Gays? In My Good Christian SING!?

At dinner, I ask my mother what she thought of SING!.

“It was like…really gay!”

I snort. My dad rolls his eyes. My sister says “Yeah!” with her mouth full of plain pasta.

She’s right—this year, each SING! included one queer character or couple. Most of those characters were played by queer actors, and the heterosexual actors who did play queer characters did so without a stutter.

Soph-Frosh’s queer main character is a young gay Brooklynite from the 80s who does not want to return to his time period because, while the 80s are a bitchin’ time, they, quote, “aren’t fun if you’re gay!” (An excellent point.)

But in Soph-Frosh SING!, queerness was included for a main character’s one moment of emotional explosion—“I’M GAY!—followed by immediate acceptance and moving on to the next conflict: that the daughter of a scientist was interested in history. It was a plot device, not an overarching theme. Queerness did not carry through the rest of the plot; there were no queer characters kissing at the bar that showed Soph-Frosh’s queer token that this was the place where he belonged.

Queerness was thrown in as a convenient plot device disguised as a political statement. And as appealing as that may have been to a straight audience of social liberals seeking to think of themselves as the good guy, homophobia could have easily been replaced with a million hardships that make a place unlivable. Especially in the context of two other performances that covered the same ground, accepting white cisgender male gayness felt unnecessary.

Using queerness in a piece requires faith to the idea, which Soph-Frosh SING! lacked. If artists decide to explore the homosexual experience in a piece of art, they need to give that theme the space it deserves to be explored in all its depth. Queerness is not a throwaway.

There’s background to SING! 2018’s queerness:

In Senior SING!’s development, the seniors discovered that both of their competitors also used queer characters in their shows, and tried to get the other SING!s to write the characters out of their show so that they could “make a statement about acceptance.” Newsflash, Senior SING!: as queer as all of you are, you didn’t invent The Gay.

Queerness isn’t a statement, it’s something one lives with. Trying to reserve queerness as a statement reduces it to its shock value.

My mother’s commentary: “But to have two high school boys KiSsiNG? On sTAGe? In a FuLl aUdiTOriUm? That’s brave.”

Admittedly, it is fairly radical (though not in New York City) to have two boys making out on stage at a public school performance. But I’m not looking for “a statement about acceptance.” I’m looking for confidence that acceptance is already expected.

In contrast, the juniors’ script was written and cast without gendered characters. They cast, according to producer Elena Sapelyuk, “based on whoever we thought would play the part best.” In the end, that created Alyssa and Celeste, the deeply-in-love, lust-filled queer couple whose queerness goes unmentioned but whose coupleness is made glaringly obvious.

This, in my opinion, is representation at its best. While bringing artistic light to the queer experience is important and admirable when the topic is given the space and focus it deserves, what I am looking for in representation is characters who are defined by their personalities and dilemmas, not limited to those considered inherent to their sexuality.

Junior SING! also addressed the bi-invisibility at Stuyvesant—a character we know to be queer is presumed to be flirting with a dude, which suggests bisexuality (or at least some flexibility). The general pathos at Stuy, at least in my experience, is straight-until-proven-guilty, at which point most straight people will put you in the full-homo box, from which you can only escape by announcing bisexuality loudly and aggressively, or by hooking up with a person-of-the-opposite-sex and having the news spread through the student body like an STI.

But it’s notable, if Junior SING!s production was the most progressive, that they were also the grade to feature the theme least prominently. Maybe what disappointed me about SING! was how much it promised to take on and how little it actually succeeded in addressing.

SING! made statements about queer acceptance that didn’t really speak to the more nuanced issues around sexuality at Stuy. We don’t, as a school, deal with homophobia. What we do deal with, and what SING! didn't address as well as I’d hoped, is how heteronormative we can be as a community.

If a production chooses to take on queer issues, they have to take them on with the nuance that’s appropriate for their audience. In a school where homophobia is common-place, making the message of your performance that Queer Love is Real Love is appropriate. In an environment like ours, where issues around queer inclusion are more complex, that message is overly simplistic and misses an opportunity to build a really substantial conversation.

While SING! 2018 made it clear that our community at Stuyvesant is accepting of queer people (and that we do not suffer from a shortage of them), it reflected a normalized queerness that Stuy lacks. According to The Spectator’s most recent survey, 14 percent of the senior class is queer. But the percentage of queer relationships, hookups, and crushes that make it to the surface of Stuy’s social scene is disproportionately more heterosexual. I do not think this is because straight people are hornier. It reflects a quiet heteronormativity that we are still scratching through. I am not looking for queer tokens, or for statements. I am looking for normalization.

Stay Queer, Stuy.

—Watwood