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Garland, Judy (1922-1969)

TO CALL JUDY GARLAND AN ICON OF THE GAY COMMUNITY is a massive understatement. Garland's fragile but indomitable persona and emotion-packed singing voice are undeniably linked to modern American gay culture and identity. This is especially true for gay men, but lesbians also are drawn to identify with Garland's plucky toughness and vulnerability.

Garland's signature song, "Over the Rainbow, " is the closest thing we have to a gay national anthem, and many have claimed that it was grief over Garland's death from an overdose of drugs in June 1969 that sparked smoldering gay anger into the Stonewall riots and fueled the gay liberation movement. Whether true or not, this story has such poetry that one feels it ought to be true.

After all, in the intensely closeted pre-Stonewall days, gays often identified themselves to each other as "friends of Dorothy, " referring to Garland's 1939 role in The Wizard of Oz.

Garland was virtually born a performer. Her parents owned a theater in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where little Frances Gumm was born on June 10, 1922. She began singing and dancing on stage at the age of four. She toured in vaudeville, performing with her sisters, before being discovered in 1935 and signed to a contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

She changed her name to Judy Garland and starred with Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy film series before being cast in her career-defining role in The Wizard of Oz.

Early in her career, studio doctors began giving Garland prescription drugs. The "speed" she took to lose weight made her too nervous to sleep, so she was given tranquilizers and sleeping pills, beginning a destructive cycle that would continue throughout her life and finally kill her.

Garland was painfully insecure; and, unfortunately, she began her career at a time when performers worked under contract to powerful studios and had little control over their careers. Her attempts to take charge of her career caused the studios to reject her as a troublemaker, but Garland's powerful talent and sheer heart propelled her through comeback after comeback.

After Garland's childhood career ended, she wowed audiences in her first adult role in Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944. In 1954, after more difficult years, she starred powerfully in A Star is Born with James Mason.

When the film roles were not offered, she went back on the concert stage, performing long runs at New York's Palace Theater. Despite an Academy Award nomination for a stunning performance in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and a brief but memorable television show on CBS (1963-1964), Garland found herself nearly penniless. Near the end of her life, she performed anywhere she could, even in piano bars when she could find no other work.

Garland was adored by gay fans throughout her career, but her connection to the world of homosexuality did not stop with her fans. Her beloved father, Frank Gumm, had g been a closeted gay man, and Roger Edens, her strongest supporter in the early days at MGM, was also gay.

Judy Garland in 1947.

Even two of Garland's husbands, Vincente Minnelli and Mark Herron, were gay, which made possible an intergenerational ménage when Herron had an affair with Peter Allen, who was married to Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli.

Garland is surely one of the most memorable and indefatigable performers in the history of American popular entertainment. She made over thirty feature films, received a special Academy Award, and was nominated for two others. She also garnered several Emmy nominations and a special Tony Award.

Garland made numerous recordings, including the Grammy Award-winning Judy at Carnegie Hall, which has never been out of print. Her concert appearances became legendary, both for their triumphs and their spectacular failures.

Perhaps the most touching, and telling, image of Judy Garland, embedded in the memories of gay men and lesbians of a certain age, is the way she ended many of her concerts. Dressed in drag as a hobo, her smudged face showing the pathos of the eternal outsider, she approaches the audience and sits on the edge of the stage. Looking far into the distance, she sings "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with intense, lonely sweetness, longing for that impossible land where dreams come true.

—Tina Gianoulis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clarke, Gerald. Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. New York: Random House, 2000.

DiOrio, Al, Jr. Little Girl Lost: The Life & Hard Times of Judy Garland. Greenwich, Conn.: Kearny Publishing, 1975.

Gross, Michael Joseph. "The Queen Is Dead." Atlantic Monthly, August 2000, 62.

Guly, Christopher. "The Judy Connection." Advocate, June 28, 1994, 48.

Vare, Eehlie A. Rainbow: A Star Studded Tribute to Judy Garland. New York: Boulevard Books, 1998.

Geffen, David (b. 1943)

ONE OF THE MOST FEARED AND ADMIRED, REVERED and reviled figures in the entertainment industry, David Geffen succeeded in transforming himself, either through sheer ingenuity or outright guile, from his humble origins in Brooklyn into one of the most important figures in the arenas of corporate rock music, movies, and television.

According to Steve Kurutz, Geffen is responsible for guiding the careers of, and forming lasting (if tumultuous) friendships with, countless big-name musical acts, such as The Eagles, Jackson Browne, Nirvana, Elton John, and Cher.

Geffen's combative style, as well as his forthright honesty and compulsive competitiveness, however, have earned him many detractors and some outright enemies.

For his foes, Geffen exemplifies the greed and excess of the music industry. In their eyes he is a shark who changed the priority from music to money. For others, however, Geffen is regarded as an extraordinarily generous and caring person, one who believes in and passionately supports a diverse array of social and political causes, ranging from homeless shelters to AIDS research.

David Lawrence Geffen was born on February 21, 1943, in Brooklyn, the son of Batya and Abraham Geffen, Russian Jewish immigrants who settled in New York in 1931. While David's older brother Mitchell (b. February 6, 1933) was long considered the family's success story, Abraham and Batya spoiled David, forgoing discipline in favor of extravagant praise, and often referred to him as "King David." Consequently, David struggled in school, barely graduating from New Utrecht (New York) High School in 1960 with a final grade average of 73.59.

Following high school, David shuttled between his home in Brooklyn and Mitchell's apartment at UCLA.

Returning to New York in 1961, he bluffed his way into a mailroom job at the prestigious William Morris Agency by both implying that he was legendary record producer Phil Spector's cousin and padding his résumé with a false degree from UCLA.

At the Morris agency, Geffen set about learning everything about the entertainment industry. After ingratiating himself to agency president Nat Lefkowitz, he began charting his ascendancy. Through Lefkowitz, Geffen became one of the hottest agents in New York, and in 1967 he got his first big break when he signed bisexual songwriter Laura Nyro and, soon afterward, negotiated a lucrative music publishing deal for her that netted them each $3 million plus a substantial share of future royalties.

Geffen's brash style also catapulted him into the executive ranks at Atlantic Records, for which he signed the newly formed supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Geffen was soon able to bankroll his own label, Asylum Records, which was initially distributed by Atlantic Records but which Geffen quickly sold to Warner Brothers in 1971 for $7 million. Geffen, however, stayed on as head of Asylum.

In 1976, citing burnout and health scares, Geffen retired from the industry; but in 1980, he returned to form Geffen Records, a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. In an attempt to make Geffen Records a viable brand, he quickly snapped up performers such as Elton John and Donna Summer, though both artists, having weathered a shift in musical direction, recorded mediocre material and soon left the label.

In the midst of this early discord at his record label, David Geffen was also maneuvering himself into the arena of movies. In 1982, by parlaying his friendship with Warner Brothers executive Steve Ross, Geffen soon produced several notable movies, including the lesbianthemed Personal Best and the teen classic Risky Business, which starred Tom Cruise in the memorable role of Joel.

Over the next decade, Geffen went on to produce a mixed array of films, but he leapt at the chance to work again with Cruise in the 1994 Interview with the Vampire.

As the 1980s progressed, Geffen also worked diligently to make his record label profitable. By the late 1980s, he had keenly recognized, and subsequently signed, big revenue-producing bands such as Aerosmith and the controversial heavy-metal band Guns N' Roses, weathering controversy over the band's homophobic song "One in a Million." Geffen was also able to resuscitate Cher's career, using his shrewd business acumen and capitalizing on their former romantic attachment.

Although Geffen had been linked romantically to both Cher and actress Marlo Thomas, his homosexuality was an open secret in the entertainment industry. Geffen had already lost several of his close friends to AIDS, but he was particularly affected by the death of his pal and partying companion Steve Rubell, owner of the infamous New York disco Studio 54.

According to Tom King, after Rubell's death, in 1989, Geffen began making large donations to individuals and charities dedicated to helping people with AIDS. His gifts include $2.5 million to AIDS Project Los Angeles, $2.5 million to Gay Men's Health Crisis of New York, and $1.4 million to AIDS Action in Washington, D.C.

Geffen's particular support of AIDS causes roused the attention of queer magazine columnist Michelangelo Signorile, who, in 1990, blasted Geffen as a hypocrite for not coming out as a gay man.

Tom King has noted that Geffen had resisted making an open statement because of a strong belief that his sexual orientation was a private matter. Geffen realized that by virtue of his success, however, he had become a public figure, and at a 1992 benefit for AIDS Project Los Angeles, David Geffen declared that he was a gay man.

Somewhat surprisingly, the disclosure did not detract from Geffen's reputation. In fact, it was viewed by many of his associates as a long-overdue and honest admission that could only increase his stature in the entertainment industry.

In 1990, Geffen again struck gold by signing alternative bands Nirvana and Sonic Youth to his record label. The same year, Geffen decided it was time to sell Geffen Records. After a series of tense negotiations, the label was acquired by MCA for $540 million.

In 1994, Geffen joined with noted movie director Steven Spielberg and former Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to form the media conglomerate DreamWorks SKG. Continuing to use the skills he had honed successfully over the previous thirty-plus years, Geffen works behind the scenes at DreamWorks, brokering deals, colluding with friends, and antagonizing his enemies.

In May 2002, Geffen donated $200 million to the medical school at UCLA—the largest single donation ever made to an American medical school. The school was renamed the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

-Nathan G. Tipton

BIBLIOGRAPHY

King, Tom. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood. New York: Random House, 2000.

Kurutz, Steve. "David Geffen." All Music Guide. www.allmusic.com

Singular, Stephen. The Rise and Rise of David Geffen. Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1997.

Goode, Joe (b. 1951)

THE MOST ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION OF the work of choreographer Joe Goode is its challenge to traditional assumptions involving gender. Like the dance theater pieces of Bill T. Jones and other openly gay choreographers, Goode's work incorporates spoken word, music, and visual imagery in varying combinations. His dances often tell stories about being gay in the age of AIDS.

Goode was born into a working-class family in Presque Isle, Maine, on March 13, 1951. Depressed and suicidal as a high school student in the 1960s, Goode found solace in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, which he read as a message from an alternative world where it was possible to be Jewish, intellectual, politically radical, and gay.

"I didn't see how I was going to fit in and have a whole, meaningful life. My sexuality and my sensitivity and my whole being seemed wrong, " Goode later told a reporter for the Washington Blade.

Goode earned a B.F.A. in drama from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973, and then studied dance in New York City with Merce Cunningham and Viola Farber.

However, he was unhappy during his years as a young artist in New York City. "All the great choreographers were big old fags, " he told the Blade, but "their work was dogmatically heterosexual, even in abstraction." The sight of so many male/female, implicitly heterosexual couples, with men lifting and leading the women, impressed Goode as a dishonest spectacle.

Like other maverick spirits before him, Goode went west in search of freedom. In 1979, he left New York for California, where he felt it would be easier to break out of such restrictive roles. The Joe Goode Performance Group, headquartered in San Francisco, was incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in 1986. The company has performed internationally and has been honored with numerous grants and prizes.

One of Goode's most noted pieces, Deeply There (Stories of a Neighborhood), which premiered in 1998, explores the impact of AIDS on San Francisco's Castro district. Another, The Maverick Strain (1996), is an examination of the stubbornly individualist streak in American culture; it puts pioneer women and androgynous cowboys on yesterday's range and in today's AIDS wards to make a complex statement about the strengths and weaknesses of the American character.

Other works with significant gay content include Remembering the Pool at the Best Western (1990), which meditates on AIDS and life after death, and Convenience Boy (1993), which examines the plight of gay and lesbian workers in the sex industry.

The women in Goode's company often lift their male colleagues. In this way and in others, Goode presents images of the softness of men and the strength of women.

"I'm just interested in those images because they're so fearful to our culture, " Goode told the Blade.

But Goode's creative impulse is not entirely confrontational. The comic performer in him loves to make people laugh. Indeed, humor helps to defuse his risky subject matter, rendering it less threatening to viewers who might otherwise be put off.

Goode's work explores the importance of "inappropriate" behavior. In a mission statement, Goode wrote that he aims to "pierce the veil of toughness that we all have in our lives and to uncover the vulnerable center, the confused, flailing human part of us that we conceal and avoid." Among his goals, he wrote, is "to make the world a more compassionate place."

With his troupe, Goode has done outreach work with various population groups, including gay youth. He has taught at several academic institutions and has received numerous awards, including multiple Isadora Duncan awards and National Endowment for the Arts and Irvine Dance fellowships.

—Greg Varner

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goode, Joe. "Mission Statement." www.joegoode.org

Varner, Greg. "Strong Women, Pretty Men: Maverick Dancer Defies Gender Assumptions." Washington Blade, March 20, 1998, 45.

Griffes, Charles Tomlinson (1884-1920)

AMERICAN COMPOSER CHARLES TOMLINSON GRIFFES responded avidly to the emerging musical styles of his day to create works characterized by refined construction, subtle gestures, and rhythmic flexibility.

The third of five children, Griffes was born on September 17, 1884, in Elmira, New York. He grew up in a comfortable middle-class household and took his first piano lessons from his sister, Katharine. At the age of fifteen, he began to study with Mary Selena Broughton, a well-trained English spinster and an instructor at Elmira College, who strongly guided his musical development and financially supported his piano studies in Germany beginning in 1903.

Besides benefiting from some of the best musical instruction available in piano, counterpoint, and composition during his stay in Europe, Griffes also became aware of the emerging homophile movement in Germany and the work of such pioneer figures as Magnus Hirschfeld. He also read the works of Oscar Wilde, André Gide, and Edward Carpenter.

Through exposure to the relatively liberal and nurturing atmosphere of musical circles in Europe, he acquired a sense of comfort with his own sexuality while still young. However, he never divulged his orientation to straight friends or associates.

During his first year abroad, Griffes formed a strong, possibly sexual, attachment to a twenty-eight-year-old fellow student, Emil Joel, who guided his artistic development, procured concert tickets for the young man, and introduced him to such prominent musical figures as Richard Strauss, Enrico Caruso, Ferrucio Busoni, and Engelbert Humperdinck, with whom he briefly studied.

Griffes returned to the United States in 1907 to assume the directorship of music at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, a post he held until his death in 1920 from an abscessed lung. His job held no special prestige, but the school's location just up the Hudson River from New York City gave him opportunities to promote his music there and to pursue an active sexual life in the relative anonymity of Manhattan.

Griffes kept a diary in German in which he reported on his various forays to bathhouses and other favorite gay-friendly haunts. He also enjoyed the company of men outside the public sex spaces and often visited newfound friends in their homes.

New York provided the ideal environment in which to become familiar with the most progressive artistic trends in the country. With his gay companions, Griffes took full advantage of the rich menu of New York's cultural life. He enjoyed not only the city's musical offerings but also its theater and visual art. He was especially interested in watercolors and photography.

Because of his cosmopolitan experience, catholic taste, and solid training, Griffes avidly approached the modern styles of art music emerging in his day more quickly than any other young American except Charles Ives (1874- 1954).

While barely out of his teens, he had left the German Romantic sound of his first works to experiment with the Impressionistic techniques now associated with Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. The White Peacock (1915) is probably Griffes's best-known piano work in this Impressionistic style. (It was later arranged for orchestra.)

Griffes, like Debussy and Gustav Mahler, was struck by the fashion for Asian art subjects, especially those prints and paintings characterized by simple clear lines and empty space. He befriended the Ballets Russes dancer Adolf Bolm, who commissioned a one-act pantomime from him that resulted in Sho-Jo (1917), which featured the Japanese dancer Michio Ito accompanied by a spare chamber ensemble of wind and percussion instruments.

Griffes's final pieces, especially his Piano Sonata of 1919, press into even more progressive territory and mark him as a bold experimenter, unafraid to use highly jagged melodies and stinging chord clashes in pursuit of a distinctive individual style.

At the time of his death, he was working on a festival drama based on the poetry of Walt Whitman entitled "Salut au monde. "

All told, Griffes composed seven sets of songs, five sets of piano pieces, ten works for orchestra, and a handful of works for chamber ensembles, the latter often written to accompany stage plays. He enjoyed critical success in his lifetime, but evinced almost no interest in the nationalist debates of the day, arguments often characterized by a patriarchal and stridently patriotic tone. He took a thoroughly modern view, free of any nativist sentiment.

Griffes's reportedly modest, shy, unpretentious, and witty personality is mirrored in his music: works recognized for their refined construction, subtle gestures depicting texts and moods, rhythmic sensitivity, and a marked melodic gift.

No man of his time and position could have been completely out without public disgrace, but clearly Griffes was able to express both his art and his sexuality, even if he was not able to integrate them as fully as he might have wished.

-Thomas L. Riis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Donna K. Charles T. Griffes: A Life in Music. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Maisel, Edward. Charles T. Griffes: The Life of an American Composer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

Struble, John Warthen. The History of American Classical Music: MacDowell through Minimalism. New York: Facts on File, 1995.

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Garland, Judy (1922-1969)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEE ALSO

Geffen, David (b. 1943)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEE ALSO

Goode, Joe (b. 1951)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEE ALSO

Griffes, Charles Tomlinson (1884-1920)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SEE ALSO