New York, more than any other city, unapologetically names its center for theater and drama: Broadway is the axis surrounded by concentric rings of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway - marking, respectively, mainstream, margin, and fringe. Anything beyond the shores of Manhattan is designated, sometimes with condescension, “regional theater.”

Lesbian and gay drama maps onto this topography. The history of scripted live performances by or about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in New York City is the history of a vexed relationship with Broadway, the mainstream visibility it offers, and the politics and aesthetics it polices. Broadway is an object of desire, a longed-for sign of success that can seduce theater practitioners toward conservative aesthetics and politics, away from radical experimentation and social engagement. Broadway spotlights a few extraordinarily talented queer playwrights - often but not always white gay men - while routinely eclipsing equally brilliant people of color, white lesbians, and feminists of all stripes. But theater practitioners who refuse and are refused by Broadway have created other venues, and the syncopation between these sites and Broadway, between the experimental and the established, characterizes New York's theater scene.

Prior to the twentieth century, plays incorporating cross-dressing were common, but a critical mass of plays that included identifiably non-heterosexual characters first emerged in the 1920s. The first of this cluster, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance , was a Yiddish-language play about a Jewish brothel-keeper whose daughter has an affair with a prostitute . God of Vengeance opened on the Lower East Side before it was translated into English and moved to the Apollo Theater on Broadway in 1923.