The joke goes "you can hardly find a strait play on Broadway anymore," however, that wasn't always the case. A lot of devoted theatre artists spent much time in jail and being ridiculed in order to get us our say on the legitimate stage. From obscure hints at homosexuality in such early plays as The Vortex to the promise of a 'real live gay kiss' in The Normal Heart to visiting a gay sex club in Jeffery the theatre has both progressed with the times and forced progression on Broadway theatre producers who are notoriously conservative; far more so than their audiences often are. Today one can see openly gay characters in movies, TV, Off-Broadway, and on Broadway herself. Currently you could see Naked Boys Singing, The Donkey Show, The Dazzle, Lesbian Pulp-O-Rama!, Cloud 9, Madama Butterfly, and the Broadway Mega-hits Rent, The Full Monty, and The Producers plus many others with gay characters. Threw the persecution of the 20's to the almost overwhelming on-slot of gay theatre in the early nineties these theatre pieces have helped shape both gay culture and strait cultures perception, or lack their of, of the 'gay world' integrating gay identities into mainstream culture.
             The earliest hints of homosexuality from plays dating to the 1890's were extremely tame and often missed by the general public. Due to strict censorship anything risqué had to be covered up especially to play in London where it must first pass through the offices of the Lord Chamberlain. In America in 1927 New York State passed a law stating that plays "depicting or dealing with, the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion" (11, Curtin) were banded from the stage. Not that it stopped completely the depiction of gay characters but it did prevent any play with gay themes or characters from getting too high profile. Unlike the English-language theatre, Yiddish theatre was far more frank about sexual ...