Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010-2020

by Aaron C. Thomas

The politics of Broadway musicals matter a great deal more to U.S. American culture than they appear to mean, and they are especially important to mainstream politics surrounding sex, gender, and sexuality. Love Is Love Is Love looks to the Broadway musicals of the past decade for help understanding the current state of LGBTQ politics in the United States.

Through analyses of Promises, Promises, Newsies, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Color Purple, and Frozen, this book attempts to move past the question of representational politics and asks us instead to think in more complex ways about LGBTQ identity, what LGBTQ politics are, and the politics of Broadway musicals themselves. Producing new, complex readings of all five of these musicals, author Aaron C. Thomas places each of them within the context of the LGBTQ politics of their day. Some of the issues the book treats are controversies of casting, the closetedness and openness of musical theatre, LGBTQ identities, adaptation from movies into musicals, and the special power of the musical form by examining how these shows differ from the books and movies on which they’re based.

Love Is Love Is Love places contemporary LGBTQ political tensions and conversations in a new light, making this an essential companion for students and scholars of contemporary theatre, musical theatre, cultural studies, Queer studies, and gender studies.

183 pages, Paperback

Published March 24, 2023

About the author

Aaron C. Thomas is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University and director of the School’s BA program. His major research area is theatrical discourse surrounding sexuality and violence, and he writes primarily about images of violent masculinity in contemporary culture. As an antidote to writing about violence, he also writes extensively in the field of musical theatre studies, where his work focuses on theatrical discourse surrounding sexuality, masculinity, and violence.

Dr. Thomas is the author of Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 (2023) and Sondheim and Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (2018). His current book project, The Violate Man, interrogates images of male/male sexual violence in U.S. American popular culture since the 1960s. He has published articles in American Theatre, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Theater, QED: a Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Theatre Topics, and he has additional work published in Theatre Journal, Performing Arts Journal, Theatre History Studies, New Theatre Quarterly, and Cultural Studies. He is currently the Editor for the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism where he edited the special section Drag vs. the Law in 2024.

https://www.aaroncthomasphd.com/