It used to be a secret that, in its postwar heyday, the Broadway
musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men. But
though this once silent social fact currently spawns jokes that
every sitcom viewer is presumed to be in on, it has not necessarily
become better understood.
In "Place for Us, "D. A. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh
off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a "general"
cultural form and the despised "minority" that was in fact that
form's implicit audience. In a style that is in turn novelistic,
memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to
their historical density the main modes of reception that so many
gay men developed to answer the musical's call: the early private
communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show
tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same
songs at the post-Stonewall disco. In addition, through an extended
reading of "Gypsy," Miller specifies the nature of the call itself,
which he locates in the postwar musical's most basic conventions:
the contradictory relation between the show and the book, the
mimetic tendency of the musical number, the centrality of the
female star. If the postwar musical may be called a "gay" genre,
Miller demonstrates, this is because its regular but unpublicized
work has been to indulge men in the spectacular thrills of a
femininity become their own.
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