Gay Representation in Musical Theatre

Ryan Donovan’s book Queer Approaches In Musical Theatre (2023) signals that shift in queer musical theatre scholarship from coding to explicit representation. Because musical narratives have grown beyond gay and lesbian identities, queer has emerged as the more inclusive term (in theoretical and colloquial definitions), which contrasts a straight, heteronormative, binary, cisgender world in many forms. While musicals have a “histori- cally gay form,” Donovan argues, they have “not necessarily always [had] a queer one” (Donovan, 2023, p. 9). Donovan uses queer as a contrast to gay not only to include a broader spectrum of queer identities but also to signal a clash against heteronormativity and homonormativity (p. 8). A mainstream gay Broadway musical like La Cage aux Folles was a precursor to queer Broadway productions like Fun Home or A Strange Loop, which pressed against conformity both in explicit queer language and linear form...