Clum

Working as a nurse for Mercy Home Care in Springfield, Ohio, Kristina Clum saw, firsthand, seniors' need for non-medical home care.

Clum: There are situations where, when we go out to meet people, they may be very eager to have care come into their homes.

And now John Clum steps to the podium and the crowd shifts uncomfortably in its seat as, perhaps having downed one too many vodka stingers, Clum launches into a rambling and familiar eulogy, succeeding mainly in demonstrating that he did not know the deceased so well as he had thought.

Clum's most notable earlier work, Acting Gay (1992), was a functional if bland survey of gay theatre.

Through a sequence of examples, Clum limns how gay men might "queer" a given text by teasing out its latent capacity for subversion.

Larry Hart, Cole Porter, and Noel Coward--the trio of Golden Age artists whose witty lyrics Clum admires--were already on the wane by the time Clum's generation came of age.

At the center of Clum's history is an angry and breathtakingly incoherent attack on Oscar Hammerstein.

Individual songs fare no better, however well-known: Sweeney Todd's "Not While I'm Around" becomes "Nothing's Gonna Harm You," and even Cats's ubiquitous "Memory" is misrendered as "Memories." To correct just a few of Clum's less glaring errors: Thelma Carpenter--not Theima Oliver--understudied Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly!; characters in Company do refer to Robert as "Bob"; and there are women in the cast of Pacific Overtures.

Clum's boosterism has a tendency to migrate to his arguments about gay culture as well.

Clum in Something for the Boys, his fascinating new book on musical theater and gay culture.

Interestingly, Clum uses as a case in point Kiss Me, Kate, the 1948 musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, widely acknowledged as Cole Porter's masterpiece.