Gay is sad. That was a title of a sermon I heard many years ago now. There is a strong case for and against.
In particular, in this play/story, the age-old no-no of falling in love with a straight boy raises its head (was it puppy love, as well?). That seems a different kind of failed suitor sadness than a regular-way disappointment, yes? Outside the particular case, homophobia still limits what GBLT people can realize in their lives, broadly speaking, no matter what their potential.
While dishing out pity for Bennet's generation, it would be a mistake to think that Andrew's generation, despite social advances in attitudes toward gay citizens, didn't also pay a price for their sexuality, even if it didn't amount to "emotional death" (perhaps, emotional schism, put more precisely). I see elements of best-little-boy-in-the-world syndrome with Andrew (and myself?), for one thing.
Whatever the case on that score, the sublimation of thwarted passion, of ambition to achieve this or that aim, to be recognized or respected, all prefigures tragedy, no doubt; but, as with so many from Bennet's generation, the resultant 'vicarious living', as Andrew broad bushes it, opened up a personal acquaintanceship with the transcendent, with the arts, with the sublime and the tragi-comic, building a sensibility of sorts around a shared experience. Why look askance as that, entirely?
In the end, I thought the play was about teaching, and less about "homosexual character" as destiny. In fact, the entire coda in which the audience learns in what station in life each of the classmates winds up, was superfluous, an artistically unnecessary afterward. The boy (Posner) who ended up taking fully to heart "Hector"'s romantic notions of knowledge and learning ended up with a trajectory that fit that that notion.
The homosexual sub-plot I found to be quite secondary. Much of the play would have stood on its own without it, or with a variation. I thought it was there to highlight the profound idolization that can crop up, for student and teacher. As an expository device, I thought some of it led to bits that were tedious, somehow; but it also turned up one of my favorite lines from the play delievered superbly by Francis De La Tour, (paraphrase) "For pity's sake, Hector, it was a grope. Don't think it was the Annunciation!"
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