The Line Forms to the Rear: Using Southernness to Oppose Respectability in Queer Theatre

Cal Yeomans (1938-2001) was a gay Southern playwright who was as uncomfortable in his central-Florida home as he was in New York or San Francisco. Yeomans’ oeuvre challenged audiences to think expansively about “gay community” and the intersections of class and location. In 1980, San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros put on Yeomans’ The Line Forms to the Rear, a short monologue set at a public toilet on a deserted stretch of beach along Florida’s Redneck Riviera that featured Henry, a sometimes-employed former drag queen turned construction worker who has made mercy sex his life’s mission. In 1981 Yeomans added two acts to make Sunsets: 3 Acts on a Beach for New York’s Stonewall Repertory Theatre. In addition to Henry (Act 1), Manny seduces men in the toilet, ostensibly for his wife Leona to service in their car (Act 2). In Act 3 Dan and John wrestle (literally and figuratively) with desire and identity. These inarticulate, ordinary Southerners were the kinds of people being left behind by gay culture a decade into “liberation.” Yeomans used a distinctly Southern setting, accents, and mannerisms to show audiences a slice of queer life that some would rather forget. These were not pitiful Southerners desperate to leave their small town for the gay refugee centers. Yeomans’ poor and working-class queer Southerners eschewed respectability politics, asserted the validity of their experience, and claimed their place in queer life. Some praised it, others were disgusted, but the show ran extra weeks because of popularity. This paper uses this recreation of a small slice of the Southern queer experience on a New York stage to show the ways that enacting Southernness, as well as regional and class Otherness, was a direct challenge to the smug metronormativity proliferating in the nascent gay and lesbian theatre movement.