A Rich life.

Is Frank Rich the world's gayest straight man? The New York Times columnist talks about his passion for musicals, his support for gay causes, and his new memoir, Ghost Light 

Frank Rich may never live down the epithet "Butcher of Broadway" that was indelibly applied to him during his years as the chief theater critic of New York Times, but since retiring from criticism in 1993 and moving to the Times's op-ed pages, Rich has reinvented himself as, among other things, a sympathetic chronicler of gay causes.

Covering the volatile territory at which culture and politics intersect, Rich has devoted columns to the cruel legacies of the Clinton administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy; to the social significance of Ellen DeGeneres's coming-out; and to the 1998 outbreak of violence against gays that culminated in the Matthew Shepard murder--as well as the waning popularity of the religious right's antigay rhetoric that followed. He's a significant part of the Times's commitment to gay issues, which marks a sea change from its policies of just two decades ago.

During his years as the Times's chief drama critic, from 1980 to 1993, Rich also hailed the rise of a new generation of gay playwrights, which included Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner, and mourned the loss of some of the industry's greatest artists as the AIDS epidemic swept up and down Broadway with a stealth abetted by silence from media outlets that included his own paper. (When Rich reviewed Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, which harshly criticized the Times's coverage of the crisis, the paper ran a rebuttal following the review, defending its coverage--somewhat unconvincingly.)

Although he's heterosexual (Rich is the father of two teenage sons and is married to the witty Times style reporter Alex Witchel), Rich's love of musical theater is, of course, a taste shared by many gay men. In his evocative new memoir, Ghost Light, Rich explores the roots of his fascination with the Broadway musical, a diversion that grew into an obsession as he sought emotional escape from a troubled childhood. (Sound familiar?) It's not your average straight man, after all, whose first adolescent crush was on Gwen Verdon, who breezed into his hometown of Washington, D.C., during the tour of Damn Yankees and ignited his sexual imagination.

Ghost Light has just been published by Random House.

When you talk about the pain of being picked last for sports teams or the sense of isolation you felt as a kid--those are touchstone feelings for a lot of gay men. Did this occur to you as you wrote the book?

It occurred to me before I wrote the book because in my column I've written a fair amount about gay civil rights issues. It's been a topic that has really interested me, and I've often asked myself, What are the things that made me identify with it? One of them, I realized, was that as a child of divorce, at a time when divorce itself was closeted--people didn't even say the word out loud--I could make a connection with the idea of being ostracized or forced to feel shameful about something that was an innate part of your identity.

There is also a shared affinity in a taste for--even obsession with--musical theater. What do you think of the stereotype of the Broadway show queen?

I don't know if I'm particularly knowledgeable about it, but I know it is a stereotype. The Stephen Sondheim profile I recently wrote generated mail from all sorts of people, from the standard theater queens to 15-year-old girls in Oshkosh, Wis. I'm not sure it's fair to generalize that musical theater is the particular province of gay men or any one group. What is clear and was clear even when I was growing up in the '60s is that theater is completely unfashionable. It has fallen from being a major part of American culture to obscure-niche status. There's something self-separating about anyone who's a theater fanatic.

But if there is a deep attraction for gay men to musicals, where does it come from? Are we attracted by the same things you are?

I've read all the usual stuff about that, and it strikes me as being cliched--the idea that it's bigger than life, etc. It often seems to me that those assumptions are a way of stigmatizing gay men by forcing certain banal characteristics on them. It would be the same thing like saying all Jews care about money.

As for me, I was a lonely kid in a difficult situation in a provincial place. This was something that entered my life that I just glommed onto--the theater was the most powerful of the worlds I was attracted to, which also included politics and baseball.

You were writing about theater during the '80s, when AIDS began ravaging the theater community. When did you first become aware of it?

When people I knew of, though didn't necessarily know personally, started getting sick and dying. This was early in my career as a drama critic, which began in the spring of 1980. Soon you couldn't cover the theater without being aware of this huge story. It was the elephant in the room that had to be written about.

Was it a galvanizing moment for you in terms of your commitment to gay concerns?

Absolutely, but it wasn't really a moment--it crept up on me. In some ways I was a typical American heterosexual who suddenly was made more aware of the presence of gay people in American life because of the disease. As someone who had always been interested in civil rights issues--partly because I'm a member of my own minority, being a Jew--I suddenly said, "Where have we all been?"

The Times came in for a lot of criticism for its policies in the early days of AIDS. Did you try to effect change in any way?

I did what I could, as others did, but impotently at first. A lot of people at the Times were aware of how slow we were in covering it, and [they] were angry about it. But nothing happened until Max Frankel took over as editor, and then things changed. For one thing, we were finally allowed to use the word gay in the context of homosexuality.

The Times is now probably the leading paper in terms of space given to gay issues. How does such a wholesale change come about?

Max Frankel broke the mold, but credit must be given to a lot of people, including Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who took over as publisher in recent years and has been fierce on this issue. The Times has completely changed in this regard from top to bottom. What changed it? Certain executives did, but really, the world changed it. There were openly gay and lesbian people at the Times; there were people with AIDS at the Times.

You've written about gay issues in your column frequently. Is this a conscious commitment you've made?

It's just because the issue engages me. It's a civil rights issue that was still fresh territory because not enough had been written about it. I also feel that all sexual issues in America--another I've written about extensively is reproductive rights--are a measure of where society stands. It's fascinating to see how gay people are being treated by American culture and American politicians.

What has kept gay issues in the headlines constantly?

Recently, I think, it's because far-right groups found that gay bashing was a good money-raising tool, so they preyed on the fears of ignorant people. They'd worn out abortion and the Clintons. Meanwhile, the Republican Party made the calculation that they could humor these people--take the money and the votes--and nobody would look askance. That's changed now: Clearly the Bush campaign, however clumsily, has realized gay bashing doesn't play anymore.

Why do you think prejudice against homosexuality is the last to fall? People who wouldn't think of making disparaging remarks about blacks or Jews feel it's still acceptable.

Lingering resentment of gay people has to do with people's own sexual confusion. I don't mean in the cliched way of, say, American Beauty, where the biggest homophobe on the block is secretly gay. It's not that simple.

This is why choice is part of it too: Reactions to that are about sex, not about killing babies. Certain people are made irrational by other people's sexual freedom.

There was a flowering of gay playwriting in the late '80s and early '90s. Do you think that was a direct response to AIDS or more generally to the opening-up of the culture?

In some ways it was a direct response because AIDS was a subject itself, the way the Depression and the Vietnam war were. It was also part of a broader picture of gay culture coming out of the closet, in fiction and poetry, that produced some terrific writing, whether it be David Leavitt or Tony Kushner.

How much has the theater lost to AIDS, and do you see any lasting negative effects?

The biggest negative effects were all the casualties, certainly. The first losses that come to mind are Michael Bennett and Charles Ludlam. It's not a word I use very often, but I think those two were geniuses of the theater, and that they both died in their early 40s is an incalculable loss. And that's just for starters. It's like what World War I did to English society--it just wiped out so many people. But the longer-term problems of the theater preceded AIDS and have to do with the corporatization that is going on everywhere, in book publishing and the movie business and journalism.

You don't sound very hopeful about the state of the commercial theater.

Culture created by a committee is just not a good thing. Art cannot be a machine-made product. I don't want to get into the theater criticism business again, but a lot of big shows today have that corporate feeling. Even a bomb of my youth like Mr. President had the sense that it was created by real people rather than being created through a Hollywood-style process.

Assuming that the theater is dying and isn't going to come back, what do you think will be lost?

I don't think it will die. To use an analogy, you can see a football or basketball game better on TV than you can in the best seats in the arena, so why are these games sold out? People want that communal experience of witnessing live action. The theater offers a communal kind of art that can't be replicated by any other means. Whether Broadway as we know it will continue to exist is an open question. The spectacular "holiday on ice" part of it will, but the economics may continue to drive serious theater into other venues. But no matter how much it is pushed under, it will surface somewhere.

Isherwood is chief theater critic for Variety.

To read more of The Advocate's conversation with Frank Rich, visit www.advocate.com