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Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black artists invented the Broadway musical, and how they changed America in the process.

I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode “Cole Porter and the Queer Artists Who Invented Broadway.”

From its earliest days, the Broadway musical has, to a large degree, been a queer creation, including its most significant and important positions, and at the highest levels of leadership.

And at least within the world of theatre, these queer artists have, to varying degrees, been able to be out, accepted, and acknowledged.

The levels of this visibility, however, have ebbed and flowed over the decades, as society’s overall attitudes toward queerness have shifted back and forth between periods of tolerance and intolerance.

Several factors have contributed to this strong level of representation within the art form. As I touched on in Episode 2, throughout history. show business as a profession has always existed on the fringes of social respectability.

Throughout most of world history, actors, singers, dancers, and other theater artists have been considered to be only one step away from vagabonds and prostitutes.

So, it would make sense that a profession made up of outcasts would be more accepting of diversity and unconventional lifestyles.

Author Patrick McGilligan points to a long history and tradition of show business being an open door for all types of humanity. And as such, it seems that theater, dance, music, and the arts in general have always been a haven for queer people throughout history and throughout the world.

Now, you could certainly make a case that the American non-musical theater has also had a similar level of queer dominance and influence.

And of course, many of the same artists and producers worked in both the musical and the non-musical worlds.

We, however, will keep our focus on the invention of the American musical and how LGBT people were at the forefront of this unique American invention.

I've compiled a list of 350 of the most significant creators and leaders of the Broadway musical from the very beginning right up through today, and well over 100 of them can be identified as queer.

And queer is an especially appropriate term for those artists who worked during the first 50 years of the musical because many of them cannot be identified as exclusively gay or lesbian.

As you might expect, many were involved in both same sex and traditional heterosexual relationships either by necessity or inclination.

In his groundbreaking study of early gay life in New York City, author George Chauncey writes about the New York theater scene in the early 20th century, and he states that while gay men did not enjoy total acceptance in the Broadway work environment, it did offer them more tolerance than most workplaces.

Some men could be openly gay among their co-workers, he says, and many others were at least unlikely to suffer serious retribution if their homosexuality were discovered.

And in an unpublished memoir written in the 1980s, the Hollywood set and costume designer George Hopkins looked back on his experiences in the turn of the century New York theater scene and remembered it as being saturated with gay culture.

But he added that homosexuality wasn't the casual topic of conversation that it is today.

It's a tricky prospect to determine the sexuality of people who lived between 50 to 100 years ago and left behind very little documentation of their sexual preferences or identities.

And we might ask ourselves, is it any of our business?

I do believe that from a cultural and historical perspective, it is absolutely worth discovering and sometimes even speculating on the sexuality of theater practitioners from this period, because it can reveal the actual and immense contribution of queer artists to our world and culture.

In a positive way, this disrupts the conventional received vision of history and since all of the individuals are long gone, I don't see what harm can come from it.

Even if during their lifetimes they wished to keep their sexuality a secret, we now view it with no shame attached.

I want to begin our story with a man named Charles Frohman, who was, without a doubt, one of the leading theatrical producers during the period when the musical began to emerge.

He was born to a Jewish family in Sandusky, Ohio in 1860, and by the turn of the century, he was running a theatrical empire.

During his career, he produced 700 plays and musicals in both New York and London, including the American premieres of Peter Pan, The Importance of Being Earnest, and a musical we talked about in a previous episode, The Girl from Utah.

Frohman was at the center of a queer circle of leading theater artists that included the playwrights Oscar Wilde, Clyde Fitch, and Somerset Maugham, the superstar Maude Adams and most significantly, his producing and life partner, Charles Dillingham.

Frohman and Dillingham were truly partners in every way. They shared offices and town and country homes, they frequently vacationed and traveled the world together.

Their colleagues in the theater considered them to be and treated them as the equivalent of a heterosexual married couple.

Their close connection continued even after Dillingham married a woman in 1913. His wife may have been a lesbian, and the marriage was very likely a cover for both of them to mask their queerness from the outside world.

This kind of subterfuge was not unusual for the time and certainly understandable since the significant risks of being outed publicly would have been very evident to both Frohman and Dillingham.

They were both close friends of Oscar Wilde and Frohman was his American producer.

In fact in 1895, Frohman went forward with producing the New York premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, even as Oscar Wilde was being put on trial in London for "gross indecency."

That you could be sent to prison for being queer would not have been in any way theoretical for Frohman and Dillingham.

Even so, they were remarkably visible, even in the press, as being unusually close friends and business partners.

In 1915, Frohman was about to sail to England on the ocean liner of the Lusitania, and Dillingham accompanied him to the dock and promised to be there to meet him when he returned.

A few days later, Frohman would go down with the ship when it was sunk by German torpedoes, an event that sparked America's entry into the First World War.

Numerous letters of heartfelt condolence were sent to Dillingham from the Shubert brothers and other theatrical luminaries of the day that addressed him in the same way as they would any other widowed spouse.

Charles Dillingham would continue on a long and spectacular career, producing a string of hit shows, including musicals by Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, and include co-productions with Florence Ziegfeld.

Most importantly, he would nurture and launch the careers of many of the queer artists that would invent the musical.

One of those was the director and designer, Hassard Short.

For over 30 years, he was one of the most sought-after and acclaimed stagers of musicals. He was hailed as a genius of color and movement, and called the ‘Master Magician of Broadway.’

He is credited with numerous innovations in stagecraft and lighting, including eliminating the traditional footlights and replacing them by mounting lights on the balcony rail, as is still standard practice today.

He was born in England and dropped out of school as a teenager to seek a life in the theater. His first stage appearance was in London in 1895, and that led to many other roles.

Then in 1901, he was brought to New York by Charles Frohman, where he had a great deal of success as an actor portraying what he called "Sillyass Englishmen." He did this so well that these kinds of roles became known as ‘Hassard Short Parts.’

As a side job, he began directing special fundraising performances, and it was his staging of an event during the Actor's Equity Association Strike of 1919 that led to his first directing job on Broadway.

It went well, and he was soon working with the best. During the 1920s, he staged several of Irving Berlin's music box revues, as well as Jerome Kern's musical, Sunny, and many others.

From the beginning of his career, he established complete directorial control over his productions. His billing was usually: “staged and lighted by Hassard Short,” but it was often much grander. And, on at least one occasion, it read: “Entire production, including settings, costumes, and lighting, executed under the personal supervision of Mr. Short."

He was especially acclaimed for his staging of three spectacular musical reviews during the 1930s.

The first was Dietz and Schwartz's Three's a Crowd, featuring what critics acclaimed as a breathtaking staging of the song "Body and Soul."

The second was The Bandwagon, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, where he employed stage elevators and turntables to new and striking affect.

The third was Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer, which included what were called "masterpieces of lighting and color control," especially during the song "Easter Parade."

His productions were lavish and spectacular, and he designed and executed them with such impeccable taste and attention to detail that they made Ziegfeld's extravaganzas seem ‘old-fashioned and garrish’ by comparison.

Short often traveled to Europe with his collaborators Moss Hart and Irving Berlin, along with Berlin's family. They went in search of inspiration and new ideas for their productions, and their comings and goings were reported by the newspapers of the day in their Theater and Gossip Columns.

But what the press declined to mention, even though they most certainly knew the full story, was that Short always traveled with his companion, Billy Lad, a slender, bleach-blond, former chorus boy.

Mrs. Irving Berlin would later say this about Hasard and Billy's relationship: "I disapproved, but as time went by, I couldn't help noticing that theirs was the happiest marriage of the group. Mine excepted, of course.”

Hasard Short was likely the model for Julian Marsh, the openly gay, British Broadway director character, in Bradford Ropes' 1932 novel, 42^nd Street, from which the 1933 film, as well as the 1980 stage musical, would be adapted.

The character's queerness is made very clear in the novel, but it was reduced to only a possible subtext in the movie, and he was rewritten as decidedly heterosexual in the stage version.

The name of the character, however, Julian Marsh, was no doubt an echo of Julian Mitchell, the white, straight, Anglo-Saxon Protestant director who was another early directing genius.

Hasard Short and Julian Mitchell were the first to demonstrate what the impact of dynamic musical staging could be, and how that staging could sometimes be of equal importance to the text and music in creating the overall effect of a show.

They would forge a path that a long line of dynamic and mostly queer directors would follow right up to this day.

One of the biggest and highest-paid stars of the Teens on a par with Jolson, Cantor, and Fanny Bryce, was the female impersonator, Julian Eltinge.

He's almost entirely forgotten today, but he was so famous at the time that he even had a theater named after him.

Eltinge's gender illusions were, by all reports, staggeringly good. There was no camp or comment about his performance. Instead, he could entirely convince an audience that he was actually a woman.

Between 1905 and 1915, he starred in five musicals that were created especially for him by top talents such as George M. Cohan, Irving Berlin, PG Wodehouse, and Jerome Kern.

And the shows often had lyrics written by Eltinge himself. This is actor David Sabella recreating a Julian Eltinge performance.

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The plots closely followed the ‘Charlie's aunt’ model and involved situations that required his leading male hero character to dress as a woman in order to solve some plot complication and save the day.

His biggest fans were women who apparently worshipped him.

At the height of his fame, he published Julian Eltinge's magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips and marketed his own line of women's cosmetics, corsets, and shoes.

Offstage, however, he made every effort to quash any suggestion of a possible queer identity. He released publicity photos of himself boxing, hunting, and riding horses as well as stories about him winning barfights.

He eventually left Broadway for Hollywood in between 1914 and 1930. He starred in 12 silent films.

In the 1930s, however, his career went into a fast decline and after his death in 1941, he faded into undeserved obscurity.

The Eltinge Theatre is still there, by the way. When they renovated 42nd Street in 1998, the entire theatre was moved on rails down to the other end of the block and today it's the Empire AMC movie theatre.

It still features a painted ceiling mural of the three muses of Greek myth. Legend has it that all three of them are images of Julian Eltinge in different costumes and poses.

Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you’re enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you’ll want to read my new book - Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, the official release date isn’t until July 24, but the book is on presale now at Amazon and everywhere books are sold. And, if you go to the publisher’s website, Bloomsbury.com, you can use this discount code (GLR BD8) for 20% off of my new book – Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show.

It was Charles Dillingham that introduced Broadway's second major drag star in a lavish musical review that he co-produced with Ziegfeld.

The show was called Miss 1917, and it included songs by Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, McCarthy and Tierney, and Bob Cole and Jay Rosamond Johnson. And the headliner of the show was a man named Bert Savoy.

Already a big star in Vaudeville, Savoy performed a double act with his comedy partner and life-partner, Jay Brennan.

Bert Savoy was born Everett McKenzie, and he reportedly began his drag career performing a hoochie coochie dance in a carnival sideshow in Boston, then perfected that routine in the rough saloons and dance halls of Alaska during the gold rush.

His career, however, really took off in 1915, when he teamed up with Jay Brennan. Their racy dialogue and campy songs turned them into a Vaudeville sensation.

Savoy was one of the first drag performers to develop an overtly queer persona, and his style has been passed down to the Drag Race stars of today.

His routines included signature catchphrases such as, "Oh, you don't know the half of it, Dearie," which probably inspired this Gershwin song.

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He was pure camp on and off the stage.

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After Miss 1917, Savoy and Brennan starred in three more Broadway shows, The Ziegfeld Follies of 1918, The Greenwich Village Follies of 1920, and The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922.

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The story of Bert Savoy's dramatic death is legendary, and by all accounts absolutely true.

On June 26, 1923, at the height of his Broadway stardom, Savoy and his half-brother and two friends were walking along the shore at Long Beach, watching an incoming storm when a loud thunder clap caused Savoy to shout out, "Ain’t Miss God cutting up something awful?” or something along those lines, and he was immediately struck by a bolt of lightning and died.

For a while after that, Brennan continued to perform the act quite successfully with another partner who copied all of Savoy's mannerisms and catchphrases.

Brennan later became a screenwriter in Hollywood and died in 1961 at the age of 78. Film superstar Mae West would later confess that she had based much of her distinctive persona, comedy style, and mannerisms on Bert Savoy.

(Mae West): "Well, when I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better."

Because of his untimely death, Savoy just missed what is now called the "Panzy Craze" of the 1920s and early 30s, which he had probably helped to inspire.

The Panzy Craze was a flourishing of overtly queer performers and overtly queer songs and comedy material that created a sensation in nightclubs and vaudeville shows during the era, and even had some impact on Broadway.

During its height, Eddie Cantor interpolated a song called "Masculine Women, Feminine Men" into his hit Broadway show Kid Boots.

The song was recorded by a number of people, but unfortunately not Eddie Cantor. The singer here is Irving Kaufman.

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The song was written by Broadway songwriters James Monaco and Edgar Leslie.

During the 1920s, queer culture flourished in New York, Berlin, Paris, and other major cities around the world. However, even during this period of relative openness, some of them would struggle with accepting their sexuality and others would revel in it.

This brings us to one of a handful of Broadway songwriters whose name would become world famous and whose songs and persona are so inextricably linked that they became brands unto themselves.

Even today, the name "Cole Porter" conjures up an art deco vision of glamour, wit, and sophistication. He was also one of the few that wrote both words and music for his songs and always with brilliant craftsmanship.

Stephen Sondheim contends that technically, in both music and lyrics, no one's better than Porter and few are his equals.

All in all, he wrote 28 Broadway musicals and more than 1,000 songs, including more than 50 enduring hits that remain some of the funniest, most romantic, and most beloved songs of all time.

Cole Porter was born in 1891 in the sleepy little town of Peru, Indiana. His grandfather, J.O. Cole, was the richest man in Indiana, having amassed a fortune during the Gold Rush, and he had Cole's life all mapped out for him.

He would go East to study law and then return to join the family business.

However, Cole's equally strong-willed mother Kate had other ideas. She felt that Cole had artistic gifts, and she began his musical training early: violin at six, piano at eight, and with her help, little Cole even wrote an operetta at the age of 10.

Cole's father was an unassertive man who played a lesser role in Cole's upbringing, although he was an amateur poet, which may have had some influence.

When he was 14-years-old, Cole was sent east to Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. He brought his piano with him and found that his skill at entertaining made him quite popular.

In 1909, he entered Yale University, where he majored in English, minored in music, and studied French. He was an early member of the famous singing group, The Whiffenpoofs, and president of the Glee Club.

While at Yale, he wrote over 300 songs, including the football fight song “Bulldog,” and “Bingo Eli Yale,” which are still sung today. He also composed scores for several musical comedies that were mounted by the dramatic society.

He quickly fell in with a group of upperclassmen who were all wealthy, homosexual, and devoted to art, theater, music, and wit, including his lifelong friend, Monty Woolley.

As described in the book Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, the homosexual scene at Yale in the teens was typical of the situation in wealthy American circles. Faculty staff and students knew that there were homosexuals on campus, but they were young men from some of the country's wealthiest and most influential families and so were fairly immune to criticism or harassment.

After graduating from Yale, he enrolled in Harvard Law School as he had promised his grandfather, but he soon switched to music.

In 1915, two songs that he had written for Yale shows were placed in the Broadway musicals Hands Up, and Miss Information.

And the following year, he wrote the complete score for a patriotic comic operetta called See America First. Unfortunately, this show was a quick flop and closed after only 15 performances.

Despondent, he spent the next year loafing around New York City and then went to Paris during World War I, where he worked for a war relief organization, but his later claim that he had joined the French Foreign Legion is probably an exaggeration.

While in Paris, he met Linda Lee Thomas, a wealthy Kentucky-born divorcee 8 years or 14 years his senior, depending which book she referenced.

In her youth, she was known as the most beautiful woman in America. They married in 1919. Linda knew all about Cole's sexual orientation, but having been brutally abused by her first husband, she was not interested in a sexual relationship.

Cole and Linda's partnership was mutually advantageous. They shared the same interest, and the marriage gave Linda continued social status and Cole a glamorous heterosexual façade.

But by all reports, there was real love and affection between them, and they remained married until Linda's death in 1954. In 1923, Cole's grandfather died, and as promised, because he had not become a lawyer, he left Cole out of the will.

Cole's mother inherited more than $4 million, equivalent to $30 million today, and she promptly gave half of it to Cole.

Cole and Linda split their time between Paris and Venice, where they lived in a succession of rented palazzos and through legendary parties.

The Porters were riding high, and Cole seemed to be a man who had everything. But something was missing, as disastrous as See America First had been, and as fabulous as his current lifestyle was, he still had a feeling that his true identity was as a songwriter.

So, amid all the parties, traveling, and fabulous lifestyle, Cole continued to study and write. He studied orchestration and counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum and was influenced by the music of Stravinsky and Ravel.

He began to introduce new, somewhat avant-garde sounds into his songs, leaving behind the rather ordinary harmony and melody of his previous songs. In later life, he would dismiss this compositional shift with the glib words, "I realized that to become a successful songwriter, I was going to have to write Jewish tunes."

While this is ridiculously simplistic, it can't be denied that Porter’s first hit songs often featured long, sinuous melodies and startling harmonic shifts between major and minor tonalities.

Porter was, within the limits of the popular song, a musical modernist, and that surely can be traced back to his years in Paris.

He reintroduced himself to Broadway in 1928, with a musical called, appropriately, Paris. The songs of the show included “Let's Misbehave” and the sexually provocative smash hit "Let's Do It."

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His use of the word "it" in this lyric is masterful. He makes us think he's referring to sex, building on this idea throughout the chorus, and then turns it into love at the last possible second. And Porter continues to brilliantly work this delightful deceit over five choruses of the song.

In the book Staging Desire, author Mark Fearnow contends that this song stands as an emblem for Porter’s entire way of living. He says that Porter revels in the raw erotic power that drives life, and then slaps a token mask of convention over this truth for showing it to the world.

In many of his early hit songs, Porter refers to love as either an "it" or a “thing.” “Let's do it,” “what is this thing called love,” “you do something to me,” “you've got that thing,” and he even uses both in “it was just one of those things”. And I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

All of those "its" and "things" can be interpreted as either innocent or naughty, either male or female, and therefore, either gay or straight.

Though he was certainly not out in any contemporary sense, he can be seen as hiding in plain sight, often employing coded language and gay slang in his songs that would be recognized by those in the know.

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In 1930, a song he wrote for the musical, The New Yorkers, continued to push the boundaries of taste. It was called "Love for Sale" and it was sung by a black street walker.

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The song was considered by many to be far too risqué, and only instrumental versions were allowed to be broadcast on the radio.

Until rather recently, Broadway musicals were created almost exclusively for adult audiences. They were expected to be racy and sophisticated, and Cole Porter made them even more so.

Cole would have great success in Hollywood as well as on Broadway, and he loved the Hollywood lifestyle, especially its wild underground gay scene, which he jumped into with great enthusiasm.

Linda, however, grew more and more concerned that Cole's homosexuality would become public and ruin both their marriage and his career, and this led to one of the few rifts in their relationship.

Although much has been written about Porter's considerable appetite for casual sexual encounters with soldiers, sailors, and rent boys of various kinds, he also had a number of very loving, passionate, and often tortured long-term relationships.

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These include the ballet Russ-Star Boris Kochno, architect Ed Tauch, dancer and choreographer Nelson Barclift, director John Wilson, and longtime friend Ray Kelly, whose children still receive half the royalty income from Porter's shows and songs.

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Many of Porter's best and most dramatic songs were written with these specific men in mind.

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Porter's songs often contain hidden and not-so-hidden sexual and queer overtones, including the lyrics to "Too Darn Hot" from Kiss Me Kate.

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Which include a ripped-from-the-headlines reference to the Kinsey Report, which had been published just months before the show opened in 1948.

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This landmark study of human sexuality sent shockwaves through mid-century America, and eventually transformed society's view of homosexuality.

Cole clearly knew what was in the report, and he knew that referencing it would be provocative.

Stephen Sondheim thinks that Porter is the easiest of the major lyricists to imitate because his style is so extreme.

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The List Songs are such a tasty stew of pop cultural references. The risqué songs are so heavy with double entendre. The love songs and out-of-love songs are so outrageously extravagant that they verge on and often cross over into camp.

But Sondheim believes that the unique thing about Porter, is that even at his most camp, the lyrics are genuinely felt. When he uses a line like "A trip to the moon on gossamer wings", we believe it because he believes it.

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Sondheim writes that "Cole Porter was too smart not to have been aware of what his writing style conveyed."

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He and Larry Hart are the two acknowledged gay lyricists in the American pantheon, but Hart's style conceals his homosexuality, Porter's parades it

Mark Fearnow sums it up like this: "Cole Porter reveled in the delightful irony of pretending to satisfy cultural expectations of gender and sexuality while at the same time doing just what he felt like doing behind a shield of what was called good taste and discretion."

And I would add that this is very typical and representative of the disruptive, subversive, subliminal, and ultimately liberating nature of the Broadway musical.

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Broadway Nation is produced and written by me, David Armstrong. This episode was co-written by Albert Evans, and I'd also like to thank Billy Wildrick for her voice acting contributions and David Sabella for his recreation of Julian Eltinge. You can hear other Julian Eltinge songs on David Sabella’s YouTube page. Finally, I want to thank everyone at KVSH 101.9, the voice of Vashon Island, Washington, and especially everyone at the Broadway podcast network.