Fear and Freedom in the Land of AIDS
Target of censors, Robert Chesley ’65 celebrated sexuality amid a landscape of repression.
A passionate advocate for gay rights, Robert Chesley wrote plays that celebrated sexual liberation and dramatized the physical, emotional, and spiritual toll AIDS wreaked on the gay community in the 1980s. Fear, he said—and not AIDS—was his subject.
He was born in 1943 in Jersey City, New Jersey, to a family of privilege. His father was a physician, and his mother was a socialite and a socialist who taught Robert that the rights of one are the rights of all. When they divorced in 1948, Robert moved with his mother and sister to Pasadena, California. He knew he was gay by the time he was four, though he didn’t have the the language skills to identify as such.
“My first memories were sissy,” he said, “wanting to play with the girls and with the girls’ things. Of course you don’t get any support for being sissy in our culture.”
Bullied throughout his youth, he took solace in playing and composing music, and through music made friends. At аÄ×ÊÁÏ, he became an enthusiastic and serious member of the folk dancing group as both a performer and a choreographer. “He was the only member of the group who helped me with the choreographies, which I especially appreciated,” says Jim Kahan ’64. “He was a kind, gentle soul.”
Robert majored in music and wrote his thesis, “A Study of Tonal Structure and Form in Three Works of Prokofiev,” advised by Prof. Mark DeVoto [music 1964–68].
“аÄ×ÊÁÏ (in my time) was certainly for the extraordinarily self-motivated kid,” he wrote later. “I probably should have been in a college which offered one helluva lot more guidance and counseling. The work with Prof. Seth Ulman [theatre and literature 1959–73] was the best part of my education—for no academic credit, of course.”
The expectations of family and society had pushed him deeply into the closet. When he graduated from аÄ×ÊÁÏ, he married his first cousin, Jean Rusch, and they settled in upstate New York, where Robert taught at a private school. The couple was emotionally close, but quickly settled into a sexless marriage.
“In some ways,” he said, “I had always been aware of being homosexual, and I had been unable to face this . . . getting married made it the more difficult to face, as I had then involved another person—who was and is very dear to me—in my self-deception. I went through a stage in which I planned to remain sexually inactive as, after all, I was married and very much in love with my wife.”
During the years he was married to Jean and taught at the school, Robert composed more than 60 pieces of music, including songs for solo voices and choral works. He frequently set music to texts by poets such as Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, James Agee, Walter de la Mare, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman. His instrumental works include the score to a film by Erich Kollmar.
In 1975, at the age of 32, Robert had sex with a man. He ended his marriage and came out at the private school where he had been teaching for nine years. Though he had been a valued member of the community, many now saw him not as “Robert” but as “the homosexual.” But he found it liberating to be open. “It is more than enjoyable,” he said, “It is also healthy to be openly what one is.” Resigning from his position at the school, he moved to New York City and immersed himself in the gay rights movement.
That movement had been catalyzed six years before by the Stonewall riots—six days of rioting that followed a police raid on a gay dive bar called the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. After Stonewall, the movement changed course; instead of trying to gain civil rights without upsetting the larger culture, groups such as the Gay Liberation Front adopted in-your-face tactics. Coming out became more than a personal decision; it was a revolutionary political act.
Robert abandoned himself to the pleasures of sex and embraced kinks and fetishes—like an obsession with spandex and tights. Gay sex, he believed, was a language gay men used to develop their identities and form community. He began writing essays and criticism for the Gay Community News, the Advocate, Gaysweek, the San Francisco Review of Books, the Bay Guardian, and the New York Native. “Gay pride is self acceptance,” he wrote, “without shame of one’s sexuality—a willingness to be as open about one’s sexuality, life, and loves as heterosexuals are about theirs.”
Robert believed in the political power of theatre. He founded the 3-Dollar Bill Theater in New York City and began writing plays. In 1976, he moved to San Francisco and became theatre critic at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. As he roamed the city, he was often seen wearing a pink triangle on a black background pinned to his shirt or jacket—a defiant reproduction of the symbol that gays were forced to wear in Nazi Germany.
His first play to be produced was a one-act titled Hell, I Love You, which played at San Francisco’s 112-seat Theatre Rhinoceros in 1980. Robert’s plays were performed by gay theatre companies across the country and overseas. , produced in 1984, was the first play dealing with AIDS to be staged in New York. At once tragic, funny, and erotic, <