What's the Gay Connection in "The Sound of Music"?

When I was living in West Hollywood, people kept saying things like:
"I can't go out tonight -- The Sound of Music is on!"
"Which Sound of Music character are you?"
"The Sound of Music is playing at the community theater.  We have to go!"

I have never seen it all the way through.  It gives me bad vibes.

It's my fourth grade teacher's fault.  She told us about Anne Frank and The Sound of Music at the same time, and I got them mixed up, thinking that the musical ended with everyone dying in a concentration camp.

When I used to hear the songs, they gave me a frisson of dread, since I thought they were being sung by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

But even without the horror, they made no sense.  Look at "Do, Re, Mi":

Do, a deer, a female deer.  It's a doe. 

Ray, a drop of golden sun.   It's a ray, not a drop.

Mi, the name I call myself.  No, it's a personal pronoun in the accusative case.

Fahhhh, a long, long way to run.  It's  pronounced far, not fahhhh.

Ti, a drink with jam and bread.  Who drinks tea with jam and bread?  For that matter, what the heck is jam?

Or "My Favorite Things":

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels.  Ponies don't come in cream colors, and strudel is a soft pastry, not crisp.

When the dog bites -- when the bee stings.  If a dog bites you, thinking of "favorite things" wouldn't help -- you need a rabies shot. And why would you feel sad when bitten or stung?  It's not sad, it's painful.

"Oh, no," everyone kept telling me.  "It's the greatest musical of all time!  And the gayest!"

So I've been looking for the gay connection.

Not in the plot: it's just a "servant inspires joie de vivre in dysfunctional family" story, done to death on tv: Hazel, Charles in Charge, Mr. Belvedere, Give me a Break, The Nanny.  Here the nanny is future nun Maria (Julie Andrews), and the family belongs to the stern Captain Von Trapp of the Austrian army (Christopher Plummer).  After they learn joie de vivre, the family hits it big as professional singers, and finally they escape from the Nazis by climbing over the hillside into Switzerland.



There is no beefcake or buddy-bonding.

There are no gay or gay-vague characters, except maybe Max Detweiler, who becomes the children's agent.

 In 1965 he was played by Richard Haydn, who was gay in real life.  This scene does not appear in the movie.

Maybe there's a gay connection in the cast?

Julie Andrews, of course, went on to play a woman disguised as a drag queen in Victor/Victoria (1982).

Christopher Plummer  won an Academy Award at the age of 82, for playing a gay man who comes out after retirement in Beginners (2010).  In the top photo, he seems to be having a little loincloth malfunction in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969).

Nicholas Hammond (left), one of the two boys in Von Trapp's mostly female family, played Spider-Man on tv (1977-78), where he is adequately cute.  He was married for only four years, and is rumored to be gay.

Not a lot of gay connection there.

What about the real life Von Trapp Family, lead by patriarch Georg Ritter Von Trapp (1888-1947)?  Ok, they were professional singers long before they met Maria, and they were Italian citizens who didn't need to escape Germany -- they just bought train tickets.  After the War, they opened a lodge in Stowe, Vermont.  

Most of the kids eventually married, although Agathe may have been gay: she ran a kindergarten with her "friend of 50 years," Mary Louise Kane.

Still not a lot of gay connection.

The Sound of Music Live! (2013) starred Carrie Underwood as Maria and Stephen Moyer (left) as Captain Von Trapp, Christian Borle (second photo), who plays a lot of gay characters, made his Max Detweiler as gay-vague as possible.

Not much there, either.

So the gay connection of The Sound of Music consists mostly of bulges?

See also: Charles in Charge

Mr. Belvedere

My Fair Lady.

James MacArthur's Fade Out Kiss

James MacArthur  had already made a cinematic splash in The Young Stranger (1957), in which his character overtly falls in love with a buddy, when Disney hired him as an Adventure Boy, one of the stable of young, muscular, attractive teens who would represent "the epitome of young masculinity" (others included Tommy Kirk, Kurt Russell, Tim Considine, Kevin Corcoran, and Jeff East), MacArthur played Disney Adventure Boys four times: in The Light in the Forest (1958), Third Man on the Mountain (1959), Kidnapped (1960), and Swiss Family Robinson (1960). Unfortunately, the Disney version always required him to kiss a girl, regardless of how alien girl-craziness was to the original story.

In Conrad Richter’s original novel Light in the Forest (1953), the white boy raised by Indians bonds with boys and rejects girls.  In the Disney version, there is only a subtle homoerotic subtext between True Son  (MacArthur) and his mentor Del Hardy (Fess Parker).  But the beefcake was stunning: True Son is shirtless almost every scene, his chest and shoulders embossed with a Technicolor glow. When he is tied to a stake, his face, painted black and white, melts into a stoic mask, but his bare chest remains bright.

All Disney Adventure moves must have a fade-out kiss, so scriptwriter Lawrence Edward Watkin dug through the novel to find a servant girl, mentioned fleetingly, and transformed her into the “love interest” Shenandoe (Carol Lynley). She teaches True Son how to dance, hold hands, and kiss.

He makes mistakes, at first: at a party, he finds a ring hidden in a piece of cake. He is supposed to present it to the one he loves best, so he gives it to Del Hardy. Del corrects him, “You don’t give it to a man. You give it to the girl you love the best.” True Son has learned that modern American adolescents must express heterosexual desire.

The movie concludes with True Son and Shenandoe kissing, as the music swells. The Light in the Forest, the meaning of life, has paradoxically switched from “the wild beloved freedom of the Indian” in the Richter novel into heterosexual love.

Swiss Family Robinson (1960) also combines beefcake and the fade-out kiss.  Both national treasure James MacArthur and nineteen-year-old Tommy Kirk are bare-chested and bronzed in nearly every scene.

But early on, Father and Mother Robinson worry that, if the family is stranded in their desert island Paradise forever, their sons will grow up without girls to ogle. Dad asks, “Don’t you sometimes feel this is the life we were meant to live?” Mom responds, “It’s wonderful now, but what about tomorrow? What about our sons? What future is there for them? They’d never know what it is like to be married. . .what it’s like to have a family”

The dearth of females precipitates the decision of Fritz (MacArthur) and Ernst (Kirk) to explore the other side of the island, where they become not chums but competitors: they encounter a puzzlingly sissy “boy,” Bertie, who turns out to be a girl, Roberta (Janet Munro).

There is a girl in the original novel, an “English cousin” that no one bothers to fall in love with, but in the Disney version Fritz and Ernst spend the rest of the movie posturing, flirting, and fist-fighting over her. Roberta is always talking about how she misses London, with its color and excitement, but at the end of the movie she refuses rescue, deciding to stay with Fritz and found a colony.

“Two people,” Roberta says, “if they have each other, what more could they want?” Fritz replies, “I guess. . .to be alone.” Then they kiss as Ernst grimaces.

Ernst goes off to Europe to be educated: Fritz, Bertie, and their heterosexual desire are necessary to bring American-style civilization to the tropics, and boy-pals are merely a hindrance.

After retiring from Disney, MacArthur became well-known as an adult actor, especially as Dano on the long-running tv series Hawaii Five-O.  But he rarely had any shirtless shots or homoerotic buddy-bonding.  When asked if he would be interested in doing a big-screen version of Hawai Five-O, he said "Not as Dano.  Maybe an old man ogling the girls on the beach."  So he wants to be cast as a perv?

He died in 2010.

13 Things I Hate About Will and Grace

Will and Grace (1998-2005) was a multiple-Emmy award winning sitcom about a gay man, Will (Eric McCormack), his best friend Jack (Sean Hayes), and their heterosexual female life partners, Grace (Debra Messing) and Karen (Megan Mullaley).

I hated it.  I still hate it.  I can't watch an episode without seething with rage and trying to kill my tv set.

Here are the top 10 things I hate about it.

1. I know that some gay men (and straight men) have feminine mannerisms, but every gay male character on the program, except for a few famous guest stars, prances.  They wear face cream and listen to show tunes and call each other "Mary."  Will goes even farther.  He believes that he is a girl, literally.  In one episode, Will's visiting cousin states that he needs "a woman's opinon" about something, and Will immediately chirps "Sure, I'll be glad to help."

3. Every gay stereotype you ever heard is absolutely true.  Grace or Karen frequently make astonishingly homophobic statements, and Will has to admit that they are correct.  In one episode, a gay man has to pretend to be interested in a woman, but he doesn't know how.  Grace says: "Treat her like your mother."  Will protests, "That's homophobic!  All gay men aren't in love with their mothers. . .um. . .ok, ok, treat her like your mother."

4. Gay men like sex with women.  A lot.  Will/Grace and Jack/Karen are always cuddling, smooching, pawing at each other.  Will and Jack occasionally kiss other women, too.

5. But they like sex with men more.  That's right, gayness is a sexual preference.  You have to try both sexes, and decide which one you prefer, like deciding between strawberry and chocolate ice cream.  In one episode, Will admits that he had sex with a woman in order to "be sure."

6. They like sex with men, but relationships are heterosexual. Will gets married to his cop beau in the last episode, but before that he had 3,000 episodes paired with Grace.  And the last episode fast-forwards to reveal Jack and Karen living together for 20 years.  Same-sex bonds come and go, but heterosexual bonds are forever.

7. There is no gay culture.  Will and Jack must spend all of their time among heterosexuals, because there are no gay political groups, social groups, sports groups, churches, or community centers.  Just a lot of gay bars, and in one episode a bookstore.



8. All gay men are affluent sophisticated lawyers who live in Manhattan and have gym-toned physiques and listen to show tunes and are utterly self-absorbed.  Of course, the straight women are the same.

9. There are no lesbians.  Will is constantly telling people that he is gay, but Grace only states that she is a woman. She doesn't have to mention that she's heterosexual, because lesbians don't exist.  Except in one episode, where they were portrayed as butch, predatory, and "confused."  One "changes back" into heterosexual after kissing Will.

10. Sean Hayes utterly refused to acknowledge that he was gay during the entire run of the show.  I can't imagine how much internalized homophobia and self-hatred it takes to do that.  Of course, if he actually believed all of the contemptible things his character was saying about gay people, I can understand why he would hate himself.

11. Leslie Jordan plays a flamboyantly feminine gay man -- even more feminine than the other characters, so much that Karen's homophobia changes from ridicule to hatred.  But he insists that he is straight.

12. Grace and Karen throw around "fags" and "homos" with utter abandon, and instead of calling them out for their homophobia, Will and Jack meekly accept the abuse.

13.  Sorry, I couldn't confine myself to 10.  But this is the last one: Will doesn't know that gay men exist.
In one episode, Will is going on a blind date.  As he sits in a restaurant waiting for his date, he strikes up a conversation with the man at the next table.  He states that he, too, is waiting for a blind date. 

At this point, what would you conclude?

Right.

But Will doesn't. He says: "You know how women are, they always like to make an entrance." He is gay, and yet he is absolutely certain that every man on Earth is straight.

Postscript:  I just heard some horrible news.  After 12 blissfully gay-free years, self-hating Willa nd Jack -- and their fag-hating  life partners Grace and Karen --are returning for another season of homophobic hijinks.  Somehow, with the new fascist regime and the throwback of gay rights to the 1950s, it seems fitting.

Swiss Family Robinson

When I was a kid in the 1960s, most books were gender-coded, but both boys and girls received copies of Gulliver's Travels and the Johann David Wyss classic Swiss Family Robinson (1812) for their bookshelves.  Boys were expected to read it for the shipwreck and savages, and girls for the family setting up housekeeping on the desert island.

I didn't like it much. I had bad memories of The Book of Cute Boys that my father threw out the window.

 At least there was no heterosexual fade-out kiss -- the family encounters another shipwreck survivor, an "American cousin" whom no one bothers to fall in love with.  But there was little homoromance, either, with no one on the island but family.

But the tropical setting provided some beefcake potential, so I kept a close watch on the various film and tv versions.  Unfortunately, many of them upped the role of The Girl to create a heterosexual romance.

1. Swiss Family Robinson (1975-76). The  tv version with Adam-12 hunk Martin Milner and up-and-coming bodybuilder Willie Aames. No girl-craziness, but everyone was fully clothed throughout.


2. Swiss Family Robinson (1960).  The Disney version with James MacArthur, Tommy Kirk (left), and Kevin Corcorran.  Muscular physiques everywhere, but both Fritz and Ernst swoon over a girl.

3. The New Swiss Family Robinson (1998) is set in the modern era and adds a French-speaking jungle girl (Yumi Iwama), who kidnaps older brother Shane (John Asher of Weird Science).  They dive Tarzan-and-Jane style into the lagoon, kiss, and plan a wedding.

But at least younger brother Todd (Blake Bashoff expresses no interest.

4. Stranded (2002), with Jesse Spencer as Fritz.  Nuff said.