An Obscure Form of Protest: Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

Abstract

An Obscure Form of Protest:Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Mary Rizzo (bio) When Esquire magazine vocal and visible young urban gay men of the era and an older generationsteeped in homophile respectability. Cultural touchstones defined each as much as politics—and were, in fact, signs of political affiliation. As he found in his interviews, while the older generation identified with the doyennes of musical theater like Ethel Merman or Judy Garland, "Today, gay kids identify with males—with Peter Fonda, or Dustin Hoffman." Overall, theater was of little interest, especially Broadway—"Except, of course Hair."1 Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a colorful, experimental, raucous musical revue about the lives of a group of countercultural youth written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 1967 and then moved to Broadway in April 1968. The first show to move from Off-Broadway to Broadway, it blazed the path followed by A Chorus Line and Hamilton. Hair became an immediate smash hit, with numerous touring companies playing the show around the world. By the end of its original run in 1972, approximately 20 million people worldwide, including innumerable gay men, had seen it.2 Hair drew gay fans, in part, because of its frank discussions of homosexuality. While theater became more experimental in the 1950s and 60s, Broadway musicals (with a few exceptions such as West Side Story and Cabaret) remained bastions of Americana with gentle, comedic narratives focused on heterosexual romance, offering ideology in the guise of heartfelt harmonies.3 Hair was different. Its loose plot revolved around hippie Claude's dilemma of whether to evade [End Page 5] the draft. But through its rock music score and scenes in a coffeehouse, at a party and during an LSD trip, the show depicted characters shamelessly engaging in homosexuality, bisexuality, and polyamory. Woof, one of the hippie "tribe," sings "Sodomy," in the first act in an angelic-voice, celebrating sodomy, pederasty, and fellatio, sexual acts that were banned by anti-gay laws on the books in many states. Even with this explicit embrace of gay sexuality, Hair has never been placed in the pantheon of musicals, like Gypsy or Rent, beloved by gay men. It remains unacknowledged in recent scholarly articles, monographs like D.A. Miller's lyrical meditation on gay men and musicals Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, and in popular, grassroots historical efforts like the website Queer Music Heritage, the 2012 winner of the Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public or community-based LGBTQ history from the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History.4 More general histories of 1960s counterculture often ignore it or mention it fleetingly, with no acknowledgement of its importance within gay liberation.5 Musicologist Elizabeth Wollman offers a welcome corrective in her work on adult musicals arguing that, "like Hair, many adult musicals were ultimately used as much to educate mainstream audiences about contemporary sociosexual mores as to entertain."6 By not taking Hair seriously, critics have ignored an important source through which gay men constructed their identities and also missed how that cultural text shaped the gay liberation movement. There are several reasons for the forgetting of Hair's gay past. No character in Hair overtly proclaims a gay identity. With the gay liberation and LGBTQ rights movements from the 1970s onward, homosexuality became a politicized identity that defined a person, rather than a set of behaviors. Hair's proto-queerness meant that it was eclipsed by other musicals and plays with explicitly gay characters, like The Boys in the Band and Falsettos. Materially, after its initial run it became difficult to see. It was revived in 1977 in a disastrous production that closed within a month. Milos Forman's 1979 film Hair focused on Claude, now an Oklahoma farm boy in New York City for induction into the army, and his infatuation with rich-girl Sheila. Most references to homosexuality were eliminated. The song "Sodomy" is sung to shock Sheila and her uptight friends rather than to revel in sexual pleasure. While cast albums from the original run still circulate...