Place for Us

It used to be a secret that, in its postwar heyday, the Broadway musical recruited a massive underground following of gay men. But though this once silent social fact currently spawns jokes that every sitcom viewer is presumed to be in on, it has not necessarily become better understood. In Place for Us, D. A. Miller probes what all the jokes laugh off: the embarrassingly mutual affinity between a general cultural form and the despised minority that was in fact that forms implicit audience. In a style that is in turn novelistic, memorial, autobiographical, and critical, the author restores to…