The South in San Francisco: Warren and Resistance to Cultural Gentrification

Throughout the 1980s, queer theatre changed profoundly as this relatively new genre grappled with the increasing destruction wrought by the AIDS crisis and its subsequent gentrification. First generation AIDS plays memorialized deceased AIDS victims whilst often providing education and offering a space for communal grief. Second generation AIDS plays often flattened representation to provide more universal or accessible avenues into mainstream AIDS activism intended to remedy communal heartache. The most recognizable iterations of both subgenres – As Is or The Normal Heart (1985) and Angels in America (1991) – portray the epidemic from a discernably northern, metronormative perspective. Yet, before AIDS plays by white gay men assumed center stage, Rebecca Ranson (a Southern lesbian playwright) composed Warren (1984) to lament and memorialize her departed friend, provide a space for communal grief, and challenge prevailing narratives about people with AIDS. Rather than distill her titular character to a more “universal” or generalizable PWA, this particular PWA hailed from Nashville and was described as a “wild country bumpkin” (with matching accent) who cooks Cajun food. Warren may have moved from the South to San Francisco, but he does not want to die there. He “want(s) to go back to the South to die.” In theatres across the country, Ranson conjured a little piece of the South in Ward 5B. This paper argues that Warren stood at the forefront of AIDS theatre, and by stubbornly refusing to be gentrified or “metrowashed” by the LGBT culture industry it provided alternative narratives of and for queers in the Southern diaspora.