Though I disagree with many of his theatre choices I always read Mordden's books, including his Buddy series, in which I find very little to identify with but he is a fast read.

    


This is the thirty-first  post in a series
highlighting the best gay and lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few
before and after that period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the
history of gay people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.
   



Ethan Mordden (born January 27, 1949, Pennsylvania) is an American author.

Biography
Mordden was raised in Pennsylvania, in Venice, Italy, and on Long Island, and
is a graduate of Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York, and the
University of Pennsylvania. He at first sought a career in show
business, working as music director on off-Broadway and in regional
theatre, and enrolling in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop run by Lehman Engel. As both composer and lyricist, Mordden wrote musicals based on William Shakespeare's Measure For Measure and on Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, but he ended up earning his living as a writer of English prose.
Works and themes

His
stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover a wide range of
topics including the American musical theater, opera, film, and,
especially in his fiction, the emergence and development of contemporary
American gay culture as manifested in New York City. He has also
written for The New Yorker, including fiction, Critic At Large pieces on
Cole Porter, Judy Garland, and the musical Show Boat, and reviews of a
biography of the Barrymores and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.



His
best known fictional works are the inter-related series of stories
known collectively as the "Buddies" cycle. In book form, these began with 1985's I've a Feeling We're not in Kansas Anymore. The fifth in the series, 2005's How's Your Romance?, is subtitled Concluding the
"Buddies" Cycle. Together, the stories chronicle the times, loves, and
losses of a close-knit group of friends, men who cope with the challenges of growing up and growing older. In this circle of best friends, teasing putdowns become performance art, but none of the friends ever attacks any other friend's sensitive spots. Mordden thus breaks away from the gay model proposed by Mart Crowley's play The
Boys in the Band, in which supposed best friends assault one another
relentlessly in a style that has bedeviled gay art ever since, for
instance in the television series Queer as Folk. Mordden's ideal of gay friendship presents men who genuinely like themselves and
one another. They are unique in gay lit in that they respect the limits
of privacy. This explains their devotion to one another: this "family"
is a safe place.

In 1995, Mordden produced an epic novel, How Long Has This Been Going On?, following the
lives of a diverse group of men and women from 1949 to 1991. All but
one of the principal characters are gay or lesbian. Mordden's own favorite among his works of fiction is The Venice Adriana of 1998,
which uses the life and art of the opera soprano Maria Callas to
question whether we are trapped by fate or free to invent a destiny. In a
Nabokovian game meant for opera lovers, the novel's plot and characters reflect the plot and characters of Francesco Cilea's opera Adriana Lecouvreur. Mordden's least well-known work is A Bad Man Is Easy To Find, published in 1989
under the pseudonym of M. J. Verlaine. Though the book aligns with the "Buddies" cycle in its structure of inter-related short stories, it
is entirely about the lives of women, and has only one minor gay
character. In 2008, Mordden published The Jewcatcher, a surrealistic novel set in Berlin from the end of the Weimar Republic to the last day of the European war. The many principal characters are a combination of Mordden's inventions and such real-life figures as Adolf Hitler, Marlene Dietrich, Raoul Wallenberg, Claus von Stauffenberg, and President Hindenburg.

Mordden's non-fiction includes seven volumes detailing the history of the
Broadway musical from the 1920s through the 1990s, guides to orchestral
music and operatic recordings, a cultural history of the American 1920s,
and examinations of the phenomenon of the operatic diva and of the
works of Rodgers and Hammerstein. He has written a number of books on
film, including analyses of the influence of Hollywood studios and of
the role of female film stars. In all his non-fiction, Mordden has been a pioneer among writers who bring their personal experience and even their personalities into discussion.

The New York Times spoke of Mordden as being among a group of "ruminators on popular culture" animated by "the gun-moll gesticulations of Pauline Kael, for whom responsiveness was everything."