"Never Gonna Be a Man/ Catch Me if You Can/ I Won't Grow Up": A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan

Abstract

“Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up”: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan Stacy Wolf (bio) Peter Pan is proof that only girls exist. —Kathy Acker 1 I begin this essay with an admission: I can sing almost every song from almost every Broadway musical produced in the 1950s and 1960s. I consider this “knowledge”—deeply felt, unconsciously acquired, now seldom practiced—a fundamental component of my subjectivity. I sang songs (loudly and energetically, usually accompanied by extensive gestures and dance steps) before I knew what they meant. Broadway musicals, embodied in record albums with tantalizing photographs and incomprehensibly detailed performer biographies, were the popular culture of my childhood, the unintentional site of education—of gender and sexuality, of falling in love and being a girl. Only recently have I attempted to revisit that place of belting and shuffle-down-to-buffalo, to understand my love for and attachment to musicals from what I just as idealistically imagine as a grown-up place, an enlightened place. And since outing begets outing, the more I come out as a singing, lesbian, feminist academic, the more others admit the same, and the more common my situation seems. This essay considers Mary Martin and her performance as/in Peter Pan from a lesbian perspective. It seeks to reconcile desire and/in representation by reading the body and voice of one of Broadway’s biggest musical stars who played the boy who wouldn’t grow up, as a “lesbian.” Historically and culturally, gay men have been the most visible devotees of musical theatre, and love for musicals and knowledge of musical theatre lore has helped to [End Page 493] establish the identities of many gay men as well as a particular gay male community. 2 The character of the musical theatre aficionado has become a staple in representations of gay men, from the priest in David Dillon’s Party (who berates the youngest man in the group when he mistakenly refers to an original cast album as a movie soundtrack) to Buzz in Terrence McNally’s Love! Valor! Compassion! 3 Both of these men are also figured as flamboyant, their relationship to musicals both constitutive of their characters and a site for the performance of camp. The characters occupy that ideologically complex position of the stereotype by simultaneously drawing on “reality,” perpetuating that image (in both its positive and negative manifestations), and producing an image available to be usefully emulated and taken up. Without negating the significance of gay men’s consumption and production of musicals, I want to suggest that lesbians, too, may intervene in the presumptive heterosexuality of most musicals’ narratives, and that feminists, too, can read resistantly the seemingly pathetic women characters who frequent musicals. In the pages that follow, I hope to model a spectatorial/auditorial “lesbian” position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship. A flourishing area of cultural studies privileges gay/lesbian/queer spectatorship, as theorists and critics concentrate on reception practices that fashion a lesbian-in-representation from fragments of images, from scraps of narratives, from frames of desire. 4 This field of theory and criticism—one in which this essay participates—raises political questions about visibility, identity politics, and the very construction of lesbian subjectivity, as well as methodological questions about evidence, interpretation, and desire’s place in cultural criticism. 5 Most problematically, perhaps, finding or constructing the lesbian in a performance necessarily relies on historical and contemporary intertexts of lesbian representations. The dangers invoked by pointing to the spinster, the schoolmistress, the vampire, the bulldyke, the tomboy, the androgyne as lesbians—the possibility that such images serve primarily to reinforce stereotypes—exists here. While I acknowledge the pitfalls of re-presenting and therefore re-investing certain images and narratives with cultural power, I would suggest that we negotiate our identities in terms of (but not at all identically with) such images. In [End Page 494] addition, re-viewing and re-hearing Martin-as-Peter Pan “as” a “lesbian” can make musicals mean differently. I term this practice “lesbian,” but acknowledge that it...