How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [68]
I acted in a really stupid high-school production of Albee’s one-act play The Sandbox. I played Grandma, who was waiting for the Angel of Death, who just happened to be played by a muscle-bound half-naked guy (not a pretty sight in our drama club). It’s an absurdist play, one of those where the characters don’t have names and prattle on endlessly about the meaning of life. Well, not prattle. They utter monosyllabic and disjointed dialogue. We high-schoolers really didn’t understand it, and I kept wondering why death came in the form of a gorgeous young man with muscles in a skimpy bikini. Now I know.
In 2001, I stayed after a performance of Albee’s off-Broadway production The Play About the Baby to hear him answer questions from the audience. One person asked whether all his characters were really gay, even if they were presented as heterosexuals. Albee became furious. He told the audience about how one theater company had acquired the rights to do his play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with an all-male cast. “If I had wanted to write about homosexuals, I would have!” he bellowed.
But Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his most naturalistic play, was first produced in 1962. Back then, could Albee have written a play about a group of sniping homosexuals and get it produced on Broadway? I doubt it, in the closeted mid-sixties. Yet the sometimes surrealistic, bitchy view of human relationships in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has a genuine gay sensibility anyway, even if it is voiced through heterosexual couples.
Ironically, the true heirs to Albee’s aggressive unnaturalis tic style, peppered with staccato dialogue, have all been heterosexual playwrights—Sam Shepard (Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love), David Rabe (Streamers, Hurlyburly); John Guare (The House of Blue Leaves), and David Mamet (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross). This is another case of heterosexuals borrowing from homosexual innovators.
Mae West, the Drag Queen’s Queen, or the Great Imitator of the Great White Way
“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted” was my all-time favorite line when I was going through my W. C. Fields/Mae West phase as a teenager. Of course, Mae has become a great gay icon, an even more exaggerated version of a blonde bomb than Harlow, Marilyn, or Doris Day. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a big fan of hers, but my mom could never understand why. “To me, she was so exaggerated,” Mom says. “Kind of creepy, so artificial and almost like a man.”
My mom was on to something, because in the history of Broadway, Mae West is famous for being the first to put homosexuals on stage, and for trying to put drag queens up there, too. West’s first show, Sex, in 1928, had gay characters, and her next one, The Drag, closed out of town in Paterson, N.J.
West got much of her inspiration from vaudeville and gay-club drag queens. She is said to have borrowed her classic hip-swaying walk and other mannerisms from Bert Savoy, a drag entertainer extraordinaire. Now here’s that homo “circle of life” thing again—Mae West, a woman, imitating a man who was imitating a woman, and arousing my grandfather in the process.
Musicals, the Great American Homo Art Form
There is nothing else like the Broadway musical. It’s a peculiar American form, inextricably linked with the creative abilities of gay men. And gay men have served as stewards, as keepers of the faith, even when everyone had predicted, year after year, that the musical was dead.
“For gay believers, musicals are what football is to many straight men,” says John Kenrick, a historian and former theater manager. “We relish souvenirs and statistics, root wildly for our favorites, and know all too well the difference between a winning season and a losing one. They have the Super Bowl—we have Tony Award night.”
I talked with Kenrick, whose enthusiasm about