Happy Birthday, Judy

One of them is the closet. You children have NO IDEA what it was like in the "Before Time." Gay bars were clandestine speakeasy joints with watered drinks, Mafia thugs and police raids. Same sex couples couldn't be seen in public lest they risk losing their jobs. And if they DID lose their jobs there was no legal recourse whatsoever. Hey, it could be worse. Your parents could toss you in the Laughing Academy and have you lobotomized and/or castrated.

Judy became a cult heroine partly because there were so many gay people in her life to begin with but also because her concerts were the only place in the pre-Stonewall world where gays could publically congregate without fear of approbrium. William Goldman wrote a sneeringly homophobic essay about this that you can find in his book "The Season."

You children don't give ONE PIDDLING SHIT about that today.

The other half of Judy was her talent. As the Incomparable Hildegarde said a few years back, just prior to shuffling off this mortal coil, "Talent is a thing of the past!"

Truer words were never --

Today we have half-wit nonentities on American Idol yowling like rutting cats. THAT is supposed to be talent.

I'd rather watch a carnival geek chew the head off a live chicken.

Here's a clip of her singing "I Don't Care" in In the Good Old Summertime.

For me this says it all

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhwFAmk7cRQ 

I am old enough to have been luck enough to see Judy in concert!

No one has ever come close to bringing her level of "star" to a concert hall. 

I don't think Judy is as passe as your article seems to be saying.  Look at Rufus' concert & album of Judy! at the Palace.

Her place as a Gay Icon will remain.                                                  Sometimes we must just remind the younger crowd about the past.  Just as much as we "older" gays need to understand how very different life is for the newer Gay generation.

"Who the hell are you to make sweeping judgments about what I do or do not know or care about?"

I am SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED ! of course.

Now who are these new young alleged talents you speak of?

Oh you Haunters of the Dark. How you try my patience!

I still think it's funny that I am a judy garland fan..atic (my room would scare you a bit) but i had no idea she was a gay icon. a teacher had to pull me aside one day and was like "liz, we get it. you're gay. that's great. enough about judy garland, ok?"

O_o??? thank god for the internet or i would probably still not know...haha :-P

I have read a lot of stories about her concerts....I think there were many things about her that drew her audience in. she had a lot of demons, but strangely enough, she found a way to find humor in them.

I think maybe her audience felt that she was their escape and they were HER escape.

Future epitaph: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

I only own 2 Garland discs (well, one of them is her 4-disc box set--but it was a gift!) and 2 of her movies.  However, to ignore her impact on popular music as well as gay culture is just plain ignorant.  Pre-1960's, what white female was singing popular music full-out without turning it into "safe" white-bread pablum a la Doris Day, Patti Page, et all?  (Peggy Lee was brilliant, but she played it way, way cool.)  Garland was one of the few who was unafraid to really sing from the gut, in a forerunner of what we might call "soul" music.  The box set has a fascinating interview with Aretha Franklin, who talks extensively about her admiration for Garland and how Garland's style impacted her own singing (along with healthy dollops of rhythm and blues and gospel).  And of course without Garland, there's no Streisand, no Midler, no Joplin--no white woman unafraid to musically "color outside the lines."  Joplin, tragically, followed Judy to an early grave; however, Streisand, Midler, & Madonna have all decided to conciously NOT emulate Garland's tortured private life, and to survive and thrive even if it meant being called out as a bitch now and then.  More power to them.  (Whitney Houston, tragically, frequently seems to be emulating the Garland/Billie Holliday template.)

I read at least one book ("The Gay Metropolis"?) which tried to actively downplay the Judy Garland connection to Stonewall, as if it were something embarassing and trite.  However, it certainly seems like there was some sort of heavy influence on the gay community right after her death and funeral, so draw your own conclusions.  When Pansy Division (whom I adore) sang in one of their songs "We can't relate to Judy Garland," they were showing off their youthful ignorance; anyone could relate to Garland, or Patsy Cline, or Billie Holliday--all they had to do was listen to the pure, undiluted emotion in their voices.  (I worked with a woman in music retail who listened to nothing but the heaviest of death thrash metal--and Judy Garland; for her, the emotional investment and sing-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it qualities were the same in both genres.) 

I was substitute teaching a middle school class one day in an acting class, and their assignment was to watch "The Wizard of Oz" on video.  On a hunch, I asked if some folks had never seen it; about 5 Latina girls raised their hands.  I watched them very intently during the film, and one of them raised her hand during "Over the Rainbow" to whisper to me, "Is that really her singing?"  I whispered back yes.  The girl frowned at the TV and murmued, almost to herself, "Oh....she had a really pretty voice."  My eyes almost filled with tears; where does one even begin to explain?

On another note: a New Yorker article of the 90's claimed that the "friend of Dorothy" moniker was actually misascribed to Garland, and actually referred to an African American doyenne of Manhattan who had a large coterie of gay intellectuals and writers around her in the mid-20th century for a couple decades.  I wish I could remember her last name--it was something like Dorothy Dean, or maybe Dorthea Dean.  But because of the Garland/Dorothy connection and the gay community, people misassumed the "Dorothy" referred to Garland.  Now it's one of those things which will probably never be sorted out.

She was a friend of mine. To say she was "quite a character" is putting it mildly. A chapter of Hilton Als book "The Women" is devoted to Dorothy -- who preferred "Fruit Fly") to "Fag Hag." She was short, thin, black and so fearsome that Max's Kansas City used her as a bouncer. She can be seen at the conclusion of Warhol's My Hustler and in a segment of Jean-Claude Van Italie's porn filck American Cream

http://www.warholstars.org/indfoto/idorothy.html

Dorothy cited as her greatest achievement "I danced the 'Tennessee Waltz' with Tennessee Williams in Tennessee!"

As for "Friend of Dorothy" -- it's Judy Garland