I hadn’t planned to catch the one-person play “To All the Boys I’ve Fucked Before,” written and performed by Henry Cohen SM ’29, because I assumed the show repeated that tired narrative of queer art: a cisgender white gay man’s broad claim on the queer experience. Yet, thirty minutes before the show, I found myself waiting in line with friends to see what Marsha P. Johnson, apparently, fought for.
I’d first read about the play in the YDN WKND article “Vanilla Ice Spice: Henry Cohen navigates sex and the one-person play,” written by Stephanie Altschul PC ’29. The interview was eccentrically loud, and showed Cohen’s love for a good sex story, and awareness of the stakes of a good sex story. As a queer writer, I admired the honest reflection on how comedy sidelines provocation, and that was a distinct element of this play.
The play’s advertised poster, photographed by Danny Rodriguez ES ’29, breathed the show’s main essence: gay sex. The abundant amount of condoms in the flyer, and on stage, indicated to me the satirical and hypersexual elements. When I discovered that the talented young filmmaker—and former creative writing classmate—Sadie Schoenberger PC ‘29 was the director, the vibrant and artistic posters on the stage’s walls, and interesting pink hand-shaped chair made total sense; her creative direction made the stage a colorfully accurate depiction of contemporary queer aesthetics.
When the show began, Henry Cohen’s performance appealed to the crowd; laughter was abundant, but not a sound came from me. I was focused on the script, and the mechanics of every line—the jokes were appealing, but some stood hovering over the line between shockingly problematic and wittily comedic.
“For the immigrants!” Henry Cohen said, as he narrated how a 64-year old immigration attorney and Colombian man “eiffel-towered” him, on stage. He made sure to mention the current events on ICE, however, not as a concrete critique on modern U.S. politics. The allusion was handled to retain Cohen’s—white—character as a center of attention, which I saw as problematic.
What makes it so funny for someone who has no reason to fear ICE to make a joke about it? Of course, some may say that we have no clear racial identity for Cohen’s character, but for a one-man show, the actor’s identity becomes mapped onto the single character. I do not shame anyone for laughing, but I just couldn’t laugh at something like that—I don’t have that privilege.
I took a look at the audience, and I recognized a few queer acquaintances from the “Gay Ivy.” According to my straight friend, who sat next to me, the audience seemingly consisted of sorority girls. Despite the show’s narrowed gay male perspective, I was not surprised that the viewership was possibly straight women; contemporary queer aesthetics have come up in mainstream media, however, for gay performance digestible to straight audiences; just like Heated Rivalry—the show projected on brick walls at frat parties, as an example—gay performance has widely expanded to straight audiences, and be inaccurately labeled as queer entertainment.
The play faced a challenge trying to distinguish itself from digestible gay performance. Yet, in Cohen’s defense, it’s already challenging to use only a gay male point-of-view to make queer art for audiences unbeknownst to queerness. I’d suggest Cohen attempt to challenge his audiences’ perception of queer aesthetics to avoid the fixed gay performance I saw.
Despite my critiques, Cohen’s final moment of the play was very impressive. Cohen’s character performs a sort of introspective soliloquy that points out his arrogant claim of victimhood. After all the sexual endeavors with older—and interestingly endowed —men, he admits that he did this consensually. That’s real, and a great opener to discuss the shallowness present in the queer community; it serves as strong character growth and demonstrates quality writing.
Sadly, Cohen’s character ends not with a lesson about this internalized shallowness, but a celebration of the fact that if he were sexually extorted, he’d be the “hottest” extorted victim. Of course, it was all satire, but he squandered such a beautiful character transformation—perhaps, it’s done that way to show how much his naïve character has yet to learn.
To All the Boys I’ve Fucked Before serves primarily as a good guidebook for straight people. The play explains surface-level concepts in the queer community despite the mainly gay male view. Gay cruising, Grindr, sexual positions, queer colloquial dialogue, etc. are present, to which I give a thumbs-up. But this play is gay, not queer. That’s because queerness has evolved and continues to evolve, so this play may find it difficult to capture queerness in solid, distinct form.
Queerness is not just gay sex. Queerness asks the individual who they are, who they will become, and whose reality they live in. The queer experience cannot be dumbed down to a dildo, nor who uses that dildo. So, I must say, if Cohen wants to truly capture the queer experience, he must step out of the gay—and commercially consumable—realm of cocks and bubble butts; and must venture to the enclaves of queer culture that challenge the binary, and look closer at the queer histories in the U.S.
Yes, Marsha P. Johnson did not, as Cohen said, “throw that brick for you to keep your legs closed.” But, she also fought for young queers to know that our bodies, inside this heterosexually fixed reality, are not unnatural. She fought for us to know that mother earth birthed us as we are and our existence is one, forever, known in nature without need of proof. Because she knew that sex, to us, can feel like survival rather than simple gratification.
“Queerness is an ideality,” said José Esteban Muñoz in his work, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Sex can help envision a queer utopia, and this play attempts that. But it fumbles for what sex can do rather than what it can mean for young queers.