Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture – by John M. Clum

If you think this is one of those academic gay- or gender-studies-type tomes that applies a lot of incomprehensible French terms to good old-fashioned American entertainment, think again. John M. Clum may be a professor at Duke, but what this garrulous gay-inflected romp around the past 75 or so years of musical theater reveals him to be is, to use his own affectionate term, a hopeless and incurable "show queen." Indeed, Something for the Boys is so personal and idiosyncratic in its survey of the gay side/subtext of musical theater that's it's kind of like a looooong dinner with an invaluable surviving old-school elder queen. You know the type--she's seen every show and/or owns every score since 1703 and she's not afraid to hold forth tartly on everything from Julie Andrews's performance in the film of Victor/Victoria ("She was Mrs. Blake Edwards and that's why she was at the center of a Blake Edwards film") to Rodgers and Hammerstein (whose work Clum provocatively finds impossible to extract a gay reading from--or, in his words, to "queer"). Of course, she's also got the last word on every diva to walk the floorboards, from Garland ("the Wreck Who Went On--brilliantly") and Streisand (who has "the toughness that drag queens aspire to") to Bernadette Peters ("as close to a diva as the New York theater has produced in the past 30 years") and an underrated treasure like Barbara Cook (whose story reflects that of gay history, Clum informs us, since she "'came out' as a fat woman." We're sure Miss Cook's happy to know that).

Clum writes that he didn't intend this book as a traditional thesis-based academic tome, which is good, since it fails miserably in that regard. He too loosely throws around terms like "camp," "irony," and "diva" that others have applied careful meanings to. He refers more than once to The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum's meditation on the storied bond between gay men and opera divas, but fails to do what that book did so brilliantly even amidst its over-the-top language--pinpoint the reason gay men have traditionally been so drawn to a particular genre. (Koestenbaum argues that the full-throated utterances of the opera diva gave release to the rage and pain pre-Stonewall gays weren't allowed to express, but Clum never attains as deep a conclusion, chalking up the gay Broadway link to those tired old undefined catch-alls "camp" and "irony"). Clum suggests that what sports are to many straight men, musical theater has been to many gay men, and, in the end, the facile nature of his own survey supports such an analogy: When there's a gay reading to be found in a show or song (as there always is, he insists, in Porter, Coward, or Lorenz Hart), the gays "win"; when there's not (as in Hammerstein), or when it's not as clear (as in Sondheim's Company, notoriously), the gays "lose"...or the game goes into overtime.

But I'm just quibbling. I read Clum's book straight through to the end (including his lushly opinionated personal discography) because I envy and aspire to this kind of encyclopedic, microscopic knowledge of art and entertainment as a sort of venerable gay badge of honor. So if, like me, Lady in the Dark, Anyone Can Whistle, and Mack and Mabel mean as much to you as Crazy for You, Follies, and Mame, you'll quit your bitching, Mary, and eat it up, too.--Tim Murphy

Released: 1999