GLR January-February Supplement 2024

Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom benefited from Strayhorn’s friend ship as much as from his skill as an arranger and pianist. Lena Horne, in a 1980 interview, commented: “We were both at that time necessary to other people, me as a provider, Billy as Duke’s collaborator. But when we were together we were free of all that.” Strayhorn’s relationship with Horne was that he wrote, arranged, and polished songs for her nightclub act. (“Billy re hearsed me. He stretched me vocally ... he wrote arrangements that had my feeling in the music.”) It was, Barg remarks, an ex ample of “queer collaborative dynamics at the intersection of the personal, social, and the musical.” Similarly, when it came time to write arrangements for the album Blue Rose: Rosemary Clooney and Duke Ellington and His Orchestra , Strayhorn and Clooney became “soulmates.” Clooney was pregnant and spent a great deal of time in bed as

Strayhorn took care of her and nursed her back to health. When they did work together, Clooney remarked: “[I]t was like I was working with my best friend. I wanted to do my best for him ... [he] was so completely unthreatening and uncontrolling and so completely in charge.” One of the longest sections of the book concerns the cre ation of Strayhorn’s solo project The Peaceful Side , recorded in late-night sessions in an underground studio in Paris with local musicians. Unfortunately, parts of this section are among the most difficult to read. Barg’s intricate reading of Strayhorn’s scores for some of the songs is as complicated as a critic’s ex plication de texte of James Joyce. The section does, however, at test to the freedom and joy that Strayhorn experienced while working with French jazz musicians, most of them queer and Black as well.

Will & Grace & Maurice

C AN YOU IMAGINE an odder throuple? Two books that have on the surface nothing to do with one another and yet form a fas cinating contrast. Maurice is the movie made by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant from E. M. Forster’s novel, which he wrote in 1913—before, one is amazed to learn, he’d ever had sex—but refused to publish in his lifetime, choosing instead to circu late it only among his friends. Will & Grace is an American sitcom that premiered in 1998 on NBC, ran for eight successful sea

and the instances in which it finally was not. Then, too, there was the humor. In one show, Karen, Grace’s heterosexual assis tant at her design business, asks Jack why gay people always resort to sarcasm. But that’s the pot calling the kettle black, since, at a certain point, Karen becomes the mouthpiece for a cynical sort of gay humor that leaves even Jack, Will’s gay best friend, in the dust. In fact, as is so often the case with sitcoms, the two leads in Will& Grace had the show stolen from them by their sidekicks, Jack and Karen. Eventu

A NDREW H OLLERAN

WILL & GRACE by Tison Pugh Wayne State U. Press. 125 pages, $19.99 MAURICE by David Greven McGill Queen’s Univ. Press. 183 pages, $19.95

sons, and then, when Trump appeared on the scene, was revived for three more less-than-stellar seasons. Maurice is placed by media professor David Greven in a tradition of melancholy and lyrical gay films exemplified by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Moun tain , and later Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name . Will &Grace ’s pedigree is more I Love Lucy . When Will & Grace opened, Debra Messing (Grace) pro claimed that “It’s not a gay show. ... The heart of the show is the life and times of two best friends,” and director James Burrows ( Cheers ) declared that “ Will & Grace is my only show that may be perceived as having made a social statement by making au diences feel okay about gay people, but we never set out to do that. It just happened.” “To these statements,” Tison Pugh re sponds, “the only fitting reply is: balderdash, bunkum, and tom myrot.” In fact, gay life was the main subject of the series, one that required walking a fine line between offending the main stream audience—what the creators referred to as “the grand mothers of Oklahoma City”—and dealing with the issue head-on. Opinions will differ as to how they did in that regard. There is, for example, an entire chapter in Pugh’s book devoted to the “gay kiss”—all the ways it was avoided, season after season, Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). 2

ally, it became for me the Jack & Karen show, and finally just the Karen show. That’s because you never knew what was going to come out of Karen’s mouth, but you knew it would be nasty, over-the-top, and imbued with what Mary McCarthy called the “comedy of coldness.” For this reason, there was something hard-nosed about Will &Grace . It always felt like it was coming out of some gay bar in West Hollywood: tough, seasoned, cynical. But, in reality, the show was tasked with a very serious mission: to get the grandmothers of Oklahoma City to be comfortable with gay people. And the way to do that was with gags and zingers. The problem, Pugh points out, is that sitcoms by their very nature are conservative—especially when linked to big corpo rations like NBC. The main characters cannot evolve or change; they’re what people tune in to see each week. Thus, in Will & Grace , the writers had to come up with minor characters, and many subplots, to deal with all the issues that gay people face in real life. The page or more in Pugh’s book that lists the minor characters and plotlines that were spun to cover the varieties of gay experience is impressive. You’d need a diagram and pointer to follow the story lines. In the two-part finale of the original se ries, Will & Grace not only end up married to other people, but their children have met in college and are about to be married to each other. How’s that for a traditional ending? (When the series was revived for three more seasons, this fairy-tale ending

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