Is Judy Garland Still a Gay Idol? [View all]

[William769]

LAST Saturday I invited my friend Brodie, a 30ish gay man like myself, to a preview performance of “End of the Rainbow,” Peter Quilter’s play about the final days of Judy Garland. In the course of that invitation, I asked him if he was a Judy fan, and he said, “No, but she was good in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ”

That’s the kind of answer I might expect from Tim Tebow, but being a good sport, Brodie accompanied me anyway. “End of the Rainbow,” which opened on Broadway at the Belasco Theater on Monday night, is, as they say, a play with music, starring the formidable Tracie Bennett, who does her scrappy best to belt out Judy’s standards. After the show I asked Brodie which of the songs he’d heard before, and he said, “ ‘Over the Rainbow’ and the thing with the train.” By which he meant “The Trolley Song,” from the 1944 MGM classic, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” directed by Vincente Minnelli, Judy’s second husband.

I weep for my people.

I’m only half-kidding. I have this theory that because of the holocaust that was the AIDS epidemic and its annihilation of the previous generation of gay men, the faith of our fathers risks extinction. Today, Judyism, like Yiddish, is little more than a vague cultural memory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/arts/judy-garland-gay-idol-then-and-over-the-rainbow-now.html

It's weird I came across this today because I had been thinking about this for the past couple of days.