Gay London in stages. (notes from a blond).

London is lousy with Americans right now. Even I get stopped on the street (by other Americans) and asked for autographs, which puzzles the Londoners who swarm by us wondering who the hell I am (sometimes I wonder myself). Gay tourists are everywhere, flocking to the theater as gay tourists do, to see star turns by Americans. Matt Damon is doing a play about being stoned in the '80s (decade, not age). Gwyneth Paltrow is appearing barefoot in Proof and getting rave reviews for her pedicure. Madonna is doing a new play about a ruthless art dealer, which many have thought could wind up being her fallback career, and in case the play isn't enough to entice you, she does a full-on lesbian kiss somewhere in there, photos of which made all the papers a week before the critics showed up.

Of course, no matter how many Americans you throw at it there'll always be an England, and there is a veritable encyclopedia of gay British show business history perusable on the mainstream London stage, from the camp of another century to the last decade's outrageousness. In other words, a whole world of closet doors to open and peer past.

As far as things truly British, at the Palladium there's the truly god-awful stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, whose only bright spot is something you hardly see anymore: chorus boys in white tights and heavily sculpted dance belts doing a number with big sticks called "The Old Bamboo." I don't think this was about the same bamboo I was imagining it was, but it helped pass an unbelievably tedious evening.

More consciously gay were two new rock musicals built around songs from their respective periods. We Will Rock You uses the music of Queen to a tell a story not quite as interesting as Freddie Mercury's own story, which is a pity. But then, the guardians of his legacy have always de-emphasized the gay side of his life, while making him a poster boy for the tragedy of AIDS. Taboo is the title of Boy George's story, which, while absorbing, doesn't have the tragic dimension of Mercury's. However, George has always been an open figure, and that, in the world of pop music, is certainly worth recording. He's in the show himself now, but not as himself--somebody else plays that--and watching the two Georges in tandem is sort of like revisiting Judy and Liza at the Palladium on acid.

The other big mother-daughter team on the West End is Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson in a sublime production of Oscar Wilde's early warhorse Lady Windermere's Fan. This is the one so filled with legendary aphorism that the largely American audience reels each time one is spun out. ("Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality," and so forth.) It's a gorgeous production, and I hope somebody tapes it so you can see Big Van in action, charming the birds off the trees and into her ovens, and the venerable Googie Withers as the sort of grand dame only Judi Dench gets to play anymore in the movies.

Up the street, Somerset Maugham's fascinating The Constant Wife is being revived with the much underappreciated Jenny Seagrove in a tour-de-force as a 1926 society wife who handles her husband's infidelity in an impossibly civilized way.

I have to believe that Maugham had seen a production of Lady Windermere shortly before writing his play. They are both serious comedies about manners, and they both revolve around an affair and an indiscretion. But there's more to it than that. Here were two gay men writing about the confusing plight of women of a certain social station attempting to get what they need from the world while also attempting to play by its rules.

For a gay audience of a certain age, the bells keep ringing from the minute the curtain goes up. Like great liners, these characters steer through the ice field hoping to make the crossing without catastrophe. Clearly, that's what even their charmed lives were like for Maugham, Wilde, and smart gay British society in their day. For more than a few gay people, little has changed. And thinking about that is enough to turn almost anybody into an activist, even on vacation.