Thanks for coming out

The onslaught of gay weddings is the endpoint in a long process of overcoming the closet. Because only once you’re willing to stand up to being labeled a “fag” can you demand equal access to a rite as conservative as marriage.
By David Ehrenstein
An Advocate.com exclusive posted April 6, 2004

“Faggot!” Jerry shouted at him over and over. “Do you have to walk like a faggot? Can’t you move like a man, you faggot?”

It was 1957, a new musical called West Side Story was in rehearsal, and as recounted by Arthur Laurents in his no-holds-barred memoir Original Story By, these venomous words were spewing from the mouth of director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and aimed at the show’s star Larry Kert. How could one gay man attack another so publicly in such a hateful fashion?

And this was West Side Story, a show which in addition to Robbins and Kert boasted such gay talents as composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and librettist Laurents—whose book for the show was inspired by an offhand remark made by a gay man named Montgomery Clift. Yet in front of the entire company Jerome Robbins called Larry Kert “faggot”—and later, to compound the offense, slept with Kert’s boyfriend. Clearly this contretemps hails from an era that has ended. Yet I couldn’t help but think of its relation to the tumultuous changes going on in gay and lesbian life today.

No, I’m not saying that no one is calling anyone else “faggot” anymore. And self-loathing gay men are scarcely a thing of the past. But in 1957, Jerome Robbins could get away with attacking Larry Kert because the very idea of a gay man standing up and defending himself was an utterly radical one. Next to no one was “openly gay” back then. In fact, many members of the “homophile” organizations that sprang up in the early 1950s worked in semisecrecy and total anonymity.

http://www.advocate.com/html/stories/912/912_ehrenstein.asp