Was stephen sondheim gay

I never met Stephen Sondheim or had an endearing correspondence with him. Apparently, there are a lot of people who have framed letters from him, or a tantalizing story about a chance encounter. Neither of these scenarios apply to me. I did have a close call once, but I ' ll get to that later.

Shortly after his death, I saw a meme that said, " Stephen Sondheim always began with the assumption that we were all adults and there was no sense in bullshitting each other about what life actually was.

Stephen Sondheim: A Singular Voice

Life wasn't glitz and glamour. It wasn't Jerry Herman. Life was awful, and beautiful, and fragile, and bountiful. It was so many other contradictions, too. He was a gentle maverick who refused to become " commercial. This was a man who could write the plaintive confessional " Send in the Clowns" and the grab-life-by-the-balls call-to-arms " The Miller ' s Son" and these were both from the same show.

He also gave us the heartbreakingly beautiful " Sunday," which always, always makes me cry. My first Sondheim encounter was as a senior in high school. For some reason my drama teacher thought the best choice for the spring musical would be his biggest flop, "Merrily We Roll Along. In college I was cast in "Company," and the love flourished.

However, it was "Into the Woods" that gay me stephen I lived. I encountered it on PBS in the early '90s. Seemingly a mashed-up fairy tale, it goes so much deeper. Written at the height of the AIDS crisis, it deals with profound loss; friends and family die, sometimes randomly.

It also illustrates the power of one ' s chosen family, those friends who we gravitate towards who stay in our lives. They ' re not blood, but they ' re family nonetheless. As gay people, especially in the '80s and' 90s, death was all around us. A simple assignation could lead to, what was then, a death sentence.

My circle of friends then, my chosen family, understood me in ways my biological family couldn't, because they were going through the same things; the same dangers that could befall us simply was venturing into the woods. We were just trying to survive as the government and sondheim many others turned their backs on us.

Once I discovered Stephen Sondheim was a gay man, my love grew exponentially. Of course he was gay. Only a gay man could have written that brilliance at that time. He was writing from first-hand experience:.