Activism on Avenue
Originally aspiring to be an actor Jeff Whitty discovered a latent talent for darkly comic writing. After penning several plays he was parachuted into workshops for the musical Avenue Q where his witty dialogue and diabolical structural contributions won him a Tony award for best book. Never one to bask in glory Whitty then, due to a feud with Jay Leno, became what he calls an “uncomfortable activist.” Drew Rowsome braved a bad connection and Whitty’s acid tongue to ferret out the motives that drove a writer to help a closeted puppet blossom.


“All musicals are always big puzzles,” says Jeff Whitty while carefully downplaying his contribution to the hit musical Avenue Q. “There was a match between my plays and the songs. It was a hunch between the producers.” The songs, including “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” “The Internet is for Porn” and “I’m Not Wearing Underwear Today,” were already written and rehearsed before Whitty came on board. His task was daunting. “I was handed a pretty insane grab bag of characters. I had to find a place for everyone, flesh them out and find out who they were.” And create a coherent, logical but most importantly funny storyline.

One of the most endearing characters in Avenue Q is one who could easily have become the most obnoxious. Rod is a Republican theatre queen and the subject of the song “If You Were Gay,” in which the other denizens of Avenue Q try to convince the bright blue closet case that they will still be his friends if he comes out. Whitty loved the song but felt that the challenge was to make the character one the audience could identify with instead of despise or mock. “Rod is funny to a point,” notes Whitty. “But I then wanted the audience to care for him and go on the journey.”

Not that Whitty was willing to cater to any hetero norm. “Gays do have their thing. What makes us laugh. Straights have their own and I sit through enough of their comedy.” In Buffalo the touring company was hit and miss for the opening night blue rinse/overdressed set. Puppets having sex onstage and jokes about racism were edgy enough, but a fantasy sequence where Rod and his roommate Nicky actually experience the ecstasy of gay romance left approximately half the audience cold. The other half were in delirious stitches.

Whitty has a habit of ignoring the goings on onstage when he revisits his handiwork. “I pick an audience member to watch. Some sour old lady,” he says. When the sourpuss softens and cracks up Whitty is personally vindicated. He believes there are three types of laughter: one where the audience agrees the joke is funny, the second where the audience smiles involuntarily and thirdly when the laughter just takes over and convulses the audience. On most nights Avenue Q achieves the latter. Of course all of Whitty’s surreptitious research goes out the window when there is a celebrity in the audience. He admits that the night Bette Midler attended the Broadway show he only watched her and has no memory beyond being overjoyed when she launched into the third type of laughter.

The big problem with the script was getting Rod out of the closet. Rod has an unrequited crush on his roommate Nicky. They share a bedroom, carefully tucked into twin beds, but both are painfully aware of Rod’s love/lust for Nicky. Having a crush on a straight friend is almost a rite of passage for most gay men but straight audiences could easily find it creepy. Fortunately Nicky’s joie de vivre leads him to only want to encourage Rod to come out of the closet and fall into someone else’s arms where he will be happy.

Whitty laughs as he recalls the various convoluted plot contrivances that were tried and discarded. There was one version where Nicky built a robot version of himself and one where Nicky invented helium bubble wrap, to make packages lighter and therefore cheaper to mail, which resulted in all of Nicky’s possessions floating away. The last one is hopelessly obtuse, even Whitty wonders what he was thinking, but it remains clear evidence of the author’s wonderfully warped mind and willingness to try anything for a laugh. The final solution, which remains in the show, is startlingly simple, far from obvious and uproariously hilarious. As a bonus it contains an explicitly gay sight gag that gently mocks our culture while also saluting it.

“I paid off my student loans,” says Whitty of the success of Avenue Q but he has hardly rested on his laurels. While on a long boring plane trip he conjured up the idea of adapting Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City into a musical. He believes that “all that pot smoking polyamory in the ’70s” is an ideal topic for a Broadway show. When shopping it to producers he brought along a tape which included disco, ’70s anthems and a lone Scissors Sisters song. The producers bit and fortunately Whitty “knew Jake Shears and he was immediately on board.” While this gay wet dream of a musical is so far “a 19-hour epic” that is still being workshopped Whitty is adamant about its potential.

“If I never have to work in Hollywood I’ll be happy,” intones Whitty. A movie musical project with OutKast is in turnaround which doesn’t seem to concern Whitty at all. “I’d rather sit in a room with people who are smart than be sitting in a room with people who are guessing what is smarter.” He’s just “more at home with plays. I miss out on the collaboration. I’m such a weird bird.”

Whitty’s work habits have a habit of their own: he keeps interrupting himself. Whitty is a ubiquitous presence on YouTube with many hilarious shorts from Meet the Casting Directors (in which YouTube reality stars are carefully cast in familiar viral shorts) to his semi-drag/semi-vicious Catherine Hepburn Rap. Whitty ruefully admits that “without the distraction of YouTube I probably would have written three more plays.” Whitty also has a tendency to write long but amusing tracts on his website, www.whitless.com, on anything that fascinates or infuriates him — from the tragedy of Little Miss No Name dolls to the idiocy of the assumption of a vast gay conspiracy.

But Whitty is not one to just simply fire pot shots from the anonymous safety of cyberspace. When Jay Leno began an endless barrage of disparaging gay jokes timed to the release of Brokeback Mountain Whitty composed a pointed yet humourous email asking the Tonight Show host to lay off: “Every single out-of-the-closet gay person has had to say, ‘I am not part of mainstream society.’ Mr. Leno, that takes bigger balls than stepping out in front of TV-watching America every night. I daresay I suspect it takes bigger balls to come out of the closet than anything you have ever done in your life.”

Whitty sent the email to three friends who sent it to three friends who forwarded it around the world of the gay conspiracy. Eventually Whitty wound up on CNN defending his “scathing” (CNN’s assessment) email. While the reporter dug for dirt and hoped for a vicious sissy sound bite Whitty calmly stated: “They talk so much about sexual issues, the right wingers, but to me being gay is an issue about love really. And that is nuanced and difficult and that’s the discussion I want to be having.”

Jay Leno eventually called and the pair had a somewhat surreal but congenial conversation. Whitty, as a comic writer, empathizes with Leno. Whitty admits that it’s, “hard not to go for a laugh. It’s like crack for a comedian.” So he called a truce. A truce that lasted until Leno launched another homophobic barrage by asking actor Ryan Phillippe to demonstrate his “gayest look” as, years before, Phillippe had played a gay character on a soap opera. Whitty’s email was not as effective this time but it led to the creation of yet another website which has taken on a cheeky life of its own: www.mygayestlook.com on which gay celebrities, activists and those just annoyed at rampant homophobia post photographs of themselves giving Leno the finger. Whitty is pleased, though he won’t claim all the credit, that Leno “sort of apologized and did that thing for marriage in California. Straight people can be so self-congratulatory when they’re not necessarily deserving of it.”

Whitty tries to be calm but it infuriates him that that gay history and gay contributions to the world are neglected in exchange for fag jokes. “Here’s today’s argument,” says Whitty, “A gay man designed fucking Big Bird. He just passed away. Big Bird, the greatest childhood teaching tool, was created by a fucking gay man. He’s inside. Straight America and the whole straight world can just put it in their pipes and smoke it. My answer for today is ‘fucking Big Bird.’ We’re everywhere. Throw a rock.”


Drew Rowsome is an editor at fab and an unrepentant fan of musicals, puppets who have sex and all contributions to gay history.