The boy with the dulcet foghorn

Many gay men of the Stonewall generation worshiped the ground Judy Garland walked on, fully aware of the fact that it was littered with empty prescription bottles. Garland—perhaps the very first human being to transmogrify into pure camp before an adoring and judgmental public, though clearly not the last—became an icon through her indomitableness, her boozy courage in decline, and her occasional grace under duress. The queens who took note of this quality, and who nourished it through ritual and oral tradition, are the people we have to thank for the canonization of Garland's superb 1964 document Judy at Carnegie Hall. Who else could have kept it on the pop charts for 95 weeks even while its star self-destructed?

It's also fair to credit these fore-fairies with inspiring the winkingly reverent, every-note-in-place, song-for-song celebration of Garland's original that Rufus Wainwright—himself no stranger to the tempests and temptations of celebrity—presented to sold-out madhouses of gay glitterati at Carnegie Hall this summer...

You can find the rest of my review of Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall at Slant Magazine.