브로드웨이/헐리우드 뮤지컬과 게이 문화

Broadway/Hollywood Musical and Gay Culture: Beyond the Secret Pleasures of Gay Spectators

In the sixty years with which this paper has been mainly concerned, Broadway/Hollywood musical that have treated homosexuality―Cabaret (1966), A Chorus Line (1975), and Rent (1996)―have gradually constructed a fake public homosexuality to facilitate a double marketing strategy: selling products to gay consumers that address their emotional need to be accepted while selling a palatable image of homosexuality to heterosexual consumers that meets their need to have their dominance obscured. However, as this paper has tried to prove, to the gay spectators’ joy, straight musicals without any direct gay themes have been no less colored than the musical that has represented homosexual scenes by means of double marketing strategy. Musicals created by gay men―Anything Goes (1936), Kiss Me Kate 1948), Gypsy (1959), Company (1970), Passions (1994)―have captured the gay spirit. Homosexual themes have been in lyrics, music, acting, and dancing. West Side Story (1957) was a case in point. To many gay adults coming of age in the sixties, the romance, violence, danger, and mystery so audible on the original cast album all felt like integral parts of the gay life they had embraced. The gay man’s exploitation of cinematic visions of Hollywood divas― Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich, Liza Minelli, Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews, Madonna―has elevated himself above his antagonistic surroundings and expressed membership in a hedonistic demimonde. In the homosexual’s imagination, divas actually became gay men and in the process of this transference, she was transformed into the homosexual’s proxy through which gay man lived out unattainable longings. The divas in Anything Goes, The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gypsy, Funny Girl (1968), A Star Is Born (1976), Kiss of the Spider Woman(1993), Evita (1996) thus became gay icons. Broadway/Hollywood has not given us much to identify with among the men onstage. The male object of desire in West Side Story (1957), Victor, Victoria (1996), Evita has seldom been the leading man. It has often been the chorus boy or male dancer, who is allowed a freedom of expression and an overt sexiness denied the male star. A gay site thus introduces Madonna’s “Vogue” music video as “[a] drag-ball-inspired video with shapely male dancers sung by one of the gay community’s most beloved icons.” As gay culture has come out in the 1990s, the secret pleasures of gay spectators have also come out.