Opera without Queens/Queens without Opera

OPERA WITHOUT QUEENS/ QUEENS WITHOUT OPERA John M. Clum BOOKS REVIEWED- The Queen's Throat:Opera,Homosexuality, and the Mystery ofDesire,Wayne Koestenbaum. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. John Dizikes, Opera in America:A CulturalHistory.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. W ayne Koestenbaum's per formance in book form, The Queen's Throat: Opera , Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire,has been, over the past year, the object of news stories as well as reviews . Some mainstream publications see the book as "outing" opera, as if its authordiscoveredthatthere was a link between opera and gay culture. Anyone who has ever looked around an opera house audience or listened to "Opera Quiz" on the intermissions of the Met broadcasts surely figured that out: "When will a fan mail this question to'Opera Quiz': 'How many gays and lesbians are listening to this broadcast .' One could also ask: "How many gays and lesbians are involved in presenting opera and opera broadcasts?" That's still an open secret. Like all great performances, The Queen' Throatis highly personal, like its author's preference for Anna Moffo. Koestenbaum does not try to universalize oressentialize his topic: the book is not so much about opera and gayness as it is about opera and Koestenbaum's gayness. I find it impossible to write about The Queen's Throatwithoutbeing as subjective: its greatest virtue is that it forces other opera queens to enter into conversation, to argue with it. So here one opera queen's performance will enter into dialogue with another's memories and observations. Opera for Koestenbaum is a solitary pleasure, spiritual masturbation. For me, older and coming of age as opera queen and incipient all around queen in the fifties and early sixties, opera was a communal event. My best friend in high school and I lay together on his bed listening to the newly released Nilsson/Tebaldi/Bjoerling album of Turandot. We might have fantasized doing more than listening to that album , butwe never would have discussed it, much less done it. Turandotwasour union. That memory (one ofmany) of displaced, repressed or sublimated sex is not sad at all to me (it is, I later U 107 found out, to my companion on that bed). In college I went to the opera weekly with gaggles of Princeton friends, all, like myself, closeted, not yet emergent homosexuals. We didn't talk about our sexual desires, at least not our real ones for each other: we talked about opera. If we were closeted , itwas a crowded closet, frustrating at times, but never lonely. Gay culture for us was a crowded closet, frustrating at times, but never lonely. Gay culture for us was, as Larry Kramer puts it, "a culture that isn't just sexual." When it became sexual, opera remained, for some of us, a comfort and source of metaphors for our love lives. In The Lisbon Traviata,Terrence McNally has depicted accurately and brilliantly two kinds of opera queen: the opera nun who makes communion with his recordings a surrogate for life and the more dangerous opera schizoid who is compelled to turn his life into opera. Many of us have been both. Wayne Koestenbaum writes: "The opera queen is a dated species: very 1950's. I am an anachronism. After sexual liberation, who needs opera." The title character of Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey quips that gay men aren't, as straights believe, obsessed with sex. They're obsessed with opera. The line gets a laugh, but it's an anachronism. It certainly isn't true of the younger generation of gay men. Adoration of opera is more an outdated stereotype for most gay men than a present reality , like limp wrists and Judy Garland worship. Now the health club is more a palace of gay culture than the opera house. The movie Philadelphiagives its gay character his most transcendent moment when he waxes rhapsodically 108 U PERFORMING ARTS JOURNAL 47 about Maria Callas singing Andrea Chenier, as if somehow that moment defines him as a gay man. But isn't the very fact of that moment in a mainstream Hollywood film a sign that it is very old, outdated news-like Vietnam , the...