Gender-bending ‘Carmen’ by Chicago Opera Theatre – Chicago Tribune

Also nothing new is opera’s history of cultivating queer fanbases. Wayne Koestenbaum’s book “The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire” (1993) discusses diva worship among gay men, and the collection “En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera” (1995) complies feminine perspectives on queerness in the art form. Both treatises toe the line between academic assessment and anecdotalism, but collectively, they gesture to a broader culture of escapism that took on deeper meaning for closeted audiences. “Where else but in the plush darkness of Covent Garden, the Met, or the Opéra-Comique, say, might a respectable woman of the nineteenth century have spent two or three hours staring raptly at another through binoculars?” writes critic Terry Castle.