ESSAY The Unqueering of As You Like It RYAN TRACY T HE DISCOURSE on homosexuality is a major part of current American culture, and it doesn't show any signs of slowing. Thus, it is all the more noteworthy that a recent production of As You Like It that ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music ear- lier this year, directed by Sam Mendes and cast with a bi-national troupe of American and British actors, seems to go out of its way to suppress the homosexual dynamics that are Inherent in Shakespeare's play. An eerie sense of homophobia comes across as this production unfolds. As You Like It offers two key opportunities for exploring con- temporary notions of gender and desire: first, through the rela- tionship between the characters Rosalind and Celia, which is set up as a same-sex pairing of intense and unorthodox intimacy; and second, through the theatrical device of cross-dressing that's enacted by Rosalind, the heroine and mastermind of the play's action. Throughout the play, Shakespeare drops telling clues about Rosalind and Celia's feelings for each other. They're said to have slept together since childhood, and their love is "dearer than the natural bond of sisters." Celia's allegiance to her friend is shown to be stronger than her loyalty to her father. Celia then becomes jealous of Rosalind's developing love for the strapping Orlando, whose poetry she mocks while telling Rosalind, in effect, "He's just not that into you." This wonderfully drawn relationship, preg- nant with homoerotic potential, is among the first of Shake- speare's dyads to be exploited as a location for gender revisionism. Indeed. AÄ YOU Like It has been at the center of fem- inist and queer interrogations of the representation of gender and sexual identity for nearly fifty years. In her Sexual Personoe (1990), Camille Paglia recognized a homoerotic potential between the two female principles, mainly emanating from Celia {citing her jealousy of Orlando) and di- rected toward Rosalind. James C. Bulman has focused on Decían Donellan's landmark all-male production oí As You Like It in 199 !. observing that the Rosalind-Celia bond resonated as espe- cially homoerotic if only because the two characters were played by actors of the same sex. who lay in bed together and caressed each other intimately. Harold Bloom, probably one of the most dismissive critics, writes in his 1998 treatise on Shakespeare aptly titled Inventing the Human, "Rosalind has been appropriated by our current spe- cialists in gender politics, who sometimes even give us a lesbian Rosalind, more occupied with Celia (or with Phebe) than with poor Orlando. As the millennium goes by, and recedes into the past, we may return to the actual Shakespearean role." Charac- terizing such exploration of sexual identity as "appropriation" of Ryan Tracy is a cultural critic and a regular contributor to New York Press (nypress.com). "the actual" role is simply shameless in its high homophobic air. Later, he asks incredulously, "Are Rosalind and Celia to marry each other?" Mendes takes up with Bloom's outmoded approach by having the women occupy separate twin beds and by minimiz- ing the physical intimacy that passes between them. Then there's the case of the gender-switch that occurs in As You Like It. in which Rosalind dresses as a young man to avoid being harassed while banished to the Forest of Arden. Rosalind takes for her male name Ganymede, a name that's already homo- erotically charged, as it refers to the young shepherd boy that Z^us kidnapped for his beauty and kept by his side. The complications of Rosalind's voyage into drag and passing (and subsequent de- construction of gender play) climax when Rosalind-as-Ganymede challenges Orlando to a game of wooing, leading up to a fake wedding ceremony —and in some performances, including that of Mendes, a kiss between Rosalind-as-Ganymede (who is pre- tending to be "Rosalind") and Orlando—that draws Orlando and Rosalind into an erotically puzzling intimacy. Keep in mind that in Shakespeare's time the actor playing Rosalind would have been a boy —playing a girl trying to pass as a boy pretending (at one point) to be a girl. We do not have the privilege of watching this play as Elizabethans would have, with Christian Camargo and Juliet Rylance in the Brooklyn production 26 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE