Eighties Teenage Heartthrob, Are You Straight or Are You Gay?

My Object Lesson: Jason Donovan

I knew nothing of Jason Donovan until I heard his name in a song, “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson” (1993), and even then I only knew his name. The song’s lyrics told me little. For a long time I was mildly curious, mostly because I liked the song, but the curiosity never led to anything so much as a simple Google search. I didn’t really even know if he was a real person.

Recently, while writing an essay on the British band Cornershop, the band that recorded this song, I became curious enough (at last!) to learn who Jason Donovan was, and why Cornershop cared about him. I ought not have been surprised to discover that Donovan was in fact a real person, and that his story (Tessa Sanderson’s too) was of a piece with Cornershop’s best songs from the era.

[The first 1 minute and 4 seconds of “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson,” ℗1993 Wiija Records]

The Strange Road from Cornershop to Jason Donovan

Cornershop was the most information-obsessed band in the universe. They were not, however, concerned with information as untethered abstraction, but as pervasive and persuasive discourse in its recorded forms, circulated by the technologies and services that, so to speak, mobilized it, put it to work, made things happen, whether desirable or undesirable. In other words, their real concern was the entire apparatus of information and its conveyance, right down to the cogs and wheels of discourse, which is to say rhetoric.¹ See, for example, the anaphora, ellipsis, and polyptoton that give a two-step swing to lines like “Where do you stand? / Where do you get your information from? / Which side do you side?”² That’s rhetoric, or rhetorical figures to be more precise.

Rhetoric is the delivery system of information, a rigorous method of persuasion, how writers and speakers make people believe information is true, whether or not it actually is. As a technique, it has no business with truth per se, excepting for practical purposes—it is, for example, often easier to make people believe information that is true than information that is untrue (the techniques of logical appeal). Also, tricking people into believing untrue information can damage the writer’s credibility, making persuasion more difficult in the future (the techniques of ethical appeal). Rhetoric creates the force behind information; and make no mistake, some information can be given quite a brutally lot of force.

In the song “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson,” Cornershop thematized rhetoric, information, and truth by posing the interesting question, is there ever a case where successfully convincing people of the truth is actually less desirable than allowing them to continue believing information that is untrue?³ Is truth always preferable to error? To query this theme, Cornershop took the cases of Jason Donovan and Tessa Sanderson, both of whom had sued British periodicals for printing untrue and defaming information about them, which is to say libel. What’s surprising, given the band’s general hostility towards the popular press (see The Most Information Obsessed Band in the World), is that this song, “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson,” heaps scorn on Donovan and Sanderson, the victims of the libel, but remains silent on the periodicals guilty of those libels. The song packs a lot of anger and ridicule:

I’m getting my head together
So I can stamp on yours
Because at best

You remind me of Tessa Sanderson
It must be the way that you throw the javelin,
And a strong resemblance to Jason Donovan.⁴

Who Was Jason Donovan?

Born in Australia, Jason Donovan became famous as a teenage heartthrob in the 1980s, first for his role on a soap opera, then for dating another teenage celebrity (his soap opera co-star, Kylie Minogue). He moved to England in 1988 and became a pop star, with three number one hit singles (UK). Here is a clip from his Christmas Day appearance on Top of the Pops, 1989.

[First thirty seconds of Jason Donovan’s “Too Many Broken Hearts” performance on Top of the Pops, Christmas Day 1989. ©1989 BBC]

This performace probably marked the peak of his career as a celebrity. After 1989 his star began to fade (so often, alas, the fate of our teenage heartthrobs!), but in 1991 he achieved a second, if diminished, stardom with his lead role in a West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.

Almost immediately after premiering in this role, he became the target of a well-publicized outing campaign orchestrated by a group called FROCS (Faggots Root Out Closeted Sexuality).

Outing: Kaleidoscopic Realms of Information and Rhetoric

Outing purports to reveal the truth about someone’s concealed sexuality, but in actuality it produces information, not truth. The information needn’t be supported by evidence. Probably it would be more accurate to describe outing as an argument, or a claim, about someone’s sexuality. It is information launched into the world with varying levels of rhetorical force.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick best describes the rhetorical dimension of outing in Epistemology of the Closet, published just one year before the Jason Donovan outing: [outing] is always an intensely volatile move, depending as it does for its special surge of polemical force on the culture’s underlying phobic valuation of homosexual choice (and acquiescence in heterosexual exemption), and elsewhere, in the same book, she so perfectly captures the frisson such disclosures elicit: To the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability,⁵ hence the insatiable appetite for such information.

The outing of Donovan lacked any evidence whatsoever, but the absence of evidence didn’t matter because, as Sedgwick argues, the closet implicates everyone: you can never definitively prove that you are not in the closet, except by coming out of the closet: a trap that can only be evaded by actually being homosexual, and by publicizing your homosexuality, and even that act of self-liberation only serves to strengthen the closet’s stranglehold on everyone else—most of all, according to Sedgwick, its stranglehold on men.

What’s more, nineteenth and twentieth century psychology, especially Freudian psychology, created the tantalizing possibility that a person might not even possess full knowledge of his own sexuality, that homosexuality can be “covert” or “unconscious,” can be “repressed” through “reaction formations,” or can even go into “remission” for long periods—all concepts that gradually coalesced into a reductive and corrupted, but titillating and widely-enjoyed, pop psychology: no man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual.⁶ I remember, in the eighties and nineties, male teen stars were especially vulnerable to such insinuations—one especially salacious rumor claimed that Donnie Wahlberg (New Kids on the Block) was rushed to the hospital where doctors pumped a gallon of semen from his stomach. A brisk trade in such rumor mongering persists to this day.

Therefore, the information produced by an outing—“Jason Donovan is gay,” for example—must be accepted as information tout court. Even taken as mere information, however, it possesses no inherent value. The value of an outing lies in the uses to which it can be put.

Of course, the gratification of prurient interest is the most obvious, and likely most common, use for such information, especially when people are willing to pay money for the gratifications such pleasures afford. In the case of the FROCS campaign, however, the purpose of the information was to make homosexuality more socially acceptable; FROCS claimed that outing celebrities would increase the visibility of gays in public life: if people could only be made to realize just how many widely-admired men and women were gay, then they might become more accepting of homosexuality. In other words, the subjects of the outings, usually celebrities or politicians, were selected for effect-potential, which is classic (not to say classical) rhetoric. An outing can have a purely vindictive purpose as well, but FROCS denied any such intent; the nastiness of their tactics, however, belied both their denials and their claim that they merely wanted to provide positive role models for “young lesbians and gays.”⁷

The Donovan outing was accomplished by posters depicting him in a photoshopped t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Queer as Fuck,” which, for the early nineties, when a word like “fuck” remained pretty shocking, does not seem especially well aligned with FROCS’s supposed mission (to provide positive role models for gay youth).

Why then choose the slogan “Queer as Fuck”? An example of paronomasia, the slogan “queer as fuck” was a play on an old British expression, “there’s now’t so queer as folk,” which simply means something like “there’s nothing so strange as ordinary people,” with no sexual connotation whatsoever. In 1999, the expression was chosen for the title of a television series about a group of gay Londoners; in 1991, however, this usage was probably novel, and seems to have been conceived by a group of gay activists called OutRage, a group which, that same year, had begun selling t-shirts bearing the slogan, “queer as fuck.” Many gays found the expression offensive, not because of the word “fuck,” but because the word “queer” was widely viewed within the gay community as derogatory, even by some members of OutRage itself.⁸ At some point between 1991 and 1999, possibly helped by the emergence of queer theory in academia, along with other processes of linguistic reclamation, the word “queer” reversed its polarity.

Whereas Donovan could have enjoyed his moment in lexical history, he instead became angry. When a magazine called the Face, in an article on celebrity outings, printed a picture of the poster, Donovan decided to sue the magazine for libel.

What Was the Face Magazine?

The Face magazine was a “style magazine,” a type of magazine unique at that time to Britain. Style magazines were for both men and women, and covered music, film, fashion, and culture more generally. Many consider the Face to have been the first such magazine. Benn’s Media Directory described the Face as a Visual-oriented youth culture magazine; emphasis on music, fashion and films. It was a small-circulation magazine [and] the bible of youth style and culture. For two decades (the eighties and nineties) it was the essential guide to British youth culture, widely read by taste-makers outside Britain as well. The Face chronicled—and in some cases predicted—the twists and turns when street fashion and pop music were co-opted for individual personal expression and as forms of social and political critique. Though not a fashion magazine, it resembled one, in its design, more than it did other magazines marketed to young adults.

For comparison, here are the covers of four youth-oriented magazines more likely to feature Donovan in their pages (and, in the case of the four below, on their covers):

The Face was the kind of magazine where a star like Donovan, then entering his twenties, wanted to be seen—just not, apparently, wearing a “Queer as Fuck” t-shirt. Traditional teen-mags represented an irretrievable past for a celebrity like Donovan, whereas the Face represented what he must have hoped could be his future (the magazine twice featured his ex-girlfriend, Kylie Minogue, on its cover). Dylan Jones, editor of British GQ, describes the Face as the benchmark of all that was important in the rapidly emerging world of British and—in a heartbeat—global ‘style culture’.” Donovan himself “regularly bought the magazine to keep abreast of trends.⁹ It’s difficult to think of anything like it today, in terms of its influence.

Its influence notwithstanding, the magazine’s circulation was relatively small: 65,000 in 1991, compared with, for example, Smash Hits, a magazine more likely to have been read by Jason Donovan fans, which had a circulation of 555,000, or the Express, one of the tabloids that had more viciously smeared him, which sold 1.5 million copies every single day. And yet the Face was the magazine Donovan chose to sue, a decision that, for a young British celebrity, seemed like nothing so much as generational recreance and career suicide.

Adjudicating Truth, Injury, and Consequences

Donovan sued the Face for “libel,” a legal term, with no real meaning beyond the law: legislators establish the criteria defining it, and courts determine whether a specific case satisfies those criteria. Because libel is a matter of law, it differs from nation to nation. In the matter of libel, Britain is known for having weaker press protections, and a lower burden of proof, than the United States. In Britain, a libel is a published statement that is false, and that tends to lower the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking people. Those are the two principal criteria. It is also open to the plaintiff to innuendo a statement, that is, to show that a statement which is not, on the face of it, defamatory, actually has a defamatory meaning.¹⁰

Although what really angered Donovan was the reproduction of the outing poster, his case against the magazine seems to have been largely based on this innuendo provision. Because the offending article never claimed Donovan was gay, and in fact specifically cited his denials, Donovan’s lawyers argued that the article implied he was gay, for example by describing him as the boy with the bleached hair.¹¹ In other words, the jury was asked to accept that gay stereotypes were legitimate signifiers of homosexuality, and that being homosexual would be something “that tends to lower the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking people.” Gay shaming formed the predicate for Donovan’s entire lawsuit. His lawyers characterized the supposedly-defamatory article as a gay “slur,” and this phrasing quickly caught fire in the British media: Jason Donovan had been the victim of a “gay slur.”

A Pyrrhic Victory

Donovan won his lawsuit, but found his character damaged in the process. As a Guardian interviewer put it many years later, by trying to protect your reputation, you succeeded in destroying it. (An example, by the way, of rhetorical antithesis.) The Guardian interviewer rightly noted that Donovan’s character was hurt more by his lawsuit against the Face than it ever was by the article he felt had so grievously defamed him. Part of the self-inflicted damage had to do with the perception that his libel suit was driven by homophobia. As the Sydney Morning Herald described it many years later, The astonishing public backlash against Donovan's alleged homophobia apparently sent his career into a nosedive.¹²

The general tenor of the backlash can be seen, for example, in Vox magazine’s end-of-the-year readers’ poll for 1992, where Donovan was shortlisted for both “Berk of the year” (I had to look up “berk,” the meaning of which, apparently, is even more unprintable than “fuck”) as well as for “Most wildly over-rated heap of cack” (guessing you can use your fill-in-the-blank skills to infer the meaning of “cack;” otherwise I refer you to Green’s Dictionary of Slang). Musician magazine labeled him a singer “[f]or those who found Rick Astley too manly.” A decade later, Donovan described his experience leaving the courtroom during the trial: I didn’t expect it to explode like it did, and when I found myself in the High Court, leaving through the back door with people kicking my car, shouting, Suck my cock, you fucking homophobic cunt—that’s when I realised I’d made a big mistake. And that probably set the scene for my bad period in the 90s. Even at the time, he clearly recognized his career-fatal mistake, and tried to salvage the damage by casting himself as the victim of serial misrepresentation: What was really disappointing was that people saw my action as a dig against homosexuality. I have no feelings against homosexuals whatsoever. However, I think I lost out through misrepresentation, because of the loss of respect from the gay community.¹³ Clearly the target of a vast, gay conspiracy.

Male Homosexual Panic

Donovan was bothered by the idea that homosexual men might think him sexually available, and felt the article contributed to that belief—[Donovan] said the rumors that he was gay had made people [presumably homosexual men] take a second look at me. Oddly, he evidently had no such qualms about similar impulses from underage girls. The Guardian, which he did not sue, described him as a lust-object […] for his barely pubescent girl fans.¹⁴ The Guardian statement is a striking, philosophically negative example of homophobia in the progressive-leaning newspaper, since, one hopes, Donovan would find sexualized attention from a “barely pubescent girl” even more objectionable than sexualized attention from an adult male, but fear of these latter misapprehensions is entirely the point.

Sedgwick, again, provides the most illuminating description, for its time (which was Donovan’s time), of how the closet affected not just gays, but all men: So-called ‘homosexual panic’ is the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail, which Sedgwick elsewhere labeled the “double blind” in (male) same-sex friendship,¹⁵ and which Donovan himself unwittingly described when he lamented that, because of the article, he could no longer enjoy the company of his male friends, It’s no longer a friend or mate of mine from Australia; it is more than that.¹⁶ In his court testimony he said that being called gay was “humiliating” and that he “took one look at [the article] and was disgusted.”¹⁷ Strong language, but consistent with Sedgwick’s account of male homosexual panic.

An Unanticipated Shift in Public Opinion

According to Sedgwick, outing depended, for its special surge of polemical force, on the culture’s underlying phobic valuation of homosexual choice, and we must therefore establish whether those conditions obtained in Donovan’s case. Public opinion polling might not prove “phobic valuation,” but it can reveal prevailing social attitudes. Polling data also, when available as time series, have the potential to show changes in those social attitudes, and these changes might offer one explanation as to why Donovan won his lawsuit, but ultimately lost his public’s support, and possibly even why his experience of the double-bind elicited so intense a response from him.

After a long period of gradual liberalization in attitudes towards homosexuaity, intolerance suddenly began to increase again after 1983, which was also the year when media coverage of AIDS began heating up, first with an episode of the BBC program Horizons, “Killer in the Village,” followed by a steady escalation in press coverage, much of it stigmatizing the disease as a “gay plague.” In 1985, media coverage suddenly exploded [...] peaking in 1987.¹⁸ Public opinion towards homosexuality closely tracked the media’s coverage of AIDS, though of course it’s impossible to know which was driving which, or whether each was feeding off the other.

When Donovan sued, public attitudes towards homosexuality were beginning to change after several years of increasing intolerance. British polling firm Social and Community Planning Research found that, from 1983 to 1990, the percentage of respondents who considered homosexuality to be “always wrong” or “mostly wrong” held steady at well-above 60%, with the numbers hovering around 70% in the six years preceding the Face magazine article. A clear majority of respondents chose “always wrong” in every survey except 1983, a dramatic shift which the study authors attributed to the impact of AIDS on public attitudes towards the gay community.¹⁹ In 1983, 61% of respondents said that sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex were always or mostly wrong, but by 1987 that number had spiked to 75%.

Only after 1987, when the AIDS epidemic entered what Berridge and Strong call the phase of normalization,²⁰ did public opinion change direction yet again, with a slow decline in the percentage of respondents who considered homosexuality to be always or mostly wrong, eventually returning to pre-AIDS epidemic levels around 1994. Even in 1995, however, a clear majority of respondents still believed homosexuality to be always or mostly wrong.

The public opinion polling is more interesting, as it relates to Donovan, when the numbers are separated by age, rembembering that, as a teenage heartthrob, the young, not the old, were his primary constituency. The shift in attitudes towards gays was especially dramatic among those respondents under the age of 30, respondents who would have been Donovan’s own contemporaries (he was 23), as well as the bulk of his fans. (Also the group most likely to have been readers of a magazine like the Face). In 1990, 49% of respondents under the age of 30 said that homosexuality is always wrong, basically unchanged since 1985. After 1990, however, the numbers began to drop quickly: 36% in 1993, 27% in 1995, and 19% in 1998, with a corresponding increase in the percentage of respondents who said that homosexuality is not wrong at all.²¹ In 1991 and 1992, the period when Donovan was suing the Face, the percentage of respondents, under the age of 30, who disapproved of homosexuality, was in the process of dropping by thirteen points, the single largest shift on record.

At a moment of important changes in attitudes towards homosexuality, especially among the young—a shift few could have foreseen, after a long decade of increasing fear and intolerance, fueled largely by AIDS—Donovan, with his soft bigotry, found himself on the wrong side of a historic trend line, in every sense of the word “trend.” When it became clear that his libel suit would backfire, he shifted tactics, trying impossibly to have things both ways: to be cleared of the gay slur, but also to be exonerated from the growing perception that his entire lawsuit promoted bigotry against gays. He attempted this sleight of hand with the disingenuous claim that his real objection, and what he felt had truly damaged his character, was the implication he had lied (about his sexuality). The feigned outrage gives the game away: This has not been a case about homosexuality and I resent the suggestion that it was. The [verdict] totally vindicates me and clears my name of the slur that I have lied about myself, very likely the referent for Cornershop’s sarcastic line, The last thing in the world I’d do to you is lie.²²

A sad irony in all this hullabaloo was that Donovan’s failing career had been saved by his performance in a West End musical (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat). This musical even gave him his first hit single in over two years. The deep connections between musical theater and gay male subcultures have been well-documented, and Donovan’s performance was enthusiastically received by gays: Thousands of gay men in the capital’s pubs and clubs are singing along to his latest technicolour single: As teenage girls all sit there screaming / Our Jason’s dreaming / Any queen will do.²² Donovan burned through a lot of goodwill with his lawsuit, and what he really achieved by successfully scotching some rumors being spread by posters pasted on Covent Garden walls…only Jason Donovan will ever know that part.

Notes

1. That discipline much-maligned for its supposed trivial pedanticism—Samuel Johnson’s famous ridicule being more-or-less general, “[A]ll a Rhetoricians Rules / Teach nothing but to name his Tools.” Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 4.

2. Cornershop, “Where D’U Get Your Information,” Hold on It Hurts (London: Wiiija Records, 1993).

3. Untrue or false information is now more usually called “misinformation” or “disinformation,” which I consider antonymic mirages, seeming to suggest that “information” is true, or should be true, or makes some implicit claim to truth. Certainly rhetoric as a discipline concerns itself with truth, and provides the rhetorician with deeply elaborated methods (logic) for demonstrating the truth of an argument, but it must be remembered that these methods compose only one of three modes of persuasion available to the rhetorician, the other two modes being by no means specifically oriented towards truth. Regarding the song “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson,” it should be noted that the song treats other themes of special interest to Cornershop, including immigration, sexism, classism, homophobia, and racism.

4. Cornershop, “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson.”

5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1990), 245 and 67.

6. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. Ulrike Kistner (London: Verso, 2016); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 88-89. Thirty years later there is still no evidence that Donovan is or was or even might-have-been gay.

7. “Any Queen Will Do,” Pink Paper (London), July 13, 1991, 1. FROCS was a shadowy organization that might or might-not have been responsible for the Donovan poster. See “All Sweet and Innocent, Shane and Simon: FROCS Was ‘Only Hoaxing’,” Capital Gay (London), August 2, 1991, 1. Even the most generous possible interpretation of FROCS‘s motives must acknowledge that it rested on shakey intellectual grounds: as many theorists had already argued by 1991, every act of outing, or coming out, merely reproduces the very closet the outing seeks to abolish. See Sedgwick, Epistemology, 71-72.

8. See “Copenhagen Welcomes Euro-Gays,” Capital Gay (London), January 11, 1991, 15: “The only real note of discord came when OutRage’s representative walked out of the conference in outraged protest at the sale of T-shirts bearing the slogan ‘Queer as Fuck.’ In a letter of explanation, he said that the use of the term ‘queer’ was so self-oppressive that he felt he must leave. Since the shirts themselves were produced by Outrage this caused some confusion.” See also Nick Cohen, “Secret World of ‘Outing’ Group That Seeks Publicity for Others,” Independent (London), July 30, 1991, 3: “To the vast majority of homosexual men, queer is a term of moronic abuse. Michael Cashman, chairman of Stonewall, a gay pressure group which quietly works for legal reform, said that the word showed society’s failure to understand ‘that there is no such thing as a separate homosexual community; that gay men’s lives can be as ordinary, dull or exciting as anyone else’s.”

9. Benn’s Media Directory (1991), s.v. “Face.” Sarah Boseley, “Expensive Outing Could Smother the Face: Jason Donovan’s Supporters Were Determined on a Public Battle to Nail the Lie of His Alleged Homosexuality in the Media,” Guardian (London), April 4, 1992, 3. For Dylan Jones on the Face, see his foreword to Paul Gorman, The Story of the Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2017), 6.; and Bill Mouland, “My Disgust at This Gay Slur,” Daily Mail (London), March 31, 1992, 5.

10. William J. Stewart, Collins Dictionary of Law, 3rd ed. (Glasgow: Collins, 2006).

11. Ben Summerskill, “Forced Out,” Face, August 1991, 72.

12. Hannah Pool, “Jason Donovan,” Guardian (London), October 4, 2007, 21; Jack Marx, “Jason's Technicolour Life,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 4, 2012, 32.

13. “VOX Readers’ Poll Results,” Vox, February 1, 1993, 31.; Jonathon Green, “Berk,” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang (Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2011).; J.D. Considine, “Backside: J.D’.s Golden Decade,” Musician, August 1, 1992, 91.; Jack Marx, “Jason's Technicolour Life,” 32; and Mal Peachey, “Jason Donovan,” Vox, 1993, 5.

14. Bill Mouland, “Court Giggles over Jason, the Amazing Lemon Blond,” Daily Mail (London), April 1, 1992, 5; and Sarah Boseley, “Expensive Outing,” 3.

15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 89.

16. Bill Mouland, “Court Giggles.”

17. Bill Mouland, “My Disgust at This Gay Slur,” 5.

18. Raphaela van Oers, “Stigma, Prejudice, and Sympathy: British Press Coverage of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s,” (master’s thesis, McGill University, 2022), 15.

19. Lindsay Brook and Social and Community Planning Research, British Social Attitudes Cumulative Sourcebook: The First Six Surveys (Aldershot, Hants, England ; Gower, 1992), M.1-3.

20. “In the new phase which began around 1988, AIDS has begun to be perceived more as a ‘normal’ non-epidemic chronic disease, and reactions to it have become professionalized and institutionalized,” Virginia Berridge and Philip Strong, “AIDS in the UK: Contemporary History and the Study of Policy,” Twentieth Century British History 2, no. 2 (April 1991): 154, 166.

21. Alison Park and National Centre for Social Research, British Social Attitudes. The 19th Report, British Social Attitudes Survey Series 19 (London: SAGE, 2002).

22. Bill Mouland, “Jason’s Mercy for Gay Slur Magazine,” Daily Mail (London), April 4, 1992, 3; and Cornershop, “Jason Donovan / Tessa Sanderson.”

23. Sarah Boseley, “Editor ‘Cut Libel’ from Outing Story’,” Guardian (London), April 2, 1992, 2. For more on Donovan’s enthusiastic reception as Joseph among London gays, see “Editor ‘Trying to Help Jason’,” Daily Mail (London), April 2, 1992, 5. For more on the connections between gay male subcultures and musical theater, see John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).