![]() ![]() So how could he be gay? Moreover, gays were disgusting. And he was Jerome Robbins-a very big something. Why should Robbins think otherwise? How could he be gay? Gays were sinful. As Laurents recently pointed out in a New York Times interview, like most gay men of his class and time, Robbins “to his dying day thought people didn’t know he was gay.” Incredible? Far from it. It’s somewhat less overt now because it’s somewhat less sanctioned, but bigotry is still alive and killing in the U.S.” Not that he’s interested-as today’s neoconservative orthodoxy would have it-in “playing the victim card” especially as regards Robbins, who, while victimizing others by naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, was the victim of his own bad faith. He was, therefore, well aware of the fact that the stubbornly petty demand to ostracize and stigmatize one group of individuals to benefit another is the very thing that keeps the “mainstream” flowing: “I believed most Americans were prejudiced against homosexuals, Negroes and Jews, in that order,” he notes of his younger self, adding, “I still do. At length and explicitly.īorn in 1918, Laurents grew up a Jew at a time when the world was ruled by Gentiles. And having lived through a period that has seen same-sex orientation move from the margins of a subculture to challenge the ever-so-famous “mainstream,” Laurents is well-prepared to talk about it. But Laurents wants to bear witness to his age. Desperate to be held, he went to bed with anyone who wanted him and discovered he was mad about sex-the best way to become good at it-and Harold was better than good”), a perfectly plain-wrap account would be quite sufficient. But when your life story’s characters include Ethel Merman, Barbra Streisand, Lena Horne, Leonard Bernstein, Budd Schulberg and Harold Lang (whom Laurents calls “The best sex I’ve ever had. When you’re a writer whose career spans a good three-quarters of the last century, a resume highlighted by “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “The Way We Were” and “The Turning Point,” explication rather than explanation would appear to be the order of the day. ![]()
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