Tag Archives: fun home

Gay On Broadway: The Best Queer and Genderqueer Characters

Broadway is gay. Correction: many Broadway actors are gay, but the stories they tell are decidedly heterosexual.

This is changing, slowly. To celebrate the 2016-2017 Broadway season, let’s look at some of the best – and most unconventional – queer characters to grace the Great White Way.

By “queer,” I’m referring to lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters; genderqueer and genderfluid characters; and pansexual polyamorous couples. I would love to include asexuals on this list, but I have yet to find AroAce: The Musical. #AsexualRepresentationMatters

Maureen and Joanne from RENT

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Maureen and Joanne are everyone’s favorite lesbian couple. By favorite, I mean that they’re awful for each other, but that’s what makes them so perfect.

If you haven’t witnessed their rollercoaster love story, start with The Tango Maureen, and try not to cry about that one girl you fell in love with even though she was bad for you and cheated on you but you loved her anyway because she was just so addictive. Then watch Take Me or Leave Me, remember that you’re still in love with that girl, and call her six times.

Dr. Charlotte and Cordelia from Falsettos

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The AIDS epidemic provides a bleak backdrop for Falsettos. Fortunately, the audience gets to spend time with the adorable lesbian couple Dr. Charlotte and Cordelia, who offer the gay protagonist friendship, hope and sweeping high notes in Unlikely Lovers.

Alison Bechdel from Fun Home

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Alison Bechdel is annoying. At least, she is in Fun Home. Her character is overly introspective, a bit neurotic, and not particularly likable.

Then again, most of us are, and that’s why Alison Bechdel is high up this list: Songs like “I’m Changing My Major (to Sex with Joan),” which explores sex, heartbreak and lesbian puberty in college, are painfully relatable. I triple-majored.

Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch

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Hedwig is the queer character to end all queer characters. Or, the queer character to begin all queer characters, since Hedwig inspired many of Broadways’s more genderbent personalities.

Hedwig will have you laughing so hard that you forget you’re watching the tragic tale of a person who was mutilated, exploited, abandoned and essentially left for dead. The music’s good, though. Plus, you will get to see mouth-watering Rebecca Naomi Jones play a genderqueer Eastern European man named Yitzhak, which is yum-mee.

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The Entire Cast of Passing Strange

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We just had sex, sing the main characters of this avante-garde Black punk European acid trip of a musical. And by main characters, I mean five people. Yes, Amsterdam is apparently all about cigarettes, philosophy and five-somes in grimy apartments.

This musical is full of amazing lines, but one of the best is: “I’m a philosophy professor and part-time sex worker. You could say I hook, therefore I am.”

Plus, you get to watch Rebecca Naomi Jones have five-way sex in leather pants. Have I mentioned: Delish?

Honorable Mention:

John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton from Hamilton

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I’m not saying John Laurens and Alexander Hamilton were definitely gay. But I’m saying that history says that they definitely might have been gay.

And you can read fanfiction of it.

Out Singer Courtney Barnett Nominated For Grammy, Along We Several Other Out Female Artists

Courtney Barnett has been nominated for Grammy in the elite Best New Artist category – beating some big names in the business to get there (as Madonna, Rihanna and Justin Bieber were snubbed).

Barnett recieved a massive plug this year when she appeared on the The Ellen Show, the same day that (oh, no big deal) Michelle Obama was in attendance, which gave Barnett arguably one of her most high-profile audiences to date.

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Other gay musicians to shine include are neo-soul group the Internet, featuring out lesbian rapper Syd the Kyd, who are nominated for best Best Urban Contemporary Album. The rapper was a longtime member of the now-defunct hip-hop collective Odd Future, which also featured out R&B artist Frank Ocean.

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Out musician Brandi Carlile is nominated for her fantastic album The Firewatcher’s Daughter in Best Americana Album category.

Legendary folk singer and out lesbian Janis Ian is nominated for Best Spoken Word Album, along with television actress Jean Smart (Designing Women) for their reading of Isabel Miller’s novel Patience and Sarah, a lesbian love story.

Bisexual blues singer Bettye LaVette (she detailed affairs with men and women in her 2013 memoir A Woman Like Me), is nominated for Best Blues Album.

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The artists and producers behind Fun Home, featuring music from the Broadway show, are nominated for Best Musical Theater Album. The show is based on lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s memoir of the same name.

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Lesbian composer Laura Karpman’s Ask Your Mama, featuring words by the late gay poet Langston Hughes, has been nominated in three classical categories: Best Classical Compendium, Best Classical Engineered Album, and Best Classical Producer.

Also, although the band itself features no out LGBT members, Los Tigres Del Norte created a buzz this year when it released the album Realidades, featuring “Era Diferente,” a song about a lesbian teenager who falls in love with her best friend. Realidades is nominated in this category. They have been nominated for Best Regional Mexican Music Album

Smash-Hit Lesbian Musical ‘Fun Home’ Wins Big at Tony Awards (Video & Pics)

Fun Home, the smash-hit Broadway musical based on lesbian author Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, took home five awards at the 69th Annual Tony Awards last night.

The show not only won the award for Best Musical, but also saw Tonys handed out to Michael Cerveris for Best Performance by an Actor in a Lead Role, Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Direction of a Musical for director Sam Gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4bV3IP_Zww

The show is based on the best-selling memoir by graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, who is openly lesbian, whose father was closeted and ran the family funeral home.

Lisa Kron, who was interviewed in HRC’s Equality magazine, said.

This is extremely deep work. We have put our heart and souls into it. We had no idea whether the show would fly or not… [Fun Home] not just on a lesbian protagonist, but it’s a butch lesbian protagonist … one of the most invisible creatures in the cultural world.”

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