How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [65]
When Falsettoland, William Finn’s gay musical about a man and his son, came to Broadway in 1992, the producers deliberately ran ads featuring wholesome families who raved about how touching and wholesome the musical was. (Translation: Don’t be scared of the gay boys!)
But now straight people no longer have to be coaxed into gay productions like frightened horses. Gay is good. Gay is funny. Gay is safe. Hairspray, the raucous musical, is based on gay director John Waters’s movie of the same name and stars Harvey Fierstein in drag as the main character’s mother. The 2003 Tony Award for best play went to Take Me Out, about a major-league baseball player who reveals that he’s homosexual. Mamma Mia!, the ABBA-based musical, is very gay—first, because so many gay men adore ABBA songs, and second, because there is a gay twist in the plot.
And, of course, many—or most—of the audience members watching these shows are straight. Finally, the great secret of the theater has come out of the closet: The best theater is gay, or at least embraces gay themes. And straight people are now flocking to the theater to see very explicitly homosexual material. Of course, there is always the nagging question: Is it just a minstrel show? From the 1920s to the 1940s, white audiences flocked to Harlem to see black performers. Is the straight pilgrimage to gay plays an echo of that practice?
Out of the three plays my daughter and I see on our theater-bender weekend, Avenue Q seems to be the least likely to contain gay elements. Avenue Q is a spoof of Sesame Street, but it’s so much more. It follows a group of people and puppets who are young, just out of college, and forced to live in a seedy neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs of New York.
It’s a delightful show. I’m a cynic, but I find myself laughing and crying at these characters’ situations. And there’s a major gay subplot—concerning Bert- and Ernie-like characters. It’s wonderful and sly, a pop-culture reference to the constant speculation about Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie’s sexual preferences. (Why do they sleep in the same room, and why are they always together?) In Avenue Q, the Bert-like character, Rod, confesses a terrible crush on the Ernie-like puppet, Nicky. Yet Rod, who spends most of the musical declaring that he is not gay, sings a very funny song about why no one ever sees him with a girlfriend—he has a girlfriend in Canada. In the end, after much therapy, Rod comes out of the closet and Nicky finds him a lover, a cousin who looks just like Nicky but is a gay bodybuilder. (The puppet version of a gay gymrat is hilarious, with all his muscles molded out of foam.)
Queer Theater: A Redundant Term?
Okay, let’s identify the “hidden” gay influences on straight theater.
Wait—whom am I kidding? Maybe this chapter is superfluous. The term “straight theater” just might be oxymoronic. All theater is essentially queer, because of its emphasis on artifice, social exaggeration, and gender play. Think of the giant phalluses in the choruses of Greek comedies. Consider that it’s a form in which men played all the roles for centuries. Yes, Shakespeare played around with sexual identity. And perhaps, from the little we know about his personal life and his plays and sonnets, Shakespeare might have found young men to be the most suitable erotic objects.
So, by the Lenny Bruce standard, all actors are queer, even if they are straight. All theater producers and directors are gay. The proscenium stage is gay, and so, especially, is the thrust stage.
I could argue that the theater is at best a marginal art form these days, reaching few people. But that’s not exactly true. For one