Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 14:41:14 -0400
From: Gabo3@aol.com

New York Newsday - Thursday, April 6, 1995
AN OPERA QUEEN TAKES CENTER STAGE
by Gabriel Rotello

	New York - Opera has always been about sex and death. The jealous Don Jose
murdering his fiery temptress Carmen. The voluptuous Tosca hurling herself
from the battlements of Rome. The fragile Mimi expiring elegantly of
consumption in a Paris attic. 
	But for gay men opera has also been about the sublimation of sex and the
denial of death. Generations of pre liberation opera queens lived passionate
but often less than genuine lives. Their reveries - captured so memorably by
Tom Hanks' aria scene in "Philadelphia" - were inspired not by love but by
the artifice of love, and were fated to vanish outside the opera house,
replaced with a harsh repression they were ill-equipped to combat. 
	"Divas are notoriously noisy, but fans go silent to their graves," wrote
Wayne Koestenbaum in "The Queen's Throat," his elegiac book on opera and gay
men. The modern opera house was, at least until Stonewall, a gilded closet
that cocooned the male victims of sexual repression in a 19th-Century fantasy
of passionate life and meaningful death. My friend Hap, who died of AIDS
several years ago, was an opera queen. Coming of age before Stonewall, he
found his deepest meaning in old recordings of Callas, obscure tapes from La
Scala, standing room at the Met. I wonder what he and the ghosts of his
generation would have made of "Harvey Milk," the new opera that received its
New York premier at the City Opera on Tuesday. 
	Like the classics, "Harvey Milk" is about sex and death. But unlike the
classics, it is unabashedly, even defiantly, about a gay man's sex and death.
Milk was the first openly homosexual elected official in America, a member of
the San Francisco Board of Supervisors whose assassination in 1978 at the
hands of Dan White led to the first great public martyring in gay American his
tory. Milk's life and death have inspired a best selling biography, a major
film documentary, and now a full scale opera. No longer can it be said that
modern gay male icons go unsung. 
	But "Harvey Milk" is more than a work of gay iconography. It is opera come
full circle.  Harvey Milk was himself an opera queen (and native New Yorker),
who discovered his homosexuality in the darkened cavern of the old Met and
lived in that gilded, suffocating closet until he was 39. In "Milk's" first
and best act, the teenage Harvey finds himself bewildered at his first Tosca,
wondering "who are these men without wives?" as a phalanx of anonymous
fanatics worship a towering icon of Callas. And on the last night of his
life, in reality and in the opera, Harvey attended another performance of
"Tosca" in San Francisco and had a premonition of his own murder. What came
full circle in life has now come full circle on the stage. An openly gay
man's sex and death are now, finally, deemed fit material for the operatic
stage.  
	Unfortunately, "Milk" is hardly a great work. The characterizations are
hollow, the score uninspiring, and worse, one doesn't particularly like the
politically vindictive Harvey who emerges in Act III. "Milk" can hardly
compare to the sublime "The Ghosts of Versailles," a more traditional opera
about Marie Antoinette written by two thoroughly modern, meaning totally
open, gay men, John Corigliano and William Hoffman. Opera queens will revel
in the artful fantasy of "Ghosts." They might bristle at harsh reality of
"Milk." 
	But comparisons are unfair. "Ghosts" is fast becoming our generation's most
popular opera, but "Milk" has made a different kind of history. It is an
opera not for opera queens, but about one. His pain. His aspirations. And
most important from the junction of gay men and opera, his sex and his death.
Opera come full circle, queer and uncocooned.