MysteriousFaith

RENT!

This past February I sat in a Broadway theater and cried through most of the second act of the rock opera RENT! The musical was a powerful culminating experience after I had spent much of the past six months reading and researching the question of homosexuality. RENT! is not a musical about homosexuality – it has real people with real problems, which by necessity when set in New York City in the 1980’s, requires it to touch on the question of homosexuality and AIDS. What RENT! manages to do that too few contemporary discussion pieces which touch on homosexuality achieve, is that it gets beneath the stereotype and reveals real people with real passions and real problems. RENT! is powerful because it is dramatically, musically, and theatrically well done; however, its masterful choreography of each of these elements is superseded by the story it forces us to deal with – how people too many parts of society consider disposable live, love and die. RENT! is not about homosexuality – it is about the ugly side of choosing to love another person. We see four couples very much in love, but suffering from the past baggage each carries into their new relationship. A number of the characters have AIDS; but those that do are both homo and heterosexual. Several of the characters are isolated from an ability to love purely because of past wounds from relationships that ended badly. But each of the characters desires to love and to be loved.

It is this point that makes RENT! predominantly. By forcing its viewers to recognize the clarion call that emanates from our inner beings to be loved, RENT! is able to draw its primary power. In my own wrestling with the contemporary question of the acceptability of homosexuality, two changes have forced me to change my thoughts on the issue: the first being an elevation of reason above revelation, and the second being a realization that what is at the basis of so much hurt in homosexual life is the desire for human contact. Most of the disagreement over accepting homosexuality as normal centers around it being divinely ordained as wrong or, more problematically, loaded anecdotal and statistical evidence which points towards dysfunction supposedly inherent in homosexual life. What is missed in both arguments is allowing homosexuals to speak simply and most profoundly only about their desire for relationship. Homosexuality suffers as an issue because some of its loudest defenders have sought to make their sexuality a more identifiable issue above their desire to simply love someone of the same gender: they are wrong in tactic and the evangelical community is right in their resistance against movements which place sexuality before relationship. This is what RENT! masterfully accomplishes: we fall in love with Angel, a transgender character whose love for life, for her partner and even for those who hate her. Before we know it, we see her as a person on her own terms, in her own ways, with her own desire for a relationship with Tom. When RENT! is at its most powerful is when it refuses to let you pigeon-hole Angel and Tom’s relationship; only the most obtuse of people could watch the movie and not see a form of love that we should edify and hold as an example. Their love is selfless, spiritual and bears on through the agony of Angel’s death from AIDS.

RENT! comes at an interesting time in the American culture wars. The movie Brokeback Mountain pointedly echoes the tension in RENT! as it forces you again to ask yourself what you make out of people of the same sex who deeply, profoundly and sincerely love someone of the same sex. By rising about the homosexual stereotypes, both RENT! and Brokeback Mountain make us uncomfortable, and finally for all the right reasons: for too long the question of homosexuality has been predominated by voices who are caricatures of real struggling gay men and women who want to love, and be loved. This realization, that what should shape the homosexual debate is not stereotypes over sexuality, but the reality of our relational needs as human beings is the elemental step in meaningful discussion over what has been an overly divisive issue. It is time for people to accomodate homosexuals on the same basis as heterosexuals, and to require of each lasting and dignified relationships for themselves, their partners and society-at-large.

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• December 1, 2005

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