Garland As Tragic Figure
The tragic aspects of gay identification with Garland were being discussed in the mainstream as early as 1967. Time magazine, in reviewing Garland's 1967 Palace Theatre engagement, disparagingly noted that a "disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual." It goes on to say that "he boys in the tight trousers" (a phrase Time repeatedly used to describe gay men, as when it described "ecstatic young men in tight trousers pranc down the aisles to toss bouquets of roses" to another gay icon, Marlene Dietrich) would "roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats" during Garland's performances. Time then attempted to explain Garland's appeal to the homosexual, consulting psychiatrists who opined that "the attraction might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived so many problems; homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria" and that "Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."
Writer William Goldman, in a piece for Esquire magazine about the same Palace engagement, again disparages the gay men in attendance, dismissing them as "fags" who "flit by" chattering inanely. He goes on, however, to advance the tragic figure theory as well. After first suggesting that "if have an enemy, it is age. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow," he wrote:
| “ | Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. And so does Garland. She's been through the fire and lived – all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone – brothers and sisters, she knows. | ” |
Openly gay comedian Bob Smith offers a comic take on the tragic figure theory, imagining an "Elvis king" and a "Judy queen", debating the idols:
| “ | "Elvis had a drinking problem." "Judy could drink Elvis under the table." "Elvis gained more weight." "Judy lost more weight." "Elvis was addicted to painkillers." "No pill could stop Judy's pain!" |
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Read more about this topic: Judy Garland As Gay Icon
Famous quotes containing the words garland, tragic and/or figure:
“Hear, my child, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s teaching; for they are a fair garland for your head, and pendants for your neck.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 1:8-9.
“It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all over the place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?”
—Ben Maddow (1909–1992)