This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

When my father turned 65 last year, he only had one request for his family. He did not require us to come home to Chicago and honor him with toasts. We did not purchase wholesale quantities of tie clips, argyle socks and “worlds’ best dad”-emblazoned hoodless sweatshirts. In fact, he specifically requested we not get him gifts at all. The only thing he wanted was for my mom, my sisters and I to convene in New York city, so he could buy us tickets to see South Pacific on Broadway.

So obviously my dad is gay, because somehow love of musical theater and love of dick got conflated in the eyes of the world. So the only explanation for a straight married sire of three’s desire to party down on “Bali Hai” is that he was using this NYC jaunt to frequent happy-ending massage parlors in Chelsea. No wonder he looked so relaxed the whole time!

I too have a hard spot for onstage spectacle. I knew the Into The Woods soundtrack by heart at age eight, and the number of Fiddler on The Roof references I pepper into daily conversation is embarrassing. Tradition! I’ve always been embarrassed by this affinity, but somewhere along the line it became doubly shameful because I learned that this was a stereotypical hallmark of gay male behavior.

I will admit almost any of my embarrassing habits, but I will never allow someone to say, “Oh, you only do X because you’re gay.” I’ve heard this attributed to characteristics as wide-ranging and unconnected as a love of clothing, a naturally slim build and a childhood aversion to condiments. My sister asserted it herself:

“Oh, you and my friend Tyler both hated pasta sauce and salad dressing until you were 12. You’re going to yell at me for saying this, but I think it’s a gay thing.”

Unless I was secreting mayo somewhere to use as lube in my adult years, those particular two concepts are entirely unrelated. Except that whole gay men/musicals connection seems to have something to it. So on Monday night, I bit the bullet and attended a local Showtunes night at a very traditional DC gay bar. It was partly because I didn’t want to go home yet, and partly because the musical-loving part of my gay life is usually enjoyed solo, with family or in extremely embarrassing videos of me yelling “It was a mule!” in a high school production.

So even for me, a guy that hates almost every sacred cow of mainstream gay culture, there was something empowering about so many men in one space who knew the words to the same bits of melodramatic ephemera. This mastery applied to some works that everyone knew (Xanadu) some that were apparently new favorites (Spring Awakening) and, most bizarrely, this clip from an old episode of “Designing Women”:

I was engaged in conversation with a friend of mine when I heard an entire bar full of men scream “THAT BATON WAS ON FIRE!” loudly enough to wake Courtney Love. Normally this kind of homo pack mentality freaks me out (same reason I get hives at an Abercrombie store), but this time I felt uncharacteristically proud. I know some men who can recite whole Shirley Q. Liquor skits, and others whose familiarity with Christopher Guest movies probably rivals that of Mr. Guest himself. So I enjoyed seeing a gaggle of dudes who have few other personal connections beside a desire to get drunk and fuck each other (it was still a bar, after all) revel in a piece of what I will, for the purposes of this article, refer to as art.

I rarely buy the argument that gay guys are inclined to like certain things like shoes or interior design because of some inherent femininity, because not even all women like that stuff and the distinctions are usually bullshit anyway. I’m more inclined to think that some kind of societal conditioning lead to these behaviors, and a reverse of such conditioning occurs as gay culture evolves. Duh, right?

So even as most pieces of musical theater are overblown clusterfucks that probably won’t last a whole lot longer as a touchstone for an entire social culture, they do hold a kernel of something that will probably define gay life for a long time: Drama. Even the calmest, most-laidback, “masculine” guy has lived a life that would rival most soap operas. The pain of growing up different, the fear of being caught, the eventual rush of coming out and living a life of open sexual expression. We don’t need a stage full of Busby Berkeley dancers to remember that real life is stranger and harder than any fiction.

All that said, my love of musicals is a holdover from an earlier time of my life and I still highly resent such episodes as a family friend asking what good Broadway shows I’ve seen lately as an icebreaker after ten years of separation. What I will acknowledge is the fact that I have spent the last two weeks straight listening to a Royksopp song called “This Must Be It,” which features vocal work from Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife and Fever Ray.

I’m looking forward to times when a song like this could be the new gay anthem. You can dance to it, and it has the requisite driving beat and female vocal work to fly at a mega club, but it substitutes the canned emotion or treacle sweetness of works like Evita or Carousel for an exultant, to-the-rafters, cranked to 11 blast of genuine feeling. It’s the same concept as most musicals – a heightened artistic version of everyday life – but it assumes a wider scope of interest for its audience. It’s nice for me to keep in mind that our collective gay past has some connection to the life I lead now, and that I can keep some connection to whats behind as I try and move forward.

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