The myth of the opera queen.

Is opera really a gay thing? This is rarely asked anywhere west of Broadway and 64th Street in Manhattan by people under age 50. But to get very specific, the question was asked most significantly back in 1985 when a friend of mine, Ira Siff, happened to be a guest on Stefan Zucker's radio opera program, Opera Fanatic, broadcast from Columbia University. It was quite a night. At the time, Zucker was prone to proclaim himself "the world's highest tenor, " and Siff was and still is Madame Galupe-Borszkh, director and leading "traumatic soprano" of the world's only opera travesti troupe, La Gran Scena opera Company. Siff is gay, Zucker, shockingly, was and, I imagine, is still straight (sexual orientation lasting somewhat longer than singing voices).

After some chitchat, the two men quickly digressed into the meat-and-potatoes subject of opera queens. Siff said he was one, and Zucker began to take offense, oddly enough. Why did gay people have a lock on being opera queens? he wanted to know. Siff didn't have a good answer for that one, and soon heterosexuals were jamming the phone lines to the program, proclaiming that they too were opera queens and proud of it.

Cut to a few years later: In 1995 Terrence McNally's Master Class was opening at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and I'd been assigned to interview the playwright. Because Master Class was about Maria Callas and a previous play of his, The Lisbon Traviata, detailed, among other things, the extravagant ruminations of a Callas devotee, I asked McNally why gay guys had this thing about opera.

McNally got kind of pissy. He rejected the premise entirely, turning the question into another question as to why society had to box homosexuals into categories like opera queen and leather queen and movie queen. He used words like "ghetto" and "fetish" and didn't stop there. Callas was, he said, not a gay icon until The Lisbon Traviata was produced. Then Tom Hanks's character in Philadelphia listened to Callas doing an aria from Andrea Chenier, and the rest was conjectured history. It was, McNally said, the way these things get started. As if to say, these things have no basis in reality.

At the time I thought McNally kind of a contentious jerk, but now I have to admit I agree with him. My turning point came that same year, when I read Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was all about gay opera queens and how opera records were preferable to opera CDs because the hole was smaller, tighter.

Even looking back at my rather extensive career of operagoing, the art form never has seemed so much a gay thing as a kid thing. Opera is expensive and time-consuming, and people with children simply have other ways to spend their time and money. Almost all of the heterosexual opera queens I've known throughout the years have been either childless or terribly bad parents who didn't mind having the kids heat a can of Campbell's soup while Mom and Dad took in their umpteenth Der Rosenkavalier.

So opera isn't a gay thing, which isn't to say being gay doesn't help one to appreciate this most arcane of art forms. To digress a moment, opera queens--gay or straight--see opera as a sport with each aria an obstacle course for the singer: Can she handle the trill, will he go sharp on the high note, will she negotiate the two-octave drop, can he decrescendo on the high B-flat? And can you hear him or her over the orchestra?

On almost all these points, opera is the one sport in the world where women have the advantage over men. In an ensemble it is the soprano voice you'll hear riding over the wall of sound--rarely the tenor and almost never the baritone or bass. When it comes to agility, there are a few male singers who can negotiate a good trill. There's bass Samuel Ramey, baritone Thomas Hampson, tenor Bruce Ford, and a few others--but very few others. Coloratura is a prerequisite for the bel canto operas of Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti, which is why the Italian operas of the early 19th century invariably feature the soprano or mezzo-soprano as the star performer.

Gay men, connoisseurs of the films of Bette Davis and the music videos of Madonna, have a history of identifying with women. This isn't a bad thing. On the contrary, if heterosexual men identified more with women, there would no doubt be a lot less spousal abuse and rape in the world. But speaking of digressing...

In conclusion, let it be known that I've never taken a gay man to his first opera who has ever wanted to go again. Of course, that may not be so much a gay thing as it is my own personal problem.