Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
By D. A. Miller
Harvard University Press
160 pages

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BY PETER KURTH | I was 12 years old in 1965 when I first saw Barbra Streisand on television in her famous CBS special, "My Name Is Barbra." I knew nothing about Streisand before that time. I did not know that she was already a huge Broadway star, for example, having made her name first as the much abused Miss Marmelstein in "I Can Get It for You Wholesale" and later, indelibly, as Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl." I did not know that she had been left fatherless at the age of 15 months and had clawed her way to the top from the wreckage of a miserable childhood, much less that she got her start in New York singing in gay clubs and cabarets and that she was considered from the beginning to be a gay cultural icon. In 1965, the word "gay" as a descriptive adjective for male homosexuals was not yet in general use. It certainly was not in the vocabulary or consciousness of a "sensitive" 12-year-old growing up in Vermont with dreams of the stage, a passion for outsized personalities, chiefly women, and a powerful, unnamed longing that I knew instinctively could not be aimed where it wanted to go -- toward men.

Putting it simply, I was a perfectly normal homosexual boy in the years before Stonewall -- innocent, eager, paranoid and ready to be lit like a match. I had a diva complex and had it naturally, viscerally, well in advance of any explicit knowledge about my sexual preference or the actual influence of gay culture and sensibility. I knew everything I needed to know about Barbra Streisand the moment I heard her voice, thrilling to the memory of a careless brush of the hand in "He Touched Me," clowning lamentably as "Second Hand Rose," mooning over "the luckiest people" or defending her rights to a rain-free parade against all comers and odds.

No one ever needed to explain the Streisand phenomenon to me, any more than I needed an explanation for Bette Davis when I first saw her, around the same time, in "All This and Heaven, Too"; in that 1940 Warner Brothers epic, Davis portrays a timid French governess engulfed by scandal, the most notorious woman in France, whose selfless love affair with a peer of the realm topples the throne of Louis-Phillipe. I felt sure the same thing would happen to me if I were in Davis' shoes -- at the age of 3, I had nearly jumped into the Grand Canyon in the belief that I could fly across it unassisted. Naturally, I was no good at sports, and my aunts all said I reminded them of someone. I distinctly remember being told that I was rather too pretty for a boy.

All of this is to say that while I don't have a musical bone in my body, I could easily have been the lonely figure described by D.A. Miller in "Place for Us," an extended essay on the Broadway musical as seen through the eyes of postmodern gay man. Miller posits as the historical progenitor of the Broadway-show-tune queen a boy of the 1940s or '50s, "at the height of Broadway's golden age," who steals into the basement of his parents' house to listen to their soundtrack albums in private, in a secretive, "shamanistic" ritual of desire and release that will mark him forever as a queer -- whether he is or isn't, whether he knows it or not, and in the certain knowledge that he'll be done for if anyone finds out. The inevitable consequence of his guilty passion -- what it says about him -- remains unspoken, inchoate, but as large as Ethel Merman and as loud as 76 trombones.

N E X T_P A G E _| The gay child's cry of pain