Gays and Oz: Why There's No Place Like Homo - YouTube
Transcripts:
Surrender, Dorothy. In the 1980s, the United States military went on a witch hunt. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? The Navy was hunting for Dorothy and her network of friends. You know, I'm a friend of Dorothy's. Long before Friend of Dorothy meant sketchy supplements, it was a code for gay men. Of course, people do go both ways.
And years before don't ask, don't tell, it was military policy to root them out. I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too. But why were these seaman gaga for Gail? We just love the Wizard of Oz, don't you? And why did a children's movie from before World War II become so closely associated with gay culture? It's a cult movie to me. I'm a member of the cult. To the point that a century later, queer people are still holding space for it.
I didn't know that that was happening. The Wizard of Oz certainly spoke to me. As a kid, I couldn't wait for the annual broadcast of the film, even though one year it nearly killed me. And as an adult, when I moved to West Hollywood, I discovered a gay bar where the Monday night tradition was selecting one person to be the wicked witch from the musical Wicked and lifting them up while everyone around them sang Defying Gravity.
The night I was chosen to be Alphaba, I felt like I'd found my home, and there was no place like it. So, how did we get from a fairy tale written over a hundred years ago to a triumphant anthem in a gay bar? 1936, Irving Thalberg was dead. Thalberg had run production at MGM since he co-founded the studio at the age of 24.
MGM and all of Hollywood had come to depend on Irving Thberg as a tastemaker. When movies were new, his pictures had helped define the genres that we have today. Comedies like A Night at the Opera, dramas like Mutiny on the Bounty, historical epics like Ben Hur, action films like Tarzan. And now that he was dead, studios shut their doors in morning.
Well-wishers sent flowers by the truckload. The actor Wallace Beer got in a plane and tossed bouquets over Thberg's funeral, nearly hitting his wife with a bunch of roses. Roses? Yeah, the roses. Why would you send me roses? Thberg's death was seen as a disaster for the film industry. It was also a disaster for the gays. This is the end. The absolute end.
Irving was straight, but he was a close friend to many queer actors, artists, drag performers. At a time when gay men often had to be closeted for the sake of their careers. That wasn't the case for Irving Thalberg. He hired gay actors for his films like Raone Navaro and Billy Haynes. I thought you were pansy.
Well, I'm the wildest pansy you ever picked. He hired screenwriters like Edmund Golding, who was notorious for wild bisexual orgies that were so energetic they occasionally landed participants in the hospital. They tore my legs off and they threw them over there. Then they took my chest out and they threw it over there. Well, that's you all over.
Thberg also gave big breaks to gay producers like David Lewis, the boyfriend of Frankenstein director James Whale. He encouraged filmmakers to watch queer films from Europe for inspiration and include queer content in the movies they produced. You cannot die an old man. I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor.
That had earned him some enemies. Sensors hated Thalberg. Considered his movies and actors indecent, pushed for tougher censorship rules. But Thalberg pushed back. He delayed implementation of what would become the production code for as long as he could. But by 1936, he was gone.
The production code was coming into effect and it looked like it was going to be a lot harder for queer people to make a living in Hollywood or for movies to share a knowing wink with queer audiences. Oh, go right ahead, boys. Don't mind me. But for the time being, the people that Irving had hired were still working at MGM, and their films would go on to have an enormous impact on American culture and specifically on gay culture to this day. And the biggest impact of all would come from an unexpected source.
It started with a film made across town at Disney. Now, don't tell me who you are. Let me guess. A lot of people thought nobody would go to a featurelength cartoon. But the first one, Snow White, was a hit. Who now is the fairest one of all? And that got the other studios scrambling for fairy tales of their own.
Over at MGM, an executive named Mvin Loy had been hired to replace Irving Thalberg. And Mvin remembered a novel that he'd loved as a kid, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It had been published about 35 years earlier in 1900, written by a window dresser turned author named Elrank Bow. No relation. You probably know the story.
A young girl from Kansas travels to Oz. She finds a pair of silver slippers. She meets a shape-shifting wizard who appears as a beautiful woman and a biblically accurate rhinoceros with five eyes. And after the girl aids in the killing of a giant spider, she returns home with some help from her new friends, the Flying Monkeys.
The book had been a huge success. There were over a dozen sequels and a massive stage version. Here's an ad posting of a cast of over a 100 people, mostly girls. And in the 19s, Elrank Bam created a studio to bring Oz to the screen. Not like that with silent films. While the books are lush and imaginative, the films, well, they look a little cheap.
They also mash a bunch of different Oz books together, and the titles don't do a great job of explaining what's going on unless you really know the books. So, they're a roller coaster of sometimes inexplicable visions. They're magic beheadings, soup cannibals, a flirty Minecraft cat. This place has everything.
His silent films were big flops that lost a ton of money. So given the reputation of past Oz films, MGM executives knew if they wanted to bring these books to life successfully, they were going to need an unprecedented creative vision, a gathering of artistic talent across countless disciplines, and boundless opulent fantasy.
In other words, they needed gays. Yes, queen. Most of the production on Wizard of Oz was overseen by Arthur Freed. He was a former song and dance man whose prior claim to fame was writing Singing in the Rain. I'm sing. No, the other singing in the raining. He'd moved into a producer role a few years earlier and he started assembling the top creative talent at MGM and the film industry in general for a musical adaptation of the LFrank Bound books.
And although Arthur Freed was straight, the crew that he assembled was overwhelmingly queer. For example, there's Cedric Gibbons aka Gibby. Not just an art director, Gibby was the art director of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The Oscar statue that's handed out today was designed by Cedric Gibbons. So, we have him to thank for everyone in Hollywood lusting after these little naked, muscular men. God, I hope I get it. I hope I get it.
God, I hope you all can get it. Then there's Edwin Willis, the set decorator. He had an exacting standard. He was known for antique hunting throughout Europe to acquire authentic props. If you ever see any opulent settings in MGM musicals, there's a good chance Edwin Willis was the one who found it.
And then there's the costume designer, Adrien Greenberg. He worked on hundreds of movies. Whenever you see Gowns by Adrien, that's him. His outfits were so popular, American fashion followed his lead. His dress for John Crawford and Mildred Pierce sparked the shoulder pad craze of the 1940s. I forgot my shoulder pads.
Who gives a And of all the queer contributions to the film, one of the biggest is from somebody who isn't even credited. Roger Edens. He served as a producer and a music director. And when The Wizard of Oz was still early in the casting stages, executives were trying to figure out who should play Dorothy.
In the books, she's around 10, so somebody like Shirley Temple would make sense. After all, there's no place like home. But it was Roger Edens who said, "Hey, how about Judy Garland?" Now, that must have come as a surprise to some folks at MGM. Judy had been signed a couple years earlier. She was a child performer who'd worked her way up through vaudeville, appearing alongside some memorable acts.
Uh, we worked with a man who just threw up for his living. And when she arrived at MGM, executives didn't really think of her as a star. Louis B. Mayor was especially awful to her. He called Judy my little hunchback and a fat little pig with pigtails. And at first, she often got cast in supporting roles. She played the awkward girl next door.
Or the unsophisticated farmer's daughter. They all stopped for melons. Are they nice and ripe? They ain't nothing else but. But when Eden sat down with Judy for vocal lessons, he said it was like discovering gold. My heart beats like a hammer and I stutter and I stammer.
Eden's had a knack for collaborating with gay icons across his career from Audrey Hepburn. As a matter of fact, I rather feel like expressing myself now and I could certainly use a relief. To Barbara, look at the old girl now, fellas. To Angela, how you like to spoon with me? I liked if there is a 20th century film diva that you love, chances are good at some point she worked with Roger.
And it was Roger who convinced MGM to cast Judy Garland as Dorothy. And he coached her to find the emotion in the music. Years later, Judy's daughter, Laura Lu, said it was Roger who gave Mama the courage to let the softness, the vulnerability that was part of her into her singing. Without Roger, we might never have had Over the Rainbow. At least not the way we all remember it.
And then there's one more queer figure that I want you to know about. One of the three credited screenwriters, Edgar Allan Wolf, or as he was known around MGM, a wild redheaded homosexual. Wolf and his writing partner, Florence Ryerson, were brought into work on a draft of the script.
The producers wanted them to focus on Dorothy's longing for a home, a place where she could be with people who love her, who she loves in return, and to focus on the threat that the witch poses, separating her from the place that she belongs. It's easy to see how those themes of longing and isolation would make sense to a gay man, but not all of Wolf's work was about melancholy longing. Some of it was also extremely horny.
In researching this video, I found a song that Edgar Allen Wolf wrote years before he worked on The Wizard of Oz. It's for a musical comedy called Toot based on the book Excuse Me. Excuse me, Princess. It is shockingly horny, but unfortunately I couldn't find any recordings of it. So I guess we'll never get to hear it unless you're so cute.
I asked a friend to bring this 100-year-old salute to soldiers in tight uniforms to life. There's a link below to the full recording. And big thanks to actor and singer Aaron Scoggins and composer and music producer Caleb Martin. There's links to their work below as well. So to sum up, as filming on the Wizard of Oz came together in late 1938, at every stage, from the writing to the costumes to the sets to the songs, the Wizard of Oz was being assembled by some of the most talented queer artists in the country.
Arthur Freed's group would stick around at MGM for years. They were celebrated for making some of the best musicals of the 20th century. And around the industry, it was such common knowledge how gay this group was that they all came to be known by a nickname, Freed's Fairies. Now, of course, it wasn't their intent to make a gay film.
And even if it was, at that point, the production code would never have allowed it. And yet, there is a lot of queer subtext just under the surface. And we're going to look at how that manifests on screen in just a little bit. For the time being, though, everybody was focused on getting through a legendarily difficult production. It was not fun. Like hell, it was fun.
It was a lot of hard work. It was not fun at all. There's nothing funny about it. First, there were the fights over how Judy should play the character. Initially, the idea was she should play Dorothy, like in the book, a child with a blonde wig and baby doll makeup.
But George Cucor, another gay man brought in to help with the production, threw that all out. He only worked on the film a couple days before moving on to Gone with the Wind. But before he left, he told Judy, "When the cameras roll, just be yourself." And then there was the challenge of directing all those actors. In some shots of Munchkin Land, there are about a hundred people on screen.
And sometimes Judy would get lost in the crowd. And so the director, Victor Fleming, who was darling man, he was always up on a boom, would say, "Hold it, you three dirty hands. Let that little girl in there." Now, to be fair, here's how her daughter Liza described that story. Our mother had an amazing sense of humor.
So anything that she talked about would become an epic joke almost. People believe a lot of the things that she has told which in fact we know are not true. But there's no doubt this was a very tricky production for everybody. Bertlar's lion costume made of real lion fur weighed nearly 100 pounds and he sweat so heavily they needed a special industrial dryer so it wouldn't get water logged.
For the Tin Man, they originally cast Buddy Epson, Jed Clampet from Beverly Hillbillies, and used aluminum powder for makeup, but that got into his lungs and suffocated him, sending him to the hospital for weeks. So, they switched to aluminum paste and just recast the part, though they never bothered to tell the new actor what had happened to Buddy. But the worst experience was probably The Wicked Witches.
During a skywriting sequence, a smoke pipe hidden in the broom exploded and sent the stunt woman, Betty Denko, to the hospital. And there was an even worse injury to Margaret Hamilton. In one take of this scene, the fireball went off too soon and burned her hand and face. She refused to work around fire effects ever again after that. The onset injuries were terrible.
But top MGM executives were even more worried about how much the producer Mvin Loy was spending. They didn't want to do that, believe me, to spend that much money because that was a lot of money in those days. 2 million six, a lot of money. They they almost fired me for spending so much money. In the end, the film cost a little under three million. That's close to $70 million today.
And for comparison, it's about four times the budget of Judy Garland's other film that year, Babes in Arms, which had the advantage of not suffocating, burning, or blowing up any of the cast. The Wizard of Oz was slated for a 1939 release, and they'd soon find out if all that pain and the expense had been worth it. The release came with a huge promotional blitz.
There were appearances by Judy, tyin merch, a promo booklet for theater owners entitled exploitation. The Wizard of Oz was everywhere. And if you jump ahead through the decades that followed, the film would become especially ubiquitous in gay culture. There were references to the characters. You see, we call ourselves the friends of Dorothy because we just love the Wizard of Oz, don't you? To the dialogue. Addy, look. It's a twister.
That's a twister to the setting. It even became part of gay slang. Disco dancing, Oscar Wild reading, strand, ticket holding friend of Dorothy. You know what I'm saying? Something about this movie and also the books just spoke to gay people. I talked about this phenomenon with D.
Michelle, author of the book Friends of Dorothy, why gay boys and gay men love the Wizard of Oz. Rosian was also really surprised how many how often people said they were really young when they first became fans. So we're talking three, four, five, six years old. So it seems natural that the gay fandom would date back to the film's release in 1939, right? Well, I think there's this myth that from the moment the MJ movie came out in 1939, it became a gay favorite. I don't have any evidence of that.
And the same with Friends of Darthy as as an expression. There's no evidence for that being before Stonewall. Now, that doesn't mean The Wizard of Oz wasn't on gay men's radar at all. Records from the time are pretty limited, but the film is enthusiastically recommended in this 1939 newsletter that was supposedly about trading stamps, but was actually a clandestine way for gay men to exchange letters.
And in his memoir, the pioneering gay journalist Jim Keepner mentions that all of his friends raved about this film when it came out, though he didn't see it until 1975. So why did it take so long to catch on with the gays? Well, part of it is that 1939 was an especially competitive year for movies. The Wizard of Oz was up against Gone with the Wind, Stage Coach, Gungadin, Nachka of Men, The Women.
I've had two years to grow claws. Mother Jungle Ray and in a lot of markets, it was simply overshadowed. Ticket sales were mixed. It didn't recoup its costs. In fact, like those LFrankbound silent versions, the Wizard of Oz initially lost money and audiences just moved on. Now, there were occasional re-releases like in 1949 with this bananas ad campaign, "Are your husbands grouchy? Are your wives irritable? Solve your problems by taking them to see the Wizard of Oz.
" But this presentation definitely wasn't going to speak to a gay fandom, even though the husband is oddly caked up. So, why did the Wizard of Oz go from relative obscurity to a foundational gay text? To come into its full power, first the Wizard of Oz simply needed to get back in front of audiences. That might never have happened if the film industry wasn't blindsided by an existential threat.
Now, the principal advantage television has over radio is that the performer can be seen as well as heard. In the 1950s, TV started siphoning audiences away from theaters, just like streaming is today. At first, studios tried to lure people back to theaters with gimmicks like 3D. And when that didn't work, they realized they were going to have to adjust to this new medium.
And they started running classic films on TV. So in 1956, audiences got to see The Wizard of Oz for the first time on television. For most viewers in black and white, so they never got the thrill of the technicolor reveal. And there were a few other differences from the theatrical version.
Well, we're going to leave Darothy and her friends for a moment so we can follow a boy and a girl on another trip and another adventure. We're off to see the Ford, the wonderful new. We're here in the land of the new Ford. Theatrically, The Wizard of Oz had only ever done so. So, how did you on TV? And the ratings, they went through the roof. They were astronomical. It was like something like 45 million people.
Part of that success was very good timing. They showed it on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a celebration of home, a celebration of Americana. And from there, it turned into a yearly tradition. The arrival every year of the Wizard of Oz on TV was a part of my lurggical calendar. We had Christmas, we had Easter, we had the Wizard of Oz.
It was like the three main events of a child's annual life. birthday, the December holidays, and the night the Wizard of Oz was on. Even in the 1980s, when I was a kid, I remember what a thrill it was. When I was 5 years old, there was a showing during a hurricane, and just as Dorothy got to the Emerald City, I swallowed an arcade token that I had found, and the token got lodged in my throat.
My parents had to rush me to the hospital to get it out. I was fine. But of everything that I remember from that experience, what stuck with me most was how furious I was that I'd missed the whole second half of the movie. The point is, with those rebroadcasts, the movie got a second life.
It was a chance for audiences to take another look and realize just how good it was and to make it part of an annual tradition. But although it was popular with families and kids, it still wasn't a cornerstone of gay culture. But what was was Judy. Call me on the phone and sing a couple of notes to me and I'll give you hatred like you've never gotten. Judy Garland developed a massive gay following in the 50s and 60s.
The phenomenon was documented by, of all people, William Goldman, the author of The Princess Bride. He spent a lot of time researching gay audiences at Judy concerts. In one article, he describes a 21-year-old fan who's watching Judy sing and clutching his hands so tight they've started to bleed.
Story that I find a little inconceivable. One of Goldman's explanations for this phenomenon is that if homosexuals have an enemy, it is age and Garland is youth perennially over the rainbow. What he's probably talking about there is the widespread belief of the time that homosexuality was a sort of arrested development, refusing to grow up like Peter Pan.
But I think there's some much simpler reasons gay men loved Judy, like the fact that she loved them back. She was often seen at gay bars. She defended them in interviews. There's even a persistent story that Judy's funeral in June of 1969 is what caused the Stonewall riots. Although there's one or two Stonewall veterans say that that's true, but many more don't.
There was hardly any mention of her in the press about the Stonewall riots. In any case, Judy's connection to queer culture is a huge topic that I'm working on a whole separate video about. Hit subscribe so you get a notification when it comes out. The gay fandom for Judy Garland was about more than just her music. It was also a piece of shared culture.
If you share jokes or you know how to cake games or kids things and adult stuff too, it binds you together with other people who share that information. And one reason fandoms like that could spread in the 60s and 70s. I think it spread and may have started when there was an outgay press and people communicated that way.
Sure enough, the more openly gay media and gay events there are, the more you see references to the Wizard of Oz. For example, this newsletter where organizer Harry Haye contrasts gay activism with the wizard's magic feats. And this newsletter about trans issues from the 1960s discussing how the original books approached gender fluidity. The Wizard of Oz appears in ads for books targeted to queer people.
Here's an ad for an Oz journal published in a gay newsletter. So, there were four big forces driving the gay Wizard of Oz fandom. One, the movie is easily accessible. Two, there's already a gay fandom for the star. Three, there's finally a way to share that fandom. And four, this movie made by some of the country's top queer artists makes it very easy to spot gay themes.
So, as gay people were watching this film through fresh eyes in the 60s and 70s, it almost seemed like it was made for them. So, let's take a look at how that shows up on screen. It starts with Dorothy's longing for escape. When we first meet her, she doesn't know where she belongs, but she's sure it's not Kansas.
Adults there don't listen to her. Dorothy, we're busy. Or they dismiss her. Think you didn't have any brains at all. Her only friend is a dog who gets targeted just for doing what comes naturally. This goat hit total right over the back with a rake just because she says he gets in her garden and chases her nasty old cat every day.
That feeling of not belonging is something a lot of queer people can identify with. I spoke to the artist and writer Terry Bloss, an Oz super fan who's been writing Oz story since he was a kid, and we talked about how he connected with characters like Dorothy. I grew up in a pretty religious household, and I think that there were certain expectations placed upon me.
You know, all the other boys in my um school and in my church were super into, you know, basketball and football and there were expectations placed on me to be a missionary and to do certain things. So I think I was trying to escape some of those things that I knew I was either expected to do or that were coming that were coming up in my life.
Wizard of Oz songwriter Yip Harber explained how he saw Dorothy starting place. An arid colorless place almost no flowers there because it's so dry. The only thing in her life that was colorful at that point was I thought the rainbow was the only thing of color that she had ever seen. So I said I must have a song with rainbow in it. He gave her a song where she expresses her dream to get out of there.
Do you suppose there is such a place to go to find a place with no troubles behind the moon beyond the rain? And when MGM executives heard Judy singhere, they said, "It stinks." They went to Louis B. Mayor and they said, "You can't have our movie star singing in a barnyard. Where's the glamour?" And at that, the producers, Mvin Loy, and Arthur Freed panicked.
They said, "No, the movie needs that song. The audience has to understand Dorothy's longing." It was almost exactly the same fight that the creative team had at Disney 50 years later when Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to cut Part of Your World. A song written by a gay man about longing for a place where you belong.
For more about that Little Mermaid story, check out my video about the songwriter Howard Ashman. This story is is true and deeply humiliating, but we'll tell it. Fortunately, in both cases, the gays prevailed and the song stayed. I also talked to Terry Bloss about how those heroic I want songs gave him something to look forward to.
I don't think there's anything wrong with like um being born in a town, you grow up there, you you know, you spend your life there. That's fine. But for some reason in my brain and it probably had a lot to do with Oz and with The Little Mermaid after high school, I was like I but I'm I'm gone. I'm leaving.
Like I'm that and obviously Romy and Michelle like we're out of here. And I think one thing about this song that works really well is that we don't just see Dorothy's sadness, we see hope, her belief that there is a place for her somewhere. And I think this line is crucial. That you dare to dream that dreams can be brave and they can come true.
That is a beautiful idea today. And imagine how it must have felt to queer people 50, 60, 70 years ago, living somewhere totally isolated and being told, "Be brave. Dream of the place you belong." And part of what makes Oz an answer to Dorothy's dream are its colors, its music, the fabulous visions. At last, it's the escape that she dreamed of and that a lot of viewers dreamed of, too.
So, I grew up between Boisee, Idaho, and several different cities in Mexico. And for me, I mean, no shade to Boyisey, but it was somewhat brown and gray. And then we would go to Mexico, which was this intense, colorful, beautiful place where I felt like I was seeing this sort of similar relationship that Dorothy would have to like here's home, here's this other place I get to go.
Um, and so I think I was one of those kids whose imagination was sort of ignited by Oz. It's It's probably my earliest and strongest um I think inspiration as a kid. But there's more to Oz than just the beauty. There's also her new friends. It starts with the scarecrow, or as drag icon Ginger Ming called him, this mindless twink that just dances his way mindlessly through life, depending on his best friend to get him where he needs to go. Then there's the Tin Man who gets so emotional he can't move, which is why he has to carry his own
lube. and the lion. You don't even have to insinuate about him being gay. I'm afraid there's no denying I'm just a dandelion. Dandy was a wellestablished slang word for homosexual by that point. Here's a review of a play from one year earlier calling Oscar Wild a witty, hedonistic homosexual dandy.
Put that in your Grinder profile. What these characters all have in common is that they're men who appear unmanly by the standards of the time. There's an expectation that men should be smart, stoic, brave. For the most part, these three characters behave the opposite of those ideals.
Plus, they're following a woman, letting her be in charge. By the standards that audiences would have at that time, the characters are totally unmasculine. And I got a permanent just for the occasion. And yet, they're also loyal. They're lovable. We root for them the whole time. They are our heroes.
I spoke to another Oz superfan, the writer Josh Trillo, about how important those characters were to him. I think everyone wishes that they had three great friends like the scarecrow, the tin man, and the cowardly lion. And I think a lot of queer people feel isolated, but to know that there is a place, whether it be real uh or imagined, like going over the rainbow, that you're always welcome to and where nothing bad will ever hurt you, I think is the most powerful story you could possibly tell. They meant so much to Josh as a kid.
He started collecting Wizard of Oz memorabilia. Every time we went to the mall, it was me going to the Hallmark store and basically throwing a tantrum until we walked out of there with Ray Bulgers like this on a porcelain plate. Here's artist and writer Terry Bloss again. You know, in those books, she calls her friends queer, not in a bad way.
It was always like, these are my queer friends and and um that she found strength in that. In the book, The Road to Oz, a character named Polychrome says to Dorothy, "You have some queer friends." and Dorothy replies, "The queerness doesn't matter as long as they're friends.
" So, the movie shows someone longing for a place they belong, finding it with fellow outcasts, and then there's just the sheer camp of it all, especially when it comes to the witches. They've got huge outfits, flamboyant gestures, flashy entrances, and exits. They're over-the-top, exaggerated, and they are essentially drag queens. I'll get you, my pretty.
So, of course, they've been inspiring drag performances for decades. I'll be seeing you, sweetie. And in multiple languages. These over-the-top displays of feminine power have had such a huge impact on pop culture. From this, I'm Glenda, the good witch of the north, to this, I'm to even David Lynch. Don't turn away from love, Sailor. And obviously to Wicked, and don't worry, we're going to get there. You stay out of this, Glenda.
There is one more angle to the 39 film that I think invites queer people in. Our heroes started their journey thinking they were inadequate, that they needed fixing to get him a heart and him a brain. I'm sure he could give you some courage. But when they're tested by overwhelming odds, the scarecrow is clever. I've got a plan how to get in there. The Tin Man's loving.
Oh, I hate to think of her in there. The lion's brave. All right, I'll go in there for Dorothy. Their reward for their journey is discovering together they were never broken in the first place. They're fine the way they are. Not just fine, but powerful together. I felt like I had it within me to kind of go out there and take on the world and be who I wanted to be, but I was always too scared to do it until I found a group of people around me that encouraged me to really find my voice and find my roar and not be scared
of other people. The qualities that made them outsiders are the qualities that brought them together. And going out into the world with each other is how they discovered their true selves because they knew they could count on each other.
And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others. So, those are just a few of the elements that make the Wizard of Oz special, cuz there's nothing that has all the themes that appeal to gay men and is as widely disseminated. And sure enough, we see an explosion of fandom for that film in the 1970s.
There's screenings at the new gay community centers, Wizard of Oz merch at the new gay bookstores, advice columns in the new gay magazines written in the voice of Glenda, and then there were the conventions. When I went to my first Oz convention, the thing that was most powerful to me was there were other people who were Oz geeks.
You know, I would make Oz illusions and metaphors and they would all get it. And then the second thing was seeing how many other gay men were there. This was not always a safe world, if not now even to be openly queer, but at a Wizard of Oz convention, you're you can be whoever you want. And it served an under the radar kind of things.
It wasn't like they had a sign like some gay cruises say, you know, friends of Darthothy meet Saturday at 2 p.m. by the pool. Uh people just sort of knew each other, winked at each other, and then chatted each other up. The Wizard of Oz became such a natural part of gay culture that by the late 1970s, the term friend of Dorothy had become slang for gay men.
Hello all you friends of Dorothy out now. That even led to a misunderstanding in 1980 when the Navy was trying to expose gay soldiers. Investigators heard gays referring to each other as friends of Dorothy and assumed there was a real woman named Dorothy who is some kind of homosexual ring leader.
So when one soldier confessed to being gay, they told him they knew all about Dorothy and insisted he take them to her. but he had no idea what they were talking about. You're Dorothy and I'm Toto. Ironically, some of the earliest appearance of the term friend of Dorothy call it dated slang from decades earlier. But the earliest documented uses are from around 1980.
It's just that the film and the references and the slang are all such a good fit for gays, it seems they ought to have been using it the whole time. The Wizard of Oz is the I think still one of the most successful movies of all time. So, a cult movie in some way. It's a cult movie to me. I'm a member of the cult, but so's everybody. So, it's a very wide cult. It's the most mainstream cult of all.
Now, there were other Wizard of Oz projects. Some very successful like The Whiz. But most ran into some resistance. It would be suicide to make The Wizard of Oz today. The movies you should remake are the bad ones, not the good ones. There's the nightmare visions of Return to Oz. What do you think? An Oz anime set in space.
We have heard the great Wizard of Oz can grant any wish that he chooses. You're correct. My powers are wondrous. There's a Turkish version where the witch really makes a meal for death scene. And one of the oddest takes on Oz. The gun is good. The god is the god of the penis is evil. Now, we don't have time to talk about all of the weird Wizard of Oz adaptations right now, but I'm posting a bonus video about them over on Patreon, plus videos about the openly queer actors working at MGM during the 1939 Wizard of Oz, and about the rumor about
one producer there eating spaghetti with his hands. It was a sight to see. Everybody came to the commissary to see it, and he likes spaghetti a lot. You can watch all that and much more at patreon.com/mattbound. These are all fun, but none of them hit quite the same way.
For decades, it seemed like the 39th film was the definitive take on Oz. And our cultural attitude toward the story and its characters had been set for good. And yet, in the mid '90s, a children's author named Gregory Magcguire started to look at Oz in a very different way. Gregory was a lifelong fan of fantasy stories. I talked to him a couple years ago on my podcast.
The stories that have always interested me in childhood and still do in adult life are those that approximate the beginning of every fairy tale you ever read. Once upon a time, there was a child who was so wonderful that her mother died. Took one look at her and died.
And then the child has to make his or her way through a dark world. Gregory never knew his own mother. She died giving birth to him. And he spent some of his childhood in an orphanage and in relatives homes before his father and his stepmother were ready to raise him. During that instability, fairy tales were an escape for him. And he especially loved the Wizard of Oz.
And I remember that in the lower middle class neighborhood in which I grew up, the advertising on TV for the upcoming rebroadcast of The Wizard of Oz set the schoolyard into a lather of hysterical anticipation. As an adult, he got a degree in children's fantasy literature, ran a literacy nonprofit, wrote novels for kids. It was rewarding work, but a tough way to earn a living.
by the early 90s. So, I was kind of living uh off my boyfriend in a way that didn't make me feel good about myself. I've been writing professionally for 16 years and I've never really broken out. I have to do something sooner or go into the selling of insurance. He was living in England then when two huge events took place.
The first was the start of Desert Storm trying to suppress Saddam Hussein who was called in the newspapers in England the next Hitler. The second was a shocking crime. A little boy murdered by two other children. How could that happen? Where does the evil in that behavior come from? Everybody in England was talking about it. And I saw the evil of international war and the evil of school kids killing a weak child with binocular vision.
And I decided if I did not write about the nature of evil somehow, I would probably have to take myself off to the Looney Bin at last because I just couldn't process all that. To tell that story, he thought back to the good and evil characters that he'd loved as a boy and one character in particular. And I thought, well, there's an idea.
After all, she's called Wicked. And I knew, having been a good child scholar, that Elrank Bomb never said anything about how she got to be bad. So he started to write. It it was as if my my curly hair was on fire. Uh I wrote the book in five months. I was writing so fast I couldn't even stop to take notes about what I wanted to have happen next.
The novel that poured out of him was called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's about a family in Munchkinland who give birth to a baby named Alphaba. She's green with fearsome sharp teeth, and she grows up an outcast knowing that people are afraid of her. As a student at a magic school, she learns that the beloved wizard who rules Oz is really a fraud.
That he's distracting the population by whipping up fear of talking animals, distracting people so he can consolidate his power. Alphaba joins a resistance movement. The wizard turns the people of Oz against her, convinces them that she's a villain, and throughout it all, Alphaba is determined to stand up for herself to stop the wizard and defend the oppressed animals of Oz.
Instead of telling the story through Dorothy, Wicked is told from the witch's point of view. She's trying to help, to do good, to fight against a cruel tyrant oppressing his people. Now, Gregory knew that might not be what people expected or even wanted from an Oz story, but he told himself, "This is what I want to do. This is what art is. You have to be brave. Don't think about what people are going to say.
Just do the best you can, and if it doesn't work, it won't be because you didn't try." Sure enough, when Wicked was published, there were some tough reviews. The New York Times said it sounds like a joke. Complained about his insistence on politicizing Oz and they were annoyed about how the book spends pages and pages debating things like the nature of good and evil.
I don't know what they expected from a book called Wicked. But at any rate, it seemed like maybe that was the end of the line for the book. Like with the 39 film, sales were okay. Nothing special. Gregory was paid a modest amount for the first printing. And I thought, well, this is the most buddy I'm ever going to earn.
But it's nice to earn a chunk of money at least once in my life instead of just pennies and hamburger money. But there were some favorable reviews. And through word of mouth, interest picked up, the opposite of how it often goes for a book. And a few months later, his publisher sent him a royalty check, a milestone that many books never sell enough copies to reach.
I called my agent and I said, "Bill, I got this check. I really like the look of it, but I'm afraid there's been a mistake. I think there's an extra zero on it." and he said, "Yeah, I thought so, too." But I called the publisher, "No, it's accurate." And at that point, we both kind of gulped and thought, "Oh my gosh, this is actually hidden.
" And then he got the news that Universal wanted to option the book for a film. Debbie Moore wanted it. Whoopy Goldberg wanted it. Lorie Metaf wanted it. Claire Baines wanted it. The book caught on especially well with gay fans. Gay magazines wrote glowing profiles of Gregory Magcguire. Gay book clubs invited him to come speak.
And although the novel isn't explicitly gay, Gregory brought a gay perspective to the story. All her life, Alphaba is told that she is evil, a message Gregory grew up hearing about gay men. For years, he denied to himself that he was gay because he was frightened of what it meant.
I wonder if I am a homosexual, as if, does that mean I have to kill myself and throw myself in the Hudson River? Maybe the path through the Dark Woods was going to be even harder and more tortured than I had imagined. In Wicked, a big chunk of Alphaba's life is spent in mourning, caring for loved ones and seeing them die too young. Gregory said, "That was an intentional reference to HIV." He said, "I had been living with a man for 15 years or so.
I knew that somebody would have to care for dying people, even in a magic land where troubles melt like lemon drops. Somebody has to wash the corpses and say the prayers." And over time, he saw that as painful as being on the outside could be, there were also advantages.
I think a great many of the riches of my life have come to me by virtue of the fact that I was assigned a position on the margins. And as he came to embrace being gay, managing that path, surviving it, uh, has given me something to write about and a sympathy, I hope, for other people who are on tortured paths without very much in the way of singing and dancing animals and uh, little spritly spirits floating around in the moonlight to help them on their way. We are all pretty much alone.
His hope was that in some way Alphaba's determination could inspire people like him. And there's a reason that Alphaba came out of me. I often think she's stronger than I am. People say, you know, who do you look for for for inspiration? If if we can identify that we have managed a couple of times in our lives not to flinch or to flinch and keep going, then something's gone right.
that his message got through to readers was a thrill and getting optioned for a film seemed unbelievable. But when he saw some of the early scripts from Universal, unbelievable didn't begin to cover it. The studio wanted to make it a runchy, scatalogical comedy full of Prattf falls. Gregory was mortified, but he and his partner had recently become fathers, and he said, "I had children to feed, so I was like, I'll just put a paper bag over my head." The movie adaptation lingered in development hell for years, but then he got a call from a producer
who was thinking about a different approach, a musical. Being a gay man, I was thinking like, you know, Broadway. Among the book's many fans was Steven Schwarz, the queer man who'd written Pippen, God Spell, music for Pocahontas, and Prince of Egypt. He was looking for projects to work on with the writer Winnie Holtzman.
She'd created My So-Called Life, one of the greatest teen dramas ever made. For more about that, check out my video and my podcast about the show My So-Called Life. There's links to that below. Winnie was a perfect person to adapt Wicked. My So-called life is full of many of the same themes that Gregory's book explores.
What makes somebody good or bad? Being an outsider, and that it's painful, but can give you a different perspective on the world. And she brought her own new perspective to the story. She added a focus on the fraught relationship between Glenda and Alphaba. It's about two women and their friendship, how at first that they immediately clash and ultimately become very, very important in each other's lives. Gregory told Winnie that he was fine with her adapting and changing his book.
He said he felt free to adapt Elrank Bound's story, so he wanted her to feel free to adapt his. And if you like act one of Wicked, you should check out My So-Called Life. It is full of complex characters trying to do good but making a lot of mistakes and hurting each other by accident.
And there's some situations that will feel very familiar, like the unlikely friendship between the popular good girl Sharon and the bad girl Rayanne. Or a school dance where an excruciatingly awkward moment is broken by characters deciding to dance together no matter what anyone might think of them.
And if my so-called life had had a second season, the writers had planned a story line involving a gay teacher that was going to be the center of controversy. That in a sense, Wicked is a bit like the second season of My So-Called Life that we never got. So, as Winnie and Steven chugged away on scripts and songs for years, they had some readings and some workshops with actors. To play Glenda, they brought in Kristen Chennowith.
She was known for playing Anjenu roles on Broadway. And for Alphaba, they cast the wickedly talented Adel Dazim. She was an actress with a knack for originating roles that were embraced by queer audiences. She'd already played Moren, the queer girlfriend in Rent. Sister, we're close. And she'd go on to play Elsa in Frozen.
Those early Wicked workshops were helpful, but to figure out if the story was working, they needed to see it on stage. So, the team decided to take a risk on a try out in San Francisco directed by Joe Mantel. He had recently won a Tony for Take Me Out, a play about a gay baseball player. And Joe is known for taking on risky projects.
You can't hesitate or they can smell it. So, Wicked opened on June 10th, 2003 in San Francisco. Here's the producer. My name is Mark and I want to welcome you to the world premiere of Wicked. Tonight is our first preview, which means our first audience basically. The audience was thrilled. Listen to this reaction to the opening line.
It's good to see me, isn't it? And when reviews came in, one local paper wrote that it serves up one bland ballad after another. It was rough. Variety wrote, "Ding-dong, the witch's prognosis is uncertain." And unfortunately, those reviews were right. I went to see that preview in San Francisco and I can confirm it wasn't great.
There were parts that were kind of a slog and there was one huge problem. I think the major thing that we discovered in San Francisco was that we had not really yet solved um and delivered the character of Alphaba, our main character. In the San Francisco version, it was kind of hard to root for Alphaba. Her decision to fight the wizard didn't really make sense. She just seemed bitter.
The whole point was to tell the story from the perspective of the outsider who is misunderstood. The hardest thing with Alphaba was that we want everyone to love her when she comes out so we can sort of break the stereotype of what they've grown up believing about the Wicked Witch in the West. They needed to fix the story, but there wasn't a lot of time.
Investors wanted them to open on Broadway that fall, and other Broadway producers questioned whether that was even possible. The stakes are high here. You know, you put an enormous amount of time, money, effort on the line and in one night, a handful of people pass judgment. Even the cast wasn't sure they wanted to risk it. San Francisco audiences are delightful. Let's just stay here.
Let's just not even go to New York. Adding to the risk, they would be up against some stiff competition. A lot of shows with queer content or connections were opening that same season. There was Caroline or Change by Tony Kushner. He's the legendary author of Angels in America. There was Avenue Q with puppets singing about being gay.
If you were gay, be okay. There was Taboo from Boy George and Rosie O'Donnell, which had lots of star power. Critics were skeptical that audiences would give Wicked any attention. One of the big shows coming this season is Wicked. This is a musical by Steven Schwarz. I assume you all know Pippen and God Spell. Do you like that stuff? Pippen. I mean, I saw it in San Francisco.
Um, it has a lot of problems. Wicked opened on October of 2003 with big changes from San Francisco. Steven Schwarz had replaced an entire song. And throughout the show, Winnie had layered in a ton of changes to Alphaba.
She made it clear what Alpha is reacting to, that the wizard is attacking a vulnerable animal minority to solidify his power and that Alphaba is trying to protect them and stand up for what's right. But still, the team was scared. I don't go to opening night. I'm too hysterical. But the critics did go to opening night and their response a lumbering bore I think you're calling probably that sounds familiar and I liked it. It's lumbering and boring and awful and overproduced and hard to follow.
It has a lot of problems. But Wicked had its fans from the beginning. There was strong repeat business. And like with Maguire's book, word of mouth began to spread. I'm not going to spread for no roses. Ticket sales often taper off during the harsh winter months, but with Wicked, we built the advance every single week during the winter, which is, you know, unheard of.
People seem to be embracing the show in a way that the numbers just keep climbing. Critics were baffled. It has a lot of problems muddled and messy and it's making a million dollars a week, so that shows our influence. But the creative team saw how their show was speaking to a certain group of fans who needed a show like this. This is a musical where the lead girl basically says, "I'm going to defy grav.
I'm going to do the right thing and be who I am." And the girl who is the beautiful popular girl learns from the green girl that that's what she needs to do, too. And that notion has really tapped into to young girls and I think they relate. Wicked spoke to people who felt like they just didn't belong.
Very much like the books and like the 1939 film. I realize now it's like kids come with their parents and they they get in on a whole different level. When you get tired and the the eight shows a week starts to get you down and you might have a cold and I I try to remember these these kids that are out there. Here's the music supervisor and conductor Steven Amis.
can see to my right and to my left a little bit of some of the people in the first couple of rows and I and there are young kids that come and when she starts to fly and you see them like you know like have this transcendent experience that is so magical. I spoke to YouTuber Emma McMahon about Wicked. She first saw the show when she was in 8th grade.
I didn't know I was queer at the time, so it's hard to know exactly what was hitting. But I think the the story of an underdog outsider who has to accept that mainstream conformity won't save her is like I'm glad that I was receiving stories like that in my adolescence. That feels really valuable to me. Emma just posted a video about Wicked Stage to Screen adaptation.
Check that out on her channel, Media Processing. One of the songs that spoke most powerfully to queer audiences in Wicked was the big act one finale, Define Gravity. It's where Alphaba declares she's not going to seek approval or even try to fit in anymore. She's going to defy the world. She's going to stand up for herself.
Oh, and well, actually, you you saw defying gravity on videos in gay bars. Adina Menzel and Kristen Chennith, both the original stars of the Broadway version, have talked about their gay fans. And Alphaba, especially, the idea of her being green and being an outsider is something that people identify with. It's similar to another anthem that Adena Menzel would sing a couple years later.
In its first year, Wicked won a ton of awards. It went on a big national tour. Then it went international. And in 2007, Wicked played an important role in protecting gay marriage in Massachusetts. Organizers there had won marriage equality a couple years earlier, but anti-gay groups were pushing a bill that would reverse that, take marriage away.
Both sides were lobbying lawmakers as hard as they could. But neither side could get through to some of them. One of the undecided lawmakers was a state rep named Angelo Pupelo, who was known to be a big fan of Wicked. Gregory Magcguire, who had lived in Massachusetts for years, wrote him a letter. It read in part, "You can tell from Wicked, the play, that my heart is very much with the underdog.
The green-skinned alphaba, passionate and devoted to the abused citizens of Oz, is a victim herself of snap judgments and slurs and prejudices." Gregory's letter went on to describe his family, his kids, and he explained why equality was so important to them. We don't want them to feel any more of what Alphaba has felt than they possibly have to.
And when it was time for Massachusetts lawmakers to vote in June of 2007, Pupelo voted against the bill and marriage was saved. So that gives you a sense of how powerful a show like Wicked could be. But of course, not everyone loves musical theater and as a stage show, it could still only reach so many people. They could have a much bigger impact as a big blockbuster, which is exactly what we have now. Two of them, in fact.
It took over 20 years to bring Wicked to the screen. And as a film, the story can speak to gay audiences in a way that no version of Oz could before. Like with the 39 film, the Wicked films have a ton of queer crew. Where the Wizard of Oz had Adrien designing costumes, Wicked has Paul Tazwell. Wizard of Oz had Cedric Gibbons a set decorator. Wicked has Lee Sandales.
Wizard of Oz had Roger Edens working on the music. Wicked has composer Steven Schwarz and musical director Steven Armis. It's hard to put your finger on or prove, but like you can feel when something was made by queer people. Um, a lot of the time something about the queer magic seeps into the art.
Plus, there's a super queer cast in supporting roles like Bowen Yang, Bronwin James, Marissa Bode, Coleman Domingo, and in major roles like Jonathan Bailey, Cynthia Revo. I think like Cynthia Revo, just the way that she is so deeply herself and like she's so embodied and she's so passionate and so unabashedly passionate.
I find that really meaningful to see this person not apologizing for her existence and she's like, "Yeah, no, I I know I'm amazing at singing." And now a lot of people have observed that the Wicked Films make it very easy to read the Glenda and Alphaba relationship as romantic. They start as enemies. clothing. They grow closer and closer. You're beautiful.
Until they are the most important people in each other's lives. They can see each other like no one else can. And even in part two, when their feelings toward each other get a lot more complicated, at the root, their love for each other always remains. And that's not just fans reading into it.
The actors themselves have said, you know, whether it's romantic or platonic or, you know, maybe Glenda might be a little in the closet, but if there were time, you know, you never know. Yeah, you never know. Give it a little more time. Yeah. And then there's Fiero, who's simply chaotic and bisexual. End of story. Of course, people do go both ways. Now, there are moments in Wicked when Alphaba seems similar to Dorothy.
Both of them have like this I don't belong and I want to know where I belong kind of arc. And I think that really connects with queer people as well. She sings this weird quirk I've tried to suppress or hide. She dreams of finding a place where she belongs cuz once you're with the wizard, no one thinks you're strange.
But you can also see a big difference between Alphaba and Dorothy when you look at their respective gay anthems. For Dorothy, it's over the rainbow, a song of melancholy longing, dreaming that someday, somehow things might get better. But for Alphaba, it's defying gravity. She sings, "I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game." This isn't her dreaming.
It's her declaring who she is and what she's going to do. I'm through accepting limits cuz someone says they're so. She's setting aside her need to fit in. If I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free. And she's done compromising who she is for other people. Too long I've been afraid of losing love, I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost.
That line is especially powerful. It's about conditional love. Deciding to reject love if it comes from a parental figure who only offers their love on the condition that you conform to what they want you to be or do. If you compare Over the Rainbow with Defying Gravity, it makes sense that for gay men in the ' 60s '7s, a melancholy song about what might change someday would make sense.
While it doesn't feel like Judy Garland is necessarily like my top diva, like it does feel meaningful to know that like this was that for a generation and that it was a shared a shared interest that united people before it was like safe to come out and say who you are and what you were into. And it makes sense that a more defiant song would hit in the 2000s.
Not an I wish song, but an I'm going for it song. For a time when queer people have made a lot of advances that we could once only dream of. And we can see we can keep winning more. This arc of Alphaba going from I'm different and it's bad and I want it changed to I'm different and that's what makes me powerful. Alphaba is especially motivated to protect the weak and vulnerable.
In this case, the talking animals of Oz. She sees that the wizard is making them into literal scapegoats. It's a metaphor that you can see as a stand-in for any number of oppressed groups in real life. They're not allowed to teach, not allowed to speak, not allowed to use public accommodations like transportation.
We see many of them trying to flee, fearing that things will get worse, which Alphabet discovers has already begun. For something written in the '9s and brought to the stage in the early 2000s, it feels shockingly timely to today. the moment in the musical where they uh where Dr.
Dillamman turned this turns the blackboard around and it says animals should be seen not heard and it just like in in blood red text um or in red paint. That really shook me when I saw it in the theaters like 3 weeks after Trump being elected. I was like, "Oh my god." I like I don't know. I couldn't figure out a way to say this that didn't sound like trit, but it like felt like I was witnessing a hate crime.
Um, and it's like, well, this is a goat, you know, like that's not akin to a real hate crime, but I was like, this is this is an intimidation tactic from a cowardly individual who wants this person erased from public life. Wicked gives queer audiences a lot of ways to see themselves. I think anytime that there's a story as catchy and as meaningful as this like um I think little queer people everywhere are have a potential to see themselves in it.
It was really interesting having like this piece of comfort media from my childhood intersect with like a really preant, really relevant political message for the moment we lived in. There's something very special about Oz stories going all the way back to the beginning. Elrankrankbound created a world that's been able to inspire people for over a century.
I think it's endured because of people's dreams and because of the possibilities and because that there may be some place over the rainbow. It's a world that specifically welcomed queer people into it. No one in the story of the wonderful Wizard of Oz is without value. We are not told this often enough and it is one of the blessings of that story and one of the reasons we return to it.
A world where we can see ourselves and where we can tell our own stories. It's not just something that you know people like and are inspired by. It's something that has um generated more art and more stories and more more media. And so I think that's another fun part of Oz.
Not a lot of well not every you know story or um fantasy world I think does that but this one does. A place to create stories and experiences that we can share with each other. My own home. It becomes a Wizard of Oz convention every so often. Just uh the music starts playing. You know the the singing starts to come out.
It's like I'm that four-year-old little gay kid singing to my grandma all over again except now I'm singing to my dog. and by sharing it create vast connections with each other because we don't have gay culture passed down for the most part in our family the way other people do in other cultures. Thinking about being part of a gay community that has lasted since before Stonewall is very reassuring and empowering. It makes you feel part of something larger than yourself.
somebody's life maybe is slightly improved because we've been here first and we've tried to uh to clear the path in this dark woods. We've tried to plant a few lights along the way for those who will have a hard time. Leave them some hope. Leave them a conversational voice as they tuck themselves into bed and pick up a book and learn once again that they are not alone.
Now, there's lots more to say about Wicked and The Wizard of Oz. There's rumors that the actresses who played Glenda and the Wicked Witch in 1939 were queer. There's more about the very weird adaptations of the books, from anime to Nintendo games to Shan Connory in this outfit. And there's more to say about the gay subtext of films produced at MGM before the production code took effect.
I'm posting bonus videos with all that and much more at patreon.com/mattbomb. Huge thanks to everybody who chatted with me for this video. Josh Trillo, Terry Boss, DM Michelle, Emma McMahon. You can find links to all of their work below. And thanks to Gregory Magcguire for giving me permission to use excerpts from our conversation several years ago.
Also, big thanks to Emma for the edit on this video. Check out her video about Wicked Stage to Screen Adaptation. That's on her channel, Media Processing. Thanks to actor, singer Aaron Scoggins, and composer and music producer Caleb Martin for recording You're So Cute, Soldier Boy.
There's links to their work below. Now, if you'll excuse me, if I don't move quickly, I'm going to miss my balloon. Here I come. Oh, it's strange to see the magic change. A suit of khaki breeze about. The men I once passed by now seem to catch my eye. Whenever I go out, one and all they are short or tall, they seem to take my heart by storm.
And every young recruiter I would like for I love a unifor so cute. Oh, so cute in your new khakis when you're marching down the line. Then I get this counter sign. It's a soldier boy for mine. As I not toily not to the boys in the squad, how my heart is filled with joy. Oh, I love to play hookie with you looking rookie. You're so cute.
Oh, so cute. So am I.
