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Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak?" This is part of the lyric of "My Funny Valentine," written by Lorenz ("Larry") Hart. These two questions have been peas under my mattress for nearly 40 years.

When I was young, it seemed that every singer covered "My Funny Valentine"-- maybe singers still do. Larry Hart was one of the best. If you were to ask me to do win, place, and show, I'd put Cole Porter as the God of the American Songbook; Larry Hart would be his second. Hard to say. The faggots do the best in Show World, don't you think?

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"Is your figure less than Greek?" The song was part of the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical Babes In Arms, 1937, the movie version of which starred Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. But when Hart asks that question: "Is your figure less than Greek?" we have to stop and consider, as I did even as a child. First off, we don't use the word "figure" anymore in the way Hart and others did in their time, meaning body shape. After Jane Fonda and Madonna, the female figure has taken on a whole new look. But is Larry Hart writing about the female figure? When he invokes the Greek culture, we must assume he's harking back to ancient Greek culture, one manifestation of which was its humanistic and bold sculpture, depicting the human body in a natural-- and in some cases heroic-- style. The Greeks were the only ancients to celebrate what we in the Porno-Era of Western so-called civilization call "full frontal nudity." If your figure is less than Greek, does that mean that Larry Hart has in his mind the memory of an ancient Greek kouros, the gorgeous naked lad standing in front of you?

I think this was what was in Larry's mind. And the next question: "Is your mouth a little weak?" Well, on the obvious level, weak rhymes with Greek, no? Hart could rhyme anything with anything, just about. In one early show, he had lyrics which ended with the following rhyming words: freaky, leaky, sneaky, and Bolsheviki. But why a weak mouth? He could have chosen weak eyes, a weak smile, a weak nose. No, I think that Greek statuary and the mouth are part of what Larry Hart wanted to reveal about himself.

I have always thought it true that gay men-- and others, surely, but gay men right now-- want to reveal themselves in all their glory and confusion, and as a challenge to the Heterosexual Dictatorship. Hart, working in the Broadway format, and part of the Jewish culture so essential to the creation of that aspect of popular entertainment, was unhappy. He was five feet tall. He was homosexual. He liked to drink a lot and smoke cigars. One biographer wrote this: "He was 25 years old, but he never had a steady girlfriend. He never would. When someone suggested he get married, he replied bitterly, 'Oh, yeah, I could always buy a stepladder, I suppose.' Alan Jay Lerner defined the inevitable result of this predicament. 'Because of his size, the opposite sex was denied him, so he was forced to find relief in the only other sex left." Wow! Tell it like it is, brother.

I have noticed that Mickey Rooney, no taller than Larry Hart, had no difficult time getting the ladies, marrying more often than Orson Welles, and perhaps to some of the same stars. No, Larry Hart was a Jewish faggot in a time and in a town-- Broadway, New York-- where, well, it just wasn't, well... you know. So many of our brothers have been in that tank-- think of Martin Duberman-- read Arthur Laurents's new memoir. The very gay men who are the creative force hampered by their own culture. Stonewall was a revolution. Read the biography of Stephen Sondheim-- it's all there, that generation, that conflict. You know, Cole Porter, a sweet non-observant Protestant lad from Peru, Indiana, had none of this conflict. And he came from the ownership class-- if only one generation of wealth. Was this sexual conflict for the gay Jewish men in the theater in the years from 1920-1970 because many were from immigrant families? Each inventing it all? I don't know.

Back to the Greek statues. That's what Larry was meditating on with the question: "Is your figure less than Greek?" His was, or so he thought. The trick here is that in ancient Greece, being five feet tall, like Larry Hart, would have made you a Big Guy, as tall as Achilles. And in the next question comes the mouth. Did he want to blow them, or did he want to get some really hot guy to blow him? I suspect, being the oral type-- a writer, my goodness, where's the headline?-- Larry would have liked to suck off the more attractive types different than he was, which is where Cole Porter went to, sailors, trade, young butch actor types, of which New York was always so full, going back to days long before Walt Whitman.

Can I sleep better now I have figured out this lyric which has so stayed with me? Maybe yes. Maybe no. I do believe gay men write in code, particularly strongly in pre-Stonewall years, but today too, 31 years after the revolution.

Lorenz Hart, back in 1927, wrote the lyrics for a musical by Richard Rodgers, A Connecticut Yankee, based on the Mark Twain story-- Twain had only been dead 17 years. In this show there is another lyric that rises to the top, like with Porter, a simple set of words trapped into that 32 bar grid of the Great American Songbook-- "Thy words are queer, sir. Unto mine ear, sir-- Thou art dandy. Now thou art my knight-- Thou swell! Thou witty! Thou grand!"

Nothing like it ever. Thank you Larry! Thou swell!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com