E-Mail This Article to a Friend Operatic overtures (continued)

Which leads us, in a round-about way, to the standout track on Want Two, "The Art Teacher." One of the more sparsely arranged songs on the album, oriented around Wainwright’s voice and piano, it recounts a woman’s youthful infatuation with a teacher who introduced her to the beauty of J.M.W. Turner. After repeatedly invoking the unmatchable godliness of this man, she moves into the present: "All this having been said/I married an executive company head/All this having been done/A Turner — I own one/Here I am in this uniformish pant-suit sort of thing/Thinking of the art teacher." In keeping with the words, the melody is a bemused shrug, a bittersweet mix of pride and resignation.

"The Art Teacher" has a basis in Wainwright’s real life. As he explains with a hearty chuckle, "I did have a crush on an art teacher. He wasn’t my art teacher. He was someone I met at the gym and got to see in a compromising position. He was straight, but he wanted to hang out with me ’cause he was a fan, and we had a nice time together, but it was odd. I’ve had a few liaisons like that with straight men who are fans and use their sexual power to get closer but not too close. I usually retaliate by writing a song about them and then discarding them. Because this guy taught at an all-girls’ school, I wrote from the perspective of one of his students. I thought maybe there’d be one last chance where he’d realize I was masking some of my affection, but in the end I had to move on."

Wainwright’s sexuality, it’s clear, is an important subject, and one that he’s not trying to hide. He came out when he was still in his teens, and he’s been as forthright about being gay, both in songs and in interviews, as he’s been about most other subjects, particularly his family and his drug problems (the most notorious of those being an addiction to crystal meth that landed him in rehab a couple of years ago). Homo-erotic themes have been part of his music since his debut, though he’s often couched them in arty terms; the most frequently sung word in Poses’ "Grey Gardens" is "Tadzio," which is the name of the young male object of desire in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. (Between Mann and La traviata, Venice features prominently on this unabashed romantic’s inner map.)

But on Want Two’s "Gay Messiah," Wainwright broadcasts his sexual orientation to a hilarious new extreme, feverishly envisioning the Fire Island arrival, in full ’70s porn regalia, of a special type of personal savior before adding this wry aside: "No, it will not be me/Rufus the baptist I be/No, I won’t be the one/Baptized in cum." For those lyrics, and a few others like them, Want Two has received the Tipper Gore stigmata, also known as a parental-advisory sticker. Rufus can’t help but laugh about this. "Yeah, they’re trying to shield the kiddies from the arts . . . and at the same time, they’re getting rid of their Social Security. You can’t listen to that music and you can’t go to the hospital."

That brings up the subject of George W. Bush, not generally regarded as any gay man’s best friend, and certainly no favorite of Wainwright’s. (The new album’s "Waiting for a Dream" refers to the presence of "an ogre in the Oval Office.") Was he as crestfallen as so many others were by the events of November 2? "Actually, I think if Kerry had won, there would probably have been more inaction from the left. At least now we know for sure that the religious right hates women and homosexuals more than they hate terrorists. I feel sorry for moderate-minded Republicans, because their party has gone to bed with an extremely demanding voting bloc and now they have to go along with fanatics who want to shape policy. It’s the tragedy of victory."

Tragic times call for big, operatic pop music, and with Want One and Want Two, Wainwright has provided. It remains to be seen how he’ll follow up this one-two punch, but he says the creative well’s far from dry: "I’m always writing stuff. I eat, sleep, shit, and write songs, basically. So there’s always a dozen more things ready to go."