Word: cocktailing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...think of the southern tradition of football, with the fraternity brothers dressed for a cocktail party, flanked by their date, cheering on their school in a mass of enthusiasm, surrounded by 40,000 or more of their comrades...
With "Fruit Cocktail," Tim Miller achieves through performance art what Jane Austen accomplishes in her novels: he tells a lighthearted story with a predictable ending, about ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, yet tells it so ingeniously that one is left dumbfounded, attempting to explain how such common events could form such a profoundly satisfying theatrical experience...
Where Austen places marriage at the center of her novels, "Fruit Cocktail" effectively proposes that sex is, for many, the most vital part of contemporary gay male experience. Miller's piece is a familiar refrain of boyhood discovery, adolescent repression and ultimate sexual release, as he moves from his childhood in Whittier, California, to his backyard autoerotic exploits, to his first sexual encounter with a modern dancer named David. One never tires of hearing stories like this, but the taboos of the dominant sexual order prevent them from being told often enough (Miller's notorious battles with government officials over...
While "Fruit Cocktail" speaks of events almost entirely in the past, it is ultimately a celebration of a gay male identity that has felt the winter of the AIDS crisis, but has blossomed once again to a point when cultural constraint can no longer contain its love of sex. While many have tried to use AIDS to instill fear and guilt into the hearts of gay men, this piece is a reminder that the gay man's cocktail party must, should, and most importantly...
...turn out to be caused by specific chemical imbalances. Those who suffer from them are racked not by toilet-training traumas or the "unceasing terror and tension of the fetal night" (as an early psychoanalyst put it) but by something as simple--and complex--as an imperfectly mixed chemical cocktail. The Oedipus complex has been reduced to a matter of molecules...