This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, "Jerker, or The Helping Hand" (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized...
moreThis essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, "Jerker, or The Helping Hand" (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of "Jerker" on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when “Silence = Death,” Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.
