BARE BROADWAY BODIES: HOW NUDITY BROUGHT THE GAY COMMUNITY AND BROADWAY CHEEK TO CHEEK Laura Macdonald

BARE BROADWAY BODIES: HOW NUDITY BROUGHT THE GAY
COMMUNITY AND BROADWAY CHEEK TO CHEEK
Laura Macdonald
Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »
2022/2 N° 171 | pages 67 à 79

ISSN 0397-7870
ISBN 9782410025705
DOI 10.3917/rfea.171.0067
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Bare Broadway Bodies:

How Nudity Brought the Gay
Community and Broadway
Cheek to Cheek
LAURA MACDONALD
Keywords Des saunas aux théâtres de Broadway, en passant

par les spectacles caritatifs, les corps nus d’hommes gays
Broadway; musical sont apparus dans les musicals de façon significative à
theatre; gay partir des années 60. Alors que Broadway commençait à
community; audiences représenter ouvertement des personnages gays dans des
spectacles musicaux, la communauté gay a dû faire face
à une longue lutte contre la crise du SIDA. La nudité a
été un élément structurant des engagements communau-
taires et une modalité privilégiée d’actions collectives pour
un changement positif. La communauté des artistes de
musicals et la communauté gay ont instrumentalisé la
nudité afin d’encourager le développement de liens, émous-
tiller et divertir mais aussi promouvoir l’égalité et
l’inclusion.
In 1991, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jerry Mitchell was dancing
on Broadway, almost naked, in The Will Rogers Follies, and thinking
about new ways to raise money for the theatre industry charity “Broad-
way Cares/Equity Fights AIDS” (BC/EFA). “I got an idea,” Mitchell
recalls. “Why not dance in my costume at Splash Bar, 1 and donate the
money I raised to the cause?” (Mitchell). Mitchell recruited “five guys
[he] knew who were in incredible shape and appearing in Broadway musi-
cals,” and the strip show they created over the course of ten days raised
$8000 from two performances. It became an annual event called Broad-
way Bares and in 2019 the two performances broke records to raise $1
1. Splash Bar was a gay club in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood between 1991-
2013 and featured nearly naked men dancing in shower stalls.
Revue Française d’Études Américaines 67

LAURA MACDONALD
million for BC/EFA. “Obviously sex sells,” Mitchell says, explaining

Bares’ success. “It allowed different members from different casts to work
together in a way they don’t get to work together in other events. Plus,
they got to do some sexy dancing they don’t get to do in their own
Broadway shows. They get to use their body, they get to use their talent
to make a difference” (qtd. in Artavia).
As musical theatre scholar Virginia Anderson notes, “[i]ts creation
came from his experience of Broadway audiences responding to a nearly
naked body” (Anderson, 2010 150). The event’s first home at Splash Bar,
which hosted Musical Mondays featuring rare video clips from Broadway
musicals, also suggests that Mitchell recognized how a synergy between
musical theatre and attractive nude dancers appealed to a gay male audi-
ence at a time when many gay men were sick with AIDS. This article
explores a range of responses to and from different naked bodies, to trace
the ongoing and evolving intersection of nude and often gay male bodies
with Broadway musical theatre. Gay drama and musical theatre scholar
John M. Clum notes that like “the doors in a French farce, the closets of
gay America, the sexuality they hid, and the aesthetic that, for many,
accompanied that sexuality, were visible in the musical for all who were
able to see them” (Clum 2). Nudity in a musical theatre context, I posit,
was a ritual threshold crossed through the marriage Clum identifies
between musical theatre and the gay community. Nude bodies onstage, in
musicals and in audiences, performed and received musical theatre that
supported gay men’s visibility. Privileging these moments of undress,
along with key clothed moments affirming gay identity, I trace the mar-
riage that is the heritage of 21st-century gay musical theatre characters
and fans.
Disrobing performers in Hair (1968) on Broadway were followed by
disrobing audiences and performers at the Continental Baths, a crucible
for the gay community’s more public relationship with musical theatre,
as this article will discuss. Throughout the 1970s gay men gained greater
visibility, fully-clothed, as out characters in musicals and as musical thea-
tre spectators. This relationship, developed through the 1970s and 1980s,
emboldened the gay community and the Broadway community through
the AIDS crisis. The gay musical theatre marriage culminated in Broad-
way performers’ appearances at Broadway Bares. Once obscene or titillat-
ing nudity has become a mainstay on the Main Stem, intensifying the gay
audience’s relationship with Broadway.
Up to the Glitter: Spectating Hair’s Bare Bodies

When asked by Esquire magazine whether she was intimidated by
the audience when she disrobed, Hair cast member Suzannah Norstrand
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HOW NUDITY BROUGHT THE GAY COMMUNITY AND BROADWAY CHEEK TO CHEEK
de-emphasised the excitement surrounding the onstage nudity, explaining:

“[a]re you kidding? The front rows are always full of fags, and they just
look at the boys” (qtd. in “Optional Nudity in Hair,” 116). If the homo-
sexual spectatorship Norstrand observed was consistent throughout
Hair’s run on Broadway, then the Broadway audience may not only have
been exposed to the alternative lifestyle represented on stage in the musi-
cal, but also to the increasing openness of homosexuals in New York City
on the eve of the Stonewall riots. The spirit of the times, sexual politics
included, was onstage at the Biltmore Theatre, and at work in its audito-
rium, where gay spectators enjoyed nude male bodies onstage.
In Hair, the musical’s counterculture Tribe explore issues including
the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and sexual liberation, in
fragmented songs and scenes. Claude has been drafted and while other
men in the Tribe burn their draft cards, he is unsure, singing “Where Do
I Go?” in an effort to figure out his path. James Rado wrote Hair with
Gerome Ragni and explained to the New York Times: “[w]e wanted the
naked bit in from the beginning… It was taken from the first Be-In, a
year ago in Central Park. Two guys took off their clothes—it was sensa-
tional at the time—and the cops closed in” (qtd. in Bender 189). The
musical sends a couple of actors playing police officers down the theatre’s
centre aisle, challenging the audience to decide whether it is a real or
staged response to nudity. “Just how many stark naked males there are
and whether the girl hippies are equally unclothed has been the subject
of urgent dispute among those who have been attending previews of
‘Hair,’” the Times reported (Bender 189). The number of naked bodies
fluctuated throughout Hair’s run, depending on the actors’ inhibitions.
In an essay on Hair’s nudity and voyeurism, Tim Stephenson notes
that “[p]artial and full nudity had been appearing on and off the Broad-
way stage since the early 1960s, eliciting varied responses from the author-
ities, but always gaining significant media attention for the perpetrators”
(197). Positioning himself like one of the police officers at Hair, Stephen-
son frames nudity as out of the bounds of theatre-making, even deserving
of punishment. Despite clear antecedents to the musical in the work of
the experimental Open Theater, in which both of Hair’s authors had par-
ticipated (Wollman, 2006 43-44), Stephenson concludes that “nudity was
the key that unlocked [Hair’s] commercial success” (Stephenson 198).
New York magazine surveyed Hair spectators at performances nearly six
months after the musical’s Broadway opening. While the show’s staff
thought nudity was a draw for theatregoers, the survey revealed that the
majority of the audience was there not for nudity but because of the
musical’s hit show status (Nash). Although nudity may have initially
brought the attention to Hair that helped it to become a hit, the scene’s

LAURA MACDONALD
brevity and absence of any titillation may explain why spectators did not
privilege nudity as the main factor in their ticket purchase. Hair’s audi-
ence may also have reflected a waning of traditional morality, simultane-
ous with the revolution and tragedy that defined 1968.
Hair “enabled Broadway theatregoers to taste the dissidence and
controversy of the counterculture within a safe setting, the Biltmore The-
atre,” musical theatre scholar Bruce Kirle notes (194). The Stonewall
riots, a series of violent demonstrations prompted by a police raid on the
Stonewall Inn gay bar, occurred several months after Hair opened on
Broadway (Kirle 178). The event “not only established homosexuality as
a presence that would not disappear from major urban centers such as
New York City but also had endowed its increasing visibility with glam-
our” (Kirle 194). Musical theatre was deployed throughout the next
decade in performances on and off Broadway, a convenient strategy to
exploit that glamour, with nudity as a feature.
Broadway Comes to the Continental Baths

Observing the success of the Everard baths (nicknamed “Ever-
hard”) in Chelsea prior to the Stonewall riots in 1968, Steve Ostrow and
his wife Joanne decided they could offer a cleaner, more hospitable expe-
rience. The basement of the Ansonia Hotel, on Broadway and 73rd Street
on the Upper West Side, had housed a health club, complete with a swim-
ming pool; Ostrow leased the space and additional floors to provide pri-
vate rooms and lockers. The Continental Baths opened that September
(Winkler 49). For six years, the venue offered guests “unheard-of ameni-
ties” including a sauna, swimming pool, refreshments, live entertainment,
a dancefloor, library, sunroof, private rooms, “and a dormitory room lit
by chandelier with floor pillows and mattresses for group encounters”
(Winkler 50). Popular performers appearing at the Tubs, as it became
known, included the New York Dolls, Patti Labelle, Nell Carter, Cab
Calloway, The Andrews Sisters, Peter Allen, Sarah Vaughan and Andy
Kaufman.
Performers “appropriated a portion of the floor adjacent to the
swimming pool,” theatre scholar Kevin Winkler explains, and “[t]he fact
that the audience was towel-clad and standing or sitting casually on the
floor added to the intimacy of the performer-audience interaction” (Win-
kler 52-53). With Ostrow’s office serving as a makeshift dressing room
some distance from the stage area, “[a]fter dressing, the performer had
to descend the stairs, pass the open bathroom and shower area, and some-
times interact with the seminude (or possibly nude) patrons before arriv-
ing ‘onstage’” (Winkler 52-53). The venue’s limited stage space and the
70 No 171
consequent audience-performer intimacy made Ostrow’s bathhouse a

model alternative to a closeted gay community’s enjoyment of main-
stream live performances.
Nearly 30 blocks south of the Baths, 1776 (the hit Broadway musical
chronicling the drafting of the Declaration of Independence) approached
the end of a three-year run. Its celebrity was sufficient to prompt the
Baths to advertise a parody revue and hire performers from the Broadway
production to appear at the Baths in December 1971. Ostrow advertised
a show entitled 177 Sex, produced by “S. Ostrow” and complete with a
knock-off logo based on the musical 1776’s cracked egg logo (Continental
Baths Advertisement). Scott Jarvis and Rita Gardner, cast members of
the Broadway production, performed the revue late in 1971 when the
Baths were well established as a venue popular with both gay and straight
audiences. The Broadway musical’s producer Stuart Ostrow (no relation)
sued Steve Ostrow for $1.5 million on the grounds of unfair competition
and defamation, citing embarrassment and exposure to public ridicule,
and Steve Ostrow filed a countersuit, accusing the Broadway producer of
embarrassing both himself and the bathhouse, and calling the negative
characterization of the revue show libelous (LeRoy).
Both suits were later dropped, but as Winkler notes, with the Conti-
nental Bathhouse “Ostrow facilitated a combustible marriage of the gay
liberation movement and contemporary show business” (Winkler 63).
While the disrobing occurring eight shows a week further downtown in
Hair at the Biltmore Theatre is a more well-known example of musical
theatre nudity, 1776’s and other Broadway performers’ interpolation into
a fused environment such as the Continental Baths had a greater impact
on the gay community and musical theatre. Occurring soon after the
Stonewall uprising that was a catalyst for the modern gay rights move-
ment, such performances foreshadowed the intensification of gay audien-
ces’ relationship with Broadway that would develop throughout the 1970s
and 1980s.
Diva performers on stage and screen had already enjoyed a long
relationship with gay audiences, but in New York in the 1970s they served
an important function in seeing and making gay audiences seen. As Clum
notes: “The great musical divas of [the 20th] century either begin or end
their careers consciously in the world of the show queen, playing predom-
inantly for gay audiences” (139). One such diva, Bette Midler, was
recruited to sing at the Continental while appearing on Broadway in Fid-
dler on the Roof (1964). Midler developed an act with singing, comedy
and dancing, drawing inspiration from divas such as Sophie Tucker, Mae
West and Carmen Miranda (Nee & Rosenthal). An archival video shows
Midler taking a bow at the end of a concert, exiting and returning

LAURA MACDONALD
wrapped only in one of the Continental’s white towels, like so many in

her audience. She makes a face, feigning innocence, twirls around to
reveal her naked backside as she exits, then returns, beaming, still in her
towel (Midler 1971). She is clearly delighted to have spent time with her
audience and expresses no embarrassment at her nudity or theirs (Midler
1971).
While the gay community had been a minority spectating nudity at
Hair, at the Baths they and their nudity were the majority. Broadway
director-choreographer-dancer and Continental performer Tony Stevens
observed “the beginning of that gay market awareness” (qtd. in Winkler
48). Their toweled numbers reinforced the presence of a gay audience in
New York City. The Baths made way for Plato’s Retreat orgy room and
gay patrons moved onto disco venues such as Studio 54. In programming
mainstream performers, often from Broadway, and drawing a straight
audience to a gay venue, the Baths celebrated and profited from the gay
audience’s entertainment preferences. Inspired in part by Midler’s success
and the Continental’s intimate proxemics, new Manhattan venues opened
offering “a more relaxed, informal setting than the older, established
nightclubs […] and they primarily featured female performers with strong
appeal to gay men” (Winkler 57). On Broadway, performers would no
longer be singling out gay men in the front row because homosexuals
very soon saw themselves on stage.
I Am What I Am: Exploring Identity In and Out of Clothes

While the musicals discussed in this section may not all feature
nudity, they do feature characters like diva Margo Channing in Applause,
the 1970 musical based on the Bette Davis film All About Eve (1950).
Applause offered gay spectators a double dose of diva, with film icon
Lauren Bacall playing Margo, who performs and presents different ver-
sions of herself. Audiences witnessed such characters’ essential selves, as
if naked, in scenes set in private spaces, dressing rooms and backstage
areas. Dressing and undressing and seeking acceptance based on appear-
ance, these characters made entrances to test out aspects of their identity.
This pattern in musicals was not unlike gay men coming out to one
another decades earlier at drag balls and, from the 1960s onwards,
coming out to people in their lives unaware of their sexuality. Because
musicals normalized processes of publicly asserting personal identity, they
became important touchstones for their gay male audience. Though
women might also have related to Margo’s career negotiations and man-
agement of her marriage, her challenging of expectations, coupled with
exuberant physicality and multiple wardrobe changes, was especially in
72 No 171
line with the simultaneous actions of homosexual men during the gay
liberation movement.
“Stonewall,” Kirle suggests, “had endowed [homosexuality’s]
increasing visibility with glamour,” and musical theatre writers sought to
capitalize on this with gay characters (194). In Applause, Margo forgoes
the traditional party after her latest opening night and heads downtown
with her gay best friend and hairdresser, Duane. Everyone keeps their
clothes on, but in representing New York’s gay community and placing
“a gay bar on stage, a first for a Broadway musical” (Clum 201), the
number that ensues removes Duane and his friends from any social closet.
Margo’s friendship with Duane mirrors the communion Midler had expe-
rienced with gay men at the Tubs, but on a larger stage where nudity and
towels were replaced by expressive clothing and exuberant displays of
self-esteem. “Lifted physically and metaphorically aloft by her gay male
fans, Bacall-as-Margo dances with them giddily,” musical theatre histo-
rian Maya Cantu observes (35). Bacall’s height and low voice marked her
difference, just as her fans’ homosexuality marked theirs. Clum suggests
that “the gay diva worship” represented in this scene is what “makes an
extravaganza like Applause possible” (Clum 201), illustrating Broadway’s
growing recognition of the gay market.
Adult musicals produced Off Broadway in the 1970s, such as Let
My People Come (1974), used nudity to offer an honest representation
of 1970s sexuality, but as Wollman notes, their creators, performers and
audiences were embarrassed by these shows. “This embarrassment is
often palpable in the writings that have been left behind by critics, many
of whom were clearly made just as uneasy by the sight of naked bodies
simulating sex as they were by clothed actors talking frankly about sexual
freedom, gay rights, and women’s liberation” (Wollman, 2012 9). Despite
varying degrees of inclusivity in adult musicals and revues, and awkward
attempts to represent gay men on Broadway musical stages, the gay male
audience supported mainstream Broadway musicals in the 1970s, with or
without homosexual characters.
Premiering in London (1978), Evita was a biographical musical
about Eva Peron, the wife of Argentinian President Juan Domingo Perón.
The now legendary musical theatre diva Patti LuPone was a diva in the
making when she starred in Evita (1979) on Broadway and attracted a
gay audience. Within a month of opening, the Islanders’ Club, a gay
social group, bought out an entire performance of Evita. The Islanders
were a travel club on Fire Island, the longstanding vacation spot for New
York City area homosexuals. For decades gay men have congregated on
the island’s nude beaches, partaking in naked community no longer
afforded by Manhattan bathhouses.

LAURA MACDONALD
Journalist Barry Tarshis accepted an invitation from the club presi-

dent, Blue Fletterich, to attend the performance. Flettrich wanted “the
entertainment and restaurant industry in New York [to] recognize how
important an economic force gays have become in this city and how
important gays are to Broadway” (qtd. in Tarshis). Tarshis described the
audience as “overwhelmingly male, not to mention younger and more
casually dressed than theatre audiences in New York are wont to be.
Moreover, many of the men bore a vague resemblance to one
another—strikingly short hair, neatly trimmed beards, boyish figures.
Clearly not your visiting firemen from Topeka” (Tarshis). Costume
designer and educator Steven Stines writes about the Clone look that
emerged in gay communities in the 1970s and that Tarshis clearly
observed in the Evita audience. Gay men wore “almost identical clothing
and hairstyles,” and “the public saw the first iteration of a character who
would evolve both with fashion and with self-image” Stines explains (135,
130).
Consistent with actor Burt Reynolds’ “parody of extreme heterosex-
uality” (Stines 138), the sexualized look appropriated elements of hetero-
sexual men’s style, such as working-class blue jeans which were distressed
or cut off to highlight anatomy. The Clone look organized and made gay
men more recognizable to one another as they became “the man they
wanted to attract” (Stines 136). Though fashion inevitably clothed gay
men’s bodies, its function was to prompt its removal for sexual exploits.
Tarshis’ article “A Gay Sensibility?” not only picked up on the gay look
but marked gay men’s presence in Broadway audiences. It appeared in the
Playbill held by every Broadway theatregoer in February 1980, thereby
reinforcing that just as heterosexual fashion helped to normalize gay iden-
tity, straight musical theatre stories such as Evita helped to normalize gay
musical theatre fandom.
Tarshis went on to marvel at the men’s enthusiasm for Evita. “A
campy couplet, ‘They need to adore me, so Christian Dior me,’ nearly
brought down the house. Indeed the reverberations in my row were so
explosive my seat shook” (Tarshis). Eva dresses and undresses throughout
the show, using her body to remake herself as she pursues power, wealth
and celebrity. Fletterich, the club president, suggested that the gay audi-
ence “have a special appreciation of stylishness and of a sophisticated
kind of wit,” while a club member attending the performance explained:
“When you’re gay, you look at the world a little differently than straight
people do. That’s why performers who give you the feeling they’re putting
on the rest of the world appeal to so many homosexuals” (qtd. in Tarshis).
Like Midler and Bacall, LuPone offered a similar attempt to deceive the
74 No 171
rest of the world, in the song that resonated so much with the gay audi-
ence, “Rainbow High.” Eva uses the song to armor herself with high
fashion clothes prior to a diplomatic tour of Europe (LuPone). Andrew
Lloyd Webber’s range-defying music and Tim Rice’s witty lyrics thrilled
gay male spectators as Eva/LuPone defied physical limitations to sing
higher and higher.
Albin, a homosexual French drag queen, arrived on Broadway in
1983, starring in La Cage aux Folles. Written, composed and directed by
gay men—Harvey Fierstein, Jerry Herman, and Arthur Laurents—the
musical was adapted from Jean Poiret’s 1973 French farce about a
middle-aged gay couple in Saint Tropez. In the musical’s opening number,
the club’s chorus girls and drag queens shed extravagant costumes and
keep the audience guessing about their bodies and identities. “Look under
our frocks: girdles and jocks, proving we are what we are!” they declare,
and end the number by whipping off their wigs with a flourish, a gesture
communicating a confidence in whatever body is underneath the costume
(La Cage aux Folles, “We Are What We Are” & “I Am What I Am”).
Albin later sits in his breast form, a naked Zsa Zsa (his drag persona)
singing as he applies makeup and her dress. Albin’s affective journey
between depression and hope as he transforms from he to she in the
space of the musical number “A Little More Mascara” reinforces the
significance of dressing to processes of identity construction. Any partial
nudity or flashing in La Cage is playful and entertaining, from a cancan
line to acrobatic tricks with legs akimbo to a scantily clad butler. The
musical uses bodies to disorient the audience and persuade them to
accept rather than judge.
David Mitchell’s scenic design decorated the couple’s home with
homoerotic art, and a dinner guest comments in song on their dinner
plates: “Mine have naked children; I believe they’re only male” (Herman
“Cocktail”). Naked boys on dishes provided a joke gay and straight audi-
ences could both enjoy and Herman included song lyrics throughout the
musical referencing nudity, as when Albin welcomes club patrons to
“come and sip your Dubonnet in the nude” (Herman “La Cage”). The
creative team explored sexuality and played with nudity in more nuanced
ways than other musicals discussed here. Combining sexuality with nudity
as strategies for comedy, the creative team may have been framing homo-
sexuality as a similarly natural and normal state as being nude. Con-
versely, and perhaps thanks to the swift pace of wig and costume changes
that kept the Broadway audience wondering who’s who, such wit and
playfulness also kept the musical conservative enough to succeed with
straight as well as gay spectators. At the musical’s close, the gay couple
provides drag costumes to help conservative anti-homosexual activists

LAURA MACDONALD
elude paparazzi seeking a scandal. The homosexuals’ generosity towards

people so different from themselves seemed, not unlike the Clone look,
to model the kind of acceptance they sought to attract. La Cage estab-
lished a presence beyond its Broadway run as Herman’s anthem of defi-
ance for Albin, “I Am What I Am,” became a rallying cry for gay men
around the world as they lived through the AIDS crisis. Decades later,
the lyrics continue to keep gay identity bared and out of the closet.
Help Is On the Way

The AIDS crisis escalated from the mid-1980s onwards and was
referred to as a gay plague, connecting the disease to homosexual activity
(Anderson 2010). The gay community was no longer visible in the United
States for its glamour and flamboyance but for its battle against illness.
Anderson notes how the bathhouses once used for community gathering
and sexual purposes symbolized “the breeding ground of the burgeoning
AIDS epidemic” (Anderson, 2010 145). The musical theatre industry was
devastated but responded with the creation of the charities “Broadway
Cares” and “Equity Fights AIDS” in 1988. They have since raised more
than $300 million, and helped provide medical care, food and financial
assistance to men, women and children throughout the United States who
are affected by AIDS and other health crises (Broadway Cares/Equity
Fights AIDS Mission Statement).
Born out of the AIDS crisis, the Broadway Bares burlesque fundrais-
ers appropriate iconic Broadway songs and dances, but also depend on
the physically fit and appealing bodies of Broadway performers. Ander-
son calls such events “philanthroproductions,” and highlights their suc-
cess as a counter-offensive to any ongoing AIDS-related stigma (2015
923). Surviving gay bodies are celebrated in order to support care of
plague victims’ bodies distorted by AIDS. Anderson explains that “the
demanding and often sexually suggestive choreography, combined with
the revealing costumes (or lack thereof), showcase the physical fitness of
the performers on display for the viewing pleasure of the paying audi-
ence” (2015 928). Such bodies are consistent with a 1990s Clone style
responding to weight loss and other physical side effects of HIV medica-
tions. “Gay style,” as Stines observes, “reflected an obsessive attention to
building a muscular body as proof of health” (148). Body conscious
clothing, whether spandex or tailored, advertised the smooth, firm bodies
that could be revealed, of men who developed a look “consistent with
their own desires” (Stines 148). Medical advances have since made an
HIV diagnosis manageable, to such an extent that some Broadway per-
formers live and perform with their positive status, eight shows a week.
76 No 171
Gay men are still in the front row at Bares, for as Mitchell notes “the
people who gave a lot of money wanted to be close” (qtd. in Anderson 2010,
151). Anderson traces the venue changes that accommodated larger audien-
ces and a runway facilitating more interaction for major donors, finally lead-
ing Bares to the Roseland Ballroom in the Broadway theatre district. “On a
theoretical level, these changes reflect the acceptance and ultimately the
adoption of the event by the Broadway community,” strengthening the
event’s community feel which has stimulated “the exponential increase in size
of the event” (Anderson, 2010 151-52). The success of Broadway Bares is a
bellwether for changing attitudes about nudity in a musical theatre context. A
decade after Bares launched, Time Out New York journalist Adam Feldman
began curating lists of the 10 hottest chorus boys and girls with revealing
images (Feldman). Bares relies on similar images, marketing the 2019 travel
themed event, Take Off, with photos of naked Broadway dancers posing with
travel themed props. Like most Bares numbers the images are fun, but the
2019 event also marked Stonewall’s 50th anniversary.
Choreographed by John Alix, a memorial number began with black
and white video projections and headlines describing a range of traumas
in the gay community, including AIDS but also the Pulse nightclub attack
in 2016 (Torres 2016). Transgender performer Mila Jam played activist and
drag queen Marsha P. Johnson, throwing a brick to symbolize the begin-
ning of protests in 1969. A clip of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
acknowledged the gay community’s grief over the funeral of popular icon
Judy Garland. Mila Jam stripped down to a white dress and guided a
contemporary activist, Broadway newcomer Gabriel Hyman, and they
were soon joined by a group of dancers of different races, genders, and
sizes—casting consistent with previous editions of Bares. They stripped to
reveal a single stripe from the rainbow flag painted across each dancer’s
crop top or briefs, together forming a living flag. Linking arms to march,
partnering and hugging one another and signing the song’s lyrics, the flag
dancers proudly assembled. Their visible muscles, sweat and heavy breath-
ing emphasised their physical fitness and their presence, whether as survi-
vors of violent attacks or as descendants of the Stonewall generation (Alix).
Like the diva performances described earlier, Broadway Bares per-
formers are developing meaningful connections with the gay community,
causing what Anderson calls an “ideological transformation” (Anderson,
2015 930). Using strong, appealing bodies to perform numbers unlike
those in Broadway musicals, and performing as a massed Broadway com-
munity, the Bares performers have much in common with Bette Midler’s
early 1970s performances, combining so many sources and influences to
entertain an audience of primarily gay men. After the slow progress
that Broadway musicals made in entertaining and representing the gay

LAURA MACDONALD
community, by combining forces they are now creating positive change.

While progress in dismantling systemic racism in the musical theatre
industry and changing who is hired and represented is ongoing, when
Broadway bodies are bared in the 21st century, it is in celebration of an
inclusive gay community, reinforcing a decades-old relationship and a
clear journey beyond lawsuits and embarrassment. 2
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BENDER, Marilyn. “Topless, And No Bottoms, Either” New York Times April
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CANTU, Maya. “‘The World Belongs to the Young?’: Age and the Golden Age
Diva in Coco (1969) and Applause (1970).” Studies in Musical Theatre 12.1
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2. I am grateful to Trevor Boffone and the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable
feedback during the development of this article.
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H ERMAN, Jerry. “Cocktail Counterpoint” (1983). https://genius.com/Jerry-

herman-cocktail-counterpoint-lyrics. Accessed August 10, 2021.
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BARE BROADWAY BODIES: HOW NUDITY BROUGHT THE GAY COMMUNITY AND BROADWAY CHEEK TO CHEEK Laura Macdonald

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BARE BROADWAY BODIES: HOW NUDITY BROUGHT THE GAY

COMMUNITY AND BROADWAY CHEEK TO CHEEK

Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »

2022/2 N° 171 | pages 67 à 79

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Bare Broadway Bodies:

Keywords Des saunas aux théâtres de Broadway, en passant

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 67

million for BC/EFA. “Obviously sex sells,” Mitchell says, explaining

Up to the Glitter: Spectating Hair’s Bare Bodies

de-emphasised the excitement surrounding the onstage nudity, explaining:

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 69

Broadway Comes to the Continental Baths

consequent audience-performer intimacy made Ostrow’s bathhouse a

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 71

wrapped only in one of the Continental’s white towels, like so many in

I Am What I Am: Exploring Identity In and Out of Clothes

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 73

Journalist Barry Tarshis accepted an invitation from the club presi-

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 75

elude paparazzi seeking a scandal. The homosexuals’ generosity towards

Help Is On the Way

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 77

community, by combining forces they are now creating positive change.

H ERMAN, Jerry. “Cocktail Counterpoint” (1983). https://genius.com/Jerry-

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 79

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