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Musical Theatre & Gay Culture Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture by John M. Clum, St. Martin's Press, 1999, 317 pages, $26.95
The first theatre queen I ever knew—a veritable walking font of show-tune memorabilia—was,
I'm told, the Parliamentarian of the United States Senate. His quaint Georgetown apartment—a spot
where he regularly held weekend parties in the late 1950s and early 1960s—found his guests a captive audience to interminably-played Broadway melodies.
Somehow I knew that this cheerful fellow represented a type, that there were other "show queens" (the term used by Something for the Boys author John M. Clum) who depended for their spiritual sustenance on the show-tune lyrics they'd memorized, just as surely as I've depended on Leaves of Grass or as Rev. Mel White has depended on the New Testament. When the lyrics seemed all too silly to me (then still in my early twenties) I had no way of knowing that they were "camp" and that committed Broadway enthusiasts were drawing meanings from them that helped them negotiate—especially with humor-- the pitfalls of 1950s gay life. Author Clum illustrates just how he himself did this, and provides not only a record of his own musically-inspired growth, but first-rate discussions about a genre that can now claim a legitimate stake in what is sometimes called "gay culture." Since this book is also a discussion of divas and their talents (or lack thereof) there will be show queens galore who either approve or disapprove of Professor Clum's musings. Even so, I'd wager, such fans will—one and all—be hypnotized by what he says. And there's no doubting but that anyone who wants to better understand Broadway's allure, will be mesmerized by Clum's clear, humorous, even "bitchy" reviews-discussions. What Vito Russo did for movies in The Celluloid Closet, in other words, John M. Clum has accomplished for musical theatre. Its all here: the gay influences, the straight reactions, and a fascinating subterranean cult whose appeal long ago transcended urban borders, reaching far into the American hinterlands, bringing solace and liberatory meanings to isolated closet-cases in Dubuque.
But more often Cole Porter provided an urbane, sophisticated perspective that helped ease the plight of romantics who felt trapped by a horrendously suffocating 1950s milieu. Famous divas all get their due in Something for the Boys. Barbra Streisand's awkward entrance into show biz is chronicled and Betty Buckley (one of the author's own favorites) is quoted as saying: "Any diva's best loved audience is the gay one—the guys and gals who adore us most." Marlene Dietrich, the diva who most captured my attention when I was 22, is remembered in this book as "a third-rate" sex pot who "was neither a good singer nor a versatile actress, but she became sex personified, the Blonde Venus." Clum informs me today that her signature song played for me on a piano in 1955 on weekends, as I entered a gay bar three blocks from the White House, later "became part of a camp vocabulary." The song was "Falling in Love Again." In a manner not unlike Clum's, I see now how I utilized certain of this song's lyrics as affirmative inspirational material, even if they didn't always guarantee success: Men cluster to me like moths around a flame And if their wings burn, I know I'm not to blame. More, I learned in Something for the Boys that "to gay men (Dietrich) was camp itself. Moreover, she was a bit of an oddball, mopping the stage like a charwoman before performances, cleaning her hotel room herself, and being notoriously cheap." John M. Clum is Professor of English and Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University. Thus, his readers can depend on him for slight-of-hand phrasings that both please and are dumbfounding. Something for the Boys is a must in any cultured gay male's library, and for committed theatre queens, it is, without any argument, obligatory reading. |
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