Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture by John M. Clum (review)

Reviews JOHN M. CLUM. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: SI. Martin's Press, t999. Pp. 317, illustrated. $26.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Stacy Wolf, University o/Texas at Austin As John M. Clum writes in the first chapter of Something for the Boys, "I don't want the closet back, but I want some fabulousness" (34). Through autobiography , anecdote, performance history, and critical readings of musicals, Clum examines the connections, both imagined and real, historical and current , between gay men and musicals. CIum demons!rates the relationship between gay men and musicals in several ways. In the first two chapters, he traces the stereotype of the show queen, asserting that pre-Stonewall gay men were supposed to be involved in the arts. The musical theatre was a place where gay men could safely congregate and where they could enact their desires for flamboyance and a certain stylishness. Through popular culture representations of gay men who love musicals, the image of the show queen continues, and Clum proudly identifies with and seeks to reclaim the power of this persona. Clum'sreadings in Something for the Boys hinge on the idea and practice of camp, which he defines periodically and helpfully throughout the book. He argues forcefully for the importance of camp, both to the identities of gay men and to the aesthetic and political significance of the pre-Stonewall musical. He writes that musicals' "heightened theatricality, their exaggerated, often parodic presentation of gender codes, and their lyrical romantic fantasies offered my generation·of cocooned male adolescents an escape from the masculine rites that disinterested and threatened us" (6). In other chapters, Clum argues that the many gay men who created musicals encoded them with gay lyrics and meanings. In an excellent chapter on Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, and Noel Coward, who "represented three approaches to being a gay public figure in the period between the world wars," Clum explores their lives and reads lyrics of their songs to demonstrate persuasively how their songs signify doubly (56). Hart's "story of self-hate and desire for caddish men," Porter's unspecified pronouns, and Coward's witty repartee all show a gay sensibility in which men in song can easily replace women (9). A later chapter on Sondheim and his oeuvre is also quite fascinating, showing how very gay Sondheim's work is and how, in spite of stated intentions to the contrary, many of Sondheim's musicals simply don't make sense unless read as gay. Clum also demonstrates how many musicals can be "queered" by gay male spectators. He suggests that gay men identify with the diva, "the woman who defies conventional notions of gender and plays out the parodic, larger-thanlife performance of gender the musical privileges" (7). He discusses the performances of Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, and Bette Midler, REVIEWS to name only a few of the many women who are objects of adoration for gay men. Clum also looks at "diva musicals" such as Gypsy, Hello, Dolly!, and Mame that feature women and offer gay readings. Gay men don't identify with the "stolid and unerotic" male principal; rather, "the chorus boy carries the erotic charge" and provides a gay presence to the musical (8). In the final chapter, Clum looks at a range of post-Stonewall musicals, from Rent to Fairy Tales, many of them obscure, and explains why he likes some and doesn't like others. Because "many gay men fear the camp, drag, and flamboyance of the gay men who were invested in musical theater" (282), most contemporary musicals, although they may be explicitly gay, are "less 'gay,' in all senses of the word, than their closeted Broadway predecessors" (246). Clum also condemns the spectacle and the derivative music of newer musical theatre, as well as the ubiquitous body mike that shifts the dynamics of the musical 's performance. The book is explicitly polemical, as Clum critiques what he sees as a new, assimilationist, apolitical, consumption-oriented gay identity and a disavowal of both the effeminacy and the wit that characterized gay men of his generation. Clum's project is, as he notes from the beginning, "autobiographical...