The gay liberation movement in the American post-Stonewall era meant a voice for those who had long been silenced. With this voice came the birth of hundreds of publications such as journalistic essays, opinion essays, fiction, poetry, and plays and with them a new way of reading these texts: gay literature and gay criticism.
Because of its very nature, a spectacular representation of life, drama may help to unravel identity building by exploring gay male representations and the process of cultural production of that identity in society. In the past few years, queer theory has become highly significant to untangle the cultural development of gay male identity in American theater.
Just like Postcolonial Studies can open a doorway to what has come to be called postcolonial translation (see Bassnett and Trivedi 1998), queer criticism may also contribute to untangle American gay drama in order to better translate queer fiction. Traditionally, the translation of postcolonial texts ?watered them down? to accommodate for the preferences of the establishment. The danger the translation of queer texts runs is to accommodate for heteronormative tastes in ways that would betray the very essence of queer fiction.
In order for translations to transmit the full impact of a language that this presentation means to outline, queer translation has to be approached from the same marginal point of view and become, in itself, a militant, combative practice, challenging the establishment on different fronts.
Gender studies and translation studies have much in common such as an intrinsic interdisciplinary approach. When they touch, so do a myriad issues such as gender differences, genderized language, transfer, correspondence, appropriation of cultural spaces and the like. In a world that is little by little standardizing, our very identity can only be safeguarded in the language that we speak, in the words that we choose. Words are the unique, individual form we have of communicating. The gay liberation movement meant a voice for those who had long been silenced; let us not make translation the ultimate form of silence. Translation has always been a bridge for our ideas to cross over; it cannot become a weapon to kill the very ideas it is supposed to transmit.
