#tlbm

First: textual gayness. In an age where the term queerbaiting gets thrown around a lot, and often in contexts where it isn’t warranted, many people think that the only way a couple (especially a gay couple) is “canon” or that any given character is “canonically queer” is if they end up as the endgame ship, marked by some kind of unmistakable kiss.

This way of interfacing with media, where anything must be waved loudly in the viewer’s face for the viewer to acknowledge it as part of the text, completely overlooks the work’s intentional subtleties. (It’s not even that subtle.)

Michael sings, “someone make me feel like that,” and David sings, “I can make him feel like that.” Michael sings, “I want a love which can slow down time / that last forever and never dies” while staring at David, who’s lit and reaching out to him. David literally cannot keep his hands off of Michael and at no point is Michael like “bro stop touching me.” David teaches Michael guitar (while doing a jerk off motion jfc), which is so common it’s a romantic cliché, like teaching someone billiards. Don’t even get me started on vampirism as sex. It’s understood that David’s touchiness and sensuality is part of what enchants Michael about him.

This is NOT a subtextual crush and seduction. This is a TEXUAL crush and seduction. If an audience expects Michael to get on the mic and say directly to them “hello I have a huge crush on David” they completely close themselves off to more complex stories in which attraction is experienced, feared, mixed with a desire to belong or escape. If they only accept declarations of love and kisses as confirmation, they erase stories of unrequited love, secret crushes, or (perhaps in the case of David and Michael) unhealthy, confusing situationships that end in flames.

So there are those people, which put blinders on and ignore all text that is not kissing, or declarations of love in exactly the way they expect to hear them. Then there are people who do pick up on the rest of the text, identify it as gay, but who dismiss the musical as not gay enough because David and Michael don’t end up together. So you admit it! Michael and David are textually involved! Then why is the musical not gay/not gay enough? Because Michael ends up with a woman.

I don’t have to write an essay to explain why this is blatantly biphobic. Michael is not less gay (umbrella term)/queer because he ends up with Star. Bi stories with same gender endings, or which involve nonbinary love interests, are not more queer than bi stories with opposite gender endings. Bi stories are not suddenly “straight” because they resolve with opposite gender couples, even if they don’t ever fool around with a same gender/nonbinary person at any stage of the story (which Michael DOES anyway). If you do in fact recognize the romantic and sexual overtones of David and Michael’s dynamic, then saying the musical wasn’t gay enough is bi erasure, plain and simple.

I will grant that this could be done in a heteronormative way, but Star is not portrayed is Michael’s better choice because she is a woman, nor David the worse choice because he’s a man. To drastically simplify some of the central themes of the musical, Michael has been on the wrong end of abuse, David is the perpetuator of abuse, and Star is actively committed to breaking the cycle of abuse and tries to protect Michael from it. David maintains family through violence, coercion and deception, while both Star and Michael are looking for a healthy family of love and care, and find it in each other. The musical itself explores normative family structures and rejects the pressure to conform to them most obviously through the rejection of Max. They are adapting a story that ends with Star and Michael getting together, but they are not trying to reaffirm the heteronormative family structure and spend the entire musical critiquing it. Wake upppppp

Contents (sorted in the order they were posted):

David keeping keys and being sentimental

David, Michael, & Dwayne's favorite albums/songs

Turning order

David serving in WWI

David's inner workings ("inner world of David's mind" as Ali puts it) & a song that reflects that and that Ali uses to get into that mindset