Cabaret: a time capsule of the timeless battle to be queer

The first thing I thought of when I sat down to watch Cabaret tonight — the first thing that came to mind as I watched Joel Grey, as the Master of Ceremonies, introduce a lineup of garrishly-attired, face-painted, grinning dancers — was of my high school theater classes.

Specifically, I thought of the kids in those classes. Garrulous kids — young people who wore frumpy yet colorful clothes, mascara or lipstick or rogue, long tangled hair… and who generally carried themselves with an air that fluctuated between flamboyance and recession.

These were the “theater kids:” kids who performed, who swarmed around movies like Cabaret or Rent or Across the Universe and who proclaimed just as swiftly as they questioned, who soared to the rafters just as suddenly as they tumbled into the wings.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the queer kids. And I was one of them.

Granted, in the scheme of the cabaret, I most closely resembled Brian (played by Michael York): sweet, tidy, intellectual and hesitant. A member of the audience with a twinkle in his eye. A conflicted homosexual who, at the time, could only have described his desires in the terms that Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) uses — that is to say, I “didn’t sleep with girls.”

There’s so much to say about this movie, which I had not seen before tonight. Its violent yet absolutely correct parallels between the grinning hostility, the coarse, comedic effrontery of the cabaret and the driving, inevitable, bloodthirsty pageant of the Nazi party: the indignation of queer people and the fascistic reaction against them, a never-ending cycle. The anguish of conman Fritz (Fritz Wepper) when he finds himself pitted against his own lie — his hiding of his Jewish identity — due to his growing love for a woman he’d meant to fleece, the Jewish heiress, Natalia (Marisa Berenson): “Do you know what she has done to me? It’s terrible. She’s turned me into an honest man!” The flashes of inaccessible, omnipresent malice or knowingness that is Grey’s Emcee… The musical numbers, particularly “Money, Money” and “If You Could See Her…” The juggling of queer or artistic or human interest in money, or financial insulation, to compensate for life’s uncertainties — in defiance of the far more devastating yet vital insecurity that is true love, or friendship… The beauty of Michael York, sounding like James Mason and resplendent in his tanned, loping sensitivity… And the magic of Minnelli’s Sally, the evocation of the memory of the actress’ dead, famous mother when, in the film’s final number, she sings:

The day she died,
The neighbors came to snicker:
"Well, that's what comes
From too much pills and liquor."
But when I saw her laid out like a Queen,
She was the happiest corpse
I'd ever seen.

I think of Elsie to this very day.
I remember how she'd turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting all alone in you room?
Come hear the music play…”

…and to consider Judy Garland’s posthumous role in instigating the Stonewall Riots (which began the night after her funeral — this movie was released not even three years later), thus in launching the modern LGBTQ+ Rights Movement.

And to consider how Liza has been her witness, her progeny, her inheritor, and her champion in roles like this. The child of a tortured star, and of a closeted visionary.

There is more life — more of life — in Cabaret than I have seen in a movie in some time. I will be revisiting it soon. I will be loving it for the rest of my life.