Musical theater and being gay are inextricably tied for me, but musicals didn't make me gay.
My family discovered I was gay when I was 6 years old. They took me to an Easter Sunday matinee of The Music Man starring Van Johnson.
When the curtain rose, they had to shush me because my little voice rang out, "Oh, my god! That set is FABULOUS!"
Halfway thorough the opening scene, I tapped the shoulder of the lady in front of me and asked could she please remove her Easter bonnet.
"What a polite young man," she said. "I'm terribly sorry. Can you not see over my hat?"
"No," I replied. "I want you to remove it because it's hideous."
Later during the "Wells Fargo Wagon" number, I leaned over to my mother and said of the boy playing Winthrop Paroo, "If he doesn't do SOMETHING about that sibilant S, I'm afraid life will be VERY unkind to him."
After the show, over cocktails ("Rum and Coke, hold the rum, please") and dinner (Steak Diane, which arrived at the table flaming, n'est-ce pas?), my parents were discussing the recent separation of Van Johnson and his wife Eve. "Oh, please," I said, lifting my Scalloped Potatoes world-wearily, "you know, don't you, that he left his wife for that chorus boy?"
"What the HELL puts things like that in the boy's head?" my father asked.
"I didn't know he was minty," my mother said, intruigued. "I'll have to ask Emilio." Emilio was my mother's hairdresser. He knew ALL the homosexuals.
"I heard it at intermission," I said. "These two men were whispering in the men's room, and they seemed QUITE in-the-know."
My family was never the same after that.
So you see, it wasn't musicals that made me gay. I would have been gay anyway.
Musicals just made me happy.
Updated On: 8/3/06 at 11:46 AM
