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Openly gay comedian Bob Smith offers a comic take on the tragic figure theory, imagining an "Elvis king" and a "Judy queen", debating the idols: She's been through the fire and lived – all the drinking and divorcing, all the pills and all the men, all the poundage come and gone – brothers and sisters, she knows. They are a persecuted group and they understand suffering. Homosexuals tend to identify with suffering. And Garland is youth, perennially, over the rainbow", he wrote:
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After first suggesting that "if have an enemy, it is age. He goes on, however, to advance the tragic figure theory as well. Writer William Goldman, in a piece for Esquire magazine about the same Palace engagement, again disparages the gay men in attendance, dismissing them as " fags" who "flit by" chattering inanely. She has the power that homosexuals would like to have, and they attempt to attain it by idolizing her."
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Time then attempted to explain Garland's appeal to the homosexual, consulting psychiatrists who opined that "the attraction might be made considerably stronger by the fact that she has survived so many problems homosexuals identify with that kind of hysteria" and that "Judy was beaten up by life, embattled, and ultimately had to become more masculine. It goes on to say that "he boys in the tight trousers" (a phrase Time repeatedly used to describe gay men, as when it described "ecstatic young men in tight trousers pranc down the aisles to toss bouquets of roses" to another gay icon, Marlene Dietrich) would "roll their eyes, tear at their hair and practically levitate from their seats" during Garland's performances. Time magazine, in reviewing Garland's 1967 Palace Theatre engagement, disparagingly noted that a "disproportionate part of her nightly claque seems to be homosexual". The aspects of gay identification with Garland were being discussed in the mainstream as early as 1967.