How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [55]
But before we get to that, I’d like to pause for a flashback, to pray at the altar of the gay man who most influenced straight people’s musical tastes before the advent of rock and roll, Cole Porter.
The Church of Cole Porter: The Queer Supremacy of Show Tunes
If a guy likes show music, he’s got to be gay, right? Not always, of course. But in recent years it’s become a cultural joke because show music, like opera, is a much older form of music than rock and roll, and those who enjoy it are necessarily a bit alienated from the mainstream rock music scene. I know that when I go to cabaret shows featuring the tunes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, or Duke Ellington, I meet only two types: gay male couples (of any age) or elderly heterosexual couples.
Yet during the heyday of show music, before and after World War II, it was mostly young heterosexual couples who enjoyed these tunes, dancing and courting to the love ballads that came from Broadway musicals. They didn’t realize that many of them had been written by gay men. Cole Porter, in particular, wrote love ballads that were made for romance; most were later recorded by super-straight artists. Frank Sinatra’s Cole Porter album is a classic example. How many heterosexuals fell in love to Porter’s clever songs, which vibrated with a flamboyant, erotic essence that so reflected the gay sensibility? How many brides danced to “Begin the Beguine” or “Night and Day” at their wedding receptions? Because Porter wrote the lyrics as well as the melodies, they are love songs replete with a wicked sense of humor and mature sexual content.
In “I Get a Kick out of You,” from the show Anything Goes, Porter’s lyrics compare the love object to cocaine, alcohol, and an airplane ride. “I get no kick from cocaine/Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all . . .” His song “Always True to You, Darling, in My Fashion” is an ode to casual adultery motivated by monetary gain, as is another, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” in which a young woman explains that she loves a young man, but also loves the gifts and money bestowed upon her by her rich sugar daddy.
In his lyrics, Porter is always juxtaposing hard sexual facts with lovely, soaring melodies. His is a very gay sensibility. His haunting song “After You” focuses on the end of an affair even as it is just beginning. “It Was Just One of Those Things” is an upbeat, sassy song about an ill-fated one-night stand; “It ’s Alright with Me” is an honest exploration of “revenge sex,” in which the singer/narrator of the song agrees that he or she will have sex with someone, even “though your lips are tempting, they’re the wrong lips . . .”
Compare Porter’s gay sensibility to Irving Berlin’s more straight-and-narrow approach to romance. Berlin’s most engaging love ballad is “Always,” a sweet song with very simple lyrics: “I’ll be loving you Always/With a love that’s true Always.” Though Berlin did write extremely clever songs, witty lyrics never made it into his love ballads. They were, to put it mildly, sappy. But Porter managed to inject drama and eroticism into his love songs. “Night and Day,” for example, is oozing with physical references to sex: “Night and day under the hide of me/There’s an oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me/and its torment won’t be through/Till you let me spend my life making love to you . . .”
Porter’s songs are steamy. There is never any sexual coyness. He knew the purpose of a love song was to get someone into bed. If we fast-forward ourselves, we can understand the vast difference between Porter’s blatant eroticism and Irving Berlin’s staid romanticism by comparing, say, the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” to the Association’s “Cherish.”
I love homosexual love songs. Most of America does, although they don’t know that they are queer songs. And who knows, really, to whom a love song has been written? I’ve come across several sources who claim that Noel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” was written about Cary Grant. Noel Coward, who never