The Selling of La Cage aux Folles: How Audiences Were Helped to Read Broadway's First Gay Musical

Abstract

La Cage, on the other hand, was the first Broadway musical not only to feature but to dignify the relationship between two gay men. [...] it did so during a time when America was entering a period of neocqnservatism that was determined to reverse what it considered to be a decline in traditional family values brought on by the political and cultural liberalism of the previous decades that had fostered, among other untraditional values, a tolerance of homosexuality.