Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (review)

Something For The Boys: Musical Theater And Gay Culture. By John M. Clum. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999; pp. xi + 317. $26.95.

What is a gay sensibility and how is it validated by musicals of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? How has gay liberation affected the creation of musicals as well as their reception? What do musicals tell us about fluidity of gender and identity? These are questions John M. Clum addresses in his ambitious Something for the Boys, a combination of autobiography, history, and cultural criticism that attempts to explore the relationship between musical theatre and gay culture.

Clum begins by claiming his book is an autobiographical performance. He argues that it is a study of musicals and the gay spectator who "finds or invents a gay reading to the spectacle presented to him" (1) and is most successful when he sticks to this approach, particularly when he reads his own life into the works of Stephen Sondheim. Clum's analyses of Merrily We Roll Along and Passion, which continue on the path recently tread by D.A. Miller in Place For Us, Patrick Horrigan in Widescreen Dreams, and Stacy Wolf in her essays on Mary Martin, are insightful, detailed, and entertaining. The author also successfully documents his personal responses to the regional, gay musical, a form written by and for gays that has blossomed during the 1990s. As historian, he examines the genre of contemporary gay musicals, a by-product of a post-Stonewall sensibility. This is a new and significant contribution to the field of musical theatre scholarship and gender studies.

Despite his claims about autobiographical performance, however, much of the book reads like cultural criticism; unfortunately the two approaches never intermingle comfortably. Clum argues that "diva" musicals, those that embraced larger-than-life female starring roles like Hello, Dolly and Mame, were a phenomenon of the 1960s and ended with Follies in 1971. He maintains they ended with Stonewall and gay liberation, although he never explains precisely why these heroines also lost their appeal for straight audiences. True to his title, the author explores the meaning of a gay sensibility but never in the larger context of the burgeoning women's movement or changes in the fabric of American life during the tumultuous 1960s. The book ignores the musical's mainstream appeal, which at times gives readers the erroneous impression that the American musical was strictly a gay phenomenon.

Typical is Clum's take on Applause: "Throughout Applause, there is a tacit acknowledgment that there are gay men on stage and 'out there in the dark.' Why else include a bare male posterior in one production number?" (202). Apparently, it never occurs to the author that straight women might also enjoy looking at men. Clum analyzes the decidedly gay elements of Applause, but never explains why they appealed to a mainstream audience. Indeed, Clum finds it impossible to consider the presence of a straight audience. Writing of West Side Story, he concludes that "even in a number like 'America,' the women's skirts twirling . . . weren't as sexy as those Sharks twisting and leaping those black pants" (205). Did no male members of the audience find Chita Rivera and later, in the film, Rita Moreno, sexually alluring?

Part of the joy of musicals is the notion of the double entendre in its broadest sense. Fluidity of identity, particularly in the female roles, invites transgressive readings, including gay ones. For Clum, fluidity of identity is reduced to a pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall gay sensibility. His idea of pre-Stonewall gay audiences is a community of closeted men who thrived on camp, drag, and flamboyance. He proudly identifies with the show queens who were the spiritual heirs to Oscar Wilde. Clum's notion of a post-Stonewall gay sensibility, a sensibility he deplores, are the line dancers and gym boys who affect buff bodies and masculine drag but do not want to be identified with sissified...