Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture [Hardcover]

John M. Clum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

This is a question that has plagued humankind through the ages, or at least ever since Riff lost his heart to Tony in West Side Story and Ethel Merman proved that you don't have to be a drag queen to find love with a high C. In this book, John Clum gives us a guided tour through the history of the musical comedy in UK and US culture, examining specifically why gay men find it so attractive. Along the way he shines a spotlight on the allure of the diva; the lives of Noel Coward, Cole Porter, and Lorenz Hart, the homophobia of Rogers and Hammerstein, the mixed musical messages of Stephen Sondheim, and the first brassy notes of the overture to 'Gypsy'

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you think this is one of those academic gay- or gender-studies-type tomes that applies a lot of incomprehensible French terms to good old-fashioned American entertainment, think again. John M. Clum may be a professor at Duke, but what this garrulous gay-inflected romp around the past 75 or so years of musical theater reveals him to be is, to use his own affectionate term, a hopeless and incurable "show queen." Indeed, Something for the Boys is so personal and idiosyncratic in its survey of the gay side/subtext of musical theater that's it's kind of like a looooong dinner with an invaluable surviving old-school elder queen. You know the type--she's seen every show and/or owns every score since 1703 and she's not afraid to hold forth tartly on everything from Julie Andrews's performance in the film of Victor/Victoria ("She was Mrs. Blake Edwards and that's why she was at the center of a Blake Edwards film") to Rodgers and Hammerstein (whose work Clum provocatively finds impossible to extract a gay reading from--or, in his words, to "queer"). Of course, she's also got the last word on every diva to walk the floorboards, from Garland ("the Wreck Who Went On--brilliantly") and Streisand (who has "the toughness that drag queens aspire to") to Bernadette Peters ("as close to a diva as the New York theater has produced in the past 30 years") and an underrated treasure like Barbara Cook (whose story reflects that of gay history, Clum informs us, since she "'came out' as a fat woman." We're sure Miss Cook's happy to know that).

Clum writes that he didn't intend this book as a traditional thesis-based academic tome, which is good, since it fails miserably in that regard. He too loosely throws around terms like "camp," "irony," and "diva" that others have applied careful meanings to. He refers more than once to The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum's meditation on the storied bond between gay men and opera divas, but fails to do what that book did so brilliantly even amidst its over-the-top language--pinpoint the reason gay men have traditionally been so drawn to a particular genre. (Koestenbaum argues that the full-throated utterances of the opera diva gave release to the rage and pain pre-Stonewall gays weren't allowed to express, but Clum never attains as deep a conclusion, chalking up the gay Broadway link to those tired old undefined catch-alls "camp" and "irony"). Clum suggests that what sports are to many straight men, musical theater has been to many gay men, and, in the end, the facile nature of his own survey supports such an analogy: When there's a gay reading to be found in a show or song (as there always is, he insists, in Porter, Coward, or Lorenz Hart), the gays "win"; when there's not (as in Hammerstein), or when it's not as clear (as in Sondheim's Company, notoriously), the gays "lose"...or the game goes into overtime.

But I'm just quibbling. I read Clum's book straight through to the end (including his lushly opinionated personal discography) because I envy and aspire to this kind of encyclopedic, microscopic knowledge of art and entertainment as a sort of venerable gay badge of honor. So if, like me, Lady in the Dark, Anyone Can Whistle, and Mack and Mabel mean as much to you as Crazy for You, Follies, and Mame, you'll quit your bitching, Mary, and eat it up, too.--Tim Murphy --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this entertaining book, Clum (drama and English, Duke Univ.) answers the age-old question, Why do so many gay men love musicals? He links musical theater to gay culture through an analysis of music, lyrics, and plot (or lack thereof) as well as the personal lives of composers (from Noel Coward and Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim and other contemporary artists) and divas (like Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, whom he links to the history of drag performance and heroine worship). Mixing personal anecdote with scholarly analysis, Clum takes his readers into a world where, despite homophobia and plots that seemed basically heterosexual, life could be fabulous. Also included are lively endnotes and a lengthy, annotated discography of cast recordings. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries, particularly those with theater or gay studies collections.
-Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312210582
• ISBN-13: 978-0312210588
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,546,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Error after Mistake after Error, December 27, 1999

By 

Michael B. Jones (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (Hardcover)

John Clum, whose unusally good book "Acting Gay" should have served as a model for this text, falls flat with his analysis of musicals and gay culture.

Individually, each chapter serves as its own essay on a topic (ranging from Divas to Sondheim to Gay Musials), but when put together in book form, serve the gods of redundancy and contradiction as the materials get rehashed throughout the book.

Furthermore, while crediting queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and author Ethan Mordden throughout his text, Clum makes the reader want to search out copies of Sedgewick's "the Epistimology of the Closet" and Mordden's "Make Believe" and "Coming Up Roses", rather than continue reading his text.

Factually, Clum makes a number of errors through the book, most of which such minor but obvious errors as listing The Boys in the Band with a 1958 date. If I, a casual reader and student of Broadway, can pick up on such obvious mistakes, what will his academic colleagues think?

Perhaps his biggest blunder occurs during his worshipful chapter on Divas. Mr. Clum continually praises such contemporary divas as Betty Buckley (who, aside from a supporting turn as Grizabella, has yet to originate a major and critically acclaimed Broadway role) while confessing his personal dislike and ignoring the achievements of Patti LuPone (whose name he mis-capitalized throughout). Clum's continual comparison of divas to drag queens becomes tiresome, and at times (see Carol Channing) offensive.

The text is a personal journey - not based in any true theatrical reality, and certainly not applicable to the "real world." I was born after A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC opened, and yet, have a better understanding of the discussed topic's historical significance and place in the theatrical canon than Mr. Clum seems to have. Why then, does every "Generation X-er" he describes have a dumb, vague and incomprehensible adulation of musical theatre? Are those of us under thirty incapable of truly appreciating Merman, Martin or Channing because we were not able to see them in person? Our (post-stonewall gays) experience is not based wholly in the diva musical, as he would assert, but in the ensemble. Names like Randy Graff, Rebecca Luker and Audra McDonald barely enter his text. Next-Generation Divae like Marin Mazzie, Donna Murphy and Faith Prince are mere footnotes. Where does the history go from MAME and FOLLIES? Unexamined.

Perhaps if Mr. Clum wants to rewrite his text from beginning to end, it might eventually make an academic document worth reading. As it stands now, it is merely a gossipy, cocktail-party conversation with little merit and no lasting value.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Boys Deserve Something Much Better, February 18, 2000

By 

jimwin11 (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (Hardcover)

I was shocked at the shoddy level of fact-checking for this book. I counted nearly an error a page. Did Clum not bother to proofread? Did St. Martin's bother to copyedit? Aside from the fact that Clum keeps inserting his personal (and not very interesting) history into the narrative (the absolute nadir is his chapter on Sondheim shows and the men he was dating at the time), his book is almost free of original ideas. To put it in Broadway terms, this book falls somewhere between "Moose Murders" and "Saturday Night Fever."

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A resounding flop, December 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (Hardcover)

Something for the Boys is easily the worst of the recent spate of books on musical theatre. It is, in fact, one of the worst books on musical theatre I have ever read. Clum seems to have written it in one quick draft from notes on the back of a cocktail napkin. The book is riddled with factual errors -- often several to a single page. Since most of these errors could have been corrected with a single look at a cast album, one can only assume that Clum does not care at all about the academic value of his book, which is probably wise of him since his analysis of specific authors and shows teeters between the facile and the absurd. I wish I could agree that the book is fabulous but surely fabulousness implies some degree of skill or originality. Instead Clum serves up endless helpings of ill-informed opinion, repetitive writing, and cheap-shot gay gossip, not to mention highly questionable taste (Betty Buckley a better Mama Rose than Ethel Merman? ). Those who know anything about the subject will find nothing of interest here, while those who know little will be unwittingly misled in countless ways by Clum's shoddy research.