years of college. Its overture taught me what a rondo and a Rossini crescendo were before I knew the terms. The auto-da-fé scene introduced me to McCarthyism. (My father caught the parallel and explained it to me during the intermission.) From Voltaire I leaped to Diderot, Leibniz and the Enlightenment, from Tyrone Guthrie to Olivier, Gielgud, the Old Vic, and the Kembles, from Dorothy Parker to the New York wits, from the word “satire” to the notion of irony. If I followed Candide’s allusions and implications to their ends, I would know everything.
Of course, gays have to. At any rate, we have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are—have to find our unique place in their culture. For some of us, isolated in the straight system, the stage gave off one’s first whiff of the gay tang. Certain clues led one to postulate the existence of another system, a secret one. One saw signs in the behavior of the male gypsies and gratuitous torso bearings, in questionably quaint rhymes and sly jokes, even in Daniel Blum’s emphasis on male body shots in his Theatre World annuals. I remember looking up Kismet in one of these volumes and being surprised by a photograph of Steve Reeves, that icon of pre-Stonewall calculus. The photo caught an insignificant moment of the show and was clumsily cropped; it didn’t belong in a book. Why was it there? Because Reeves in Arabian pajamas was too toothsome not to be included? Obviously Blum thought so; his Theatre Worlds were like certain New York parties: always room for the beautiful. This is an exclusively gay notion, and coming upon it through my cult told me I wasn’t alone.
Overtly, I pretended membership in the straight club; this was the 1950s. Yet we cultists found our way around it: for taking up theatre as a hobby was not unlike coming out in code, reserving a place in a possible gay future without having to challenge the hypocrisy of the social contract. Kids always want to be like each other, have what they all have and fashion clubs of belonging; to have something different and join one’s own club was to practice for later, when the system was no longer secret. Thus, liking musicals was like a legalized coming out. The connection made sense: what other profession is as gay-identified as theatre?
Indeed, an ancient queen who has been everywhere and known everyone once told me that gay was invented in a theatre, in 1956. Yes, there were the Greeks, but all their secrets were lost. Petronius? Fragments, dreams. Ronald Firbank was a fluke and Noel Coward was an abundance of suave, not a sexuality. No, the queen tells, gay came about at the City Center revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in which Tallulah Bankhead played Blanche DuBois. Everyone who attended that production was instantly struck gay, the old queen says, including the usherettes, the candy sellers, the stage crew, and—on Tallulah’s good nights—even those who were passing outside the theatre. This must be gospel. What else is common to this scattered, unwieldy, and inherently contradictory condition we term the “gay community” but a bent for the stage? We all go; we all look upon those who don’t as unintellectual, uncultured, gross. True, we don’t all want the same thing from it. Some want a poetry of life, some a keen comix, some a colorful immortality. But I notice that A Streetcar Named Desire has all of these, as well as the two basic gay characters, the stud and the queen.
If attending theatre educates, putting it on stimulates, which is why most of the men who write, produce, stage, perform, or even drum hype for the theatre are gay, with emphasis on musicals. Why musicals? Because gays love boas and sequins? Or because they have been attracted by a unique form of music theatre that sophisticates all arts so deftly and—on occasion—profoundly that it sweeps other pastimes and enlightenments to the side? Musicals aren’t a fetish,
Of course, gays have to. At any rate, we have to know more than the straights know: have to understand what we are as well as what they are—have to find our unique place in their culture. For some of us, isolated in the straight system, the stage gave off one’s first whiff of the gay tang. Certain clues led one to postulate the existence of another system, a secret one. One saw signs in the behavior of the male gypsies and gratuitous torso bearings, in questionably quaint rhymes and sly jokes, even in Daniel Blum’s emphasis on male body shots in his Theatre World annuals. I remember looking up Kismet in one of these volumes and being surprised by a photograph of Steve Reeves, that icon of pre-Stonewall calculus. The photo caught an insignificant moment of the show and was clumsily cropped; it didn’t belong in a book. Why was it there? Because Reeves in Arabian pajamas was too toothsome not to be included? Obviously Blum thought so; his Theatre Worlds were like certain New York parties: always room for the beautiful. This is an exclusively gay notion, and coming upon it through my cult told me I wasn’t alone.
Overtly, I pretended membership in the straight club; this was the 1950s. Yet we cultists found our way around it: for taking up theatre as a hobby was not unlike coming out in code, reserving a place in a possible gay future without having to challenge the hypocrisy of the social contract. Kids always want to be like each other, have what they all have and fashion clubs of belonging; to have something different and join one’s own club was to practice for later, when the system was no longer secret. Thus, liking musicals was like a legalized coming out. The connection made sense: what other profession is as gay-identified as theatre?
Indeed, an ancient queen who has been everywhere and known everyone once told me that gay was invented in a theatre, in 1956. Yes, there were the Greeks, but all their secrets were lost. Petronius? Fragments, dreams. Ronald Firbank was a fluke and Noel Coward was an abundance of suave, not a sexuality. No, the queen tells, gay came about at the City Center revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in which Tallulah Bankhead played Blanche DuBois. Everyone who attended that production was instantly struck gay, the old queen says, including the usherettes, the candy sellers, the stage crew, and—on Tallulah’s good nights—even those who were passing outside the theatre. This must be gospel. What else is common to this scattered, unwieldy, and inherently contradictory condition we term the “gay community” but a bent for the stage? We all go; we all look upon those who don’t as unintellectual, uncultured, gross. True, we don’t all want the same thing from it. Some want a poetry of life, some a keen comix, some a colorful immortality. But I notice that A Streetcar Named Desire has all of these, as well as the two basic gay characters, the stud and the queen.
If attending theatre educates, putting it on stimulates, which is why most of the men who write, produce, stage, perform, or even drum hype for the theatre are gay, with emphasis on musicals. Why musicals? Because gays love boas and sequins? Or because they have been attracted by a unique form of music theatre that sophisticates all arts so deftly and—on occasion—profoundly that it sweeps other pastimes and enlightenments to the side? Musicals aren’t a fetish,
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