A closet can be a prison. This was especially true one hundred years ago when the only safe way to be anything but white and straight was to lock away the truth of your life in order to fit in and make a living. One element of Modernism for the gay community was a very slight opening of the prison door that allowed people “skinny” enough to make it through as their free selves.
Usually I limit these episodes of the 20th Century Modernist Muse to writers, but for the sake of the argument I am going to include a brief mention of important composers who also wore the shackles of convention.
I want you to imagine you’re a young, sensitive multitalented teenager. You can act, sing, dance, compose and even write plays. You’ve grown up in a family that embraced artists of all types, and yet you know what would happen if you admitted to anyone your feelings for other boys.
Such was the case with Noel Coward (1899-1973).
Coward was a boy wonder, producing hit plays in his early twenties and hanging out with high society who found his droll wit hysterical and his personality charming. Like a playwright from another era, Oscar Wilde, Coward had the gift of gab that helped him avoid seeming too heavy handed when satirizing the well-connected. Plays like Blithe Spirit, Private Lives and Hay Fever kept his name in the headlines as the delightful man about town. He also wrote operettas and popular songs such as Mad Dogs and Englishman, as well as acting in and directing his own works.
One of these was the short play Still Life. This would later be made into the film Brief Encounter. If you’re familiar with that film—and chances are you have because it is a classic—imagine if the couple who meet in the train station were gay. So much more of the story would make sense. The friend who comes upon the couple while they are making love and thus forces the break up. The lies they have to tell the gossipy neighbor. I would love to see that movie redone in this manner. It would be so much more heartbreaking when the closeted husband was returning home to his good wife at the end.
Eventually, Coward could write his own ticket, but only so far as the partially opened prison door allowed. One of his greatest hits, Design for Living, had to open in New York rather than London because the censors would not allow a play about bisexuality that featured a menage et trois to be staged in his native country. He insisted he would never do long runs because he found they stagnated his delivery. They also limited his supply of conquests.
As the years went by Coward’s cabaret act became what people wanted to see. Here’s how the esteemed drama critic Kenneth Tynan described it.
To see him whole, public and private personalities conjoined, you must see him in cabaret ... he padded down the celebrated stairs ... halted before the microphone on black-suede-clad feet, and, upraising both hands in a gesture of benediction, set about demonstrating how these things should be done. … If it is possible to romp fastidiously, that is what Coward does. He owes little to earlier wits, such as Wilde or Labouchere. Their best things need to be delivered slowly, even lazily. Coward's emerge with the staccato, blind impulsiveness of a machine-gun.
Yet as Coward aged he became aware of the need to tone down his flamboyance and asked the designer Cecil Beaton to give him a straighter appearance, even though nearly everyone knew he was gay. As he explained it, "It is important not to let the public have a loophole to lampoon you."
Coward wasn’t the only Modernist composer to hide. Cole Porter (1891-1964) masked his sexuality with a sham marriage. Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) hid inside a bottle. I am often filled with sadness when I think of this African-American jazz genius not getting the credit he deserves. If one says, “Who wrote Take the A-Train” the first picture that comes in most people’s heads is the straight Duke Ellington, not the composer of many of perhaps his greatest hit.
Where would American drama be without Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) and William Inge (1913-1973)? Both men wrote some of the finest plays ever performed on the stage. A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Picnic and Come Back, Little Sheba would not even exist. Sadly, both Williams and Inge committed suicide. While no one knows what the primary reason for that act was, I am certain their homosexuality had something to do with it.
One of the key components of Modernism is iconoclasm. As partially or fully out members of the LGBTQIA community, these writers and many others (Amy Lowell, Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, E.M. Forster, Aaron Copland, and Gertrude Stein to name a few), broke ground on new and exciting territory culturally as well as compositionally. Copland’s open chords and swelling melodies spelled what it was to be American. Stein challenged our use of language. Lowell brought Imagism into the mainstream. Millay made sexuality safer.
Tristan II I still can see How you hastily and abstractedly flung down To the floor, Having raked it, arm after arm, Over your head, Your lustrous gown; And how, before Its silken susurration had subsided, We were as close together as it is possible for two people to be. It was your maid, I think, Who picked it up in the morning, while we lay Still abed, exhausted by inexhaustible love; I saw her, I saw her through half closed eyes, kneel above it, And smooth it, with a concerned hand, and a face full of thoughtfulness. Not that the dress Was fragile, Or had suffered harm. But that you had planned To walk in it, when you walked ashore: And our ship was getting minute by minute, more and more Close to Tintagel.
I challenge readers to begin investigating the lives of the people I have mentioned. If you’re straight, you may come to a better understanding of the amazing contributions gays have made to society. If you’re gay, you might take a little more pride in the accomplishments of your community.