The Music Man!

I’d love to have a long, rangey conversation about this new revival of The Music Man. I have lots of thoughts, but I’m hesitant to get too detailed here because, one, it’s in previews and anything I comment on could be different by opening night, and, two, most of what I want to talk about are the ways in which it is, or might be, different from what you know from past productions and, especially, from the movie. I’ll say up front: everything you expect and want The Music Man to be, this one is. But I’ll keep my commentary pretty general; I don’t want to color your experience. You need to see this.

So! Here are a few thoughts in no particular order, and we’ll wait till after it opens to get into the weeds:

1. I loved it so much. I said on Facebook that I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and I was. The preview audience was electric because most of us I would imagine had bought tickets two years ago and waited out the Broadway shutdown and the show was canceled and rescheduled and then canceled again and rescheduled again and then Sutton Foster got sick and then Hugh Jackman got sick. When the curtain went up on that train car, the crowd burst into loud sustained applause. Big entrance applause for the stars, big ovations for nearly every song. It was the most exciting night of theater I can remember, the show feeding the audience and the audience feeding the show.

2. Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster are wonderful in the lead roles. Jackman’s Harold Hill is, maybe, sunnier than Robert Preston’s, and I would say that Foster plays Marian as earthier, smarter than, say, Barbara Cook or Shirley Jones did. And they look closer in age. The couple seems more evenly matched. Foster finds new, unexpected things in the acting of the book scenes and the songs. My White Night, especially, is a revelation.

3. But this production is not all about the stars. The production design across the board — stage, costumes, lighting — is gorgeous, thoughtful, at times breathtaking. The sound design and music direction are impeccable. The orchestra and ensemble were crystal clear. And good lord, the supporting cast: Jane Houdyshell, Jefferson Mays, Shuler Hensley, and Marie Mullen are each so great and so funny. They are the heart and soul of it.

4. The dancing! I had never thought of this show as one where much of the storytelling is accomplished through movement. The ensemble is so tight, every moment so full of heart, and what’s better than a stage packed with kids who can dance their asses off?

5. Speaking of Marie Mullen. She reads at the older end of the Mrs. Paroo range, which sent me thinking about the family at the center of this story. Marian is maybe early to mid-30s? Winthrop is about 10. Their mother is 60 if she’s a day, so Winthrop is an Irish Catholic miracle baby being raised by his sister who is old enough to be his mother and his mother who is old enough to be his grandmother. And presumably a redeemed conman for a stepbrother/father figure. For all the complaining about how normative these old musicals are, they all seem to be stories about very unconventional families.

6. I want to talk about Grant Wood (whose paintings are a main scenic element in this production) and how his work, much like The Music Man, is often misunderstood, but misunderstood in exactly the way it is intended to be misunderstood, but I’ll save that conversation for later.

Women Who Leave.

Has this internet squabble about Honor Jones’s essay in the Atlantic, “How I Demolished My Life,” grabbed your attention? I subscribe to the Atlantic and marriage is kind of a pet interest, so I would have stumbled upon it anyway, but before I saw it a friend sent it to me and asked my opinion. I read it once quickly, found it kind of slight, but when I read more and realized how starkly polarized the reaction to it was I gave it a closer read and had a very different response. (Much of this post is recycled, edited, from an email exchange with a friend and a comment I left on another friend’s Facebook page yesterday.)

Most of the negative critique of the essay seems to be about Jones’s avoidance of moral questions, as if she hasn’t grappled with them, but it’s hard to imagine that was not her intention. We don’t know because she doesn’t tell us much of what she feels about her actions. Why do people assume she’s cavalier? That she doesn’t care about anyone but herself? Do people want her to judge herself? She doesn’t need to. Women who make decisions based on what they want will be judged.

Literature is full of stories of unhappy women who abandon their families, their children — the most recent example: just last night I watched the new movie by Maggie Gyllenhall, The Lost Daughter — because it’s a powerful taboo. Our notion of what motherhood is and means is so deeply rooted we can’t help but find women who reject it to be unnatural and deeply flawed, immoral, wicked.

It is still the default that a woman take her husband’s last name and not uncommon that she take his first name as well (Mr. and Mrs. John Smith). It is unusual for a man to follow his wife’s career, for a man to manage the house and kids. Fifty years after the battles of the 2nd women's movement (and some victories, though we're seeing how fragile they are now) a woman still faces a giant wall of cultural resistance to the slightest even symbolic recognition of her desires, her individuality, her entitlement to fulfillment outside of pregnancy and subservience. I think in that context, for Honor Jones to write about her divorce this way, to refuse judgment, is a radical act and my guess would be, considering the writer, intentionally unsettling and maddening. The reactions and debates it provokes are not accidental.

I went to a big family wedding last week, so It's fresh in my mind how vaguely and breezily people speak about marriage as if its only component is love. That beginning passage in the Jones essay about the kitchen is, maybe too obliquely, about the too-late realization (which is a much bigger deal for women) that you've been sold a bill of goods, that love doesn't just make your life magically fulfilling. For most people, the realization that you’ve made a mistake and you want something different is not a valid reason for divorce. As a married man, I have a hard time not looking askance at her decision to get out. But I didn’t have an expectation of subordination lurking in the background when I took my vows.

(Here’s Jill Filipovic, basically in accordance with my view but with a much deeper look and with authority and standing that, obviously, I don’t have.)

Memories Are Lies.

As far back as I can remember I’ve told people that the first LP I bought was Jesus Christ Superstar, the movie soundtrack, but this morning I was thinking about the Partridge Family Christmas album and I went to Wikipedia to see when it came out (1971), and I noticed that the first Partridge Family album (called The Partridge Family Album) was released in 1970, the second in 1971. I had and loved and played to death both of those albums, and the JCS film didn’t come out until 1973. I guess it’s possible I didn’t get the Partridge Family records right away, but more than 3 years after they came out?

Another possibility is that my parents bought them for me, and JCS was the first LP I went to the store and bought with my own money, but that’s not really the story I’ve been telling all these years. I think what happened is that at some point — it must have been in my late teens or very early twenties when being regarded as cool was important because by my mid-twenties I was going through a “the more uncool something is, the more cool” phase; I used to say that I wanted the vocal arrangements for my band TV Goodbyes to sound like the Partridge Family — I started answering the question, “What was your first album?” with “the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack” because the Partridge Family Album would have been an embarrassing answer. And then over time the lie became the memory.

I know this is a thing that happens; I’ve been writing a lot about the past, sometimes before and sometimes after reading my journals and correspondence from any given period.

My brother and I had a conversation at Thanksgiving about how for a while as a kid, I was a terrible liar. It started with lying to try to avoid being punished (deny everything!) but it got to be a habit and soon I was lying all the time often for no reason at all. Maybe I can’t blame this first album story on the slipperiness of memory formation. Maybe it’s just me.

I know for a fact I did not own the Partridge Family Christmas album. Then again, the Partridge Family Christmas album would have been exponentially more uncool than even the regular albums, so maybe I’ve buried the memory of it even deeper.

You Could Do Worse, and Likely Would, Than Choosing Meet Me In St. Louis To Watch Once or Twice Every Year.

Chan was in North Carolina visiting his family for a few days, so I watched Meet Me In St. Louis twice in the last 2 days (not that he wouldn't have watched it with me, but probably not twice). If for some reason I could only watch one film for the rest of my life it would be this, and I wouldn't be mad about it. I've seen it a dozen or two times and I see new things every time (like I never noticed her striped stockings halfway through this song before yesterday).

Every singer should study Judy Garland. What made her special was not just the power of her voice but her absolute commitment to every word, sentence, image, the story, every single time -- what made her special was her acting. What other singer can make you believe a lyric like "And though I'm heartsore, the boy next door affection for me won't display"?

The other thing about this movie: I will go to hell for asking this, but how did Margaret O'Brien not win all the Oscars for this performance? Judy is so radiant and it's her story, so I guess it's easy to overlook what O'Brien does in this film, which is astonishing.

In obvious ways, it’s a reactionary film — MGM knew its audience — but this paean to small town values and the patriarchy is shot through with the ambivalence and anxiety of its director Vincente Minnelli — about family, about the Midwest, about marriage, about men — who knows that most of those patriarchal families were actually run by charismatic women. Speaking of which, his adoration of Garland illuminates every frame. No wonder she fell in love with him.

This next clip is only the second half of a longer sequence that is one of my favorites in any film. I wish I could find a video of the whole thing, which starts with their father coming home from work to announce that he’s taken a job offer in New York and they’ll be moving right after Christmas. Everyone is shaken by this news, they love living in St. Louis, they have friends and boyfriends, attachments, the World’s Fair is coming. They argue, shout, cry, and eventually everyone runs off to their rooms, except Mom and Dad, who sing this song which brings everyone back, and then they have cake. Besides showing Minnelli’s genius as a storyteller, it’s a lovely example of how he uses music in this movie, which is not really a musical — the songs are a mix of traditional songs, popular songs from the era the story is set in, and a handful of songs written for the film. Nothing is resolved in the scene, the disruption of their lives will still be painful, but family is everything. I find it heartbreaking.

(The other genius and Midwestern gay man whose work underpins lots of these great golden era MGM musicals is Roger Edens. Besides composing, arranging, supervising, and producing, he worked closely with Judy Garland from the beginning of her film career as a voice teacher and coach. All her greatest film performances are collaborations with Edens.)

I love this moment (starting at 2:10) at the end of the film, when John Truett delivers a line I can’t for the life of me make any sense of, and Judy’s reaction seems to show she’s similarly puzzled. What is he talking about?

There’s all kinds of other stuff that someone should write about, or maybe someone has? For a film with such a simple story, some say no story at all, its preoccupations, themes, resonances are expansive. It’s about urbanization and modernity, “traditional values,” race and colonialism (can we talk about that cake walk scene and all the African themed decor in the house?), it’s about America. It’s a wartime film, made in 1944, when the world order seemed to be spinning apart, and it’s set in and ostensibly about, a simpler time, but somehow the final sequence at the World’s Fair doesn’t bring to mind stability. It feels like a last gasp.

State Fair.

The anniversary today of the assassination of JFK reminded me of this short essay I wrote in 2008 when I was at U.T. Austin in the American Studies department, finishing my undergrad degree, about the 1962 film, State Fair (the only score Rogers and Hammerstein wrote for a film).

Fear of cities, urban/rural polarization, political violence — nothing ever changes in America.

“The blithe innocence of Texas, so little aware of the true nature of evil floating and coalescing in the world, was shattered by this tragedy that produced in the collective soul of the state a tormenting sense of guilt -- and shame. Strangely, perhaps, no such soul-searching, and certainly no such national condemnation, attended the assassination of Robert Kennedy in California or of Martin Luther King in Tennessee. But neither of those states is a paradigm, a microcosm, of the nation….” (Lon Tinkel, Introduction to The Super-Americans.)

“If Dallas is getting too big for you now, you are not expected to be happyover the prospect that it will get still bigger during the next decade. The best estimates show that Dallas has grown, since 1950, at the rate of about 44,000 a year. That could mean, at a like annual increase, a population for Dallas in 1970 of 1,300,000.

“Meanwhile, farms will practically disappear from these two counties and will be getting fewer in numbers throughout the state. Population in farming counties will be reduced, population in urban counties will be enormously increased. Farming is to become a highly technical, highly mechanized, highly capitalized business.

“The political, economic and sociologic meaning of this ought to engage the thought of every thinking man and woman in Texas. We should be able to look to the northeastern part of the United States and see pretty much the pattern that we shall be following for the cities. There the problems and the mistakes we shall confront are to be seen. The city man’s future is all laid out, pretty much as we may expect it to be here. Mass transportation, city planning, regional planning, master highways, crime problems, school development—all these will press upon us now as never before.” (Dallas Morning News, February 16, 1960)

Between WWII and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, practically everything in Texas -- politics, geography, culture, demographics, the landscape itself -- underwent massive changes. Texas’s one-party system which had held sway since Reconstruction started to break up, and liberals, minorities, the poor, women, and labor unions gained power. The federal government got more involved in Texas with court decisions affecting education, prisons, racial segregation and control over the tidelands. Thriving industries pulled workers to cities. Boom times didn’t benefit everyone, though; poverty, crime, and unemployment all rose. The population flipped from 70/30% rural/urban to just the opposite, and the center of Texas farming shifted from East Texas to the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Panhandle. (Campbell 396-432) With agricultural land shrinking, Texans were concerned about soil conservation, water supply, crop surpluses and falling prices, mortgage debt, and shortages of doctors and teachers in rural Texas. Even farmers who managed to stay on the farm saw their lives come to resemble city life, with improvements in rural education, telephone service, and more electric appliances and televisions. (Dallas Morning News, 1/10/1960) Rural Texans were watching their way of life fade before their eyes, and they -- and by extension America -- were nervous.

The 1962 film, State Fair, opens with a panoramic shot of sky, farm fields stretching to the horizon, and a long straight country road. It’s Texas, but it looks enough like Iowa or the flat parts of Missouri to stand in for any American farm scene. A bright red race car cuts through the middle of the landscape, and Wayne Frake’s girlfriend screams, “Wait, be careful! Slow down!” He drops her off in front of a Greek Revival mansion that looks like the big house on a Virginia plantation.

“How do you like the sound of that engine?” Wayne says.

“Ah hate it!”

“Why Betty Jean, that’s the most beautiful noise I ever heard in my life.”

“Ah never want to hear it again!”

It’s clear from the first shot that State Fair is going to be concerned with the encroachment of the modern world on farm life. The opening scenes (except for that race car) are all sky and cows and gingham. You’ve never seen a farm so shiny. Even Mrs. Frake’s hair is salon-perfect, her white blouse crisp and spotless despite the fact that she spent the morning in the kitchen making mincemeat. The Frake family is getting ready for their annual excursion to the Texas State Fair, each of them with a goal: Wayne is going to win the racing cup, Mr. Frake’s hog Blue Boy will come home a champion, Mrs. Frake’s mincemeat will take the blue ribbon, and Wayne’s sister Margie is going to figure out why she is, as she sings, “starry-eyed and vaguely discontented, like a nightingale without a song to sing.” (She’d say that she had “spring fever, but it isn’t even spring.” If you get her drift.)

After hitching up Blue Boy and Wayne’s racer, Mr. Frake makes a bet with the veterinarian (who just gave him some pills in case he needs to dope the hog for the competition) that nothing will go wrong and the Frakes will return to the farm safe and happy. Mom, Dad, Wayne, and Margie head for the big city. They wake up the next morning on the interstate, cruising past the Dallas skyline. This is no small-town 4-H fair -- as in two earlier films and the 1930’s novel about an Iowa farm family upon which all three films are based -- but a big modern neon-lit city.

In updating the story, why did the producers move it from Iowa to Texas? It could be that Texas, before its gruesome and very public loss of innocence in 1963, was the last place in America where the idea that this story hangs on -- that the city is a place we visit in a rite of passage before we return to the land, rather than what we are inexorably becoming -- still holds a shred of plausibility. Through the rose-colored lens of Texas, it was still possible in 1962 to tell ourselves that the American landscape existed as a setting for a traditional way of life. It was possible to believe that there was still a pristine frontier. In 1961, the year this film was shot, John Bainbridge wrote in The Super-Americans, “To most Americans, Texas is the last real frontier…, and in this country the frontier still holds a mystical fascination. According to the idealized concept, life on the frontier has always been simpler and happier….” (Bainbridge 378)

If the Frake’s farm looks generic, once we get to the fair we are unmistakably in Texas. The film was shot at Dallas Fair Park, a sprawling art deco complex created for the 1936 Texas Centennial and boasting the world’s tallest Ferris Wheel and the world’s biggest cowboy statue, “Big Tex,” who bellows “Hurry, hurry, it’s the biggest, the brightest, and the best state fair on earth!” Margie’s arrival at the fairgrounds looks like a Chamber of Commerce promotional film. (Ragsdale 176-207)

The Frakes are fighting off modernity on every front. When Wayne zooms by in his race car, Dad says, “Twenty-two years of love and care and what do we raise? A piston farmer.” Mom is pitted against two large canning corporations in the mincemeat competition. Margie watches a staged tug-of-war between a tractor and a team of horses and says, “It must make them sad, if horses get sad, beaten by a tractor. Not even another horse.” Jerry, the fasttalking big city newscaster who woos her, says, “They’re no worse off than we are. Over at the commerce exhibit they got IBM machines that are smarter than people. They keep that up, in a couple years, they can do away with all of us.”

This story of two Texas teenagers’ sexual awakening can be read as a parable of Texas’s coming of age. It is a wistful snapshot of Texas at the end of its innocence, presented by (non- Texan) Hollywood producers who take the point of view of an affectionate parent who feels a nostalgic warmth and blind forgiveness in vicariously reliving its own last pure moments, knowing that there is a point past which, in order to believe you’re innocent, you have to lie to yourself a little. This wider American point of view lets us experience Texas’s impending loss of innocence remembering, and mourning, our own. As Mrs. Frake says when Margie comes to her unsure of whether to let Jerry kiss her or not, “Honey, where you’re going, we’ve been before.”

Wayne is played by Pat Boone, whose biography makes him an ideal stand-in for a conservative America’s image in the mirror. Hugely popular at the time, he was raised in the Church of Christ, born again, attended North Texas State University, and claims to be descended from Daniel Boone. (patboone.com) His late fifties/early sixties career consisted of recording watered-down rhythm and blues songs for a white audience. (Another change America was nervous about then was that its children’s music was growing louder, blacker, and more urban. Pat Boone was the antidote to rock and roll.)

The parable is most explicit in Wayne’s storyline: farm boy meets itinerant showgirl, Emily.Boy, she makes him nervous (He: “You’re not a b-b-bad girl, are you?” She: “No, but I wouldn’t run a Gallup poll on it.”), but he falls for her (“You’re the most exciting girl I’ve ever known”).They sing “Willing and Eager” and, if I read that fade to black correctly, he loses his virginity. But he has no conception of a life other than the one he’s destined for (“One day you’re a little boy out feedin’ chickens, the next day you’re an old man out feedin’ chickens.”), so he proposes to her. She dumps him (He: “I don’t understand. Last night you said everything was wonderful.” She: “So’s a martini, but sooner or later you drink it.”) He has learned his lesson: you can take the little red race car for a spin, but then you have to get back on the tractor.

State Fair reassures us that, in the end, growing up means coming home, that the cure for the modern world is a return to an agrarian life. After the fair, the Frakes return to their pristine farm telling themselves that nothing has changed or ever will. Blue Boy is a champion. Mrs. Frake’s mincemeat beat out the corporate competition. Wayne is wiser (though Betty Jean is not -- Dad advises Wayne not to tell her about his fling with Emily, as he himself has kept a similar youthful affair secret from Mrs. Frake). Only Margie is sad, but then at the last possible moment the phone rings. Jerry has given up the fast life and followed her home. Not only are the Frakes unscathed, the corrupt city boy is purified by Margie’s innocence, the redemptive power of the land. Dad has won his bet with the veterinarian.

State Fair is a plea to cling to this pastoral moment -- against a tidal wave of evidence that the moment is really already past -- when the myth of American innocence is still believable, when, as Emily sings (with a broad wink) “all the things we tell each other are true.” Americans “have turned the practice of conning ourselves into an art. And Texans, being Super-Americans, have perfected it.” (Bainbridge 213) A year and a half after State Fair came out, not far from where it was filmed, Texas’s illusions about itself would be blown apart in front of the world.

Works Cited

Bainbridge, John. The Super-Americans. Garden City, New York: Double Day, 1961.

Campbell, Randolph. Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

“Gap Between Farm Life, City Standards Narrows.” Dallas Morning News 10 Jan. 1960, sec. 3: 13.

Landrum, Lynn. “Thinking Out Loud: Farms Getting Fewer.’” Dallas Morning News 16 Feb. 1960, sec. 4: 2.

“Pat Boone is the Original American Idol.’” PatBoone.com 28 April 2008 <patboone.com/bio.html>.

Ragsdale, Kenneth. The Year America Discovered Texas: Centennial ‘36. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1987.

Tinkel, Lon. Introduction. The Super-Americans. By John Bainbridge. Garden City, New York: Double Day, 1961.

It Never Ends.

So now Biden’s necessary and popular child care plan is on the ropes because conservative Democrats might oppose it. Their reason is that the plan contains a provision saying that you can’t have the taxpayers’ money if you discriminate against LGBT people.

These “Christians” with their so-called “faith” that compels them to kick me to the curb and then demand that I pay them to do it — I am weary to the bone of them and my anger toward them. And maybe even more infuriating — because with religious bigots there’s at least a sort of coherence, an evil but predictable logic to their mission — is gay conservatives who’ve been, ever since the Supreme Court ruled that gays are okay as long as they ape heterosexual norms, have been telling us that the gay liberation movement is over, we should all pack up and move on, we won.

This kind of moralistic, legalistic “religion,” and governmental, societal, cultural deference to it, is so deeply engrained in the idea of America that even the people who are directly persecuted can’t see how insidious and corrosive it is. Andrew Sullivan, one of the generation of gay men the Reagan government and its collaborators decimated by religion-motivated neglect and mistreatment, even he will look you in the face and tell you this bigotry is justified in the name of “religious freedom.” I want to fucking vomit.

It. Is. Not. Over. It will never be over. These people are black mold, you think you’ve cleaned it up but it will return and return and return and if you turn your back it will kill you.

In the Beginning.

For National Coming Out Day today, here’s an excerpt from the book I’m writing:

❦

I didn’t, that I know of, meet my cousin Lucretia until I was eleven or twelve. I grew up thinking of her as my only first cousin, the daughter of my father’s late sister, Jane. My mother’s sisters both had children but they lived in California and we never saw them. The only cousin we knew as young kids was my mother’s first cousin, Cathy, who was close to my brother’s age -- Mom’s Aunt Alice had her last child when she was in her forties.

Jane, four years older than Dad, married a cocky young lawyer, John, in 1949, had one child, Lucretia, and died in 1959 of a blood infection after a hospital stay that lasted eight months in the middle of which my mother and father got married. Jane was in law school when she became ill. Lucretia was three years old when her mother died. John remarried quickly to a woman named Janice who bore five sons before they divorced. By the time I met John years later, he was a prominent judge in St. Paul and married to his third wife, Judy. After Christmas of my freshman year of high school, Michael and I took the bus with Grandma Lenore from Greencastle back to St. Paul to spend a week with the Kirbys in a Minnesota winter so cold the insides of my nostrils turned to ice when I breathed. Trailways took us as far as Chicago where we ran for blocks through snow and near-zero temperatures through downtown Chicago in the dark to the Greyhound station. The station was bright and cold and full of people sleeping on benches. Grandma admonished us firmly not to use the restrooms without telling her, and when our bus to St. Paul arrived, she grabbed her luggage and our arms, ran to the gate, and pushed herself and Michael and me into the front of the line of dozens of people who’d been standing there waiting for who knows how long.

Lu, who was five or six years older than us, introduced us to snowmobiling and tequila, and took us to a party where we smoked marijuana for the first time, sitting in a circle in someone’s basement passing a joint, the whole crowd chanting “Hold it! Hold it!” after I inhaled. I worshiped my cousin Lu.

I don’t remember why or how or even exactly when, but Lu started spending Christmases with our family. The first time I remember, which might have been the first time, she was on her way home from a student trip to England and she brought souvenir candy from Stratford-on-Avon, a bag of “scone mix,” and the Iron Butterfly record, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. She brought gifts for everyone, incense and Chinese brass incense burners for me and Michael, the smell of which made me nauseous for several days but I didn’t tell a soul. All of it was exotic and cosmopolitan for Indiana in the early 1970s, even the three-year-old Iron Butterfly album, even Lu, tall and broad-shouldered with long brown hair (that she told us she ironed), dressed plainly in jeans and a sweater. She spoke in a direct, forthright tone of voice, and she read Herman Hesse and Ayn Rand. She wrote poetry. My father said she had “class,” his highest compliment, a word that to him meant educated, worldly, sophisticated: everything that Indiana could never be. Grandma Lenore shook her head and lamented Lu’s “long stride.”

The year following that trip to Minnesota, Lu’s Christmas gift to me was a book of blank white pages; its dust cover read, “The Nothing Book: Wanna Make Something Of It?”. In the center of the first page, I carefully inscribed, “A Collection of Thoughts” and on the next page:

December 27, 1976

Since this was an “indirect” gift from my cousin, I will start out with one of my thoughts while talking with her and then go into some of her thoughts. This is one of my “verbally expressed” thoughts.

“If people can’t take me for what I am, then I don’t want them to take me at all.” 

A few pages later I transcribed one of Lu’s poems:

Young man with your quick
ready hand.
Sketching flashes of life,
That too often move by …
missing my glance.
You stop them in an instant.
Freeze them with your hand.
I look very quickly but …
You’ve ingrained them in
my mind.

Then a little Lord Byron, Langston Hughes, a fragment of lyrics from Seasons in the Sun which had been a big AM radio hit a year or two back, a handful of unattributed proverbs in the tradition of Grandma Lenore’s scrapbooks, but by January 7, I was chafing against the format, moved to express feelings more directly — on Tamara Burkett’s Dear John letter (I gave her a houseplant for Christmas, she gave me a concise handwritten note telling me that she liked me but not enough): “I wish she had a reason -- that girl’s got real hang-ups such a shallow personality at least we don’t hate each other -- I hate it when it ends that way.”

And I started keeping a regular diary. The Nothing Book became my founding document, nearly scriptural, the physical object, with its crumbling dust jacket, a phylactery. I became an artist in its pages, admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, panicked and cut the pages out with an Exacto knife and burned them, then, weeks later, braver, came out again, scribbling pages and pages of bottled-up sexual fantasies about the boys and teachers at school. Everything important that I believe and desire, the moral principles that guide me still, my feelings about love, everything I yearn for, all had their first utterance in that book that I wrote in from Christmas of 1976 to the end of my junior year of high school.

Michael, Jack, Kay, Lucretia, and Grandma Lenore — Christmas 1973.

"Not only my flesh, but my heart also, was involved in the emotion which it stirred."

Queer history has been so thoroughly and systematically not just skipped over in the history books but deleted from the primary sources that you’re lucky if someone, even someone queer, knows about Harvey Milk let alone anything queer that happened pre-Stonewall.

Speaking of Stonewall, Stonewall was an unquestionably important event in our movement for rights and liberation, but it does not, despite its tagline, mark the beginning of the modern queer liberation movement. I would put that marker a hundred years earlier when a handful of poets and scholars and scientists (it was pretty common for someone to be all three back then) in England and Germany and, more tentatively, in the U.S., spurred by their study of ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance, started to let their feelings of same-sex desire come to the surface and then to find each other and compare notes.

John Addington Symonds, whose birthday is today, wrote his Memoirs around 1890. It’s the first known gay autobiography, and it’s very moving. His account of what we would now call “coming out to myself” is immediately recognizable from over a hundred years’ distance. This stuff should be, is to me, scripture:

“It was my primary object when I began these autobiographical notes to describe as accurately and candidly as I was able a type of character, which I do not at all believe to be exceptional, but which for various intelligible reasons has never yet been properly analyzed. I wanted to supply material for the ethical psychologist and the student of mental pathology, by portraying a man of no mean talents, of no abnormal depravity, whose life has been perplexed from first to last by passion — natural, instinctive, healthy in his own particular case — but morbid and abominable from the point of view of the society in which he lives — persistent passion for the male sex.

“This was my primary object. It seemed to me, being a man of letters, possessing the pen of a ready writer and the practised impartiality of a critic accustomed to weigh evidence, that it was my duty to put on record the facts and phases of this aberrant inclination in myself — so that fellow-sufferers from the like malady, men innocent as I have been, yet haunted as I have been by a sense of guilt and dread of punishment, men injured in their character and health by the debasing influences of a furtive and lawless love, men deprived of the best pleasures which reciprocated passion yields to mortals, men driven in upon ungratified desires and degraded by humiliating outbursts of ungovernable appetite, should feel that they are not alone, and should discover at the same time how a career of some distinction, of considerable energy and perseverance, may be pursued by one who bends and sweats beneath a burden heavy enough to drag him down to pariahdom. Nor this only. I hoped that the unflinching revelation of my moral nature, connected with the history of my intellectual development and the details of my physical disorders, might render the scientific handling of similar cases more enlightened than it is at present, and might arouse some sympathy even in the breast of Themis for not ignoble victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age. No one who shall have read these memoirs, and shall possess even a remote conception of my literary labour, will be able to assert that the author was a vulgar and depraved sensualist. He may be revolted; he may turn with loathing from the spectacle. But he must acknowledge that it possesses the dignity of tragic suffering. . . .

“In the spring of 1865 we were living in lodgings in Albion Street, Hyde Park. I had been one evening to the Century Club, which then met near St Martin le Grand in rooms, I think, of the Alpine Club. Walking home before midnight, I took a little passage which led from Trafalgar into Leicester Square, passing some barracks. This passage has since then been suppressed. I was in evening dress. At the entrance of the alley a young grenadier came up and spoke to me. I was too innocent, strange as this may seem, to guess what he meant. But I liked the man's looks, felt drawn toward him, and did not refuse his company. So there I was, the slight nervous man of fashion in my dress clothes, walking side by side with a strapping fellow in scarlet uniform, strongly attracted by his physical magnetism. From a few commonplace remarks he broke abruptly into proposals, mentioned a house we could go to, and made it quite plain for what purpose. I quickened my pace, and hurrying through the passage broke away from him with a passionate mixture of repulsion and fascination.

“What he offered was not what I wanted at the moment, but the thought of it stirred me deeply. The thrill of contact with the man taught me something new about myself. I can well recall the lingering regret, and the quick sense of deliverance from danger, with which I saw him fall back, after following and pleading with me for about a hundred yards. The longing left was partly a fresh seeking after comradeship and partly an animal desire the like of which I had not before experienced. The memory of this incident abode with me, and often rose to haunt my fancy. Yet it did not disturb my tranquillity during the ensuing summer, which we spent at Clifton and Sutton Court. Toward autumn we settled into our London house, 47 Norfolk Square, Hyde Park. Here it happened that a second seemingly fortuitous occurrence intensified the recrudescence of my trouble. I went out for a solitary walk on one of those warm moist unhealthy afternoons when the weather oppresses and yet irritates our nervous sensibilities. Since the date of my marriage I had ceased to be assailed by what I called "the wolf" — that undefined craving coloured with a vague but poignant hankering after males. I lulled myself with the belief that it would not leap on me again to wreck my happiness and disturb my studious habits. However, wandering that day for exercise through the sordid streets between my home and Regent's Park, I felt the burden of a ponderous malaise. To shake it off was impossible. I did not recognise it as a symptom of the moral malady from which I had resolutely striven to free myself. Was I not protected by my troth-pledge to a noble woman, by my recent entrance upon the natural career of married life? While returning from this fateful constitutional, at a certain corner, which I well remember, my eyes were caught by a rude graffito scrawled with slate-pencil upon slate. It was of so concentrated, so stimulative, so penetrative a character — so thoroughly the voice of vice and passion in the proletariat — that it pierced the very marrow of my soul. "Prick to prick, so sweet"; with an emphatic diagram of phallic meeting, glued together, gushing. I must have seen a score such graffiti in my time. But they had not hitherto appealed to me. Now the wolf leapt out: my malaise of the moment was converted into a clairvoyant and tyrannical appetite for the thing which I had rejected five months earlier in the alley by the barracks. The vague and morbid craving of the previous years defined itself as a precise hunger after sensual pleasure, whereof I had not dreamed before save in repulsive visions of the night.

“. . . Inborn instincts, warped by my will and forced to take a bias contrary to my peculiar nature, reasserted themselves with violence. I did not recognise the phenomenon as a temptation. It appeared to me, just what it was, the resurrection of a chronic torment which had been some months in abeyance. Looking back upon the incident now, I know that obscene graffito was the sign and symbol of a paramount and permanent craving of my physical and psychical nature. It connected my childish reveries with the mixed passions and audacious comradeship of my maturity. Not only my flesh, but my heart also, was involved in the emotion which it stirred.”

"I tried it and I liked it."

I was writing today about an incident that revolved around a journalism class I took in high school. The class was an English elective and whoever took it became responsible for publishing — editing, writing, taking photos, typing the copy, and laying everything out using a machine with rollers that coat the back of paper with wax to send to the shop class that printed it using giant offset printers — the school newspaper for that semester. I was the editor.

My high school was as clique-ish as the next but I never fit neatly into any of them. I was alternately a theater kid, a pothead, a brain, a troublemaker, a teacher’s pet. I smoked a lot of pot in high school but I was conflicted about it and would give it up for periods of time, like say when we were rehearsing a play, then start again. Smoking marijuana had a deeper stigma than it does now but because it was such a serious transgression it could stay hidden in plain sight. Homosexuality was like that too, most people didn’t know what they were looking at. The risk of being caught was lower while the consequences were more serious. Now everybody is all up in everybody else’s subculture and you can’t hide anything.

I don’t remember getting any real resistance from faculty to my non-judgmental survey of students’ attitudes toward marijuana. (I did have to include a sidebar expressing a negative view.) I used the school mimeograph machine to print the blank surveys and I kept the filled-out sheets with their purple typed questions and answers scrawled in pencil for years but don’t have them anymore. I remember being really impressed by how openly and thoughtfully most of the kids answered the questions. And we ran out of copies of “the pot edition” much more quickly than usual.

And Another Thing.

On the rare occasions during my early teenage years when I found myself alone at home, I would get out my mother’s makeup. I kind of knew how to do it because I’d been in plays by that point. I was not so daring, or stupid, as to put on my mother’s clothes, but there was a sort of shimmery green bedspread that I liked to wrap around myself like a sarong.

I have to say at 13 I was kind of a pretty girl.

Those Eyes.

My grandmother’s eyes would light up with a girlish “what could I do?” expression and she’d say, “Oh, your grandfather was handsome!” But I knew that because I’d seen photographs.

City People.

This is a draft of a song from my musical, Jack.

I haven’t decided for sure what her name will be — I keep going back and forth on this, but at the moment I’m pretty sure I’m going to change most of the names of characters based on real people — but this is sung by the grandmother to her grandson, Jack. (Picture Jack and his grandmother doing a little Garland/Astaire soft-shoe during that instrumental break.)

There are two kinds of people in this world: city people, and everyone else. Jack knew early on which one he was.

I’ve used lots of copyrighted images in this video, mostly without permission. These videos are my work sketches, sort of like mood boards, to help me visualize the songs, and meant only to be shared with friends. I don’t claim any rights to this work, except to the underlying song.

Summer of 1981, Fishkill, New York.

This summer is the 40th anniversary of my move to New York. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was August. I had planned to spend the summer before I moved here in Bloomington, Indiana, living with a high school friend and working to save what money I could, but after pounding the pavement for a week or so, and still no job, discouraged and sweaty, I went into the Indiana University library to cool off, picked up the New York Times to read, reflexively flipped to the “want ads,” and saw a tiny listing reading something like, “Counselors Wanted at boys’ camp in Upstate New York, Call the Fresh Air Fund, etc.” So I called.

They were looking to fill the position of “Nature Counselor” at the camp for boys ages 13-15. At that time, in addition to sending underprivileged (do they still use that word?) New York City kids to live for a week or two with rural families, the Fresh Air Fun also ran four summer camps near Fishkill, New York: one for disabled kids, one for girls, and two for boys (divided into ages 10-12 and 13-15, as I remember). Either they were desperate to fill the position (it was all very last-minute) or I bluffed well, but they offered me the job on the phone, on the spot. My minimal qualifications (I don’t know, an 8th grade leaf collection, a nature merit badge in Boy Scouts, just being from Indiana?) were more than enough. These kids had never seen a tree that wasn’t in a park.

Needless to say the experience was life-changing, not just the part about spending a summer in the woods with very poor, very street-savvy teenage boys who were not afraid of much but they were afraid of the dark, and the forest, and any noise they couldn’t identify, which there are a lot of in the dark in the forest. It was physically and emotionally exhausting work and the perfect preparation for my new life in New York.

Nearly every time I pass Port Authority to this day, I remember arriving there alone with a huge duffel bag and my dulcimer (because of course poor Black city boys are dying to learn “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” on a dulcimer). I’d been up all night, arrived on a Greyhound bus in the morning, and had to walk from there to an office somewhere in the far west of Hell’s Kitchen with all my stuff. When I stopped at a crosswalk about halfway there, my hand, the one that was carrying my dulcimer, went completely limp and I dropped the case. I had to wait for about 15 minutes till I got my grip back.

Pretty much everything about New York was terrifying and hard at first, and I was in heaven, knowing I had finally arrived home.

The cabins where we slept, one counselor with about 8 or 10 boys in each cablin. But since I was one of the specialty counselors, I got to sleep in a cabin with all adults.

The staff. I regret having no photos of the kids. They were insanely challenging boys but smart and hilarious, very observant, often insightful and affectionate.

Circling Back.

So. A year ago last March, I was getting ready for a first table reading of the musical I’d been working on for a couple years. I had a date, a room, a cast, a draft. And then the world changed. I put my musical on the back burner and decided to begin writing a book because I had an idea I was excited about and I could write a book at home by myself.

In the last year, I’ve made great progress on the book. It’s big and gets bigger as it slowly takes shape in my mind and on the page. I’ve written about 150 manuscript pages and I’ve only dealt with less than 1/4 of the material. Now, I have a lot of research to do requiring travel to various towns and libraries and courthouses, and that should be possible before too long.

It occurred to me this week that another thing that will be possible before too long is a table reading of my new musical. So I’ve been listening to the songs and revising the script all week. The book and musical are not exactly the same story, but there’s significant overlap. I’ve changed names and fictionalized quite a bit in the play whereas the parts of the book that are autobiographical have not been altered — except in the way that one’s memory is always making revisions. So I decided to remove one thread of the story from the musical which is dealt with more directly in the book and which I struggled mightily to integrate into the musical, probably unnecessarily.

I wonder now if I’ve made a big mess of it, but that’s what table readings are for — to find out how big a mess you’ve made.

This song is sung by Augusta Cheney who is the sister of Horatio Alger, the nineteenth century writer of books for boys, who was lionized by 20th century conservatives for his “rags to riches” stories, all of them variations on a narrative established in his first book “Ragged Dick” of a homeless but smart and ambitious street kid who rises in the world through dumb luck and the mentorship of an older man who takes an interest in him. Alger’s first career as a minister was cut short when he, as the young pastor of a Unitarian church in Brewster Mass., was accused of sexually molesting boys in his congregation and run out of town. The church covered up the scandal, Alger moved to New York City, and he began his long literary career. In his will, he stipulated that his sister Augusta destroy all his personal papers, correspondence, and manuscripts, which she did. Modern historians consider this a great loss and Augusta Cheney somewhat of a villain. In this song, she defends herself.

Terra Nova.

This song came up in my shuffle on the plane on the way home from Indiana yesterday, after a visit — the first in a year and a half — with my sister and her husband and her three boys (my nephews, who are no longer boys but all young men now), my brother and his partner of nearly 30 years, my oldest dear friend Martha, and my dad who is 87, and that a capella coda that Carly Simon sings has been in my head ever since, the best kind of earworm.

In high school, I listened to this album over and over and over and, though I didn’t and still do not know what the song is about — something about the Pilgrims and an ex-lover and a voyage somewhere you’ve never been to but that is home? — I was moved by it and I am still. I’m sure back then my deep feelings were at least partly due to James Taylor’s eyes looking back at me from the album cover.

I still love this record best of all the James Taylor albums, and this song is my favorite among many favorites.

Like others I’m sure, as a kid I loved that James Taylor and Carly Simon were married. Shortly after I moved to New York, I saw him and their two children on the Upper West Side, all of them looking willowy and beautiful. And then a year or two later, they were divorced. I’ve long imagined their final argument:

Carly (at the end of her rope): And please stop pronouncing “the” like “thee.”

James: Why?

Carly: Because it’s irritating.

James (crestfallen): But it’s my thing.

Carly:

James:

It's hot.

It’s very hot today. New York has always had a reputation for miserable, muggy summers, but this is early for a string of 90° days.

On days like this I always remember that when we were young we didn’t have air conditioning in the city. No one I knew had it. It was miserable, but we tolerated it like so many other fucked up things in the city because it was the price of living here. We sat out on stoops in the evening and drank tall boys in paper bags. We ate cheap Mexican food on the sidewalk, went out dancing all night, to the movies in the afternoon when we were desperate to cool off for a couple hours. We slept naked on bare mattresses in front of windows with box fans rattling and blasting hot air across us all night long. We didn’t get much sleep. Now there are a thousand festivals of all kinds in the city all summer long and it’s crowded with tourists, but in the 1980s, the city emptied out in July and August when everybody who could afford it left for Fire Island, or the Hamptons, or Cape Cod or wherever they went, I don’t know I stayed. We had the place to ourselves, free of rich people.

I don’t know if this is true, but I always thought the reason we didn’t have air conditioners was because the electrical outlets in the tenement buildings we all lived in weren’t wired for it. But we couldn’t have afforded the higher utility bills all summer anyway, we lived so close to and usually over the edge of our means. I guess some time in the late 90s, they must have started making air conditioners that used regular voltage, who knows?, but I remember when my partner Jay and I went to the P.C. Richards on 14th St. and bought a cheap little window unit on an installment plan for our tiny street level studio apartment that we shared with four cats who were every bit as relieved as we were to feel that cool air. But we were just as broke as ever so we only turned it on when the temperature got into the 90s, which used to be pretty much limited to August.

Maybe I’m spoiled, maybe I’m fussier now that I’m older, maybe I’m having less fun to distract me (because summers in New York were if nothing else fun), but I can’t imagine living without a.c. now in the city. Or I can imagine which is why I know I would not tolerate it. Many of our older neighbors in the co-op, who bought their apartments in the 1950s and live on fixed incomes, have not installed air conditioners. They tough it out. On really hot days, they go to “cooling centers,” public spaces like schools and community rooms, where they hang out during the heat of the day. And, I imagine, go home at night to sleep naked in front of box fans rattling in their windows.

On This Day.

On this day in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that state laws against homosexual sex were unconstitutional. I was 42 years old when it became legal for me to have sex in the United States of America. (I recommend the book Flagrant Conduct, about the Lawrence case. It’s a real page-turner.)

When I was born, 1961, “the infamous crime against nature” was a felony in every state. Over the next 42 years, a handful of states repealed their sodomy laws or reduced the penalties, but in 2003 same-sex sodomy was still a crime in 13 states, in some states still carrying long prison sentences and hard labor.

Lawrence vs. Texas reversed the 1986 S.C. ruling in Bowers vs. Hardwick which had upheld laws against gay sex. 1986. I was 25.

I place these events in my own timeline not to make it all about me, but to, 1, say that these are laws that shape lives, and 2, to convey how recent, and to my mind tenuous, is this so-called rapid shift in attitudes toward queer people that we keep hearing about. The Republican Party, as it exists today, doesn’t just want Roe vs. Wade reversed, not only are they gunning for the Voting Rights Act, they’re coming after all the 1950s and 60s civil rights laws, and the New Deal, and Obergefell (gay marriage) and Lawrence vs. Texas while they’re at it. (Sixteen states still have sodomy laws on the books which they still occasionally find sneaky ways to enforce, and which would go back into full effect if Lawrence were overturned.) For minorities whose ability to live their lives unmolested has so often depended on court rulings, the current religious conservative makeup of the Supreme Court is terrifying.

I don’t say all this to wallow in despair (though I struggle with my share of that lately) but to say that it’s a long war with an uncertain outcome. But that’s no reason not to keep fighting. In fact, it’s the reason TO keep fighting.

The Last Time I Saw Richard.

Of course Blue is one of my favorite albums but it sounds stupid to say that. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, which is 50 years old this week, exists somewhere outside of any trivial list I or anyone might make, any bestowing of a subjective distinction or rank.

When I hear it, or any of its songs, the thought is never far of the first time I heard it, or rather listened to it, with a boy named Richard in his dorm room at DePauw University, where I ended up one winter night my sophomore year of college when I was home for the Christmas break. I went to school in Oxford, Ohio at Miami University. DePauw was the small liberal arts college in the town where my family lived, where I’d gone to high school.

I had become friends with a piano student named Nancy, who was wildly funny and wildly talented and just wild, and somehow through her had met Richard, a soft-spoken boy with thick, dark hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a soft, expensive-looking yellow sweater, a vocal performance student in the music school, though no one I talk to now who was part of that group of friends remembers how we met Nancy, who is dead now so we can’t ask her, and they don’t remember Richard at all. A week or two into January, when I was back at school, Richard drove to Oxford to visit me. I don’t remember exactly what happened — I’ve probably pushed it out of my memory because I’m ashamed to have treated him, or anyone, so badly — but in Ohio everything felt different, or I should say I felt differently about Richard. He left brokenhearted.

But before all that, we were alone in his dorm room together very late one very cold night until very early, sitting on two chairs facing each other, his stocking feet between mine, listening to Blue. He knew every word, as I do now. Before that night I used to say, if anyone asked, that I didn’t care for Joni Mitchell because “all her songs sound alike.” I’m nearly as ashamed of that as I am of dumping Richard.

The Richard in The Last Time I Saw Richard is nothing like my gentle, effeminate college boy in the yellow sweater. But still.

1990, Lizzie, Outweek, Pride.

The beginning of Pride season, combined with Sarah Schulman’s new book about ACT UP and my current writing/rabbit hole, had me thinking about Outweek. Life, for a few years there, revolved around Outweek, the magazine that kept us all up to date on the epidemic, queer life, ACT UP and Queer Nation and WHAM and all the other AIDS and queer activism, as well as arts and culture in fin de siècle plague-era New York. I can’t think of another example of any media that so shaped my life and world view. Everyone I knew devoured it every week.

I loved Outweek so much that this nasty little diatribe by a pseudonymous lesbian music “critic” about the very first version of what is now LIZZIE in 1990 didn’t put me off the magazine as much as it put me off pseudonymous lesbian music “critics.” And pseudonymous non-lesbian music “critics.”

This is probably self-evident, but it’s not a super great idea to send a letter to a magazine protesting a negative review. They will win. They have a magazine. (But the thing about Outweek is that it felt like our magazine, everybody’s magazine, and in many ways it was. The “Letters” section was long and probably the most read.)

Anyway, I should say that — though it retains its spirit and volume, the story, the core idea and some of the songs, its queerness and wild feminism, its reason for being — 1990’s Lizzie Borden: An American Musical is not 2021’s LIZZIE. It was 45 minutes long, started with the murders, and contained 4 songs. It was rough and some of the criticism in this review is legitimate. That was the beauty of the downtown experimental theater scene, that you could work stuff out on stage in front of a supportive audience that understood that creating serious, provocative, original work is a process. There would be no LIZZIE, in the full-length, narratively coherent, every beat completely thought through, professionalized form it takes today if we hadn’t had the freedom and support of that community.

I miss how wild you could be back then though. I miss the low commercial stakes that allowed artists to take crazy aesthetic risks.

LIZZIE in Barcelona, coming in fall 2021.

1979-1983.

I’m writing now about the time between summer of 1979 and the middle of 1983 — roughly my two years at Miami University and my first 2 years in New York. This period of my life is the most heavily documented. (Well, that’s not strictly true — the late 90s and a few other random times are chronicled pretty extensively but for this particular project I’m stopping at, roughly, 1990.)

My high school diary is what sent me on this trail to begin with, and it contains some of the most compelling material for me, but it’s often very sketchy and selective regarding events. That’s typical of most of my journal-writing: much of it revolves around questions in my head, and people, places, and things are there sporadically but they are not the main thrust. All that is to say that my childhood and high school years are lightly documented and so were easier to write about because I was writing about memory, which is always accessible even if spotty and unreliable. But from the early 80s, I have piles of journals, drafts of plays and stories and essays, manuscripts, drawings, and various hybrids of all of the above. And whereas the years from 0-18 largely revolved around waiting, the following few years are dense with new experiences, exposure to new people and ideas, a massively hectic life in a city that never stops giving you something to do or contemplate, and men men men art art art. Things moved fast. It’s a lot to absorb and synthesize. Rabbit holes abound.

1982. I was 21. You know how it is.