What’s with Gay Men and Musical Theater?
Why are show tunes a thing?
My husband Lenny was a big bruiser of a man, a rough-edged New Yorker with a thick, Alphabet City accent and a very traditionally masculine presentation.
In his prime, you'd have been quicker to take him for a Lower East Side gangster than a theater queen.
But how that man loved Judy, Liza, and Barbra!
I wish you could have seen his eyes sparkle as he barked out a lilting line.
I don't think he missed a single musical, on Broadway or off, after West Side Story.
He took an usher job as a kid just so he could see shows he couldn't afford.
Up until his last days, he spiced his conversation with snippets of lyrics and melodies from musical theater. He loved opera too, which is another common stereotype about gay men that contains a good bit of truth.
We haunted Broadway together, we subscribed to opera series, and we regularly spread a blanket out in Central Park to sip Chardonnay and thrill to Puccini.
But why?
Well, I did it because Lenny did. I inherited a certain love of musical theater and opera from him.
He inherited it from other, older gay men when he was a teen.
They had inherited it too, and the generation before them.
That's culture. That's how culture works.
In the early days of theater people, difference was tolerated. The theater had its roots in troupes of low-class wanderers who were often socially unacceptable.
Actors and even professional musicians were seen as rather more than a little shady. Well-born, polite people didn't associate with them.
Lesbians and gay men became fixtures in the theater. Theater people developed a culture of tolerance and acceptance. A sort of “band of freaks” mentality.
Lenny didn't know any of this, of course. Most of the theater people of his day didn't know how their culture had evolved either.
They just knew that many of them were gay and even transgender, not that transgender was a word yet.
All Lenny knew is that men who liked other men liked the theater. Men who liked other men were more likely to meet one another if they hung out with theater people.
He simply joined an existing culture because it was there. It gave him something to be part of.
Then I met him and I fell in love with the culture too.
Kind of.
I'm afraid that link dies with me. I'm not passing it on. I don't have anything against show tunes, I just don't care.
Like many gay men of my generation and younger, traditional gay culture is not something I actively value.
As we integrate and normalize, our special cultures are fading away.
We're the last links to the old rogues of the travelling theater people.
After us, those ancient traditions will live on only in history books.
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