Ed and I originally saw “Kinky Boots” when it was still in previews. We had treated each other with reciprocal Broadway tickets for Xmas, because we had high hopes for a Harvey Fierstein / Cyndi Lauper musical collaboration. The performance ended with the audience in ecstatic jubilation, echoed by the critics after opening night, and four years later “Kinky Boots” is still going strong on Broadway.
Broadway tickets being rather expensive, even half price at the TKTS booth, Ed and I are not likely to see any show more than once, no matter how much we like it. But then Jake Shears, the lead singer of my fave pop band “Scissor Sisters” took over the lead role of Charlie Price, and his tenure at “Kinky Boots” would overlap for 4 weeks with “Whose Line Is It Anyway” improv comedy performer extraordinaire Wayne Brady playing the other lead role Lola. Two of our favorite idiosyncratic talents starring together in one of our favorite shows. Four years after our first joyous visit, we decided we would treat ourselves again. Half price tickets at the TKTS booth. Still had to pluck down 9 Harriet Tubmans (currently still Andrew Jacksons), but we took the splurge.
One delicious irony of the current casting is that the flamboyant gay guy is playing the straight guy and the straight guy is playing the drag queen.
Ed may just have been thinking about something fun for the family to do together in the holiday spirit, in addition to the traditional caroling sing-a-longs and 1000 piece puzzles. Or he may have also been thinking about the fact that the last piece I composed was the 
Ed and I were at a play when he raised the question. Before we were back in the subway on the way home I had scribbled some notes for a seasonally angelic, perhaps corny, but still pretty vocal theme for sopranos. There they are in the page from that day’s NYTimes, because I always take along the Saturday crossword puzzle for Ed and me to do together on the subway.
A simple tune with plenty of internal repetition for easy instant sight singing (chord modulations in the accompaniment will add extra variety). In traditionally kitschy but still pretty parallel thirds; what the Germans like to call “Schweineterzen” – pig’s thirds – not sure why exactly “pig” but I like the comical way the phrase denotes harmonies that are generically fatty and juicy and common and popular and, let’s face it, just plain good. And relatively easy to sing instantly.
The playwrights’ bios already clued me into the strong likelihood that a message of love and acceptance and inclusivity would conclude this charming play very much designed for a mainstream audience. But the original title also telegraphed ambivalence or worse about the lead character Max’s homosexual history. And so it was. I experienced much of the first 3/4 of the play feeling mildly aggrieved while the hero keeps postponing telling his girlfriend about his gay experiences, revealing a conflicted uncomfortableness with his sexual past. This culminates in a brutal freezing out of a friend and former fuck buddy when he accidentally runs into him while on a date with the girlfriend. The worst stereotypes about bisexual male secrecy, inconstancy, and untrustworthiness were looking to be fully justified, thank you very much.
Ed may be somewhat more forthcoming about his sexual history with both Arnold and his future wife Laurel than Max is during most of “Hot Mess”, but that doesn’t make Ed’s true feelings easy to pin down since he seems so slippery about them even to himself. And then the play stacks the sexual deck against Ed’s heterosexuality so much – Ed comes to orgasm with Laurel only when he kisses her neck and thinks of Arnold; Ed almost acts on fantasies of suicide because he is so fearful of coming out; Ed ‘s desire for a family and pleasing his parents are more forcefully stated reasons to marry Laurel than his love for her – that he comes across more like a deeply conflicted, self-deluding homosexual than a true bisexual. But then again, wasn’t (or isn’t that still?) the belief of most gay men of that era (and still?) – there is no such thing as truly bisexual men? Just gay men not being honest with themselves?
Eliel Cruz raised the question if there is even a need for labels: “I find that people who are monosexuals push for a world where labels aren’t necessary.” Which had David reminiscing about another festival where “everybody identified as queer or fluid or pansexual or ominisexual…” but apparently not bisexual (
Regarding the necessity of labels, Alexandra said “short answer: yes. Long answer: sometimes. The needs of the bi community can’t be met if we aren’t counted.” Taylor added “I accept the decision not to use any label – but they are helpful. It’s a pretty common experience within the biplus community that it takes a while for people to figure themselves out.”
Three very different docs successfully blended the Gay Micro with the Gay Macro, by which I mean (get your head out of the gutter) that deeply personal, specific slice of life details were illuminatingly integrated into narratives that comprehensively spanned decades of gay history. In 100 Men director Paul Oremland lists and tracks down a hundred men he had sex with over the last 40 years of his adult life. Everything from random hook ups to longterm relationships. This is initially as cheekily irreverent and titillatingly provocative as one might expect, but through Oremland’s journeys through New Zealand, The United States, England and Poland, interviews with and remembrances of a variety of people and experiences, covering decades of gay sexual, social, and political revolutions and struggles, “100 Men” becomes an invaluable document of modern gay male experience. As well as a stealth love story.
Similarly, Jochen Hick’s My Wonderful West Berlin covers 40 years of gay history in the historically uniquely situated city of West-Berlin, the liberal Western oasis that was surrounded by the walls of the Iron Curtain; a place like no other in its time (and my childhood home during much of the time Hick’s covers). Many individuals’ personal narratives regularly enrich the complex broader picture of the quiet 1950s, the clandestine 1960s, the revolutionary 1970s, and the devastating 1980s that marked gay life in the divided city, which before German Unification was like a unicorn among the cities of the world: a geopolitical all-time original, a beacon, an outlier, a refuge, a renegade, a subsidized experiment; an unusual condition that contributed greatly to its uniquely evolving queer culture. I was too young at the time to take part in any significant way in any of the varied gay history Hick’s excavates. Still I was deeply drawn by nostalgia to the movie’s depiction of my childhood hometown, brought back in such vivid detail. And many of the film’s featured seminal LGBTQ personalities and locations and events – the Pariser Bar, queer film director Rosa von Praunheim, the Deutsche Oper, intersex Drag Star Romy Haag, gay movie classic “Taxi zum Klo”, the squatters movement, to name a few – made an impression on me too even as just a child mostly consciously unaware of his own burgeoning bisexuality.
The third example of the gay micro/macro history doc I saw is the short Bayard & Me, which lovingly recounts Walter Naegle’s love story with the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Personal touches are threaded with illuminating historical details, like how Rustin’s Quaker background helped inform the non-violent civil disobedience tactics espoused by Martin Luther King, or how the couple pioneered gay adult adoption as a way to ensure the younger Naegle would be able to inherit and continue to live in Rustin’s apartment in a time long before gay marriage was considered even a distant possibility. When the short concluded during the middle of the 
I first heard about the Gay Romance “Call Me By Your Name” when the film version premiered at Sundance last January. The early rapturous reviews of the movie (starring Timothée Chalomet and Armie Hammer, directed by Italian sensualist Luca Guadagnino, screenplay by “Room with a View” / “Maurice” / “Howard’s End” legend James Ivory) poured into the Internet movie sites I habitually read. I looked up from my laptop to my husband Ed and said “Guess what we will be seeing at the movies in about 11 months…”. A romantic, sexually frank gay love story with that cast and that pedigree in writing and directing? Even without the glowing advance word, it would be a must see. But 11 long months, that is how long I would have to wait until I could expect to see “Call Me By Your Name” released in the local theaters.
I wished to read it all from start to finish, with no interruptions, just as one would engage with a movie. But that would not be practical, as reading the book would take me many many more hours than watching the movie. Still, experiencing it parceled out over three days, with interruptions like social engagements and spending time with my husband, and sleeping, was more concentrated and quicker than the relatively slow reader I am usually can manage.
