In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”
In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy — that I passed through first as a child.
Backstory 1: The Lost Boys on Broadway. From Wikipedia:
A poster for the musicalThe Lost Boys: A New Musical is a musical with music and lyrics by American indie pop/rock band the Rescues and a book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, based on the 1987 comedy horror cult classic film The Lost Boys. [set in a Santa Cruz infested by vampires, the movie was a great household favorite]
Directed by Michael Arden, the show opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway in April 2026.
Backstory 2: childhood trauma. From my 5/8/26 posting “Not knowing”:
I remember the first magazine photos of the liberation of [Buchenwald]. I was just a child. The magazine stories altered my life, presented the problem of wickedness to me in the bleakest, most personal terms. I already knew that I was an oddity, and therefore feared and despised by some people; now I learned that these people [even my neighbors] could band together to erase me — cast me out, imprison me, torture me, murder me. Awful knowledge, shared by Jews, and blacks, and sissy boys, and others. We had to be watchful. We had to protect one another. Warn each other. Be both strong and compassionate. Well, try to do the best we could. And for that, we had to know — know many things, including the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
… I look at those photos from [Buchenwald], and weep, and say [about all those who perished there], I would have saved them if I could. And think, You all need to know this, remember it.
June 20, 2026 at 4:07 pm |
What a way to have to grow up.
L.
June 20, 2026 at 5:13 pm |
My very adult awareness of many things was an important part of the story, and there’s some immensely sad stuff I haven’t posted about (there probably is in most families), but these hard truths came along with great waves of affection, respect, and protection by older family members; I was an only child, but with a rich assortment of people acting as my older siblings, so that though I was eerily canny about the ways of the world I was also a famously happy child. A good friend to any kid who would have me, and there were enough of them.
In the end it was a complex childhood, but much of it was genuinely wonderful. It could have gone so badly — my parents got a kid who was utterly unlike what they imagined their son could be and fully embraced the cuckoo in their nest, loved him for what he was. That’s a very great gift.