The Televisual Proscenium: Staging the Archive in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy

Title: The Televisual Proscenium: Staging the Archive in Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy

By Matthew Helm (University of Iowa, English) 

Date: Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Time: 1630-1800

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: Critics have long approached Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1982) in paradoxical terms: dismissed for its sentimentality, appeals to tolerance, and apparent assimilationist politics, yet celebrated as a groundbreaking depiction of sexuality and family life, especially for its influence on later television sitcoms. Such readings rely on a linear progress narrative that equates increased visibility with inevitable social change—an assumption the play unsettles through its self-conscious engagement with media technology. In media-archaeological terms, the stage becomes a site for excavating the archive, “rerunning” forgotten TV histories and enacting the intergenerational transmission of queer memory. This presentation is an excerpt from a work-in-progress book, Transmediations: Media Materialism in the Archives of Queer Literature.

About the speaker: Matthew Helm a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. A scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture, his current research examines the significant role of media technology in the making of queer identities, communities, and activism. His scholarship has appeared in The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Religion & Literature, Studies in the Novel, and differences.

Organized by the Department of American Culture and Literature