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Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical Sharps & Flats Home Movies Strangeness in the night Courtney Love called me a retard Listen through this Rounders |
THE SAME OLD SONG AND DANCE | PAGE 1, 2
"Ensconced in this underworld," Miller writes, "where he was equally removed from company at home and the lack of it at school, he would utterly abandon himself, now tapping furiously away (while in his stocking feet), now belting out a vocal accompaniment (albeit only mouthing the words), now breaking down into sobs (so moved he was by the bravery of his refusal to do so)." Along with ecstasy, there is shame in the boy's act, in the wholehearted surrender to his "perverted" nature. It is not so much the musical itself he is drawn to, but the individual numbers, which have been "rationalized" out of idiotic plots and characters in an effort to adhere to the rules of dramatic action but which cannot disguise their "formal discontinuity." All Broadway show tunes have the same mission, Miller writes -- "to deliver whoever sings it from disaster and dejection, from resentment, self-pity, and various other unconsoled relations to want" -- but in the end they're all shams, just whistles in the dark, "constituted to conceal -- or, rather, by concealing badly, to disclose -- a radically pathetic subject, who by letting us see that he is trying to hide his sufferings, becomes additionally so." "Place for Us" is at once brilliant and irrelevant, moving and cruel, chock-full of insight and reduced to the most conspicuous generalities about a subject that doesn't bear a lot of scrutiny -- not because gay men aren't peculiarly drawn to the Broadway musical (they are), but because there's not a lot to say that wasn't said already in the gay child's cry of pain: Lemme outta here! I wanna be a star! It's true, as Miller asserts, that many gay men feel a flush of shame not only at their past or current devotion to the show tune, "that vehement hymn to self-belief," but also at the association of all gay men with a particular kind of broken-down queen who hangs out at piano bars, drinking grasshoppers or mai-tais and shouting, "Sing out, Louise! Let them know you're a lady!" But didn't we already know this? I can swear we did. It suits Miller's deliberately ironic purpose to mine a rich vein of pop-cultural material in pursuit of an obvious but elusive truth. As it happens, he's one of those academic writers -- he's a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University -- who deconstructs himself, so you don't need to worry about his conclusions, or his motives, or even his "argument," which seems to be that gay men's historical attachment to the musical and the show tune is both meaningless and profound, empowering and humiliating, deeply personal and culturally induced. In short, it is something unknowable, just another speck for study in the post-structural universe. "It is impossible to describe the appeal," Miller writes, "-- let me insist: the organized appeal -- made to gay men by the post-war Broadway musical as though one hadn't heard it long ago." Indeed, one had, though never in such strange, hallucinatory prose as this; part treatise, part personal rumination, with Sondheim's "Gypsy" as the central case study, Miller's essay offers lines like these: Not only does a dread of being caught, not to say taken, by surprise where male homosexuality is concerned -- which as matters stand can hardly be anything other than a dread of what will already have occurred -- seem to incite the entire multi-form social will to knowledge of an entity called 'the gay man' (who must be tricked out in every dog tag with which he can be plausibly thought, or reasonably persuaded, to accessorize his desire), it also tends to put such knowledge, be it popular or academic, homophobic or progressive, in the service of a mere knowingness whose only aim is, by reducing him to a set of signs, to display, amulet-like, its own mastery in reading them. Got that? Follow the sentence with a slide rule and you'll see it makes some sense. But it's an old, old story now -- the object watching the object watch itself. Paddling through Miller's more torturous canals, I found myself wondering how long it can be before the entire Queer Studies brigade sets upon the Broadway musical with the purported goal of explicating (but in fact with a mission to destroy) one of the last of the gay taboos: a passion for schmaltz, brass, "favorite things" and happy results, along with the elaborate fantasies of love and vindication that the show tune provides and that helped at least one gay man -- me -- through some very difficult years. "The homosexual ... is a prodigious consumer of signs," said critic Harold Beaver, "of hidden meanings, hidden systems, hidden potentiality. Exclusion from the common code impels the frenzied quest: the momentary glimpse, the scrambled figure, the chance encounter, the reverse image, the sudden slippage, the lowered guard." And this is no exaggeration of the gay experience as it used to be and possibly still is -- I wouldn't know, since people cruise you out in the open now, and much younger gay men, the post-post-Stonewall generation, seem to me little different from their het companions. The modern voice of the gay rights movement -- whiny, white and obsessed with marriage -- will not be raised in defense of murky emotions and secret desires. This is not to mention the burden imposed on a congenitally high-spirited gay male culture by the gender/of-color/trans-this-and-that thing. What have gay men lost by bringing everything into the light and everyone -- anyone -- under their tent? Of whom will we now say, as we did with Garland, Davis and Garbo, "Judy is for pain. Bette is for size. Greta is for love"? Still, I wonder what lonely boys in suburbia are sneaking into the shadows to hear nowadays, alone with their innermost thoughts. Not having any children, I'm not prepared to say that this isn't a ritual common to all adolescents, gay or otherwise. It's hard to imagine that Gertrude Lawrence or Mary Martin could light up the kids anymore, though maybe I'm wrong. Undoubtedly some other voice, or image, or indestructible symbol of push and pluck is telling gay boys the things they need to know. I hope so, since I like to think that all the chatter in the world about "preference" and "choices" and "lifestyles," not to mention "epistemology," can't take the mystery out of homosexuality, nor obliterate the secret thrill of the expressly forbidden. As George Chauncey remarks almost superfluously in his groundbreaking "Gay New York" (1994), "Many men positively enjoyed having a 'secret life,' more complex and extensive than outsiders could imagine." One thing's for sure: Miller's "Place for Us" is the record of an artifact, a dead genre and vanishing sensibility that won't be back again. Miller is at his best when he describes his horror at "the unbroken lugubriousness" of a monster hit like "Les Misérables" -- "a show in which the few characters who don't die remain permanently guilt-tripped by those who do" -- and when he says that he's chosen "Gypsy" as his model for discussion because it was the first stage musical he ever saw, and that he saw it with his mother, and that after all it's a show about musicals and mothers, and Merman was in it and -- and -- "in short," says Miller, "if all these things hadn't forever after made me as little capable of finding a better example of the genre as a boy is of having more than one mother, then I would not now be in a state either of desire or ability to read the fortune that, on the road during the summer of 1961, this 'Gypsy' first told me." Which brings us right back where we started, no? Yes. Period, end of story.
Peter Kurth is a regular contributor to Salon. |
