Lest We Forget, my current research project at Concordia University, critically analyses the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Stretching over three decades and taking the country's bilingualism into consideration, its objectives are to study the aesthetic variety and political complexity of plays and performances that attend to the epidemic and to identify the multiple challenges faced by theatre artists and activists. Furthermore, the project explores the methodological and historiographical challenges when studying HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in a Canadian context.Footnote ¹

A significant body of research on HIV/AIDS theatre has concentrated on American playwrights such as Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner, performance artists like Tim Miller and the theatrical forms of protest staged by ACT UP. Scholars should, however, avoid neglecting the history of HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in Canada or conflating experiences and essentializing Canadian cultural expressions with those in the United States. For, although there are noteworthy overlaps, there also exist crucial differences in the histories and manifestations of queer activism north and south of the border.Footnote ² In the words of activist Tim McCaskell, [u]nlike in New York, Canadian AIDS activism avoided a civil war between established AIDS service organizations and the new radicals’.Footnote ³ It is imperative to show how HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in Canada has its own history to record, including the manifold ways theatre artists interacted and collaborated with health and cultural authorities on local, provincial and federal levels. It may be futile and unwise to attempt a comprehensive and uniquely ‘Canadian’ narrative or historical overview – after all, Canada is a regionally and linguistically diverse country with a complex colonial past and post-colonial present – nevertheless, I posit that there is value in arguing for the necessity of Canadian perspectives and teasing out some particularities of HIV/AIDS theatre north of the forty-ninth parallel. An important contribution here is the identification of some dramaturgical and historical shifts that HIV/AIDS has entailed for queer theatre.

One of these shifts occurred between the late 1980s and mid-1990s when queer theatre and gay male theatre in particular produced a number of broadly commercial and critical successes. These include Michel Marc Bouchard's Les Feluettes (Montreal, QC, 1987) and Brad Fraser's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Calgary, AB, 1989), both turned into acclaimed movies, in addition to the 1992 publication of the first anthology compiling plays by gay authors.Footnote ⁴ Around the same time, many playwrights dealing with HIV/AIDS broke with the until then predominantly realistic and melodramatic dramaturgy of plays from the 1980s that, in a teleological way, ended with the death of the protagonist or his lover. Stage works like the late Gordon Armstrong's Blue Dragons (1993) and Daniel MacIvor's The Soldier Dreams (1997) both feature leading gay characters who died of AIDS, but return from beyond the grave to actively take part in the respective plots. Not only do these revenants force the survivors to replay some original dialogue that they once had with the dead person, but they also put to the test the processes of memory formation and false idealization of the past. Inspired by theatre scholar Marvin Carlson's theories of ghost characters haunting the postmodern stage and queer theorists Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed's cautioning against the cultural and political amnesia currently surrounding HIV/AIDS,Footnote ⁵ I have argued in a recent essay that Armstrong and MacIvor deploy ghost characters as an aesthetic and political strategy of resistance to grant the dead queer person a voice and presence that has first been denied by history and then threatened by annihilation through disease.Footnote ⁶

The larger number of Canadian plays addressing HIV/AIDS were written and produced before the medical breakthrough that new types of protease inhibitors have provided since 1995. In an ongoing project that documents the rich visual culture produced as a response to the crisis, artist Vincent Chevalier and scholar Ian Bradley-Perrin have drawn attention to the risk of canonizing the – arguably iconic – posters by Gran Fury and ACT UP from the 1980s and 1990s, at the expense of the concerns of people currently living with HIV/AIDS. Under the protest slogan ‘Your nostalgia is killing me’, they have created their own digital poster project to emphasize the many unresolved issues of the epidemic, including unequal access to treatment and the problematic legal discourse on HIV/AIDS.Footnote ⁷ This nostalgia, I believe, also applies to theatre and performance. In recent years, we have seen acclaimed revivals of plays like The Normal Heart and Angels in America in both North America and Europe. Without denying the value of these works, their canonization risks reproducing the false assumption that new plays about HIV/AIDS are no longer being written. Lest We Forget therefore also argues for the necessity of exploring the continuing challenges posed by the epidemic for the queer (theatre) community in the twenty-first century.

The work of activist, playwright and director Sky Gilbert, co-founder of North America's largest professional queer theatre company Buddies in Bad Times Theatre (located in Toronto and celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2014), serves as an example of how contemporary Canadian theatre responds to these challenges. In plays like Rope Enough (2005) and I Have AIDS! (2009)Footnote ⁸ or the unpublished The Bewitching of Max Gunther (2001) and Hamilton Bus Stop (2010), Gilbert explores the commodification of HIV/AIDS by transnational pharmaceutical companies through aggressive marketing campaigns of anti-retroviral cocktails, the implications of consensually unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner and the criminalization of HIV by Canadian courts.Footnote ⁹ Gilbert's flamboyant characters, many of them loud and proud drag queens who are at odds with the straight-acting and media-friendly gay poster boys we see in advertisements for transnational financial institutions, consistently oppose assimilation into neoconservative morality and heteronormative modes of coupledom by unapologetically living out their queer sexuality. Proudly confirming that they have ‘swallowed busloads of male sperm’Footnote ¹⁰ and acknowledging that they have had anonymous sexual encounters with ‘an average of ten men a week for the last twenty years’,Footnote ¹¹ these characters refuse to give in to the normalizing mechanisms and narrow expectations of the contemporary gay movement. They are the embodiment of Gay Shame, a concept proposed by David Halperin and Valerie Traub to designate the political attitude and activist movement of ‘queers . . . who don't lend themselves easily to the propagandistic publicity of gay pride or to its identity-affirming functions’.Footnote ¹² Revelling in their opposition to being shamed into silence, Gilbert's characters transform their self-consciously excessive behaviour into a subversively queer strategy of resistance.Footnote ¹³

While the methodological and historiographical reflections outlined here are specific to my ongoing research, they also articulate broader concerns for scholars studying queer theatre and performance. The rich theoretical apparatus offered by American queer scholarship encourages a necessary and often stimulating dialogue with American cultural products, but it also risks obscuring or subsuming non-US – in this case Canadian – narratives and histories. Finally, it is vital to balance the need to examine and document history with the immediate concerns of the present, honouring those whose deaths continue to risk falling into oblivion without forgetting that the HIV/AIDS epidemic is far from over and that theatrical responses continue to provide indispensable interventions of queer activism.