Part 2: The Queer Lyrics of Cole Porter

Porter drops more than a few hints about his aversion to monogomy in his lyrics. A particularly notable example comes from his 1934 song "Don't Fence Me In", which was written for an unproduced musical and did not become popular until it was finally used in 1944's "Hollywood Canteen". In the set-up for the song, the outlaw Wildcat Kelly is told by the Sheriff that he's going to jail, leading to Kelly's plea, "Don't fence me in." However, the second half of the song is introduced with the following verse:

Wildcat Kelley, back again in town,

Was standin' by his sweetheart's side,

And when his sweetheart said, 'Come on let's settle down,'

Wildcat raised his head and cried...

His response to this request by his sweetheart is identical to his reply to the sheriff, equating marriage to a life in prison. The character also sings, twice, "I can't look at hobbles," which is also telling, given Porter's familiarity with horses – a hobble is a device placed on the legs of a pacer horse to control its gait, and hence its speed, to keep it from running ahead of the pack before the starting signal is given in a harness race. Short of resorting to the clichéd description of a wife as a "ball and chain", Porter is saying the same thing.

He also seems to touch on his marriage elliptically in one of his many songs celebrating what might be called a woman of loose morals, "Always True to You" from "Kiss Me, Kate". In it, Bianca catalogs the men she may have strayed with, always assuring her love interest, "But I'm always true to you, darling', in my fashion/Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin', in my way." Two of the men she lists in the song are particularly notable, the first because it could very easily be the kind of man that turned Cole Porter's head:

If a custom tailored vet

Asks me out for something wet

When the vet begins to pet – I cry Hooray...

Clearly referring to a military man, while the "something wet" would have been understood in general as an alcoholic drink at the time, it can also be taken to refer to the singer's reaction to the vet's petting which, while passed off as something innocent, really isn't. The sentiment in this line is reflected years later in Richard O'Brien's lyrics in The Rocky Horror Show – in fact, the line may even be influenced by Porter – as Janet, deciding to give herself to monster Rocky, declares, "I thought there's no use getting into heavy petting/It only leads to trouble and seat wetting..." Moments later, of course, she's imploring the monster to "toucha toucha toucha touch me, I want to be dirty." Porter would have enjoyed the gender-blending, pansexuality of O'Brien's musical.

The other example from "Always True to You" is probably another one of Porter's sly inside jokes that only a very small part of his audience would get:

Mister Harris, plutocrat, wants to give my cheek a pat

If the Harris pat means a Paris hat, pay, pay!

Not only do we need to figure out exactly which cheek Mr. Harris wants to pat, but there's also the matter of the term "Paris hat." On the surface, it is what it is – a bit of high fashion from France. However, through a long tradition of France providing names for all things sexual (Syphilis, for example, being long known as "le maladie français"), "Paris Hat" could just as easily refer to a condom, which was known at the time as a "French letter."

Porter also pulled off his sly asides in the music itself, and one notable example will suffice here. One of his most famous songs, "Night and Day", was written to be sung by a man, and it again deals with the obsession of love. Now, the music is unusual in several regards. First, the opening verse, all seven lines of it, are sung on mostly the same note. This could indicate obsession, but it could also indicate monotony. Second, at several points in the song, there is a sudden jump, in which the melody actually breaks out of the key briefly, only to return back to it. This is most noticeable in the next to last line of the song, "Until you let me spend my life making love to you". The words tell us one thing, but the music says another, perhaps indicating a certain lack of sincerity on the part of the singer.

There seem to be two moods in Porter songs – joyously in love, or alone and depressed. A great example of the latter is from "Down in the Dumps", from his 1936 musical "Red, Hot and Blue", which also includes the improbably titled "Hymn to Hymen". In the former song, first performed by Ethel Merman, a rich woman looks out over New York from her penthouse, lamenting her loneliness, and one has to wonder exactly how autobiographical was a line like, "When the only one you wanted wants another/What's the use of swank and cash in the bank galore?" Indeed, one of Porter's strengths as a songwriter was portraying all the aspects of love from either the male or female viewpoint.

Some of his biggest hits – "Love for Sale", "Anything Goes", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Too Darn Hot" – were written to be performed by women, and a common theme is obsessiveness, or the addictive power of love. "Some get a kick from cocaine," Reno Sweeney (Ethel Merman) sings, concluding that she doesn't, but "I get a kick out of you." Naturally, whenever this song was used in a movie, the Hays code dictated that the reference to cocaine was verboten. Porter provided two "official" replacements that pretty much killed the "love as a drug" concept: "perfume in Spain," and "whiff of Guerlain," the latter being a French perfume maker.

Of course, Porter always let his women speak more freely because they could, and because he had to hide behind them, but he was constantly peeking out from behind the curtain, speaking in his own voice. In "Love for Sale" from "The New Yorkers" (1930), a prostitute tells us, "Let the poets pipe of love/in their childish way,/I know every type of love/Better far than they." One can't help but think that Porter did, as well. He seems to be giving advice to the younger generation in "Experiment" from 1933's "Nymph Errant", when he writes, "Experiment./Be curious,/Though interfering friends may frown."

Porter certainly experimented. His musical career shows that, but several numbers from his Yale days are probably more illuminating, as they are Porter without censorship, and without the 1930's new-found distaste for his kind. In 1912, he wrote "A Football King", ostensibly about his desire to join the Yale football team as a player:

Now I'm sure that I should find it heaven

If I had a chance to make the Yale eleven,

With my only stunt to go around and punt the afternoon away.

The cynosure of ev'ry eye, whenever I should pass men,

I'd open up and show my Y to all the underclassmen.

"Yale eleven", of course, refers to the football team, and "make" is a perfectly respectable shorthand for "make it onto the team." But the verb "make" is also old slang meaning that you've convinced someone to have sex with you. If he had written these lines now, he probably would have used the phrase "hook up with the Yale eleven," which also has an innocent and a sexual slang definition.

"And punt the afternoon away" is another double entendre on Porter's part. It could refer to the act of kicking a football, but it could also refer to paddling around a lake in a small, flat-bottomed boat – a common wooing activity of the era. "Cynosure," in this context, means something that strongly attracts attention, and Porter further specifies that this happens whenever he walks past men. I don't think I even need to explain how the last line can easily be taken in a very sexual way. Remember, when Porter wrote the song in 1912, Yale was an all-boys school.

Finally, contrast these companion pieces that he wrote in 1910, the first from the female point of view, "I Want to Be a Prom Girl":

I want to be a Prom girl,

A Prom girl through and through.

I want to be a Prom girl,

Dancing for the Blue.

I want to learn to tango,

Boston and two-step too.

Mother, if you can, introduce me to a man,

For I want to be a Prom girl too.

And the second, from the male point of view, "I Want to Be a Yale Boy",

I want to be a Yale boy,

A Yale boy tried and true.

I want to be a Yale boy,

Fighting for the Blue!

I want to beat old Harvard,

Princeton and West Point too.

Mother, if I can, when I grow to be a man,

I want to be a Yale boy too.

Cultural sexism of the era aside, we're back to the bottom and top of the beginning, but with the female version somewhat hopeful: she will meet a man; and the male version somewhat self-critical: the singer has to become a man before he can become a boy again, presumably remaining so forever.

This is, understandably, the hidden and enduring tragedy of Cole Porter, along with other gay men and lesbians of his generation. In their youth, they discovered each other easily and, while their love dare not speak its name, neither did it need to hide its head in the thriving cities of the early century. They were what they were, not self-defined as a community or a subculture. Then they had the rug yanked out from underneath them as they passed into what was then middle age. Porter suffered the additional handicap of having his legs severely injured in a horse-riding accident in 1937. He couldn't stand to look at hobbles, but a horse finally hobbled him. For the rest of his life, as in invalid in constant pain, he could no longer live the high life he had once known, and one can only imagine how his love life with one stray man or another dwindled to nothing. The yearnings of a 19 year-old who only wanted to grow up so he could be a Yale boy are, perhaps, prophetic of the wishes of a much older Porter, and are certainly echoed in his writings of obsessive, fleeting love. Certainly, he wrote on a universal subject, but he also injected it with his own personal asides and feelings, which are quite clear when you read between the lines.

Twenty years after his death, Porter was quoted by Robert Kimball in "The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter": "Sophisticated allusions are good for about six weeks... more fun, but only for myself and about eighteen other people, all of whom are first-nighters anyway. Polished, urbane and adult playwriting in the musical field is strictly a creative luxury." It's hard to believe that most of those eighteen people were not fellow members of the pansy craze gone underground.

- Jon Bastian