• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 485 0

Mercury: The Afterlife and Times of a Rock God. Scripted and directed by Charles Messina, the one-man play focuses on Mercury’s emotional struggles as a closeted performer. The actor playing Freddie Mercury dons his different “looks” throughout, and the performance costumes alone tell a story about Mercury’s path as a gay man. At the beginning of Queen’s career, he had dressed very flamboyantly (he was the band member who had suggested their name) in effeminate costumes, and then, when the more masculine, mustachioed look became prominent in the gay community, he adapted completely. He wore extremely tight, faded jeans, skimpy tank tops, and eighties-style aviator glasses. Or, as one of my gay friends put it, Mercury’s new clothes screamed “gay, gay, gay!” Amazingly, the straight boys who made up most of his audience copied his look. (And so goes the circle of clothes—see the fashion chapter.)

When asked if he had ever socialized with Freddie Mercury, Rob Halford of Judas Priest recalled only one time, at a gay bar in Athens, Greece, where the two rockers met unexpectedly. It’s amazing to think that two closet queens were able to drive all-American teenage boys into macho frenzies.

Chapter 10

Theater: Life Is a Drag

There’s a place for us,

Somewhere a place for us.

—“Somewhere,” from West Side Story by Stephen Sondheim

Is a gay play a play that has sex with other plays?

—Harvey Fierstein

If at the end you want them to cheer

Keep it gay, keep it gay, keep it gay,

Whether it’s Hamlet, Othello or Lear,

Keep it gay, keep it gay, keep it gay!

—lyrics from The Producers by Mel Brooks

The only times I really feel the presence of God are when

I’m having sex, and during a great Broadway musical.

—Father Dan in Jeffrey by Paul Rudnick

You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you are all flops.

—Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

December 2003. My daughter and I have just left a spectacular performance of a one-man play, I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright. On a spare set, Jefferson Mays eerily conjures up the main role of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a gay transvestite furniture and clock collector in East Germany in the 1960s. Yet he also plays the role of the gay playwright, who wants to know how an obviously gay man survived the Nazis and then the incredibly repressive regime of the com munists. And he portrays a gay “trick,” a flamboyantly gay clock dealer, a straight military guy, and several others. It’s a virtuoso performance, a great big gay stew of a theater piece. We’re dazzled, or should I say dazed? We’ve completed a theater bender in which we’ve seen three plays in two days, and everything we’ve seen has been gay.

As we leave the theater, we walk up 45th Street, past the theater where The Boy from Oz is playing. It’s a musical about Peter Allen, a composer who was gay but once married to Liza Minnelli. (Insert your own Liza Minnelli/she always marries gay guys/David Gest jokes here.) I beg my kid to stop in front of the theater so we can read the reviews. It’s then that a middle-age gay couple approaches. One is short and a bit stout; the other is tall and balding.

“That show is fantastic!” the short guy says. “You’ve got to see it.” I say that we’ve just come from I Am My Own Wife. They have, too. They continue to rave about The Boy from Oz. I mention that most reviews say it’s not a good play, but that Hugh Jackman is supposed to be incredible in the lead role. It’s clear that mentioning anything negative about the show makes them angry. The show is perfect, they say, and most enjoyable.

The taller of the couple asks if we saw Taboo, the Boy George musical. “Yeah, but we kind of didn’t like it,” I say, and then they lose interest in us entirely. But our dislike is not because of its gay theme, I tell them. The musical’s got a weak book. (Well, I could mention that the scene featuring copulation in a men’s john was a little . . . off-center for a mainstream Broadway audience, but I don’t.)

The couple goes away, because I’ve obviously