P E R S P E C T I V E
Great Expectations with Bruce Springsteen
BY NICHOLAS BOSTON
There could not have been
a more fi tting choice of
show-person to reopen
Broadway than Bruce
Springsteen. On June 26 night,
the Boss took the stage at the
St. James Theatre for opening
night of a limited 31-show run
of “Springsteen on Broadway.”
It is the fi rst Broadway performance
to take place in the last
15 months since theaters shut
down due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
“It’s great,” Springsteen told
the full house jubilantly. “Unmasked,
sitting next to each
other!”
A maverick of American music,
Springsteen, 71, brings the kind
of symbolic capital that an occasion
carrying such great expectations
demands. To those viewing
his performance as the start
of a reboot for the economically
wounded Broadway industry,
“Springsteen on Broadway” returned on June 26.
Springsteen’s “working man” persona
speaks volumes. For those
REUTERS/MARIO ANZUONI
attuned to the ongoing struggles
for social justice, he performed
“American Skin (41 Shots),” a song
he wrote to remember and protest
the 1999 police shooting of Amadou
Diallo, an innocent, unarmed
African immigrant in the Bronx.
And to all of us hungering for the
company of others, Springsteen’s
explosive line from “Dancing in
the Dark,” his biggest hit, “Man,
I’m just tired and bored with myself!”
is a salve.
“Bruce is a singular artist who
is really able to speak directly to
every one of us individually and
collectively — that’s a magic trick
— and also to the moment we are
living in at every moment,” Jordan
Roth, president of Jujamcyn
Theatres, the producer behind
“Springsteen on Broadway,” told
NY1’s Frank DiLella at the opening.
In attendance was one of the
highest-ranking out gay government
offi cials, Secretary of Transportation
Pete Buttigieg, accompanied
by his husband Chasten
Glezman Buttigieg.
As LGBTQ+ people, many of us
found entryways to Springsteen’s
music and/or persona that affi
rmed, or at least did not negate,
our identities. Naomi Gordon-
Loebl, a Brooklyn-based writer,
has described how Springsteen
enabled her to model her own female
masculinity. “My relationship
with Bruce started sometime
in my early teens,” she wrote in
a very clever article in the Nation
in 2019. “In part, of course, it was
the butchness. I was a 14-yearold
disciple of a very particular
brand of masculinity, and there
seemed to be no better teacher
than Bruce.”
Writing here in Gay City News in
2016, Michael Luongo refl ected on
his confl icting feelings of angst and
attraction while editing his high
school yearbook at Freehold High
School, Springsteen’s alma mater,
in New Jersey. The source of Luongo’s
anxiety was Springsteen’s
“Born in the U.S.A.” album cover,
showing the Boss’s butt. Someone
on Luongo’s editorial staff had the
bright idea to riff on it in the yearbook
with pics of the seats of their
classmates’ pants.
Luongo explains: “Being a deeply
closeted gay teenage boy at the
time, I feared having to make decisions
about the butts of my classmates.
What if they thought I was
too gung-ho about their butts,
expressing way too much of an
interest in what I was doing, or
if I lingered too long over the images?
Or if I blurted ahead of time
which of the boys in class I already
thought had great butts, because
I’d been staring at them long before
the ‘Born in the USA’ album jacket
brought Bruce’s Freehold fanny to
fame?”
Springsteen might have touched
a nerve of a different kind among
straight-identifi ed guys. One
Springsteen concert goer I recall
seeing interviewed in the 1990s
said when asked about a kiss the
Boss had planted on Clarence
Clemons, saxophonist for his E
Street Band, “I probably wouldn’t
kick Springsteen out of my bed,
but as for the rest of the male species,
nah.”
Nicholas Boston, Ph.D., is an
associate professor of media studies
at Lehman College of the City
University of New York (CUNY),
and author of “The Amorous Migrant:
Race, Relationships and
Resettlement” (Temple University
Press).
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