"There used to be a time when it looked like the Communists were taking over show business. Now it's fairies. They operate a lot alike, actually; both have a tendency to colonize. Just as there used to be no such thing as one Communist in a play or movie, now there is no such thing as one fairy. Where you find one, you usually find a baker's dozen swishing around. I had a little game I used to play when I was an actor in Hollywood, back in the days when Communists or Communist sympathizers were nearly as plentiful in the film capital as yes-men. If I spotted someone in a picture who was a Communist or leftist, I could usually pick out several others. They always came in sets. Now I play it a different way. When I hear that some fairy is producing or directing or acting in a play, I can often name some of the rest of the cast, even if I've never heard it. But Communists and fairies do differ in some respects. The Hollywood Communists had their "Unfriendly Ten," who refused to testify before a Congressional Committee, but the fairies are overfriendly. They do say no occasionally. "When a fairy says no," Alex King has observed, "he almost throws his back out of joint." The poor darlings, as they sometimes call themselves, are everywhere in show business. The theater is infested with them and it's beginning to show the effects. "The New York theater is dying," the late Ernie Kovacs complained recently, "Killed by limp wrists." The dance is a mecca for the gamboling third sex, which prompted Oscar Levant to observe that "ballet is the fairies' baseball." The movies have long been a happy hunting ground for them, and now they're starting to take over television. No TV variety show seems complete without a group of fairy dancers leaping about with balloons. George Jean Nathan wrote long ago, "What we need is more actors like Jack Dempsey. Jack may not be much of an actor but his worst enemy cannot accuse him of belonging to the court of Titania." Alas, things have been getting worse ever since.
The increasing emasculation of our stage seems to stem in part from the influence of actors from England, where homosexuality is rampant in the theater. Kenneth Tynan, the British critic, has acknowledged the growth there of the theatrical phenomenon known as "camp" whose distinguishing feature, he says, is a marked inclination toward the dainty, the coy and the exuberantly fussy. "High comedy in England is nowadays hostage in the camp of camp," he lamented. "With each new season its voice gets shriller and its blood runs thinner."
Formerly playwrights were writing plays about fairies and now they're writing plays for them. There was a wonderful scene in Peter Pan when Mary Martin turned and asked the audience if they believed in fairies and they answered with an affirmative roar. I began to get worried when the cast started drowning out the audience.
Not only have homosexuals taken over a leading role in the theater, but the theme of homosexuality is becoming increasingly prominent on the stage as witness Advise and Consent, Compulsion, The Best Man and Tea and Sympathy, some of which have been produced on both the stage and screen. Recently, not one but two versions of the life of Oscar Wilde were showing in New York.