On June 10, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland will appear on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen. Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice.

The new postage stamp won’t be showing Oz’s Judy, but rather what became of her: the rakish elfwoman of A Star is Born, thinned out, hair slicked, a dazed flatness to the pupils, as if she were still not looking into this world but somewhere out there. Behind the moon. Beyond the rain.

In the Alice in Wonderland world of quantum physics, a particle can exist in two places at one time. So Judy exists in these two forms simultaneously: forever Dorothy, but also the Carnegie Hall Judy. On Gay Pride day, it’s always the hopeful Dorothy who shines a bit stronger and commands my thoughts.

Judy was 16 when she made The Wizard of Oz, and it fixed her in the imagination with finality. The film is not ten minutes old, when this finished Judy appears, set up in one quick stroke by the song Somewhere Over the Rainbow — particularly in the intelligent and committed way she sings it.

Everything in the scene is oatmeal brown. Judy settles into a haystack, big moon eyes searching the sky. The woodwinds glisten with the hint of rain. Then out it comes, carried on her young voice. A sweet, melancholy melody that gives The Wizard of Oz the thing that makes it so great — a living, beating heart.

Sophisticated in style (unlike, say, the easy sing-song of Someday My Prince Will Come, a contemporary 1930’s ‘kid’s” theme from Snow White), Over the Rainbow would be sung by the actress until the day she died from a sleeping-pill overdose at 47, picking up stormy and ironic subtexts along the way — as well as after her death, when it became the banner anthem of the gay movement.

Yet Louis B. Mayer had doubts that the song should even be in the film. It was thought too “adult” for his alternate choice to play Dorothy, Shirley Temple. But with Judy, it worked beautifully — a combination of the just right singer with the just right song. Though the Wizard of Oz continues to be one of the great communal experiences of an American childhood, it is Judy Garland’s singing at this point that steers the film away from the shallows of sugary children’s fare. Gives it a mature power that endures.

I was amazed when I watched the film recently by how restrained the original performance is. A change had taken place in me, though, in the way I heard the lyrics. I kept recognizing the Carnegie Hall Judy in the clunky schoolgirl body.

Particularly, the song’s final line: if happy little bluebirds fly … As children viewing the film, the line is simply a spur to go above the clouds, never doubting that the trick of the bluebird can be mastered. It is only now, in the Carnegie Hall overlay, that we hear how hard the voice is climbing, drawing up power and volume as if to double its efforts, the better to make it so.

…beyond the rainbow…

Is that a tremble we detect even in the film’s still young, still masked vibrato?

Why, oh why… The note of desperation. Then, strong: …can’t I.

Ending in a pitched cry (Judy’s signature), the songs speaks to us now of grown-up limits and the Kansas-drab rituals of pragmatism. No, Toto, we’re not in Munchkinland anymore.

In one sense, Oz is childhood: bright, big-hearted — but also scary. Unlike the false vision of childhood usually portrayed in movies where the villains are all spoofy comedians, there is a real terror of the dark in The Wizard of Oz. The winged monkeys are actually horrific, and when they scoop up Dorothy in the Haunted Forest, children in the audience scream. The child-size munchkins, with their frumpy Russian faces, are similarly disquieting, and some children (I was one) find them more freakish than playful.

The Witch — ah, the witch is a masterpiece of childhood terror. The hatchet face, the green skin, the purple tongue. Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West is something out of a fever dream. She will be satisfied with nothing less than Dorothy’s death. The surrender she requires is a total one. To be, as the munchkin coroner might put it, not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead.

(That’s another thing that distinguishes The Wizard of Oz from phonier children’s fare. Death is real there. It’s a plot point. It is, indeed, the only possible plot resolution.)

Mature viewers will naturally take a longer view. To us, the witch is charming. To us, Hollywood is the real Oz in this movie, its bright and oversaturated colors forever capturing the MGM studio system in its glory, calling generations of dreamers to its western gates, encouraging them to remake themselves in fabulous ways, as Dorothy is remade in the Emerald City, where they can even dye your eyes to match your gown (jolly old town!)

To go to Oz is to become the “Hollywood version” of one’s self, where beauty counts more than brains, and luck is everything. Or as the munchkins put it, You just follow the yellow brick road — advice so mystical that the chords of the ditty grow suddenly mysterious and calm.

I used to believe that The Wizard of Oz belonged to gay men in a special way, a way the straight world was barred from. I know now I was wrong: I’ve just read a brilliant monograph on The Wizard of Oz by Salman Rushdie — yes, that Salman Rushdie, of the Satanic Verses and the ayatollah’s death fatwas. An unlikely, but as it turns out, fascinating combination of writer and subject.

Rushdie saw the film when he was a boy and, as the son of a diplomat traveling between London and Pakistan, experienced it against the pungent backdrop of Indian cinema, where hectic outbreaks of mass dancing are common and gods routinely descend from bubbles. Puffs of smoke, too, are a favorite mode of transportation for Vishnu and the gang.

Reading the monograph I realized that everybody gets the heightened, or “gay”, sense of this movie. Perhaps because we see it first as children, more likely because the Judy performance leaves such a vivid imprint, but the gay vision of Wizard of Oz turns out to be unavoidable, the universal take. Rushdie — a man I have to conclude is straight as he has gone through four marriages — doesn’t miss a trick, no matter how “queer,” in his short and penetrating essay.

“Of the two Witches, good and bad,” he writes, “can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda?” Like many of us, he prefers the gleeful green malevolence of Margaret Hamilton. Glinda — specifically Billy Burke’s way of being Glinda — works poor Salman’s last nerve.

The actress is mercilessly — but exquisitely — unpacked: Her appearance Rushdie pronounces “powdery,” her “elocution voice” — with its fluttery cooings and simpering facial accompaniment — beyond irritating, and Dorothy’s reaction to her (oh, but I never heard of a beautiful witch before) way too generous.

A commonplace of post-modern critiques is to invert good and evil in a fairytale. In this reading, the Witch turns out to be noble (if flawed), while Glinda is mendacious and banal. The musical Wicked takes that tact, as does Rushdie, but the author goes one better. He finds Glinda not merely corrupt, but perverse. “She has a smile,” he writes, “that seems to have jammed.” Glinda knowingly misleads Dorothy while carefully sidestepping an outright lie — “plausible deniability” as we now call such shams of statecraft:

When Dorothy asks her how she might return to Kansas, Glinda tells her to ask the wizard. It turns out Glinda knows the answer all along — you just click the ruby slippers three times and recite a platitude about home. Yet this Good Witch of the North doesn’t produce the formula until another Witch is dead and the Wizard exposed — both, perhaps, her rivals for control of Oz.

“Glinda’s instructions to Dorothy are oddly enigmatic, even contradictory,” writes Rushdie. “One can see Glinda’s obliquities as proof that a good fairy or a good witch, when she sets out to be of assistance, never gives you everything. Glinda is not so unlike her description of the Wizard of Oz, after all. Oh, he’s very good but very mysterious.”

Rushdie’s deconstruction of official morality goes further, pointing out that the purported traditional value put forth by the film — there’s no place like home — is exactly the lesson the film refutes:

“This is the home that there’s no place like?” he exclaims, citing the dirt-poverty of the film’s Kansas and the stiff, prim way Miss Gulch rides roughshod over Auntie Em and Uncle Henry when she seizes the dog. “This is the lost Eden we are asked to prefer (as Dorothy does) to Oz?”

Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriter’s notion that this is a film about the superiority of “home” to “away” … would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice [when she sings Over the Rainbow]. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots.

At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is a great tension between these two dreams; but as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger?… Over the Rainbow is, or ought to be, the anthem of the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place “where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”

This, I feel, is the “gay” sense of the film — or what in my provincialness I used to think of as a sense exclusive to us. Gay people often have to reject their home and families and find a new home, a new family for themselves. The bizarreness of Munchkinland, with its ballerina-pink Lullaby League and strutting, cow-licked Lollipop Guild — how like a child’s premonition of places like the Castro and Greenwich Village where gay identity would be distilled into colorful and at times shock-schlock public performances.

Without quite meaning to, Rushdie captures the way it feels to be a gay child in America when he unpacks the actual message of the film:

The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults… and how the weakness of adults forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent substitutes…are powerless to help her save her dog …into a world where the people are her own size and in which she is never, ever, treated as a child, but as a heroine.

She gains this status by accident, it’s true, having played no part in her house’s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East but by her adventure’s end, she has certainly grown to fill … those ruby slippers.

Who could have thought a girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness, laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts … As the witch grows down, so Dorothy is seen to have grown up. This, in my view, is a much more satisfactory reason for her new-found power over the ruby slippers…

The weakness of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in the face of Miss Gulch … leads Dorothy to think, childishly, of running away. … Later, however, when confronted by the weakness of the Wizard of Oz, she doesn’t run away, but goes into battle, first against the Witch, and then against the Wizard himself.

All of these Ozian forces came into play the night of the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Judy Garland had died five days earlier, and some of the rioters had waited in line, along with 21,000 others (my teenage self among them), to get into Campbell’s Funeral Home to view the star’s small, waif-like body lying on satin bedding. She wore a sparky silver lame gown, as befitted a gay icon, and her coffin was lined in tufted blue velvet.

Emotions were running high that week, the night was humid, and when the police began corralling us out of the Stonewall, something just …snapped.

There were no more drag queens, no more kids from the Boroughs, no more slumming East Side Aunties — we were all one, a community, united in grief, evicted out onto the sidewalk, with a sense that we had nothing left to lose.

Like Dorothy, we did battle, finally, with our version of the winged monkeys. As can happen in fairytales, they had taken another form, that of prosaic New York cops with sarcastic smirks on their faces.

And so the gay-rights movement was born.

E pluribus unum, as Professor Marvel tells the fugitive Dorothy early in the film, and as we will later see in Oz, where it takes all kinds — a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow, the friends of Dorothy, in short — to get to the other side of the rainbow.

The Wizard of Oz monograph
by Salman Rushdie
and the Two-Disc Special Edition DVD
are both available at Amazon

For more information on the film,
visit the official Wizard of Oz website