GLR November-December 2024

on the vaudeville circuit, touring exten sively throughout America and Europe, where he was lauded by critics as the “elastic, double-jointed man.” By the early 1930s, however, vaude ville was in steep decline, in part because of the popularity of motion pictures but also because of the rise of “elite mod ernist literary drama” associated with playwrights like Eugene O’Neill. Sens ing that his dancing days were num bered, Ropes turned his attention to writing and, while still on tour, wrote the manuscript for 42nd Street , a backstage novel about a fictitious Broadway musi cal production. The novel was a minor sensation and the movie rights followed almost immediately. Ropes wrote two more backstage novels, Stage Mother (1933) and Go Into Your Dance (1934), likewise fictionalized accounts of the Broadway theater scene of the 1920s. He eventually settled into a busy career as a Hollywood screenwriter, churning out re

Donald Brian (1877–1948). Maya Cantu’s meticulously researched biography, Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes , reveals the ex tent to which Ropes based his backstage novels on his own Broadway experi ences. As much a work of theater history as a biography, Cantu’s impressive book recreates New York’s theatrical scene in the 1920s, a business that provided new opportunities for artistic gay men but that also strictly circumscribed their behavior by forcing them to conceal their sexual identity and bolster the image of straight, middle-class masculinity. Through a sen sitive reading of the novels, Cantu shows how Ropes imagined a “queer resistance” to the theater’s inherent homophobia through the figure of the chorus boy: the ubiquitous (and typically gay) Broadway performer who responds to his stigma in the business with a sharp tongue and a “camp” sensibility. No doubt Ropes saw

Cover of the 2023 edition.

liable comedies like Laurel and Hardy’s Nothing But Trouble (1944) and Abbott and Costello’s The Time of Their Lives (1946). Eventually, however, Ropes found it hard to adjust to the changing film industry, and in the early 1950s he moved back to Boston and started writing novels again. When he died unexpectedly in 1966, he was at work on several novels, in cluding a biographical novel about the Broadway musical star

himself as such a figure. Cantu does such a thorough job of establishing the theatri cal and literary milieux of Ropes and his novels that at times Ropes himself almost recedes into the background. For exam ple, the last fifteen years of his life, which saw some of the most important changes in his career and relationships, are briefly sketched out in the book’s last chapter. His ten-year re lationship with the musician Roswell Jolly Black—probably the most significant romance in his life—merits only four pages. This lack of emphasis is partly due to the fact that Ropes left behind no personal memoirs or letters for historians to pore over. He did, however, give a number of talks and interviews in his lifetime that could have been mined more deeply for biog raphical material. And, as Cantu proves beyond a doubt, Ropes wrote himself into all of his novels. One of the many virtues of Cantu’s book is that it serves as a call to rediscover and read Ropes’ backstage novels—not only for what they reveal about the history of American theater, but also for what they reveal about the life of an important gay figure who might otherwise have been forgotten. &BOOKLOVERS READERS ATTENTION Tim’s Used Books 242 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA timsusedfilms@gmail.com | 508-487-0005 | Open year-round. Are TIM’S USED BOOKS of Provincetown has been traveling throughout the Northeast since 1991, buying book collections, large and small. Scholarly, gay interest, the arts—all genres. Immediate payment and removal.

At Twenty-Six The symptoms of being alive are overall embarrassing. I’m at the will of my bowels, for example, and delude over the joy of crushing the hand soap’s pearls. I get by with friends, blueberries in the morning yogurt and trying on a new word every year’s quarter: overwrought was autumn’s. Lindsey doesn’t think it’s the right way to describe my ruminations, overwrought, but we decide it can be if I need it to be. Oh, twenty-six. The marvel of fresh fruit and chèvre cheesecake sold on the bike path is both mine and nobody’s to keep. It’s all over now, between my fiver & me. And my appetite still takes! I’m completely awed by this girl with the plantain colored hair—her loose tobacco, the way it strings together a smoke. I don’t keep a tab on the sky, its powers, but I expect, when the party is over, to ask, “Who is this lovely girl? Who amI?” M EGHAN S ULLIVAN

November–December 2024

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