SPIRIT WOW: PRIDE 2024
On Singing a Gay Song
Having never been in a play and without telling anyone I was doing it, as a sophomore in high school I tried out for the lead in the musical Oliver. I can’t tell you why. I hadn’t attended other shows. I didn’t know the kids who did theater, or even how tryouts work. Up to that point I actually saw myself as a pretty shy kid.
I suspect on some level I just identified with the part of this little kid who doesn’t know where he fits. Even as a sophomore in high school there was something about me that was a lot younger than my peers, so much so that I actually ended up identifying some of the actors in the show with their roles. Especially the actress who played Nancy: a senior, she was luminescent to me, like Mary Poppins to the Banks children, somehow more real, more kind, more everything than anyone I had ever met.
And just like the character Nancy, she took me under her wing. I can still picture her looking down on me at some point, an arm around my shoulder, her smile radiating comfort. Was that a moment that happened on stage or off? I can’t remember. They were inseparable.
I had no idea that I was gay at the time. The high school theater world was filled with kids who were daring in ways that I was not, including in their sexual explorations. No doubt on some deep-down level that was part of the attraction for me. But I instinctively averted my gaze to it all. It was just more than I could handle.Â
Still, looking back I think being on stage was the way that I was able to be gay before I could face it. It was a space in which I got to be all of me, even the parts I couldn’t bring myself yet to see. There was safety, perhaps, in theater’s fundamental quality as illusion. Nothing real was happening here, therefore I could be totally out in the open.
When Oliver was done I cried for a long time. Doing that play meant so much to me.
The next year I got to play Renfield in Dracula for the same director. It was liberating in a whole other way to be able to be so funny and strange on stage.
I wanted to study theater in college, but this was a non-starter with my parents. They had known others who chased that dream and flamed out, and they didn’t want that for me. Do it as a hobby, they said, not as a career.
I did act for a brief time my freshman year. I once again had the part of a boy who shows up at the end of a play. Little boys and crazy men, that was my niche.
(Actually I got cast as kids so often in high school I started begging the high school teacher who did our costumes and make-up to give me gray hair just once. She was literally the first person I thought of decades later when I was suddenly going gray way ahead of my peers, and my dad. That, and Be careful what you wish for…) Â
Shortly before Thanksgiving that year I got cast as Prince Charming in a children’s theater production of Cinderella that our college was doing over the holidays. It was a plum role. Also, he was an adult. Huzzah!
But something about the idea of being on my own over the holidays with a bunch of other students scared the hell out of me. I had no words to express that anxiety, really still no ability to even perceive my quiet traveler of all these years, let alone name what I feared might happen if I were hanging out with a group of people more mature (and more importantly, more free) than me. I dropped out pretty much immediately.
More than once in the decades since I have run into the student who was directing that play, a talented upperclassman named Pat Acerra. She was absolutely golden, a generous, funny, brilliant woman. I would have been lucky to work with her. Each time I’ve seen her since I apologize profusely that I dropped out. After I think the third time she looked at me, amused, and pointed out, not only have I already done this, I keep using almost exactly the same words.
At this point I should probably just make it a bit, some Irish Catholic version of The Princess Bridge. Hello, my name is am Jim McDermott. I ruined your play. I’m sorry.
It has haunted me, that decision. But it’s not because I let Pat down. It’s because I let fear run the table. I didn’t want to learn what I think I probably would have learned, and so I ran away from this thing that was actually important for my life.
There was a moment in high school like that, too. When I got the lead in Oliver, it pissed off some of the theater kids, who had (very reasonably) expected someone they knew to get the role. And I guess they watched me clomp around with no real idea what I was doing, no thousand stories of Stephen Sondheim to rattle off at a moment’s notice, and a voice that was earnest, maybe, but not polished, and they let me have it.
I got such a complex about my voice, actually, that a year later when my drama coach was holding tryouts for Camelot I insisted on auditioning only for the little boy who shows up at the end. He was the only character in the show that had no singing part.
My drama coach looked at me with such sadness when I did that. Are you sure? she said. I don’t think she knew why I was insisting on this, but I think she knew what lay behind it. Someone had convinced me of who I was and wasn’t, and despite all the work she’d put in to showing me a different version of myself, I’d bought their lies.
This is Pride weekend. Historically it’s been an occasion to remember the saints of the queer community, people like Harvey Milk or Marsha P. Johnson who paved the way.
But maybe it’s also a moment to look back on the sweet little queer kids who paved the way for us, to see them and love them in all their innocence, awkwardness and vulnerability. They had no idea of the journey they were on, or perhaps that they were on a journey at all. They had to carry a lot to get here, too. And look how far they brought us.
This weekend marks the end of my Pride Month sale. Subscribe by Monday and you’ll get 30% off. There’s some great stuff to come, including an interview with Broadway legend Heather Headley! (I know, I can’t believe it either.)
Thanks again to everyone for reading and for your support. You’ve all been a great source of inspiration to me this year. Happy Pride!
Here's to all of our "sweet little queer kids." May they thrive and be loved and glorious and safe.
Great article Jim