Place For Us

In Place for Us, D. A. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a 'general' cultural form and the despised 'minority' that was in fact that form's implicit audience. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to their historical density the main modes of reception that so many gay men developed to answer the musical's call: the early private communion with original cast albums, the later camping of show tunes in piano bars, the still later reformatting of these same songs at the post-Stonewall disco. If the postwar musical may be called a 'gay' genre, Miller demonstrates, this is because its regular but unpublicized work has been to indulge men in the spectacular thrills of a femininity become their own. 

Softcover. English. Publisher: Harvard University Press. 1998. 141 pp. Fair/Good. Book No: 15462