ABSTRACT
The fi lm version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the fi rst novel of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, serves as a pop-culture icon of twentieth-century Western gay culture. With Judy Garland as the star, its exaggerated characters of good and evil, and its Technicolor wonderland of vibrant colors and outlandish costumes, the fi lm displays a queer sensibility that countless viewers adore.1 Today gay bars in New Orleans, Seattle, and Sweden bear the name Oz, and the iconic polychromatic fl ag of the gay community pays homage to the fi lm’s theme song, “Over the Rainbow.” References to the fi lm appear in numerous other artifacts of gay culture, such as when, in Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, one character derides another’s claimed heterosexuality by declaring “he’s about as straight as the Yellow Brick Road.”2 Daniel Harris documents the “canonic” nature of references to Oz in the oft-repeated catchphrase, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,”3 which, for certain T-shirt incarnations, has been campily reformulated as “Aunt Em: Hate you! Hate Kansas! Taking the dog. Dorothy.”4 Although numerous other cinematic classics-from Mildred Pierce to Mommie Dearest-display a queer sensibility that elevates them to the status of cultural touchstones in the gay community, The Wizard of Oz towers above the rest in terms of its iconic role in queer cinema’s relationship to queer culture. As Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffi n observe, “almost every viewer (queer or not) probably enjoys the fi lm not for its sepia-toned representation of banal ‘normality’ but for its breathtaking creation of a Technicolor Oz, a land where difference and deviation from the norm are the norm.”5 Somewhere during the transition from print to fi lm, Oz
lost its ostensible innocence as a children’s literary classic and was claimed by queers as a Technicolor land of deviance from normalcy.
