Yes, I went to see that play that's taken Broadway by storm, when last I was in NYC; and I must admit, I was deeply disappointed. "Is the word 'infidelity' really in the gay lexicon?" I asked a friend a few days late. Yes, boys, I hate to say it, hot it's true: this play is a nineteenth-century morality pageant, replete with punishments for promiscuity, praise for monogamy (or, even more puzzling, no acknowledgment that any other lifestyle is possible), and haunting renditions of 1930s tunes. My response? Oh, a Gay Lifestyle, you're too kind ... keep it, please, I'd sooner die.

I had a similar response on viewing Angles [whoops! in America;: these are people I'm supposed to have an emotional response to? The primary emotion seemed to be guilt. Not surprising, since that's the predominant motivating factor in American society; but I do like to think that Gay Society is at least making an effort to break free of it. Mr. Kushner unsurprisingly; given his heritage and politics spent most of the play celebrating it, wallowing in it, flagellating himself and his characters and, by extension, the audience. 'If we just feel guilty enough, we can become better people,' he seemed to be saying. And Terrence McNally was eagerly echoing those sentiments.

People make much of the fact that Angels has become such a major hit. Oh, audiences must be becoming more tolerant, they say: even (simulated) gay sex onstage, they can watch without becoming nauseated! I was persuaded by that line of thought, until I saw! V! C!, and realized that the take-home message from the sex scenes in both plays was that we should feel guilty about promiscuity', that it was unhealthy nay, suicidal. And that's a message that mainstream America was only too happy to gobble up; it was balm to their troubled souls.

You see, heterosexuals, over the past few years, have begun to experience a nagging worry: worry that they've been missing out on something all these years. Faced with the demise of all their psychiatric and moral explanations for 'those poor homo-sexuals,' they've been forced into the realization that yes, freed from the strictures of their Judean-christian upbringing, we are having a better time than they are. I can only presume that Mn McNally is engaging in an elaborate bit of disinformation: reassuring the breeders that really, it's okay, we're just as miserable as you are, deep down underneath our carefree Gay Exterior. If this is the case, I congratulate him on his subtlety. I'm only concerned about the effect his play will have on impressionable youth. If I were a gay fifteen-year-old who'd read all the glowing reviews in the gay and straight media, of course I'd want to go see this play; and having seen it, taking it as a blueprint for what my life as a gay man would be like, I'd promptly jump off the Empire State Building.

I may not be different in any fundamental way from heterosexuals nature vs. nurture is not an argument that interests me-but I live my life radically differently from the majority of them. I deliberately choose to question each of society's dicta, because I have seen first-hand the insanity of some of their primary rules (thou shalt be heterosexual, thou shalt not have sex in public, thou shalt not have sex with more than one person, thou shalt not use pornography, thou shalt cut off thy sons' foreskins, thou shalt not do anything fun, thou shalt not question any of these commandments ... ). Realizing at an early age that I had no interest in obeying their sex-rules made me aware that the rest of the rule-book was ready for a rewrite, too; thus, I credit much of my intellectual curiosity to the fact of my being gay, and my guilt-free attitudes about sex (more or less) to my intense feeling of separation from that Mainstream Manifesto.

Don't let anyone hornswoggle you into feeling guilty about your body or your sexual desires. Given what I know of our readers and what I know of the general populace, I'll give strong odds-say, 150:1:-that you're right and they're wrong. Yes, there are things in life over which it's apprpriate to feel guilt. Sex isn’t one of them.