Terrence McNally, the playwright, librettist, and screenwriter who portrayed gayness to a mainstream theater audience humanizing and universalizing LGBTQ daily lives and challenges, died March 24th at 81, becoming one of the first celebrities to succumb to COVID-19.
But being first was nothing new for McNally, as he was among the initial dramatists to write about the concerns and struggles of gay men not as oddities or pathological but as full-fledged normal human beings with parallel needs,.