"There lived in the Land of Oz two queerly made men": Queer Utopianism
The film version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz serves as a pop-culture icon of twentieth-century Western gay culture.1 With Judy Garland as the star, its exaggerated characters of good and evil, and its Technicolor wonderland of vibrant colors and outlandish costumes, the film displays a queer sensibility that countless viewers adore. Today gay bars in New Orleans, Seattle, and Sweden bear the name Oz, and the iconic polychromatic flag of the gay community pays homage to the film's theme song, "Over the Rainbow" References to the film appear in numerous other artifacts of gay culture, such as in Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band when one character derides another's ostensible heterosexuality by declaring "he's about as straight as the Yellow Brick Road" (27). Daniel Harris documents the "canonic" nature of references to Oz in the oft-repeated catchphrase, "Toto, 1 don't think we're in Kansas anymore" (19), 2 which, for certain T-shirt incarnations, has been campily reformulated as "Aunt Em: Hate you! Hate Kansas! Taking the dog. Dorothy" (Gilman 127). Although numerous other cinematic classics - from Mildred Pierce to Mommie Dearest - display a queer sensibility that elevates them to the status of cultural touchstones in the gay community, The Wizard of Oz towers above the rest in terms of its iconic role in queer cinema's relationship to queer culture.3 As Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin observe, "almost every viewer