Oh! I Miss the War: two dangerous predatory homosexuals want
10 Jul 2025 - Photos by Kryshan Radel

Oh! I Miss the War: two dangerous predatory homosexualsOh! I Miss the War encapsulates approximately 80 years of gay history in the form of two parallel monologues. In the '60s we meet, in a local watering hole, a tailor who runs a small shop that specializes in tight fitting trousers in order to emphasize "the goods." He is an entertaining raconteur as he explains his desires, "my ass was snapping like a Venus Fly Trap," and his journey from rent boy to paying rent boys as he aged. His memories cover the second world war and in a particularly haunting passage, cruising during the blitz after curfew. Being the only ones out in the dark, they daringly kissed right in the street. He speaks in high gay poetry, imagery of water and eels slithering, liberally dashed with Polari and filled with nostalgia for a time before sodomy was, sort of, decriminalized. His speech is laced with innuendo but he is blunt about how much more exciting it was when sex was dangerous.

With an expansion of light thanks to Vishmayaa Jeyamoorthy we are closer to 2025, another man is at a disappointing kink night. He thinks he messed up a job by joking about pronouns, "How do you distil 50 years of being a gay man into a pronoun?" He decides on queer elder but then asks "What the fuck does a queer elder mean?"  David John Phillips (Priscilla Queen of the Desert, The Crucible, The Mousetrap), who plays both men with a slight change of accent and mannerisms, is a sterling example of what a queer elder can be. This second character takes us through the '80s and '90s, through his discovery of BDSM, through AIDS, through naked self-discovery with the Radical Faeries. He is less poetical than his spiritual ancestor, but just as fascinating and possibly funnier as the one-liners are closer to home. He too is nostalgic for times that were horrible for gay men because it made the sex more "magical," "unsettling," and "dangerous." 

The intertwining texts flow together though the '60s monologue, I Miss the War, is by Matthew Baldwin with Phillips writing Oh! as what he calls an "homage." The result, while uproariously comical and emotionally shattering, is a testament to the resilience of gay men. How no matter what we are threatened with, the eroticism of the gay experience triumphs, or, as the tailor says, he will always "crave cock."  Phillips creates an instant intimacy, a shared confidence of the sort one usually only gets with a slightly tipsy queer elder determined to impress. He is particularly skilled at delivering a raunchy quip and then, with a slight leer of a smile or a twinkle in his eye, letting us know that he had every intention of shocking but also of getting a laugh. Phillips also smoothly navigates the whiplash moods required: the tailor's lost love is evoked to the point of tears, and an assertation that AIDS didn't affect our kinkster too badly is followed by a recitation of names of those lost that summons full characters projected from memory, before becoming a devastating chronicle of the loss he denied. 

While the tailor prefers to sit on his stool at the bar and address us directly, our contemporary rises and paces. The latter escapes the pool of light that pins the tailor down but is finally pinned himself before achieving a final freedom. Freedom of sorts. He is, we are, still trapped by nostalgia for the bad old days and have to be prepared for further battle, this time on the field of gender instead of sexuality. Director Anthony Misiano keeps the movements fluid and has coaxed an astonishing performance out of Phillips. The characters remain separate and distinct but are spiritually conjoined. The contemporary character may have experienced a large sampling of gay history, but then that is also part of the gay experience: trying on personas and sexual roles on the road to becoming a queer elder. Two delightfully ribald and erotically engaged elders. Proudly announcing that they are "what everyone has learned to fear: a dangerous predatory homosexual." Who better to celebrate our history with?