt that she would have become much more candid because she had a very deep distrust of the straight world. When I was straightforward about being gay at Wellesley, she thought it was very dangerous. She said, “I believe in closets, closets, and more closets.”



She knew it was the new fashion to be very accepting. But she felt that even if they accepted for a while, it wouldn't last, and people who came out would be punished eventually. And my own attitude was, “Well, if this candor is going to turn on me, then so be it, because I can’t be hidden anymore.” But I think I was always wary of that happening. And it has not happened. But I also think one must not be categorical about the future. You know, I never thought Trump would get as far as he has gotten, and I was astonished that white supremacists were no longer afraid to announce to the world that they were white supremacists. But there’s no alternative, I mean, you can't go back to the closet. I can't. And I'm incredibly lucky to have lived in a period in which these things have opened up. When the AIDS epidemic started, one might have thought that straight America would turn against the gay world and think of it as the source of AIDS. There are people who tried to do that. I saw Pat Robertson on TV trying to do that. But he didn't succeed.



**What about people like Roy Cohn?**



Well, he was Trump's teacher. But it didn't happen. And if anything, I think it humanized gay people to the straight world. They saw people suffering, they saw people whom they had not known before were gay, were gay, and the effect was not isolation but acceptance. I could not have predicted that'd be the effect. I think one still has to keep some degree of skepticism about the future and about what will be. Things constantly surprise me.



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***



“Once I have the voice



that’s<br>

the line



and at



the end<br>

of the line



is a hook



and attached<br>

to that



is the soul”



(Excerpt from “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger,” 2013)



***



**I remember when I first read your poems, I almost felt like they were written about my life, which was a wonderful, confounding experience. And at first I thought it was because you write about queer life, which is something that I’m very interested in. But the more I read your work, the more I realize that it’s not just that. There’s something very cinematic in the way your poems operate.**



I think that’s very true.



**Is that a deliberate choice?**



It’s certainly deliberate. I mean, I accepted it as a model in some ways, because I think that’s the way to handle transitions. The fluidity of transition in films, I think, corresponds to something very real. And that fluidity is already in Shakespeare. Moving between scenes, the shifts of action… I think I first absorbed it while watching films, and it’s very much affected by my whole experience of films. No question.



**Was that something you were conscious of?**



Yes. I mean, I love films. I wanted to be a film director for a long time. And I think I yearned for transitions in art and in writing to have the kind of directness, fluidity, and abruptness (at times) of film transitions. So that was very conscious. I think it also became part of how I see the world. I think that the way I understand the world is very colored by my experience of films.



**Have you ever thought about making a movie?**



Sure. But I've never had anything that felt as if it had to be a movie. In fact, when I discovered the story of Myrrha, which became the center of my poem “The Second Hour of the Night,” I knew it was going to be something long and ambitious. That certainly would be a potential movie. But I've never had the apparatus to make a movie. And, more than that, I felt that what I had to give it was not what I could do on film. It’s not one of the greatest poems of Ovid. Ovid is scared to death of Myrrha; he relentlessly refuses to give her interiority until the very end when she becomes a tree. Outside of that, he's rather ironic and distanced about her. And I felt that what I had to give to that narrative was interiority. I think that the best vehicle of interiority, at least as I’ve experienced it, is words. And that's why I don't feel that being a director was my real calling. There's a kind of intimacy of the inner voice that one can do in a poem better than in any other medium. And that's the real work I have to do.



But it's also true that I don't know. If I were a film director, maybe I would know how to embody things in images. It's not as if a great Antonioni film really wants to be a poem. I mean, it is a poem. It completely works by being an eloquent series of images. But I think that’s not the way my mind works.



**Do you have any favorite directors who are working now?**



Not in the way that I love Antonioni. I discovered La Notte when I first went to Paris in 1961. It was a tremendous discovery for me. I like Tarantino very much. I like Ari Aster's film, Hereditary. I think it's a masterpiece. Of the young directors, he’s the one I'm most astonished by. But it's also true that as I’ve gotten older, I stopped going to theaters. I wait until the films come out as disks. I'm drowning in disks.



**I think you might be the only one.**



Well, I gather people don’t buy disks anymore. But I’m very possessive. I grew up in a world in which I was constantly reading about things I could not see. I was not living in LA; we did not have repertory film theaters. I could see the newest films, but not the history of Hollywood. Then videotapes came and you were able to actually buy a copy of Bringing Up Baby, which was thrilling. But it means that today I don't trust that the people who own these films are going to make them available. They didn't when I was growing up. What if some estate somewhere decides that I can no longer see Bringing Up Baby? I am damned if I allow that to happen.



You can live with a film the way you can live with a poem, when you own a copy of it. You can see it again and again at your own pace and look at sequences. I don't trust the conglomerates. Disney withdraws films for five or ten years, some even permanently. And I don't want someone to be able to do that to me. You can't think about something if you can't see it and touch it and hold it. And so I continue to be a hoarder. Absolutely.



**Of books and records too, I assume?**



Yes, books and records and performances of any kind and poems. But my apartment has become increasingly unlivable because I can’t store all these things. So everything is just stacked up and becomes inaccessible. It's very self-defeating.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



***



“I love sweets,—<br>

&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;heaven<br>

&emsp;would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream <br>

...<br>



But my true self<br>

is thin, all profile<br>



and effortless gestures, the sort of blond<br>

elegant girl whose<br>

&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;&emsp;body is the image of her soul.”



(Excerpt from “Ellen West,” 1977)

***



**Do you read contemporary poetry?**



Sure, and I like discovering things online very much. But very seldom you can experience a whole book online, so what you get is a taste of an author. Some authors I’m impressed with and think they're very good. And if I really want to experience the author, I end up having to buy the book.



**What's your impression of American poetry today?**



I think we're going through an incredibly vital time. I've been nominated for the National Book Award many times. I always lost until the last time. And very often, when I've been a finalist in the past, I thought that at least one or two of the books weren't good at all. Sometimes I thought the books that won weren’t very good. This last time I was a finalist, I thought all the books were incredibly interesting and various and adventuresome and bold in many ways. I think we're going through an extremely strong period for whatever reason. I don’t feel I understand why, but there’s a lot of experimentation and bold, adventuresome choices. Some of it probably has something to do with people being so inflamed about politics, but I don't think it's all that. I think there's also been a real opening out of people’s sense of aesthetic possibilities. I don't mean that the poets now are better than the poets twenty years ago. But I think the level, in general, is higher. There have always been great poets, but I think that there is probably more extraordinary work being done now, or that at least achieves some audience, than in the past.



**A big question today is who has the right to tell what story. I was reading your poem “Ellen West” the other day and thought, “Well, I don't know if a male poet can write something like that today.”**



Or would.



**Is that a concern for you?**



Of course. You don't think anybody was saying to Shakespeare, “You can't write about these Italians kids. You don't know anything about Verona.” I think that all that kind of identity politics in poetry is stupid and wrong. It’s just wrong. The whole idea of appropriation is ridiculous. Artists have always taken on things that were not their own identity. Art is not just autobiography. So I think that's just kind of stupid contemporary prejudice, really pushed by people who are not interested in art. They're interested in politics or perhaps social justice. Anna Karenina was written by a man. And so I think all that is just nonsense. It contradicts what artists have always done, that is to say, they have felt their way into narratives that were not literally their own. That's always been the case, and the notion that that's somehow forbidden is anti-art. It's stupid and anti-art.



**That's something that always strikes me in your poems: the great empathy you have for basically everyone, whether it's your parents, a necrophiliac murderer, or an anorexic woman in the ‘20s.**



I hope so. The idea that it’s possible is fundamental in art. So I think that's a bad aspect of this contemporary moment. But one must resist it.



***



“When I tell you that all the years we were<br>

undergraduates I was madly in love with you<br>

you say you<br>

knew. I say I knew you<br>

knew. You say<br>

*There was no place in nature we could meet*.”



(Excerpt from “Half-Light,” 2016)



**Last month was the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall. When the police raid happened in New York you were probably writing Golden State, your first book, in Cambridge. Did the riots influence your writing process?**



When Stonewall happened, I was not aware of it. I've never been part of the New York gay scene and I just wasn't paying attention. On the other hand, I was extremely aware of the results of Stonewall. Gay liberation suddenly became a term. And after that I came out. I’d been out to my friends, but after Stonewall certainly was more open. There's nothing explicit in my first book about being gay, but in my second book I say I'm gay. Stonewall was immensely important. A few years ago the whole nation engaged in a big discussion around the question of gays getting married. In 1960 I did not believe that such a discussion could happen. It's incredible. The change in my lifetime is astonishing and I don’t know anybody who predicted it. The world had resisted candor, had resisted acceptance of these things for a very long time.



**On the other hand, we do hear people of that generation saying today, “This is not what we fought for.”**



Absolutely, and I was very aware of that too. I have a very good friend who was straightforward about being gay. When the whole gay marriage thing happened, he thought it was ridiculous. That was not what he’d been hoping for, because it looked so much like simply mimicking the straight world. But I sensed immediately that if it was accepted, it would make a real difference in the straight world’s idea of what it meant to be gay. There are so many images in our culture in which to be gay simply means disorder and flouting convention. But the gay people I knew were far from that. Maybe they flouted convention in one way, but in many other ways they didn't. And they also yearned for stability. People in general do. I never lived with anyone, but most of my gay friends, maybe all of them, have either lived with somebody or have been in a committed relationship for many years. I'm actually very unusual in that respect.



In any case, I saw it as a sign of some importance that people could marry. And I think it has been important and very good. I think it's important that gay people can live any way they want to. If they want to be married, if they want to be committed, if they want to raise a family—fine. Who am I to say how others should live? I know gay people who’ve lived together for twenty years and don't get married. The condition of their relationship is that they don't make it formal. That's how they live with each other.



**Was that something you were interested in?**



Well, I've fallen in love plenty of times, and I was always a little blurry in my mind in terms of what I wanted after falling in love. But I always managed to choose someone who would not respond. And I think that's because part of me did not want it. I think that was my protection. I am very, very, very wary of what happens to people when they have a single relationship. Many of the marriages I know have, in some way, been corrosive and I don't want that. And the ones that are good I don't really know from the inside. My own parents’ marriages were terrible—great arenas of revenge, anger, resentment, and torturing. And I don't want to be part of that.



***



“He made him wake. He ordered him to eat<br>

my heart. He ate my burning heart. He ate it<br>

submissively, as if afraid, as LOVE wept.”<br>



(Excerpt from “Love Incarnate,” 1997)



**“Love Incarnate” is one of my favorite poems. You based it on Dante’s La Vita Nuova. What made you want to revisit an old Italian sonnet?**



First of all, I was astonished when I discovered the sonnet. It’s not at all the conventional view of love. And I was astonished because I had read it in translation and did not understand what happened, what the action of the poem was. I think that the earlier translations I knew (probably only Rossetti’s) blunted what the poem was about. One day Tom Sleigh casually mentioned Dante’s sonnet in which Love eats the speaker’s heart. Suddenly I had a job. I wanted, then, to do a version which made manifest the central action, which had been bowdlerized. There was something I could do to make clear this complicated thing that Dante had seen, and that had been obscured in the translations. I had not realized what the poem was about until Sleigh’s statement—until I then read the sonnet in Italian, and saw that it was a vision of love that most people did not understand as Dante’s.



**Why do you think it was obscured?**



People are unbelievably sentimental about love. You know, we live in a culture in which an incredible amount of crap is said about love. Anything really complicated about love, people may recognize for a moment, but then they want to look the other way. People tend to soften everything and make it all more palatable. And the essential complication at the center, they tend to not face. And the reason for that says something about human beings. And literary culture.



**You have that beautiful quote in which you say that our culture has essentially replaced its obsession with god with an obsession with love.**



I think that's true.

One may as well begin with the moment I sob on a stranger’s shoulder. It happens well into the second half of a two-part, seven-hour gay epic on Broadway. 24 hours earlier, I hop on the bus from Boston to New York, overworked and brokenhearted. Going off of the faint memory of a New Yorker piece I read about it, I Google *The Inheritance*. On the website of the British *Telegraph*, I find a review that promises “a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe” and defines the show as “perhaps the most important American play of the century.” This description seals the deal; I book my ticket before the bus leaves South Station. So, in retrospect, I have no right to complain—a stream of tears is exactly what I signed up for when I paid eighty dollars I didn’t have to witness gay men fall in love and break each other’s hearts for seven hours.



Written by American playwright Matthew Lopez, *The Inheritance* operates on a simple premise: a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s novel *Howard’s End*, it follows a group of gay men in modern-day New York, two decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic. At the heart of the play are Eric Glass, a thirty-something activist and his partner, novelist-turned-playwright Toby Darling. The two live in a rent-controlled apartment that Eric inherited from his grandmother, a holocaust survivor who fled Germany. A few hours before he and Toby get engaged, Eric is notified of their imminent eviction, which threatens to disturb the peace of their Upper West Side domestic paradise. While Toby leaves town for work and falls for Adam, the leading actor in his play, Eric befriends Walter, their older upstairs neighbor, who tells him about his life as a gay man in the ‘80s.



*The Inheritance* opened in March 2018 at the Young Vic Theatre in London. The reviews were ecstatic; within six months, the play transferred to the West End and went on to win four Olivier Awards, including Best New Play and Best Director (Stephen Daldry, the man in charge of hits like *Billy Eliot*—the film and the musical—and *The Crown* on Netflix). Last November, it opened on Broadway, making its long-awaited journey across the Atlantic.



As I am walking to the subway after the show, still wiping my tears, I see the play’s bright future as clearly as I see the enormous ad for Buffalo Wild Wings right in front of me: rapturous reviews, a two-year run, a few Tony Awards, perhaps even a TV adaptation starring Andrew Garfield.



But that is not quite how the following months unfold. American critics turn out to be much more ambivalent than their British counterparts. *The New York Times* says that the play’s breadth “doesn’t always translate into depth”; *The New Yorker* calls it “audacious and highly entertaining, if not entirely successful”; and Time Out observes that “a certain amount of imperfection is built into ambition on this scale.” The friends I send to watch the play, using my rare must-see command, eventually report back, describing a fair amount of empty seats, that only grows post-intermission. I start asking myself what I saw in *The Inheritance* that others didn’t see. And then I realize: it was my own reflection, bright and shining.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



What does it mean, to see oneself on stage? This is a question our culture has been grappling with since the early days of theater. Aristotle, for example, would probably categorize my *Inheritance* experience as cathartic. In *Poetics*, he used the term to respond to his teacher Plato, who argued that poetic drama is detrimental because it creates anarchy within our soul by stirring up our passions and impairing our reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, insisted that good drama doesn’t create anarchy, but prevents it, by providing a regulated outlet for our feelings. A well-executed tragedy, Aristotle believed, arouses “pity and fear” in us to the point of their “catharsis,” a medical metaphor which literally means purification, or relief. Then, more than two thousand years later, German playwright Bertolt Brecht challenged Aristotle’s theory, which by then had pretty much become the foundation of Western theater as we know it. Brecht thought catharsis was “a pap for bourgeois audiences”; he argued that its byproducts (empathy, sympathy, identification) prevent us from thinking about the action rationally. Instead, Brecht advocated for theater that pushes us to adopt a critical approach, by using techniques like alienation and distance.



Lopez is an outstanding writer; his characters are sharp and witty, ruthless and humane, compelling and infuriating. I fell in love with Eric, even when he sounded like an Intro to Queer Studies textbook. I admired Walter for his heroic treatment of his HIV-positive friends at a time when they were dehumanized by virtually everyone—from President Reagan to Henry Wilcox, Walter’s own partner. I was even able to find compassion for Toby, who shattered my heart when, in response to Eric’s claim that “There’s more to people than beauty,” he said, “You would have to tell yourself that, wouldn’t you?”



But Brecht definitely had a point. I saw myself on stage so vividly, with overwhelming clarity, that I wasn’t able to consider the things I didn’t see.



Only a few weeks later, in the aftermath of an exhausting verbal sparring with grad students at a party, am I able to do a double take. At first, I defend the play with the vehemence of Joan of Arc, leading a fearless campaign against the English (in this case, gay English Ph.D. candidates who dismiss *The Inheritance* as conservative, burgeois, and even homophobic). But on my way back home, confused and slightly drunk, I decide to lay my arms down and consider my enemy’s position. I think about the play’s relegation of characters of color to the outskirts of its plot; its heavy reliance on Toby and Leo, a homeless sex worker, as the sole representatives of the working class; and its almost complete exclusion of female-identified and trans characters (with the exception of Margaret, a repented homophobic mother of an AIDS victim, extraordinarily portrayed by Lois Smith, an acting legend).



My confusion persists, slowly morphing into a thick, gray cloud of ambivalence, until, a few weeks later, I get an opportunity to talk to Lopez, the playwright. During a phone interview, I ask him if he considered including non-cisgender characters in his gay epic. “I did, and I’ve certainly written women before in other plays,” Lopez says. “Then I decided that I was not attempting to write a play that tells the story of all the letters of the LGBTQIA alphabet or all the colors of the rainbow flag. I was going to talk about what it meant to me to be a gay man. This was always a very, very personal play for me. And I have no experience of what it’s like to be trans or a gay woman, which doesn’t mean that I won’t write these roles in the future. We do not deny our trans siblings in the play, but it’s not my story.”



I try to reconcile Lopez’s response with the fact that *The Inheritance* has been widely perceived as the ultimate queer, post-AIDS crisis saga, which supposedly sets out to speak for a large community. “I don’t believe that investigation into one’s own experience and the community that one most identifies with is necessarily to the exclusion of all else,” Lopez explains. “Just like I had no real connection to *Howard’s End* when I was a Puerto Rican teenage kid growing up, watching the movie and reading the book, I would hope that others could find commonality in the experiences of the heart and the soul that I examine in the play. I can’t explain myself to the world as anyone else except for who I am and the life I’ve lived.”



Lopez insists that a single work of art can’t be expected to do everything. “I think that’s a burden to place on a piece of art that is not achievable. Or, I’ll just say, it wasn’t my goal,” he says. “But I don’t think that that’s necessarily exclusionary. I can’t wait to see the seven-hour trans epic, but I can’t be the one to write it.”



What about casting? I ask him, mentioning the charge that while the play provides perhaps the most comprehensive portrayal of queer life on Broadway today, some of its main cast members are heterosexual. “When I’m casting a play, all I’m thinking when an actor walks into the room is, ‘Are you my character? Do you have the heart and the soul? Do you have the facility with language that I require?’” Lopez tells me. “When we were casting the play, especially the roles of Toby and Adam/Leo, we were spending a lot of time trying very desperately to find actors of color. That was the primary concern. It didn’t happen, despite our efforts. In fact, we didn’t make the offers to Andrew and Sam, the actors who play these roles, until just a few weeks before production started in London, even though they lived in the United States. So my focus was really making sure that the leads look like the community.”



While he regrets not having cast actors of color to play any of the main characters, Lopez is also grateful to the cast members “for their beautiful performances, the sacrifices they had to make, and their commitment to the project.” For him, an actor’s sexual orientation is simply not part of the equation. “When they walk into the room to audition, my first thought is not, ‘Are you gay? Straight? Bi?’ It’s not a consideration for me, and I know that some people insist that it has to be.”



At this point, Lopez refers to employment discrimination laws, which prohibit employers from asking potential employees questions about their sexual identity. “I think it’s a weird place we’re in, where more people are insisting on demolishing the binary of sexual identity, on embracing the fluidity of sexual expression, but when it comes to casting actors in a play they still insist on the same binary,” he says. “I can’t speak to the private lives of the actors, but my question is, how many sexual encounters in their lives will they have to have had in order to qualify for these roles? Is there a number? It feels somewhat regressive suddenly to say, ‘Well, just because you have a girlfriend now you don’t have a multiplicity of sexual expressions in your psyche.’ It’s a question that I simply, literally, legally cannot ask, and it defies everything we know about the art of acting.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



A few weeks after watching *The Inheritance*, I find out that Machine, the only gay bar I know in Boston, is closing. I’m immediately reminded of one scene in the play, in which Eric’s thirty-fourth birthday party turns into a heated debate regarding the future of the queer community. “Gay bars used to be safe spaces for people like us to be ourselves and to find others like us,” Eric declares in an impassioned monologue. “Now everyone just goes onto Grindr. But what about a twenty-year-old kid who’s not looking for sex, but rather for community?”



When I tell Lopez about Machine, he laughs. “It’s a fascinating evolution that we’re seeing,” he says. “I guess that enough gay men feel comfortable enough in the world that they don’t necessarily need to congregate at gay bars. But the truth is that this is still not a safe space for so many in our community, certainly not for trans women and lesbians. In many areas of the country, gay men are still not safe either. So while gay bars may be closing in big cities, there still is a need for these spaces. And I wonder what these spaces will be.”



Lopez, it seems, is somewhat optimistic. “I think we have a particular resilience,” he explains. “TV shows like Pose demonstrate the ability of the queer community to create spaces for itself. We have to. The only fear I have, well, not the only one, but one of them today is… It would be a shame if these spaces are all online and everyone is in their individual homes and apartments. Social media can never be a replacement for actual community. It’s an approximation of it, but it isn’t the real thing,” he says. “And that’s something to which I don’t have an answer.”



Did he feel a difference between the reactions of the audience in London and here? “Instantly,” he says. “New York loves to look in the mirror and I don’t think that’s a failing. I think it’s a perfect explanation of what it means to be a New Yorker. There’s great joy in the theater when locations are mentioned. New Yorkers love to talk about rent and real estate and that always gets a good response. And I think there’s something even deeper for New Yorkers because it deals with events that occur here. The AIDS epidemic affected London just as badly, but to see the play here and be reminded of those events as they happened to New Yorkers makes the experience more personal.”



Before we hang up the call, I wonder if Lopez has considered turning the play into a TV show (last month, Playball called *The Inheritance* “The Greatest Netflix Binge on Broadway”). “Of course,” he laughs. “That wasn’t something I was thinking about when I was writing the play, not in the least. But as I was structuring it, I did realize that I was actually writing two three-act plays, which then meant that no act would be longer than an hour—the average length of an episode of television. Once we started to perform in London we realized, ‘Oh, each act is like an episode of a Netflix show.’ It was not the intention, but it was the result, and it was what audiences began to like in the play too. And then, as we continued to craft the show, we decided to really lean into it. We thought of that as an asset. Once we realized that was how people were accessing the play, we made sure that we really allowed them to have that experience. I think that it is incumbent upon any art form to not deny the age in which it is being shown. We live in the age of Netflix and binge-watching. And it’s enjoyable,” he adds. “But even in a six-and-a-half-hour long play, there are so many darlings that you have to drown. There’s a lot of the story that didn’t make it into the play. And maybe I will tell it someday, hopefully.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Like any ambitious work of art, *The Inheritance* is imperfect. Yes, some of the political debates it stages can feel awkward or expository. Yes, it might not be as sophisticated as another great gay epic, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—a common criticism whose prescriptiveness reminds me of my mom’s pleas that I be more like my brother (not every gay epic has to be intellectualy demanding, just like not every member of my family has to be in Boy Scouts and play soccer. And, while the two plays do share many features—being New York-centered, long, and queer—they are completely different projects, created in two distinct historical moments, a fact that makes the relationship between them resemble more that of a grandfather and grandchild, or of distant cousins who see each other rarely, at funerals and weddings). And no, the cast members don’t wear shoes on stage, a fact that, for some reason, seems to have stirred some critics much more than the play’s engagement with themes like sex work, drug addiction, and intergenerational trauma.



I’ve recently heard that if ticket sales don’t improve, the curtain might come down on *The Inheritance* sometime in the next few months. If this is true, I think it is a grim prospect. Not because the play’s queerness makes it untouchable. I can’t help but feel like the standards to which we hold Lopez accountable are virtually impossible. His play should be criticized for its flaws, but not entirely dismissed.



Albeit partially and imperfectly, *The Inheritance* features some fascinating characters, like Tristan, an African-American, H.I.V.-positive doctor, who compares Donald Trump to AIDS in a brilliant moment of political commentary. It contains some of the most original depictions of gay sex I’ve ever seen (which, quite predictably, have already provoked some homophobic reactions, like that of the New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski, who complained that “the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying”). And, most importantly, it tries to push the boundaries of the theatrical experience, and it does so on West 47th street, two blocks away from The Tina Turner Musical.



Unsurprisingly, some of the play’s loudest critics have been members of the queer community. Last month, the producers of Slate’s queer podcast, Outward, assembled four gay men of different ages to discuss the show. “So many people were seeing the play that they wanted to see, not the play that was actually being enacted on stage,” one of the commentators argued. “To me, that was half the tears of older theatergoers and younger ones. They needed this play to be there, so therefore they made it what it was and brought their own needs to it in a way that was separate from the agenda of the play and the enactment of it as well. And I respected that and felt sad in some ways that something like this was filled with so much evanescent sentiment when we deserve a story that has more power and complexity to it.”



Was I seeing *The Inheritance* or the play I wanted it to be? Did I just need it to exist? Do we deserve a different story? These, I think, are all questions worth considering, ones to which I don’t have clear-cut answers. All I know is that I spend my last hours in New York running through the streets in the pouring rain, desperately looking for a copy of the play. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read and reread it, trying to figure out why it strikes a chord within my soul so powerfully.



As I board the bus back home from New York, a friend sends me an essay by James Baldwin, a major link in the chain of queer artists that *The Inheritance* charts and perhaps the person whose thoughts about this play I would have been most interested in hearing. Published in 1964, the essay is titled “Nothing Personal.”



“When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents,” Baldwin writes. “Everyone is rushing, God knows where, and everyone is looking for God knows what—but it is clear that no one is happy here, and that something has been lost. Only, sometimes, uptown, along the river, perhaps… yes, *there* was something recognizable, something to which the soul responded, something to make one smile, even to make one weep with exultation.”



I am profoundly moved by Baldwin’s words, which I struggle to decipher on the broken screen of my iPhone. There are no shoulders to sob on, so I stare into space silently. I lean my head against the window. I think how wonderful it is that we were made to connect, to be moved, to feel.