Is gregory maguire gay
How ‘Wicked’ composer Gregory Maguire’s retain story helped him channel Elphaba’s
The long-awaited “Wicked” show is now in theaters worldwide.
It’s based on the 2003 musical, that’s based on the best-selling 1995 guide by Massachusetts resident Gregory Maguire: “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.”
We visited Maguire at his home outside Boston to travel back to where it all began — both for his own existence and for his trip into the world of Oz.
Maguire was raised in Albany, the middle child in a family of seven siblings.
“Very few kids perceive when they are very young that they’re going to grow up to be gay or lesbian. And I certainly did not know that myself,” he said. “I was both thronged with loving brothers and sisters, but also isolated by feeling that I was just a little different from them.”
Though he couldn’t quite identify the reason why he felt alternative until his tardy high school and early college years, he felt it made him experience separate from his siblings, he said.
“I do deliberate that if you are trying to figure out your identity in a crowd of kids…one of the tools for a imaginative kid is to say, ‘Let me imagine myself somewhere else,’” he s
Gregory Maguire, author of "Wicked," will be coming to Fresno State in May, 2010, for "Oz – The Books Conference." Peruse more about it HERE. More details coming soon.
OZ: THE BOOKS CONFERENCE
May 14-16, 2010 California Articulate University, Fresno
Guest speakers and guide signings by authors including:
• Gregory Maguire – author of “Wicked,” “Son of a Witch” and “Lion Among Men”
• Eric Shanower – storyteller of “Adventures in Oz” and “The Age of Bronze”
• Dee Michel – author of “Friends of Dorothy: Why Gay Men and Boys Like Oz”
• David Maxine – producer of Grammy-award nominated Best Historical Album: “Vintage Recordings of the 1903 Musical: The Wizard of Oz”
From the LA Times
Gregory Maguire, writer of seven books for adults and five for adolescent readers, is probably best known for "Wicked," his retelling of "The Wizard of Oz" from the witch’s signal of view.
But creating stories that scout the nature of evil, or what we perceive as evil, hasn
4. But Are They Gay? A Queer Take on Elphaba and Glinda
Questions eight and nine asked respondents to characterize the connection between Gelphie, and asked if Wicked is a “queer” musical and how so, respectively. The brief answers are yes, most ship it, but whether it is a gender non-conforming musical was very up for debate. Among the six heterosexual respondents, for instance, four outright said that the show was not queer or that Glinda and Elphaba were not a couple, while one said she could see the potential and one said Gelphie is her OTP (one real pairing). Among queer respondents, many saw the musical as not as gender non-conforming as the book, or not queer at all because characters who are canonically queer in the book are not discussed or erased. For instance, Gregory Maguire has confirmed that Elphaba and Glinda were in some type of relationship, so both are canonically bisexual, and Elphaba is hinted to be intersex. Other folks saw the show as definitely queer or the potential for it to be read as gender non-conforming, understanding its need to insert the love triangle and make the demonstrate “family friendly” in the name of ticket sales, but “the way it is structured, the choices musically etc make it clear tha
What is the nature of evil?
This is the question that the much celebrated musical Wicked thrusts upon us – and it is no coincidence that the concept of evil is something that everyone in the LGBT community knowingly or unknowingly, has had to grapple with. Even today, there are those who tell us that by virtue of who we admire , we are damned, in other words, evil. When I came out in the 1980s, our redefinition of evil became an oft repeated slogan: the moral majority is neither.
But somehow the accusations never go away. As Gregory Maguire, readings/appearances of the novel that the participate is based on -- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West -- writes, “It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.”
Wicked, the musical, has been around for a while -- and has reached the mega-hit pinnacle of becoming a cliché. As I tell my students, a cliché is a word or expression that is so overused that it is in need of further definition. And my definition of