From the Closet

I was twelve when my friend Joel introduced my to Sybil Dorsett. Not only was her story of a woman afflicted with a psychological condition called multiple personality disorder printed on pulpy old paper and delivered in the same stay-up-all-night-with-the-flashlight gothic style as V.C. Andrews grotesque Flowers in the Attic, here was a heroine with which a gay tween in the eighties could unknowingly align: she was a wallflower whose many shades of fabulousness were so bright that not even the grisly sexual abuse of her schizophrenic mother would contain this girl's spirit. Her psyche had simply found a creative and beautiful way to escape torture and pain. Sybil was sold as the real story of how this young lady worked with a psychologist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, to discover, heal and unite her many selves into one.

The second part of Jon Bastion's narrative biography of Cole Porter through his many subversive lyrics.

I have seen Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) many times but a recent viewing was the first time I cried while watching it.  I wonder why it has taken so long.  I have always enjoyed it visually, nostalgically, and as a transcendent vehicle for film’s greatest musical performer, Judy Garland.  But when dateless Esther Smith (Judy Garland) is so low at a Christmas party, ballroom dancing with her grandfather (Harry Davenport) and then disappearing behind the Christmas tree, I got weepy at anticipation for the moment at which a beaming Garland reappears continuing the dance in the unexpected arms of her beloved “boy next door” John Truitt (Tom Drake).

Celebrated playwright and television writer, Mart Crowley survives to tell his artistic struggle leading up to the making of his best known work, The Boys in the Band, produced for the stage by Richard Barr (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and directed by Robert Moore. The opening nights of the groundbreaking 1967 play at the Playwrights Unit was attended by Jackie Kennedy, Barbara Walters, and Marlena Dietrich and other major public figures drawn by the brave new Off-Broadway production about how a group of gay men react to an uninvited guest at a birthday party. It is credited with being the first play to show gay men "as they are," which ironically become dated a few years after the Stonewall riots. Director Crayton Robey's behind the scenes story, Making the Boys, (now on DVD from First Run Features) is a continuation of the 1970 film and stage-play featuring exclusive interviews with the talent who brought the play and film to the screen.

A gay classic from 1956, as relevant and beautiful as it was a half-century ago.

CHICAGO – I came of age in a nice Catholic household in the 1970s, the oldest of five kids. My mother and father were first generation college graduates in their respective families; they were moral, kind and respectful. There was tolerance in the household, with no prejudice and no expression of prejudice. But my two brothers and I could call each other out with the one word that got away from all that tolerance. We could say “faggot” with no retribution.

The book Music on Film: Grease is an homage to everything Grease: The original 1971 play, the 1978 movie, the sequel Grease 2, the TV documentary Behind the Music, the 1994 and 2007 New York revivals, more TV specials, the 2010 sing-along version of the original movie, the promotional John Travolta posters given away with purchase of Helene Curtis shampoo, Grease jeans, Grease jackets, Grease Firestone tires, and Pepsi’s Grease “lucky caps”.

Last June 9th marked the 120th anniversary of composer Cole Porter's birth, the only child of a well-off family in Indiana. His father was a pharmacist; his mother the daughter of "the richest man in Indiana." Porter would be twenty-three when war broke out in Europe and twenty-six when the US finally entered it. He did move to Paris in 1917, and there are stories of him serving with the French Foreign Legion or teaching at the French Officers School, but, according to biographer Stephen Citron in "Noel & Cole: the Sophisticates", there is no documentary evidence to back up this military experience. In 1919, Porter married Linda Lee Thomas, a divorced woman of high society eight years his senior and, according to Citron "(Porter had) frequent homosexual encounters" of which she was aware. The couple's global travels and Porter's sexual prowess were the inspiration for many of his most popular American songs of the 1930s.