THE COMING OUT STORY is the foundational myth of modern gay life. The term itself dates from outbursts of liberation activity in the late 1960’s and the militant slogan “Out of the Closets and Into the Streets.” Just as a communicant at a revival meeting is expected to stand up and testify for the Lord, activists demanded a declaration of one’s sexuality: to family, to co-workers, to the world at large. Yet, given the potency of the voluntary coming out experience for most individuals, it’s surprising how seldom this theme has served as a dramatic device. For all the reams of prose devoted to it, coming out is exploited by few plays as a fulcrum of their action.
“Outing” in our sense comes on stage with the homosexual law-reform movements. In several German plays of the early twentieth century, characters are “outed” involuntarily. From Ludwig Dilsner’s Jasmine Blossoms (1899) to Reinhart Kluge’s Who Is to Blame? (1923), the exposure of the protagonist’s homosexuality is effected by blackmail or vice-squad raids or the maneuvers of jilted lovers. It is a traumatic and embarrassing experience that blights one’s life. The upshot is almost invariably suicide. Although the goal of these plays was to enlighten the general public as to the sorry lot of those with “contrary sexual feelings,” the effect upon the homosexual individual was probably a determination to stay under wraps.
It is therefore surprising to find a play about coming out, in the current sense, on the Dutch stage shortly after the First World War.
All three acts are confined to a comfortable dining-room in a middle-class home in a small Dutch city, and the cast is made up of only five characters. As the curtain rises, father, mother and son are sitting around the table, reading. The desultory conversation seems banal, but already a rift between Gerard the father and the rest of the clan is evident. Marie the mother is reading a biography of Beethoven, recommended by her son, but her husband teases her for indulging in such highbrow activities. He also prods his son Walter (Wouter) for playing only classical music on the piano and never engaging him in a game of cards. Daughter Lies passes through on her way to a date with her fiancé Charles; her friend Lucie has been depressed lately and Lies tries to get Walt to explain why he won’t propose to her. Walt protests that he “cannot and may not” tell her the reason.
The reason becomes abundantly clear in the following confrontation between mother and son. Marie, protesting that she has made every effort to improve her mind in order to keep up with her children, demands to know why Lies and her fiancé seem on the outs. She explains that she has always found the friendship between Charles and Walt, “where you can’t be without one another for a minute, something… something…” “Unnatural,” supplies Walter. (In every case, the translation is mine.) Gradually, Walt reveals that, although he has taken no action, he has had thoughts that relegate him to “another race.” When the mother protests that this is horrible and incomprehensible, he replies “it’s nothing… bad, nothing I can help. Not something that I can slough off and reform, because it resides in one’s whole being… you might just as well say: your breathing is wrong, you must fight against it. ” For all Walt’s insistence that his “homosexuality” (he uses the word) is natural and innate, he still regards himself as a social outcast. He also reveals that Charles may be the same way and wants to marry Lies only as a kind of protective coloration.
Between Acts One and Two, the mother has paid a visit to a doctor, who has assured her that “the boy has unnatural tendencies,” but they are neither morbid nor immoral. She tries to convey this to the father who dismisses Walt’s thoughts as “twaddle,” fantasies that can be knocked out of him.
Mother: Walt is sorely to be pitied. What a wretched life the child will have, always in conflict with his own nature, always an outcast in the world, or living a lie. (She weeps.)
Father: What a boy like that needs is a good talking-to and he’ll get one, hot and heavy, too.
Schepper-Becker is even-handed in her treatment. She is careful not to turn the father, at first sight an obtuse philistine, into the villain of the piece; she makes it clear that Gerard is terrified that he has been losing the affections of his children as they grow up, and now fears that his wife will abandon him for them. He promises not to talk to Walt until he has learned more about the “horrible idea.”
After the father leaves, Walt arrives with a little painting of a female nude, which he puts on the mantelpiece. Walt’s artistic leanings, his piano playing, and his fondness for pictures are conventional signs of his sexual tastes. The mother tries to explain her husband’s emotional situation, but the children are unresponsive. Alone together, mother and son reach a moment of truth about the need to declare oneself:
Mother: And then, Walt, you will have to put up with prejudice from so many people if they know about it. Therefore, child, you must keep quiet, never talk about it to anyone.
Son: I’m well aware of that. I never stop thinking about it, everywhere. You all have to know —you all have to know—I am not a hypocrite by nature.
Mother: It doesn’t make you a hypocrite, just because you keep quiet about things.
Son: Oh, but that’s no mean feat, keeping quiet. It means keeping quiet about your whole nature, your whole inner being. It’s a constant, everlasting silence. Do you think there are any moments when I’m not aware, don’t remember that I’m other than I ought to be, that I am something I should not be?
Then he reveals that he has told his girlfriend Lucie about his condition. At that juncture, his sister’s fiancé Charles arrives. Left alone with Charles, Walt insists that he break off the engagement with Lies because he knows that Charles is homosexual too, to which Charles replies: “I felt that you knew it. I could have hated you for it. But now I am glad that I can speak out about it. God, for once someone who understands, whom you know will not condemn you. I have struggled. This engagement period is hell for me… and then, I had hoped, Walt, that if I could but hold out… I could overcome my nature, that perhaps I could become another person, like everyone else. ” More cowardly than Walt, Charles refuses to admit that he is irredeemably homosexual and is reluctant to take action.
The second act ends with an emotional blow-up. The father is infuriated by the nude painting and calls Walt a “filthy beast” and his predilections “shameless.” In his distress, Walt tears the picture to pieces and stamps on them:
Son: There, there you’ve got what you want. That’s what you like to do, eh? Trample on what someone else holds sacred—
Father: (laughs) Sacred! I didn’t know that you had a soft spot for women. (His laughter turns to anger, as he sees that Walter is about to escape him. Father and son stand face to face.) (Lies opens the door and stands there speechless.)
Mother: (pushes Walter out the way; he drops helplessly on to a chair; she grabs hold of the Father, half weeping). No! you’re being vulgar, vulgar. Don’t touch him, I say. I won’t have it. (Stands in front of the Father.)
Father: (looking at both of them; his anger ebbing away) So! that’s just lovely! Go and take his side! (To Lies) Out of my way—can’t you let me by? Go to your brother and your mother, then you’ll all be together. (Walks out the door.)
After the emotional storm and stress of that finale, Act Three begins on a calmer note. The father has paid a visit to the doctor and been convinced that Walt is perfectly healthy, morally and physically, “simply different from others,” a term made current by Richard Oswald’s German educational film Anders von die anderen. When the mother protests that this difference condemns Walt “to a whole life of obloquy, of loneliness,” the father replies that if no one else finds out he’s so “peculiar,” everything should be all right. By now, however, Marie has adopted her son’s convictions and regrets that Walt will have to live a lie. “How it is possible that what should bring us closer to one another is just driving us apart! Perhaps this time I am more mother than wife, but —let me be that way, for Walter needs me.” Furious, the father storms out.
Walt’s insistence on coming out to the world is contrasted with Charles’ cowardice. A letter he has left for Lies breaking off their engagement says nothing about the true reasons for doing so. Marie, informed of the real reason by Walt, fears that Charles’ homosexuality will expose her son’s. The following scene is the crux of the coming-out issue and is worth quoting at length:
Son: So what! He won’t tell anyone else. And even if he did. (more quietly) Everyone knows it already, Mother.
Mother: (aghast) What are you saying?
Son: You find that so terrible? I’m almost glad of it, now that it’s over and done with. I’d like—God—I’d like to shout it from the rooftops. I will not be a hypocrite any more, not lie any more.
Mother: Walt! Are you crazy?
Son: I want to live the way I am, the way Nature or God made me. I dare (more gently) because—I still have you, Mother.
Mother: (moved) Oh Walt, child!
Son: I am what I am and I am going through life open and upright. Don’t be afraid—I shall not throw my life away or hang out with bad characters, as the doctor warned. Don’t you feel, Mother, that it is much more honorable for me to triumph over these hypocritical pretenses? I don’t want to be humiliated by denying my nature. I refuse flat out, I won’t do it.
Mother: Walter!
Son: I told the doctor—and yesterday the pastor as well.
Mother: The pastor? Were you there?
Son: Yes. He had asked me to come by.
Mother: (anxiously) But what for?
Son: Don’t you understand? I understood right away. He had heard rumors, someone alerted him and he felt called upon to separate the sheep from the goats.
Mother: Oh Walt! That is horrible!
Son: Why? I satisfied his curiosity.
Mother: And what did he say? He will keep quiet? He has to keep quiet as pastor.
Son: Let him talk: it doesn’t matter to me. That’s what I told him.
Mother: But, for heaven’s sake, Walter, that cannot be. How does he know? How do they know?
Son: Lucie told her mother. Now, you understand: the lady told it to her hubby, and hubby told a friend, etc., etc., and someone told the pastor. That’s how things go around here! It catches on like wildfire.
Mother: Oh, God.
Son: Is that then the worst thing—the world’s contempt? Isn’t it enough that I have such a slender chance at happiness, that my life will pass by like a dream, unreal? That I am doomed to —loneliness? Never a family, never children, what does a little scandal matter compared to that? Are you so ashamed of me?
Mother: Oh no, child, I’m not. But what will your father say when he hears it?
Son: (tough) I don’t know.
Mother: Don’t act so indifferent, boy, that I can’t stand.
Son: I want to be indifferent, to everything, everyone. Except you, Mother. But though it may make you unhappy, this thing is a question of life and death for me. This hypocrisy is driving me to rack and ruin; I feel it; it is gnawing away at me, it keeps me down, it devours my self-respect.
Mother: What does Pastor Bruinsma say?
Son: Yes, what does he say? I don’t know any more. He was indignant and took it to be sin and shame. A person like me is dangerous. Any understanding —or even a bit of leniency—there wasn’t a hint of that.
Mother: Not all people are alike. You know, child, most people don’t take the trouble to find out first before they condemn, they feel aversion and that is natural and understandable too.
Son: We have a right to live too. It is unfair to kick us out and force us to disavow ourselves. I don’t understand, Mother, how so vast a prejudice can take root. It is scientific knowledge that this is not a fault, that it is a fluke of nature.
Mother: That may well be. But as I imagine it, Walt! I must, I can’t help but find it revolting. And that, ah, that makes it hard for you, but in that I’m not so removed from the society which condemns you.
Son: Mother!
Mother: It is sexual hatred. My nature resists it all, but you are my child. So my condemnation of you becomes even harsher. No, be still, child! I know, it is unfair for society to react with condemnation, but I can understand, Walter, how it comes to be unfair. Because even though you are my child, I have to struggle hard to —
Son: To accept it?
Mother: But, child, I don’t condemn it any more. I won’t be able to do that any more. I have too much pity on you, poor boy.
Son: Oh no, Mother, most people are more to be pitied than I am, for I have you.
Meanwhile, the father is furious that the town now knows about his son, whom he condemns as “the rot in the community,” responsible for the loss of his family’s good name and his daughter’s happiness. He intends to put Walt in a reformatory to learn a trade. But at the height of his tirade, when Walt calls himself a “pariah,” the Father breaks down and says: “Don’t say that. I cannot, I cannot hear it. My poor, poor boy! (Sobbing.) I love, I love you so much, but I don’t know. … I am afraid, that you will leave me in the lurch. You may find it childish now that I’m weeping—but I am, I am too afraid that you will go away.” He staggers out to get some air.
In the final scene, Walt insists that his mother stay with his father, while he resolves to leave for “somewhere where I can be free, where no one knows me.” He can be unafraid because he knows his mother is always with him. Left alone, the mother speaks the tagline: “Has it all been for nothing then?”
THE AUTHOR has evidently absorbed many of the ideas of Magnus Hirschfeld and the German homosexual liberation movement. Schepper-Becker accepts homosexuality as an inborn attribute and offers her audiences a strikingly unprejudiced, unhysterical view. She is, however, far more advanced than her characters. Because the play is set in a bourgeois milieu, they must reflect prevalent social attitudes. Only physicians accept homosexuality calmly as something natural, if not “normal.” For the pastor, it is a potential source of corruption to his flock. For Walt’s parents, it is something one reads about when criminal cases are reported in the papers. The mother is not a likely candidate for PFLAG, and the father’s ultimate surrender derives mainly from his emotional neediness.
Still, everyone agrees on one thing: so long as Walt’s sexual tendencies remain cerebral and not acted upon, they can be accepted; if they are ever made flesh, they become “wrong,” “horrible,” “atrocious.” Walt himself accepts this belief. There is no indication in the play that he will ever commit a sexual act with a partner of his own gender. His assurance to Marie that he will not “throw his life away” or hang out with bad company implies that a homosexual community is unthinkable. Walt forecasts for himself a life of loveless isolation, made bearable only by his mother’s unflagging loyalty.
Oddly enough, when Wat Niet Mag… was finally revived in 2006, it was done by Het Volk, a Northern Dutch group known for its absurdist style. They decided to perform it as a play within a play, as if done by amateurs. Three men played all the roles, giving a Monty-Pythonesque tinge to the mother and daughter. There were interpolated jokes about relying on the prompter, losing one’s lines, and the telephone failing to ring on cue. Still, when the production toured eleven cities, it met with unanimously favorable response. Most reviewers believed that the farcical additions, while amusing, in no way prevented the serious elements in the play from having their full effect. One critic pointed out that the response that had recently greeted the coming out of a soccer star showed that, after 85 years, the central thesis of Wat Niet Mag… had not lost its point.
Laurence Senelick is the author of Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-sex Love, 1895-1925 and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre.
