"Ahh... An afternoon alone with my favorite book. Broadway Musicals of the 1940's.
"
The stereotype that if a man is gay, he
must love theater, especially musical theater. He'll know every play worth knowing in a given season, will be familiar with every Broadway leading lady (living and dead), and owns the soundtracks to his favorite musicals that he sings with gusto. He'll religiously attend the plays in his hometown's biggest theater or theater district.
As one can imagine, this trope extends all around. If a man is a stage actor or is in any way employed by a theater company, or simply enjoys watching plays and/or listening to showtunes, questions of
his sexuality will rise quickly. This can be a
Pet Peeve Trope, though the degree of which varies. Most heterosexual stage actors and fans are secure enough that this sort of thing doesn't bother them (unless they're
teenagers), but gay men who don't enjoy theater tend to
chafe at being grouped with
screaming queens who argue over whether Jennifer Holiday or Jennifer Hudson played a better Effie in
Dreamgirls.
There
is some element of
Truth in Television, as a good portion of stage actors and fans are indeed gay, however this only really means that men who enjoy theater are more likely to be gay compared to other mediums, not so much that every gay person enjoys theater or every person who enjoys theater is gay.
See also
Performance Artist, for gay men who
perform theatre.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Actually popped up in Samurai Champloo, of all places - a Dutch ambassador (or possibly just an important representative of a major Dutch trading-company) is maniacal about Noh Theatre - and after finding out that all the actors are male, he likes it even better. Turns out he's gay, and came to Japan to find a culture that was somewhat more open towards such thing.
Film
Live-Action Television
Music
Western Animation
- Futurama:
- Mentioned when Bender uses his Gaydar to identify a prospective date for Leela as "coming from a planet that's big on musical theater".
- On "I Dated A Robot", the Educational Short shown to Fry argues that all of mankind's endeavours (Art, Politics, War) were attempts to impress members of the opposite sex... "and sometimes members of the same sex" (Drama).
- Subverted in the Larry 3000's case. While he is gay, he prefers sleazy novels to theater and strenuously tries to censor Shakespeare's plays because he considers them unsuitable for children.
- The Simpsons: In "Three Gays of the Condo," Homer's gay roommate informs him that "anyone who’s ever written, starred in, or even seen a play is gay."
Real Life
- Infamously, one of the questions other soldiers asked of linguist Bleu Copas, who was discharged from the U.S. Army for being gay, was whether he was "involved in community theater."
- Comedian Russell Peters has a joke where his father asks if he knows some random gay people they saw on TV.
Russell: "Dad, why would you ask me that?"
Mr. Peters: "Well, they are gay, and you are in the entertainment business!"
- The producers of Monty Python spin-off musical Spamalot witnessed a hitherto un-heard of phenomenon in musical theatre. The one demographic that musical theatre had previously utterly failed to reach was now flocking in its droves, and buying bums-on-seats time to see Spamelot. Heterosexual men aged 18-40, a group so normally engrained in the belief that musicals were such a gay male art form that you could catch it just by walking past the stage door, were actually buying tickets. And coming back for repeat performances.
