An American stimulus package

For all its faults, Broadway must be given praise for consistently aiming below the belt. Recently I've been putting in hours of research, posting searching questions on messageboards -- "What is the plot of Cute Boys in their Underpants Fight the Evil Trolls?" "Not 100% shure... U SUK DIKKK" -- and generally parking my nosey into the world of gay theatre. (To quote Margaret Cho, it smells like balls in pantyhose.) Firstly, there's James Edwin Parker's 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter's Night. It's a kind of Cute Boys in Their Underpants but without the underpants and the crippling shyness:

Other intruiging productions include Blowing Whistles and the slightly unappealing but nevertheless glorious Slap and Tickle. But I wonder: are we breaking glass ceilings, or just the fourth wall? With a penis? The New York Times wrote interestingly on this topic in 2005, so as fit crit goes it's practically vintage. Their entire article is but a shameless excuse to show things like the hilariously named Keith Nobbs dressed like this:

Although the Times piece makes some interesting comments about the introduction of the penis to the theatre coinciding with the emergence of gay men from the closet, it failed to question whether this is indeed a positive move. The idea that gay men are only valid if they are entertaining and pecc'd out to the nines -- and indeed judge one another by this standard -- is outdated and potentially harmful. Take Matthew Bourne, the influential choreographer, who has had a lot of success with productions like the incredible, all-male version of Swan Lake and the Play Without Words. However the line between an admiration of beauty and a less artistically credible exploitation is much less defined as it is with female ballet dancers, and I think this is a problem. Bourne's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray for Sadler's Wells will shortly be returning to the stage:

And I think it'll be interesting to see how Dorian Gray handles this potentially problematic fetishizing of the body -- since this is of course something which the novel explores -- or whether it will itself becomes victim to the narcissism and objectification of art which Wilde critiques. The critic in me fears the latter. The bonertronic in me just doesn't care.