ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at work by choreographers during the 1980s and early 1990s in Britain and the US who were openly gay and, within the context of the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) epidemic, used their work to assert gay identities and sensibilities. Through a discussion of key works by Mark Morris and Joe Goode, it examines a camp destabilisation of masculine identities; it discusses ways in which Michael Clark's work, including a collaboration with Stephen Petronio, exemplified a specifically gay theme of treachery and betrayal; it identifies in DV8’s work a concern with masculine failures and inadequacies; and it concludes with a critique of Matthew Bourne's 1995 version of Swan Lake. Drawing on José Muñoz's writing about a queer utopian futurity it discusses the way these openly gay choreographers queered dance practices to create works whose aesthetics offered hopeful antidotes to the negativity and hostility of a homophobic present. By denaturalising supposedly universal truths, the pieces discussed opened up new potentials for reimagining genders and sexualities.
