The Great American Songbook, or boy meets girl?

I have been informed by people over the years that I am remarkably heterosexual in my opinions (well I am heterosexual, so what else would you expect?).

Which does not make me intolerant of people in the Gay community. You do not have to be Gay to be prepared to allow the same rights as heterosexuals to the people who are Gay (critics of President Obama's views on the subject please note). Live and let live, and don't interfere in other people's choices.

Move on.

This was not always the story. In the 1920s and 1930s - how much of this sort of behaviour was allowed to appear above the parapet? In Berlin before the rise of the NSDAP in the 30s, and in Paris between the wars (see Brassaï's book "The Secret Paris of the 30s" for some info on that), it was tolerated, but in most other places it was seen as decadent and unacceptable - and in passing realise that the image of Berlin in the Roaring '20s that many of us now have was not admired by people in much of the rest of Germany.

For no apparent reason (the way my mind works, I suppose) I started thinking the other day about the songs that comprise "The Great American Songbook". Many of them were written for shows where boy met girl or vice versa.

Then check out the lyrics of those songs and ask yourself how many of them are specifically male or female songs, and are absolutely essentially heterosexual - d.h. they could not have been written for a man to man or woman to woman relationship.

My favourite rhyme (indicative of the ultimate consummate skill in writing lyrics) comes from the song "My Funny Valentine":

           Your looks are laughable
           Unphotographable .....

That lyric comes from Lorenz Hart. Read anything you want about him you get lines about him "having problems with his sexuality"- a nice 1930s translation of the fact that he was Gay! Check out the rest of the lyrics to "My Funny Valentine", you will not find any distinct references to the object of desire being of the opposite sex.

Yes in the musical context in which it first appeared it would have been presented as such, but the inspiration for it ....

Not that he was the only example. Cole Porter was apparently either bisexual or Gay, depending upon the accounts that you read.  

Of course at the time "discretion" was the order of the day. You did not have to make it too obvious usw.

You can pick up some odd stories about the music of the period and its writers.  Not a song included in the "The Great American Songbook", but interesting nonetheless - in the 1950s Nat King Cole recorded a song called "Darling, je vous aime beaucoup". Written in 1935 by a lady called Anna Sosenko. From one account at least that I have read about this, it was written for her girlfriend - by implication the film star, Hildegard, who first introduced the song (I will not vouch for absolute accuracy on that story incidentally, but it is intriguing that if it were only rumour, that the rumour was never squashed).

It may be that we notice things more now, and times are less innocent than they were. The old song "I'm just wild about Harry", obviously a "female" song if you listen to the lyrics, was recorded by Al Jolson during his comeback in the 1940s. Four times married, something of a lady's man from what I can gather, and otherwise a staunch conservative singing a line like "the heavenly blisses of his kisses fill me with ecstasy" - hmmmm, OK, did it cross his mind at all, one wonders?

Imagine someone of his stature and political views doing that now.You would never hear the last of it!

It is now a more open world (or much of it is) and more tolerant. And I would politely, from my straight heterosexual perspective, suggest that things are better like that as well!