It's a gay world after all: Tim Acito, the creator of Zanna, Don't!--a new musical set in a world where everyone's gay--reflects on the ups and downs of fantasy fulfillment. (theater).

Imagine yourself back in the familiar world of high school--except that something's different. Everyone is gay. Everyone--your parents and teachers as well. The controversial school musical, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, is about the taboo subject of--gasp!--straights in the military. The school outcasts are the boy and girl who discover an attraction for the opposite sex.

This is the upside-down world of Zanna, Don't! a peppy new off-Broadway musical that begins performances March 4 and is scheduled to open March 20 in New York City. It's the creation of musical theater newcomer Tim Acito, who penned the book, music, and lyrics for the bright and goofy yet bittersweet show.

His inspiration, Acito says, was a country-and-western love song by Clint Black. "Listening to it, I thought, Wouldn't it be great someday to hear a country-and-western song sung from one guy to another without camp, irony, condescension, or disclaimer?" From there, Acito continues, it was a short leap to, Why not songs in every style of pop music--from funk and disco to hard rock to sweet, sappy ballads?

Zanna, Don't! is Acito's love letter to 1970s pop. He grew up on a steady diet of AM radio back when an Aerosmith song could be followed by a Dolly Parton ballad followed by a Parliament funk number. "My mission," he says, "became to write Top 40-style pop music in a gay context.

"You know, you can dismiss pop culture as being trivial, and yet by its sheer ubiquity it is so powerful in shaping people's attitudes about themselves and about each other," he adds. "It would have meant the world to me to see a gay Brady Bunch episode."

Raised in New Jersey, the 34-year-old writer-composer says he has no harsh stories to recount about his own high school years. He even had a "wonderful relationship" with a girl. But, he adds, "like a lot of gay men, I devised my own strategies to get through." Some of those coping mechanisms are reflected in the play: Like one of the lesbian teens in the show, Acito was a "hyperbusy overachiever," and like another--a gay boy with a secret--he threw himself into athletics.

"When I finally started dealing with it in my senior year," he reports, "I found everyone sort of knew except for me."

Still, Acito looks back with a slight sadness. "I consider myself very fortunate, but even when you have, in general, a very normal, healthy childhood, it could have been very different growing up in a little more gay-positive world."

Zanna, Don't! he says, "is a childhood experience that no gay person ever gets to have." But its roots are in the real emotions gay youth experience every day. "I started questioning the deeper ramifications that lead to isolation, self-doubt, and self-hatred," Acito says. "Any time any one group is made to feel that way, I think it not only harms that group, it snowballs into harming others as well."

Hence the slight hint of blue underneath the bright hues of Zanna, Don't!

"Charm has always been my key word," says Acito. "I think there's a certain wistfulness to that word. On the surface the show is magical, very celebratory and whimsical. But its [world] is also somehow unattainable."

Raymond writes on theater and film and lives in New York City.