True West Side Story Poem by gershon hepner

THE TRUE WEST SIDE STORY

Conceived by men both Jewish and left-wing,
West Side Story disguises love that could not say
its name, for when you hears the lovers sing
you aren't supposed to know its writers were all gay.

Allan Ellenzweig ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (Tablet,11/6/12) writes about the gay identity of so many of the creative artists who flourished: in New York after the Second World War:
At the beginning of the long presidential campaign now finally closed, Texas Gov. Rick Perry ran a TV campaign ad in his quest for the Republican nomination that complained about gays who can "openly" serve in the military while "our kids" can't "openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school." The Internet and blogosphere quickly lit up as discerning viewers noted that the music underscoring Perry's words sounded awfully close to the opening strains of Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring." Copland, the author of some of the most recognizable and inspiring American music of the 20th century, was—as one blogger crowed with delight—a "gay Commie Jewish composer." Perry had hit the minority trifecta.
These days, East and West Coast sophisticates can laugh about right-wing rubes who associate Commies with Jews, but when and how did gays get into the mix? There is a long and complicated history here. To be Jewish and gay and left-wing when Copland was working in midcentury America meant having three minority identities, each subject to social shaming. Being Jewish, it turned out, was the least of it, but hiding any one of these often encouraged suppressing all three, at different times or for different audiences. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" preceded the law fashioned for the military; for some, it was a daily life ritual….
Yet just as Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male informed an innocent American public in the late 1940s that same-sex experience was more widespread than openly professed, this could also mean that homosexuals sometimes strayed from their own turf. Arthur Laurents, a Cornell graduate who had written training films while in the armed services, afterward turned successfully to Broadway and Hollywood. He writes that he became "hooked" by ballet's "exacting combination of art and craft" and found himself smitten by Ballet Theater's dramatic ballerina Nora Kaye, known as the Duse of the Dance. A middle-class Jewish boy from Brooklyn, Arthur Levine was the son of a barely observant father who was a lawyer with an Orthodox background he left for Reform Judaism. Laurents got to know Kaye's dance colleague, Jerome Robbins, "an imp with a high-pitched giggle" who referred to Laurents as a "dark prince" and, as their friendship grew, as "baby." As it happens, Robbins, as conflicted about being gay as about being Jewish, also had sexual relations with Kaye.
The ballet world's sexually mutable milieu, and Laurents' emotional attachment to Kaye even after their affair ended, informed his script, decades later, of the ballet film The Turning Point, directed by Kaye's last husband, Herbert Ross. One spicy similarity between screenwriter Laurents and Robbins was their having bedded two up-and-coming dreamboat actors of their generation: Laurents, Farley Granger; and Robbins, Montgomery Clift. But Laurents would look back upon his strained friendship with the impish dancer through the prism of Robbins having named names in testimony to HUAC in 1953—professionally dooming colleagues whom Robbins had briefly known in a "theatrical transient group" called the Communist Political Association. Robbins said he joined under the naïve impression that "the Russian Communists were against fascism and anti-Semitism and in favor of artistic freedom." Under HUAC questioning, he was asked, with supreme lunacy, "if dialectical materialism had influenced Fancy Free."
Anyone who has seen that delightfully fresh ballet, or the Broadway musical On the Town, which expanded its themes, could guess that the attractive young sailors who surged into Times Square in waves during the Second World War were what "influenced" its choreographer. But Robbins gave way under pressure, an act of moral betrayal that his former friend Arthur Laurents (who wrote the screenplay for The Way We Were with its Hollywood Red-scare background) refused to ascribe to his being afraid that he would be outed as a homosexual, as others rationalized. To Laurents, the ambitious Robbins was merely securing his future career, since at the time he was choreographing Broadway'sThe King and I and anticipating its move to the movies. "He wasn't threatened with exposure, " said Laurents, who was unable to get his passport renewed during this period because of his own former connections with leftist organizations. "Jerry said, ‘It won't be for years until I know whether I did the right thing.' I said, ‘Oh I can tell you now. You were a shit.' But I wasn't so pristine myself. I worked with him afterwards and I knew he'd been an informer."
The major collaboration on which they worked after Robbins informed was one begun before the blacklist had taken its toll. It was an idea Robbins first brought to Bernstein and Laurents in 1949: The story of Romeo and Juliet was to play out as a feud between Jews and Catholics, an idea Robbins claimed came to him when an actor friend asked how he should play Romeo. Some presume this must have been Robbins' lover in the mid-1940s, Montgomery Clift, and Robbins used religious hostility as a parallel to explain the family feud in Shakespeare's Verona. Originally, in the updat written by Laurents, news of "Tybalt's" death—Juliet's cousin—would arrive during Passover Seder.
Robbins had introduced Bernstein to Arthur Laurents, whose short-lived 1945 Broadway play Home of the Brave, dealt with anti-Semitism in an Army unit during World War II and had brought Bernstein to tears. Ultimately, Laurents and Bernstein bowed out of the project, originally called East Side Story, when its familiarity to the sentimental hit of the 1920s, Abie's Irish Rose, became clear.
By 1955, the project was re-imagined when Bernstein and Laurents, coincidentally out in Hollywood at the same time, were struck by news about gang violence in L.A. between Chicanos and Anglos. Robbins had already urged Bernstein to reconsider the project and now joined them in reworking the story so that ethnic gangs replaced Jewish and Italian families. Stephen Sondheim, who had been nurtured at the right hand of Oscar Hammerstein, was brought in to help write lyrics. Thus was born a landmark in popular musical theater in which tragedy held final sway, operatic elements balanced with a symphonic take on jazz and Latin music, and dance became a way of defining character and underlining themes.
That the Jewish/Catholic motif was dropped so easily by its Jewish creators may seem to us a supreme irony. But then, this was still show business. When Home of the Brave was adapted for a 1949 film produced by Stanley Kramer, the Jewish character was changed to a Negro. "When I asked why, " writes Laurents, "Stanley replied: ‘Jews have been done.' "
Some attribute the success of West Side Story to a shared gay sensibility among its creators; certainly the sexy male dancing of the two gangs would have been a draw to a gay audience. But Laurents himself explained, "We're Jews. … West Side can be said to be informed by our political and sociological viewpoint; our Jewishness as the source of passion against prejudice; our theatrical vision, our aspiration, but not, I think, by our sexual orientation." Yet this statement tends to deny that a shared minority sexual orientation could also produce a "passion against prejudice."
Here, perhaps, was the conspiracy that infected gay Jews in the postwar era: the making of common cause against prejudice of all kinds. But as Charles Kaiser writes of Laurents' assertion: "[T]his debate simply highlights the similarities between the experiences of Jews and homosexuals in New York City: Two oppressed minority groups who have struggled mightily, and very successfully, to travel out of invisibility and assimilation to proud self-declaration."
Bill Goldstein's response:
Aware of most of this…but still I didn't know that Lauents was bi, or that Montgomery Clift was his significant other…..At the end of the day they created a GREAT work of art. Judaism needs to take a more sophisticated look at the gay question and why the Ribbon Shel Olam has blessed gays with so much creativity.
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