The Wizard of Oz: Why? [Archive]

Paul_UK

9th Oct 2007, 11:55 AM

I found this by googling "wizard of oz gay" http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9803EED7173CF93BA15755C0A96295826 0&n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FT% 2FTheater. It's a registration site and I had to do a fake registration to access it so here's a copy/paste.

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Why Oz Is a State of Mind In Gay Life and Drag Shows

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 28, 1994, Tuesday

Consider this scenario: A teen-ager, growing up in a drab, flat part of the Midwest that is strictly American Gothic, feels out of place and misunderstood and fantasizes about a more colorful, exotic world. Well, the kid finds that world: a land of magnificent artifice filled with strange, enchanting companions, all united by a pungent feeling of incompleteness. The kid has many exciting adventures but continues to yearn with a bottomless pang for the idea of something called home.

Yes, that is the plot of "The Wizard of Oz." It is also the life story of countless numbers of gay men and lesbians who fled what Tina Landau, the writer and director, describes in the play "1969" as the "vast map of normalcy" that is much of America. Many of them found their own Oz on a northeastern island called Manhattan. And for an important subset of those people, Emerald City took the form of an all-inclusive land of make-believe known as the New York theater.

Many of today's gay-rights advocates who emphasize progressive political engagement over escapist nostalgia may consider "The Wizard of Oz" an unhealthy frame of reference. Still, the spirit of the classic L. Frank Baum tale, especially in its incarnation as a 1939 MGM musical, hovered over the cultural festival celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Talismanic lines from the movie showed up in everything from Tony Kushner's epic "gay fantasia" on Broadway, "Angels in America," to "Charles Busch's Dressing Up!," a one-night drag revue at Town Hall.

And the film provided a metaphoric center for two plays that dealt specifically with the 1969 rebellion: Thomas O'Neil's "Judy at the Stonewall Inn" and En Garde Arts' ambitious production of Ms. Landau's "Stonewall: Night Variations."

Nonetheless, the ways in which Oz was evoked went way beyond tear-stained sentiment and camp. If there was a subtext that united these varied works, it seemed to be that Oz was a nice place to visit but that you really couldn't live there forever. Correspondingly, the plays by Mr. O'Neil and Ms. Landau symbolically laid to rest the spirit of Judy Garland, the actress who played Dorothy on screen and whose funeral took place on the day of the Stonewall uprising (and probably helped provoke it).

Oz was a cornerstone in gay mythology for at least five decades, and characters and phrases from the movie became a coded legend for a subculture. Homosexuals in the United States military identified themselves as "friends of Dorothy," just as "I have the feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" was a traditional opening line for out-of-towners making their debuts in metropolitan gay bars.

For audiences watching "The Wizard of Oz" in its immensely popular television broadcasts from the 1950's on, the image of the ingenuous, wistful younger Garland was overlaid with an ironic awareness of the tortured, self-lacerating creature she turned into. Her version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" became an anthem of pain for homosexuals who perceived themselves as belonging to a despised minority. Her interpretation of the song seemed, as a character in "Judy at the Stonewall Inn" puts it, to embody "all the suffering voices of the world twisted into one spectral shape."

Last week in "Dressing Up!," the veteran female impersonator Charles Pierce (attired as Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond) chanted, "When you're down in the dumps, pray for Judy's red pumps," and segued into a riff of Garland's Dorothy praying for another tornado to deliver her from Kansas. In Ms. Landau's "1969," at the Humana Festival in Louisville, Ky., last March, a persecuted small-town high school student dreamed of attending his senior prom as Dorothy, and, after running away, found his own Glinda the Good Witch waiting for him in Greenwich Village in the form of a motherly drag queen.

In the current "Stonewall: Night Variations," the sequel to "1969," there's still a yellow brick road running through the Village. And Billie Burke's Glinda is evoked again, as a barker who summons gay men to the Stonewall Inn by singing Ms. Burke's fabled call to the Munchkins: "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

A white coffin, representing the dead Garland, figures prominently in the play. And a choir of angels sings an elegy to the fallen star, which includes the lines, "We were never sure whether you would fall into the abyss or soar into the sky." Implicitly, the same alternatives are available to the gay men and lesbians at Stonewall. And when the bar is raided, they choose to soar by fighting back.

The same conceit is given more explicit form in "Judy at the Stonewall Inn," where the ghost of Garland materializes to a pill-popping Judy impersonator just before the police raid. She is not the spirit of despair but of hope. While Jimmy the drag queen wails that Garland made a world that "does not like me" bearable, the ghost admonishes him to stop feeling sorry for himself and to abandon "Over the Rainbow" for the more militant song that was sung at her funeral, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." She also tells Jimmy, in fluent Oz-ese: "You've always had the power to get home. You just had to learn it for yourself."

The notion of home and homelessness echoed through other works with gay themes last week. In a revival of her most recent performance piece, Holly Hughes spoke of the sense of exile and of the "fairy tale" that ends in banishment from the family hearth, both known to many lesbians in America. Nicky Paraiso, in the autobiographical "Asian Boys" at P.S. 122, concluded a series of tales of displacement by saying, "I'm telling you these things here because it's the only place I feel at home."

Sir Ian McKellen, the great English actor and gay rights advocate, once described the theater as "the one place in the world I've taught myself to be at home." Last week, in his disarmingly intimate one-man Broadway show, "A Knight Out," he spoke of the pleasures in discovering the warm sanctuary provided for gay men by "the half-open closet of the theater." His show was a sustained, engaging argument for opening that door all the way.

This is a process that's happening by degrees. The last 15 years have seen more plays and performance pieces by openly gay and lesbian writers dealing directly with gay and lesbian themes. "Angels in America" is a hit on Broadway. And cross-dressing performances have moved from the margins of downtown drag shows into mainstream houses.

Indeed, one of the highlights of the cultural festival, "Charles Busch's Dressing Up!," celebrated drag with both gay female impersonators and heterosexual stars well known to American television audiences. Beatrice Arthur showed up to deliver her own version of Bette Davis saying, "What a dump!" And 85-year-old Milton Berle, who memorably donned dresses for his 1950's television variety series, swaggered out in a spangled, floor-length red gown, high heels and a blond wig.

Mr. Berle, clearly delighted by the enthusiasm with which he was greeted, proceeded to doff his wig ("It's me, Milton!") and hold the stage for half an hour with a series of Borscht Belt jokes that this audience might have been less enchanted by in another context. Finally, Bette Davis, in the person of Mr. Pierce, had to remind the actor it was time to sign off.

Mr. Berle appeared a bit annoyed. But it did seem time to let the gay version of drag reassert itself. The evening ended with a lineup of Bette Davises and Mr. Busch, in a stunning second-skin orange dress, commenting, "I suppose we have to realize how far we have to go, but I think we can all be very proud of where we've been."

Outside the theater, a middle-aged man with a boyish face observed a coterie of leathery, muscular guys in tulle and chiffon and exclaimed happily to a friend, "Hey, we're in Oz!"

I also found this http://www.obuuc.org/TheologyOfTheWizardOfOz.pdf The second section on page 1 says:

Before we get to the story of Oz, I’d like to mention that The Wizard of Oz has been a cult favorite in the gay community for many years. One reason, I think, is that there are a number of lines in the movie that can be taken with a double entendre – Like: “Come out, come out, wherever you are …” Or the line that comes to mind whenever a gay person first goes to San Francisco or some other gay mecca – “Toto, I’ve a feeling were not in Kansas anymore.” (As someone once put it, “In San Francisco, Halloween is redundant.”)

Also, in some places here in the Midwest, when you wanted to get into a gay bar they’d ask you, “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” And if you said yes, they’d let you in. Also, when we were kids, Thursday was Queer’s Day, when you’d wear yellow – and of course, there’s the yellowbrick road to Oz. Or consider the line: “Who knows what dangers lurk on the path ahead? Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” In some gay-rights marches I’ve been on, we have turned that line around and chanted, “Faggots, and fairies, and dykes, oh my!” Plus the rainbow flag – which has become a symbol of the gay-rights movement and diversity.

Also, when the scarecrow first speaks, he says, “You could go this way. Or you could go that way. And some people go both ways.”

In many ways the journey to Oz is the journey that many of us who are lesbian or gay (or bisexual or transgendered) have made, when we tried to find a wizard somewhere, to help us find acceptance – only to find out that it’s got to come from inside. But then, that’s what all Unitarian Universalists … come to see, right?

Join me now as we follow the saga of Dorothy. She and her dog Toto have just been caught up in a cyclone and blown away from her family’s farm in Kansas. When the house she is in, lands, and Dorothy steps out, she finds she is in a marvelous land called Oz, when the munchkins live.

I'm not suggesting these are the whole answer, only answer, or even accurate - they are opinions. Google gives loads of hits for that search, and many hours could be spent researching this.