A Place for US: Essays on the Broadway Musical (D.A.

Miller: Harvard University Press, 1998)

Miller wishes that instead of music having to further the plot (starting with Oklahoma), it had
been the other way around, that the music could have been released, freed from plot. As it is
when gay men sing show tunes at piano bars. More, not less sentimental

Show tunes “Rhetoric of denial” [p. 8] (except Sondheim)

breakdown of stoicism [p. 9] causes “widespread cultural embarrassment w/Bway music

every musical lover has to take a position vis a vis male homosexuality. To love musicals is to
declare oneself either gay or not gay [16] (does one have to position oneself as black or not
black to love jazz???)

Miller is talking about a pre-gay rights movement. “solitude, shame, secretetivness,... excessive
sentimentality... that allowed no real object.” [26]

At a piano bar, singing as an “ancient rite” consisting of “nothing more than putting the words of
songs into a certain vocal italics, the metaphoric force of the latter is so radical that, whether
being putatively sung in the Middle Ages or the South Pacific, by a courting cowboy or a
cloistered nun, every lyric now becomes a figure for present-day metropolitan homosexuality,
which no lyric has ever cared, or dared, literally to mention.” [34]

“gaying up of the repertory” to release “a gay genie who had always been lying cramped inside”
the songs [p. 35]

on the other hand, he who gays up these songs “the allegorist of the piano bar” knows that others
would hold this practice in contempt (the “insolence of producing gay meaning”) “He may not
shrink before spoiling the loveliest songs with preposterous readings, but in doing so neither
does he omit to call attention to their factitiousness and hence his powerlessness of offering them
for real. It is as though he could not conceive of truth, beauty, meaning, value, except as the
exclusive properties of the mainstream cultural order.” [36] -- That is what camp is (says Gail)
Gail also muses: when heterosexual women take show tunes out of context, singing presumably
from their own lives rather than the lives of the characters in a play, it acquires no such aura of
rebellion. Why can Barbara Cook sing “I’m in love with a wonderful guy” but not Michael
Feinstein? And how long before this changes? Why is GENDER the thing that makes this
WRONG? Why not time period or class or religion? Why can a Jew sing a Christmas Carol
(Barbara’s Christmas album, for example) without it becoming campy?

And what to make of the fact that so many of the men who created this music, or wrote the plays
that held it or directed, etc. were themselves gay, and sometimes closeted? Was there an
intentional code? Was this available double meaning the result of a subconscious practice?

“In the topsy-turvy cosmos of musical theatre, the normal rights and prerogatives of the
masculine role are beside the point. [73]

great queer reading of Gypsy in section 2

Sondheim “psychologizes show music.” [83]

For women in the audience (by this Miller probably means straight, feminine woman “the
musical is simply thrilling” [87]

The musical “leads a woman to inhabit the socially given idea of her gender... but it seduces a
man to inhabit the same idea.” [89]

Mame, as if mischievously bent on reversing the notion that every gay man is ‘a woman inside’,
brings forth a world in which every woman must always seem to be harboring a gay man, a
hidden, but scarily secret agent who is ready at the drop of a hairpin to turn her into her own
impersonator.” [122]

The more modern musicals, starting with A Chorus Line kinda kill the buzz by bringing gay men
out. Miller contends that Paul’s accident, taking him out of the running for A Chorus Line job is
kinda retro (Gail says, like Lillian Helman, etc. killing off the lesbians)

“The featuring of homosexuals on the b’way stage .. works against the recognition of the
homosexual desire that diffuses through ‘other’ subjects, objects, relations all over the form....
Gypsy and its closeted kind can now seem to have rendered a far richer account of this desire
than anything we are likely to owe to [overtly gay musicals.]” [132]
Gail says, very important point. Post modern. What we read into things, when they are not
given to us fully digested is richer, can contain more meanings, that those that are literal. Not
that there can’t be multiple readings of La Cage, for example. But La Cage is not begging for
gay men to deconstruct it. Gypsy is!

There is energy in the closet – in hiding – in the secret subculture. Is it all over now?
“musicals aren’t made ‘that way’ anymore.” [133] HA! Great payoff for this difficult read.