The Rise of the Meta-Gay Show
At times, this approach can wear thin, the air quotes so enormous that they dwarf what’s inside them. But, when the method clicks, it captures something profound: the deep craving to understand, cross-generationally, queer art that refused to play it small. At one juncture, Bassichis recounts a routine that Maya did about coming out as gay to his father, a devout Catholic who reassured him that their family would pay any price for a cure. Maya wisecracked that everybody already knew the cure for homosexuality—fame. Then Bassichis explains the gulf between then and now: when they first heard the joke, they thought the point was that gay men were showboaters, striving class-president types, whose traumas got healed by the limelight. But Maya’s real joke was that getting famous meant you could no longer be gay—you needed to retreat to the closet, like Liberace and Reubens did.
At times, the show reminded me of David Drake’s “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” from 1992, in which Drake argues that the then popular Chelsea “clone” aesthetic wasn’t about vanity so much as self-defense: get bashed enough and you, too, might adopt a shield of muscle. Bassichis argues for something similar: that gay-male narcissism can be a form of political defiance, a refusal to be ignored. Watching him, I was flooded with memories of that lost era, back when debates erupted in response to OutWeek magazine, which took shots at all the famous figures who chose security over solidarity. Mostly, I flashed back to Buddy Cole, a character created by Scott Thompson on the Canadian sketch show “The Kids in the Hall,” which débuted in 1988. It was my first glimpse of the razzle-dazzle of gay fury: Cole, a haughty queen who held court from his barstool, similarly took aim at his peers, tearing into homophobic comics such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, during a time when grabbing the mike back from bigots was a radical act. “Can I Be Frank?” performs the opposite of a takedown—it throws its arms around the painful past, as if it were an old friend you might never see again, someone who might have a few sharp ideas about how to survive the present.
Just uptown from the Soho Playhouse, you can find a more cheerful variant of queer fandom in “Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical,” an adaptation of last year’s surprise television hit about closeted gay hockey players, one sweetly Canadian, one gloomily Russian. You might assume, not unreasonably, that this parody would be dumb, disposable fun—for superfans only. You’d be wrong! To my shock and delight, “Heated Rivalry,” written with unsettling swiftness by Dylan MarcAurele, is a flat-out terrific musical, no caveats necessary. I saw it with somebody who hadn’t watched the show, and she loved it, too.
Like “Can I Be Frank?,” “Heated Rivalry” arrives in ironic air quotes: a trio of horny housewives, all named Susan, sing a rollicking homage to their preferred binge-watch, a series about “Hockey players, with big butts / Sucking dick, but they’re sad.” The prima donna of the group (the fabulous Ryann Redmond, in a haystack wig) explains that this is all a sacred ritual, an attempt, during the show’s hiatus, “to keep the spirit of Shane and Ilya”—the show’s central couple—“alive through this endless winter.” Yet what Susan narrates, as she guzzles “Ambien margaritas,” is not a rude satire; in fact, it’s actually a pretty solid distillation of the show’s narrative. For all the raunchy puns about “heavy loads” and meta-references to the fandom (the YouTube videos of Connor Storrie, the original Ilya, come into play), the show delivers much of the same emotional kick of the series, from its enemies-to-lovers frisson to the psychic burden of the celebrity closet. That makes sense, really: Aren’t Broadway musicals and romance novels the art forms best designed to tap buried feelings that can’t be repressed?
