Today in Gay History

Happy 79th Birthday
Stephen Sondheim

Thanks to qlbtq

Sondheim has been honored with multiple Tony Awards, an Academy Award, and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the bestowal of Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honors by President Clinton in 1993.

Sondheim's musicals occupy a paradoxical place in gay culture. A gay creative artist who has never created an explicitly gay character and who, according to biographer Secrest, did not come out until his early forties or allow himself to fall in love with another man until age 61, Sondheim has nevertheless attained gay cult status.

He is recognized both as the most intelligent, witty, and musically audacious of composers and as a brilliantly ironic lyricist in the tradition of his gay predecessors Lorenz Hart, Noël Coward, and Cole Porter.

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