Accepting Queerness and Musical

I don’t quite remember how the conversation came about.

I don’t even quite remember if it was in one of those long empty main streets in Khalifa City, surrounded by dirty sandlots and residential compounds, or in that one long empty avenue in Margarita Island, surrounded by trees and sculptures which adorned the space between the two ways of the road. I remember the sky was a calm after-school blue.

But the banality of the setting is irrelevant. What’s really relevant is that I was talking to my mom in the car. I’ve always seen my mom and I still see her as a very progressive person. She always speaks of not being able to identify with the things that other Venezuelans usually talk about and not being able to identify with it all. I always saw her as somebody who was progressive and accepting. Because of that what she said on that day actually shocked me. The conversation that afternoon drifted towards sexuality and I was mentioning the case of somebody that I knew who was bisexual. She snapped. She said “that’s not natural.” The way biology works, is to support heterosexual couples. That’s how we reproduce. That’s how the human race survives. I then mentioned how at one point I thought I was homosexual. She murmured and kept looking at the road. “That’s not natural.”

Every time a conversation about how Latin American societies are not very open to the idea of non-heterosexual couples I think back to this incident. I still think my mother is a really progressive and open-minded person, and in fact, if I asked her about this topic now, after the rise in LGBTQ movements that have happened over the last two-to-three years, and in a setting different drive in a lazy afternoon, she might say something different. But it shows how ingrained heteronormative relationships are in the collective mind of the society I’m from. While in Venezuela I don’t remember meeting a single person who was not heterosexual, and to this day the idea of someone who isn’t is something that strikes me as hard to deal with. Not because I reject the idea of a non-heterosexual orientation, but simply because I’ve never had to deal with it and it’s just different. Unusual. Queer.

In Stacy Wolf’s book A Problem Like Maria about the possibility of interpreting the famous musical The Sound of Music from a lesbian or feminist point of view, she first provides an overview of how throughout history, musical theater has mainly focused on heteronormative narratives. “The musical appears to reflect the dominant values of the culture: conservative, sexist, and homophobic.”¹ “In most cases, the message of musicals is that heterosexuality is both natural and mandatory and that women should know their place.”¹ (p9) This is the common interpretation of the narratives of many popular American musicals, including The Sound of Music. But as Stacy Wolf says, it is possible to interpret things in a different way. “There is no ‘natural’ way to read a text”^2­ (p25) People will always find different meanings in things, according to their culture, their personal history, and the ideas they have been exposed to; and Stacy Wolf wrote a 200+ page book about how it is possible to interpret The Sound of Music as a lesbian/feminist narrative, as opposed to the traditional heteronormative interpretation most viewers would associate with it.

In her book, Stacy Wolf discusses more than just the way in which The Sound of Music can be interpreted as a queer narrative through the strength of the main character Maria. I found it really interesting that Wolf quotes Alexander Doty and Corey Creekmur saying that “queerness is ‘at the core of mainstream culture even though that that culture tirelessly insists that its images ideologies and readings [are] always only about heterosexuality.’”³ (p31-32) She mentions that “many men in musicals are constructed as feminine, if not gay.”⁴ (p41) These ideas lead to the idea that musicals provide a stage for performing queerness. Song is not something that is limited to a stage. Song is something that invades our everyday life, something that any human being with a voice can engage in if they wish to. And this allows us to impersonate things that we would normally not. This does not necessarily make much difference; I remember singing the song “I Feel Pretty” from Bernstein’s West Side Story and clearly enunciating the line “I feel pretty and witty and gay,” literally saying “I feel gay” when I was still 15 and me and my friends from school would obviously laugh at that stuff. But the song was catchy, and so we would sing that. We would impersonate Maria (from West Side Story), a female character singing about how she is in love with a guy. It does not necessarily affect us; me and my friends still remain heterosexual (as far as I know), but that does not remove the fact that we did that. In a sense, one starts to become more accepting of things like queerness, by doing in a performance that allows you to engage with it. Wolf has convinced me that musicals are really a central part of queer expression and culture.

Except that according to Wolf it isn’t. As she said, it’s mainly heteronormative narratives. But the point is that one can see it differently. Regardless of whether or not being heterosexual is truly the “natural” thing to do, non-heterosexual orientations exist, and it is a fact that we can no longer deny. Because of that, it is important that we become more accepting of these perspectives. We cannot force such a large group of people (LGBTQ) to hide away their desires. Becoming more accepting of LGBTQ people is a well-marked step towards global acceptance of people. Towards world peace. Ok, maybe not that far. But it certainly allows for the creation of a more open-minded world to live in. This is why it is important to be able to view certain narratives as being from a group that is less represented. We learn more about the group, and eventually become more accepting of the group.