It may seem strange given theatre’s reputation for sexual licence, but in the 20th century, gay men and lesbians on Broadway had to spend most of their careers in the closet. Even today, startlingly few American leading actors are out, a notable exception being David Hyde Pierce (Niles from Frasier). Don’t believe me? Make a list of the others. Hint: you won’t need both sides of the paper. Correction: you won’t need paper.
Gays on Broadway, the latest book – he has written more than 50 – by cultural critic and novelist Ethan Mordden, is a whistle-stop historical tour. It begins at the turn of the 20th century and culminates with Tesori and Lisa Kron’s musical Fun Home and the 2019 Broadway production of The Inheritance, Matthew Lopez’s six-and-a-half-hour gay revamp of Howards End (depending on your viewpoint, either deeply moving or Howards Endless).
It’s scarcely the first survey of its kind. Kaier Curtin got there in 1987 with a book Mordden references not least for its title, borrowed from the remark movie mogul Sam Goldwyn made when told that the play he had bought, Lillian Hellman’s The Children Hour, featured lesbians: “We can always call them Bulgarians.”
Mordden makes it clear that, for decades, far from being a cowardly option, the closet was a necessity, offstage and on. The Wales Padlock Act of 1927 threatened those putting on plays treating, as the law stated, “sex degeneracy, or sex perversion” with prosecution. Thus much of the first half of the book deals in disguise, as writers dropped hints and relied on subtext. Only on rare and intriguingly dangerous occasions did homosexuality make it into the text itself.
Racing conversationally through 120 years in 218 pages means there’s little time for sustained argument. Half of the book is straightforwardly informative, the other trading in illuminating gossip and insider knowledge. Gentleman in the demographic once doomed never to marry will love the jokes about Ann Miller taking over from Angela Lansbury in Mame; others may be left wondering.
But sharp-eyed observations are dotted throughout. Mordden reserves his highest praise for Edward Albee, and has a revisionist take on Tennessee Williams, usually deemed the patron saint of gay playwrights. Despite the latter’s openness about his sexuality and the reputation of his plays, Mordden points out: “Williams’ outwardly gay characters are usually off-stage or dead.” And he also floats the idea that Noël Coward – the man he argues first used the word gay in the contemporary sense onstage in a lyric for his operetta Bitter Sweet – was writing a coded gay relationship when he brought a threatening first love back into a marriage in Blithe Spirit.
Often dismissive and far from balanced, Mordden is strong on barely remembered writers like lyricist-librettist John Latouche. And he’s deft about John Van Druten, once famous for turning Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories into I Am a Camera which begat Cabaret, but who also wrote the cunning closet drama Bell, Book and Candle, ostensibly about witches living in 1950 in Greenwich Village but whose real subject is clearly lesbians and gay men.
In his groundbreaking 1981 book The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo wrote that even until the 1960s, as far as American cinema was concerned, “homosexuality was still something you did in the dark or in Europe, preferably both”. Mordden, fascinating and maddening by turn, offers its wildly opinionated theatrical equivalent.
• Gays on Broadway by Ethan Mordden is published by Oxford (£22.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
