Gender and Sexuality on Broadway: You Oughta Know Better

AMERICAN THEATRE: Pre-pandemic, the last full Broadway season we had (2018-2019) began with Head Over Heels and ended with Tootsie. The former was a landmark musical for gender and sexual diversity, including lesbian leads, a character that does drag and explores his gender, and Broadway’s first explicitly nonbinary character, played by Peppermint, the first trans person to orginate a leading role on Broadway. In many ways Tootsie was its antithesis: a musical rooted entirely in transphobic man-in-a-dress jokes. In May of 2019, I wrote an essay for American Theatre, “The Gender Problem Tootsie Can’t Dress Up,” which became the site’s most read story of the year and sparked a lot of critical debate.