Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of Outward slates LGBTQ

podcast I'm Brian Lauter editor of Outward. Instead of our usual look at the

month's queer news and culture today we're going to be devoting a whole hour to the inheritance.

A two-part play by Matthew Lopez that won like all the awards in a recent run in London and

is currently dominating discussions on Broadway.

Gonna say it up front, in this conversation there will be spoilers, so stop listening if you don't want them.

While its length, ambition, and engagement with the AIDS crisis has invited comparisons to

Attorney Kushner's angels in America, the inheritance is driving concern is a bit more contained,

if no less daunting.

I'm going to try to put it this way. If gay men think of ourselves as a community

spanning generations, what happens when a huge swath of that community is lost to plague? The survivors

deeply traumatized and younger cohorts must therefore come of age and figure out what it means to be gay in the wake of a tragedy that shapes everything around us, but that many of us may not fully understand.

Borrowing a line from EM Forster's Howard's end

on which the play is based,

the inheritance desperately wants gay men

to connect across age and loss,

but is that kind of connection really possible?

It's a big question, but before we dive in, I'd like to introduce our esteemed panel who have

graciously agreed to join us in the studio today for inheritance chatter even

after sitting through seven hours of theater.

First up we've got Alex Barresh, slate, alum, and member of the New Yorker's editorial staff and writer on

culture, science, and LGBTQ issues.

...