Queer before RENT?

In my music class today we were covering musical theater, and I had this thought. We don't think of many musicals before RENT as being anything close to Queer. In fact musicals were displaying Queer traits long before that ground breaking musical.

The famous musical Showboat could be said to be the first Queer musical. Before even going into the plot it is the first queer musical of it's time.

Before Showboat (1927), there were no musicals as we know them today. There were operetta's like Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. There were musical reviews like Ziegfeld Follies, but there were no musical plays. Showboat is the first musical to be based on a book and to bring into the light social issues that had been kept behind closed doors.

This musical is about the lives of people on the river showboat, The Cotton Blossom, from 1880-1927. The opening of the musical has no introductory musical number. Instead the first scene deals with the issue of miscegenation, where a Mulatto is married to a white man.

The play continues to discuss the lives of professional gamblers, men who leave their wives and how the wives become hugely successful in spite of their stigma as a divorcee. All of these are issues and situations that were not discussed except in the privacy of ones own home.

Fast forward sixty years. RENT took audiences on another tour through a lifestyle that was far from ideal. The story is based on the opera La Boheme but RENT deals with the lives of artists in New York rather than Paris. Instead of everyone dieing of tuberculosis, everyone is sick with AIDS. This musical is queer because at the time no one wanted to talk about AIDS, no one wanted to think about the homeless in the big cities. Many people wanted to pity these artist who were squating in apartments in "alphabet city", sick with AIDS, looking for their next high.

Jonathan Larson took the life he and his friends were living and made people see that that life was not to be pitied. They had moments of great happiness and also great sorrow, but they were content with what they had, this can be seen in the famous songs "La Vie Boheme" and "Seasons of Love". Dispite the sickness and poverty that surround them these young people find happiness moment by moment.