GLR November-December 2024

I N AN EARLY SCENE in Warner Brothers’ hit musical 42nd Street (1933), Peggy Sawyer, a naïve aspir ing actress, accidentally walks into the dressing room of Billy Lawler, a young, good-looking actor who’s getting ready for a Broadway show rehearsal. Billy (played by Dick Powell), caught wearing only his underwear, jumps up in surprise and yells at Peggy (Ruby Keeler), who had mistaken him for the show’s stage manager. “Weren’t you expecting me?” asks the startled and confused Peggy. “Well, not exactly,” answers Billy. “But I’m afraid you’ll do.” Billy’s line is a fleeting and subtle acknowledgment of the possibility that he might have preferred someone else—i.e., a man—to find him half-naked in his dressing room. In fact, the line is a wry nod at his “earlier life” as a gay man—in Bradford Ropes’ 42nd Street (1932), the novel that served as the basis for the 1933 film and the 1980 stage musical version. (Para doxically, the wild success of these adaptations led to the near Joseph M. Ortiz, professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, is the author of Gordon Merrick and the Great Gay American Novel . 40 email discussions are fascinating, the format keeps the emotion at a distance; one wishes they could speak in person. Josephine opens her apartment to the protestors, helping to organize events and articulate the group’s mission. On one of Youssef’s few visits, she guesses he is gay, joking that he is the only man not to hit on her. She and fellow protestor Khalil are deeply in love, and they both react strongly against the funda mentalist Muslim faction’s attempts to co-opt their group. Khalil is captured by security forces and brutally tortured. These scenes are difficult to read, with painful electrocutions and whippings, as well as sexual assaults. Khalil ends the novel ab solutely broken. Bilal is a protestor who begins to align the group with fun damentalist Muslims, who enforce their harsh interpretation of Islam with violence. When the group wants to distribute gifts to families near Christmas, the religious faction demands no singing, firing into the air and ending the festivities when this is disobeyed. Bilal sides with the fundamentalists, even urging Josephine and Khalil to marry, which they absolutely refuse to do. This religious takeover adds to the sense of futility in this short novel; what starts as a hopeful, idealistic revolt against an oppressive government ends in violence, pain, separation, and death, with seemingly hardly any chance of success. I N HIS MEMOIR Crooked Teeth , award-winning author Danny Ra madan speaks directly to readers, asking in the first chapter if he can trust us with his life story, if we “will see not only my story but also my art.” He refuses to go into detail about his six weeks of imprisonment and torture in Syria, explaining that describing

it would neither help him process the experience nor help us un derstand his story. Still, he shares plenty of trauma, from his parents’ near-con stant fighting and his mother’s delusional outbursts to his an grily coming out to his father during a confrontation. Working at a newspaper in Egypt at the start of the Arab Spring, he suf fers a concussion from a mob attack while assisting a reporter covering the protests and the government response. After emi grating to Canada as a refugee, his sponsor turns out to be a con trolling, needy stalker. He also recounts many moments of joy. As a teenager, he has a relationship of sorts with an older man, who nurtures his creativity and introduces him to gay culture. While technically not a boyfriend, when telling this experience to Canadian high school students, he refers to the man as his first boyfriend, to give students hope that if even a Syrian teenager can find love, so can they. After visiting the seedy Cinema Bilbos, he meets a trans woman who introduces him to a community of queer peo ple, finding an alternative family. Years later, as an adult, he turns his home in Syria into a safe place for queer folks to con gregate. At a benefit he helps throw, he meets a recently arrived lesbian couple deeply grateful for this familiar, welcoming place, amid the chaos and mystery of Canada. The memoir is partly about Ramadan’s trauma and his at tempts to deal with it. The title comes from one of his triggers, teeth, and images of teeth recur throughout the book. In one scene he counts the faces of people murdered in an attack, to get an accurate account for a news report; soon, all he can see is their teeth.

Putting Broadway on the Silver Screen

disappearance of the novel, which until 2021 had been out of print for decades.) In Ropes’ novel, Billy is an ambitious gay actor who’s having an affair with the show’s producer, Julian Marsh, a legendary Broadway impresario well known in the business as a “queer.” Marsh’s sexuality is tolerated (though ridiculed) by his straight colleagues because of his ability to engi neer theatrical blockbusters. In the 1933 film, directed by Lloyd Bacon and with a screenplay by Rian James and James Sey

J OSEPH M.O RTIZ

GREASEPAINT PURITAN Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of

Bradford Ropes by Maya Cantu Univ. of Michigan Press 329 pages, $29.95

mour, Billy’s affair with Marsh is completely erased; he is a verifiable heterosexual who ends up in a storybook romance with Peggy. As a gay man himself, Ropes would have been very famil iar with the sexual politics of Broadway and Hollywood. Shortly after finishing high school in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1921, the theatrically gifted Ropes moved to New York and began a successful career in vaudeville. An exceptionally tal ented dancer known for his high kicks, the eighteen-year-old Ropes adopted the stage name “Billy Bradford” and was soon performing in Broadway’s most prestigious vaudeville the aters. For the next ten years, Ropes was a luminous presence

TheG & LR