American Queer Life: How Culture Saved a Little Gay Boomer Boy Part 6 – Theatre

“Let’s put on a show!” This is what friends and I did as kids in the living room, as towels metamorphosed into fluttering capes, sofa cushions into bombarded battlements, ottomans into steps impervious to a lake of lava. The time was simpler.

In first grade, I “starred” in Peter Rabbit portraying the mischievous, vegetarian merrymaker. Following my acting debut, I wish I could say “the rest is history” as I polish my boy toys, Oscar and Tony, but such is not the case. Eventually, one must feed, clothe, and house oneself, but back in first grade, theatre had burrowed into my heart and has never left.

This article is the sixth and final part of my series How Culture Saved a Little Gay Boomer Boy; the others explored visual arts, television, literature, music, and movies. The arts were a life raft to me in a masculine sea of fears: farming, athletics, tools, cars (though I did love the fins of the 50s). Give me a song, book, movie, anything pretty, and I sailed to a happy place. 

Where was I? Oh yes … a very happy, hoppy place within a fluffle of sibling bunnies. So there I was on stage—the elevated end of a gym with a basketball hoop bolted to the center of the proscenium—scurrying from the rake and ire of Farmer McGregor to avoid becoming the main ingredient in a meat pie when my ears fell off. It wasn’t my fault. I had no dresser, and the costumier was limited to construction paper and Elmer’s glue.

Mortified, I picked up the floppy crown and ran offstage where my director Mrs. Holmes (loved her!) smushed it back on my head and shoved me back onstage, my ears falling off again and again and again. I was so embarrassed, until … what was I hearing? Trills of shrieks and snickers and chuckles? I was making the kids laugh! Their soprano peals of laughter glittered me with joy and gave me a direction in life.

My solo repertoire grew to include “Jesus Loves Me,” that Lutheran chestnut of guilt from Sunday school. When I figured out I liked boys, I also figured Jesus would no longer love me. A Mother Goose chestnut “Baa Baa Black Sheep” became a prescient choice for a kindergarten recital. Unable to pull the wool over many eyes—funny what one senses as a child—I felt early the prejudice of being a black sheep, a small town oddball. My brother gave me a plush, black lamb when he got out of the service, around 1957. I kept it, discarded the homophobic brother.

I took tap-dancing lessons, though short-lived. The instructor would yell, “Ricky, tap louder! I can’t hear you!” She failed to link her failure to order my tap shoes with my failures to stomp taps out of my rubber-soled Keds. And the world was deprived of another Savion Glover.

In my teens I saw movie versions of gay-themed plays on TV: Tea and Sympathy, The Children’s Hour, Tennessee Williams’ works. I could relate to these misfits, a mysterious clan whose secrets I wanted to learn and experience. Though their stories were unjust, sordid, unforgiving, I also felt their humanity, hilarity, honest self-expression.

In high school, my drama teacher, the divine Miss Holly Hart (love her!) cast me as Charles Condomine, the urbane and witty writer in Blithe Spirit. Anne McEntire (spitting image of Morticia Adams) played the living wife and knocked over the fireplace tools during a performance, never missing a beat through the clanging, brass-bell-like cacophony.

Fifty years later, I still remember a line of Charles’: “My affair with Maud Charteris lasted exactly seven-and-a-half weeks, and she cried all the time.” Weird. The British accent and Noel Coward’s luscious words flowed naturally and easily. I felt at home onstage, with my voice and the glorious English language.

However, the Bloomsbury Set was far from my rural Colorado, where my parents declared they would not pay for college tuition if I declared theatre my major. I minored just to keep my foot onstage, a presence that expanded with practical experience when I was cast as Fagin in Oliver! and Felix in The Odd Couple at the Chuckwagon Dinner Playhouse.

Singing one of Fagin’s solos, I stopped the show, meaning in the middle of a verse, the audience started cheering and clapping; so disconcerted, I lala-ed a refrain. In a scene as Felix, I was supposed to be crying to the Pigeon sisters about missing my family, but was actually laughing hysterically—ah yes, ever the professional—and frustrating my buddy playing Oscar. It’s a story that annoys him and amuses me to this day.

Auditioning for and performing in a 1974 college production of The Boys in the Band in conservative Greeley was one of my most important coming out experiences, motivating me to move to New York in 1976. Equus was my first Broadway play, A Chorus Line my first musical. Gay experience was between the lines in the drama, front-and-center in the musical. 

I met Doric Wilson, one of the first resident playwrights, at New York’s legendary Caffe Cino, when he participated in a summer rep of gay plays at of, all places, The Spike, a West side leather bar. (Doric got me into The Mineshaft, the notorious sex club with patrons performing dramas as if co-authored by the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud.) I met Martin Sherman, author of Bent, about gay love in a Nazi German concentration camp, and saw Ian McKellen’s electric 1979 London performance.

My acting buddies and I would eagerly await the weekly tabloid-sized newspapers, Backstage and Show Business, for upcoming auditions. That’s how I was cast in the two-character play The Other Side of the Swamp by Royce Ryton as a leather-clad hustler, a thinly disguised tale of 60s playwright Joe Orton, outrageous and unapologetically out of the closet. 

Nudging me out of my own closet, theatre saved this little gay boy. Pretending was a creative channel of fun and joy, an escape to survive and flourish in a hostile world. The inner ham of this old gay man still has fun and joy moderating Sunday services onstage at the Althea Center for Engaged Spirituality.

Though the pandemic took center stage and lowered the curtain on Broadway in March of 2020, New York’s theaters have reopened, and the Tony Awards finally aired in September. Even better, individuals who work in theater once again bring the wonder and magic of live performance to the world. 

Which hopefully means in February 2022, I’ll attend Hamilton at the Denver Center. Bunny ears won’t be falling off Alexander’s head, but still, I’ve heard it’s pretty good.