American actress and songstress Judy Garland is a gay icon. She rose to iconic status in the 1950s. At that time, gays admired her talent as a performer, and her value as a camp figure. She was often parodied in drag revues. Her struggles with drugs, alcohol, and personal relationships during her adulthood mirrored similar struggles among urban closeted gays during the same era. Garland's role as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz may be the foundation stone of her iconic status. Following her death in 1969 and the Stonewall riots, Garland's status as a gay icon began to slip. Young gay men embraced their sexual orientation with pride rather than shame, and could or would not identify with Garland's melodramatic victimhood and emotionalism.
Who was Judy Garland?
Judy Garland was born Francis Ethel Gumm in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in 1922. Her parents were vaudevillians who operated a movie theatre that featured vaudeville acts. Judy was a toddler when she joined her two older sisters in singing "Jingle Bells" from the stage of her parents' theatre. The sisters performed as The Gumm Sisters for the next few years. The Gumms moved to Lancaster, California in 1926 when Judy's father was rumored to be making sexual advances to young male theatre ushers.
The Gumm Sisters continued to perform successfully. They made their movie debut in 1929. In 1934 they changed their name to The Garland Sisters. Judy was signed by MGM in 1935 and made many movies including the Andy Hardy series with Mickey Rooney and The Wizard of Oz. Judy was given amphetamines and barbiturates to keep up with the hectic pace of moviemaking. She became addicted to drugs.
Judy was insecure about her appearance. Her feelings were exacerbated by cruel studio executives. In April 1947 she had a nervous breakdown and was placed in a sanitarium. In July she tried to commit suicide. She was released from the studio in 1950, but found a new lease on life performing on the concert stage. Her personal life was troubled with drugs and alcohol. She was married five times, four marriages ending in divorce. She died in London in 1969 of an accidental drug overdose. Thousands attended her funeral in New York City.
Garland as tragic figure
Gay identification with Garland as a tragic figure was being discussed as early as 1967. Time magazine reviewed Garland's 1967 Palace Theatre engagement in New York City, and wrote that a "disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual." The review goes on to say that "[t]he boys in the tight trousers" (a phrase Time repeatedly used to describe gay men) would "roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats" during Garland's performances.
Time tried to explain Garland's appeal to the homosexual. Psychiatrists thought that "the attraction [to Garland] might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived so many problems; homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria". They speculated that "Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."
William Goldman wrote in Esquire magazine about the same Palace engagement. He too disparages the gay men in attendance. He dismisses them as "fags" who "flit by" chattering inanely. He also advances the tragic figure concept. He suggests that "if [homosexuals] have an enemy, it is age. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow." He wrote, "Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. And so does Garland. She's been through the fire and lived – all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone – brothers and sisters, she knows."
Camp aspects
Gay movie scholar Richard Dyer has defined camp as "a characteristically gay way of handling the values, images and products of the dominant culture through irony, exaggeration, trivialisation, theatricalisation and an ambivalent making fun of and out of the serious and respectable." Garland is camp, he asserts, because she is "imitable, her appearance and gestures copiable in drag acts". He calls her "ordinariness" in her early MGM movies camp in their "failed seriousness" and her later style "wonderfully over-the-top."