Undercover in the House of Love
In this repressive atmosphere Brian Kirst’s intricate, erotic play about gay bathhouse culture is particularly powerful. In the 80s, gay performance artist Tim Miller’s frank nudity was a refreshing shock, but Undercover in the House of Love goes further, using explicit sexual choreography to turn the viewer into a bathhouse voyeur, an uncomfortable role that’s more political than pornographic. Kirst manages to demonstrate that sex–even anonymous lust–is more complicated than the self-protective, hypocritical Christian right would have us believe.
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Gay culture in the age of AIDS also underlines the play’s boldness. When AIDS seemed to promise certain and immediate death, the gay bathhouse culture declined, becoming merely a piece of nostalgic history–or so we thought. Last year the New York Times reported with just a whiff of repugnance that bathhouses had become popular again among young gay men giddy with the promise of new drugs to prolong immunity and safer sex to protect the healthy.
The simple plot is made baroque by its sexual encounters. Derrick, a refugee from the stifling conformity of corporate culture, takes a job as “snack boy” (counter clerk for the food concession) at the Ghetto, a New York City bathhouse. He wants to be a writer, have an adventure, break out of his shell. At first he manages to keep his distance–mostly–from the sex constantly going on around him. But when he meets Toni–a female photographer voyeuristically into bondage, gay sex, and crystal meth–he’s drawn into a 24-hour adventure that exposes his careful pretense of objectivity. Derrick backs out of the bathhouse world and returns to corporate America, choosing impulse control over unbridled lust. Resurfacing from the underground, he connects with his nonbathhouse friends, Maureen and Pete, and the ordinary world.
But minor disappointments in this bold production are far outweighed by its strengths. Off the Helms/Lott scale for obscenity but too intelligent to be classed as shallow pornography, Undercover in the House of Love marks a new and vital territory, the contested, sensual ground of gay male sexuality.
