Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical – by D. A. Miller

Everybody "knows" that gay men love show tunes; as D.A. Miller writes in one self-mockingly academic passage of Place for Us, the original cast albums "were used, scholars now believe, in a puberty rite that, though it was conducted by single individuals in secrecy and shame, was nonetheless so widely diffused as to remain, for several generations, as practically normative for gay men and it was almost unknown for straight ones." Miller's elaborate pondering of the intersection of homosexuality and Broadway shifts between critical exegesis of shows like Gypsy and autobiographical reflections written in a curiously distancing (and, at times, generalizing) third-person voice. Although some will be put off by the academic tone, there are treasures to be found sprinkled throughout these pages, such as the black-and-white reproductions of Michael Perelman's Broadway-inspired oil paintings. Or Miller's description of an ironic piano-bar singer, "like a third-rate magician who, thinking to take advantage of his inferior talent for illusionism, devises a novelty act in which he gives away the familiar tricks of his betters ... out to betray the habitual prestidigitation of the whole enormous population of gay composers, lyricists, librettists, choreographers, and others" who coyly cloaked their sexuality in misdirection and innuendo. --Ron Hogan

Released: 2000