Thanks to the Wicked movie and its extremely gay cast, theater gays are so up right now. All three current Autostraddle editors are certified theater gays, so we decided to pool our collective knowledge and nerdy ass brains to rank the 30 longest running Broadway musicals by lesbianism using the same extremely scientific method applied to all ranked by lesbianism lists on this website. For the shows we haven’t seen ourselves, we went off of vibes from their Wikipedia pages.
30. Miss Saigon
Drew: One of the worst shows I’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing. Extremely straight, extremely racist.
29. Hamilton
Kayla: Entire show has the same energy as someone who is overwhelmingly straight but claims to be an ally.
Drew: This show doesn’t even have gay guy vibes which is impressive for a musical. Lin Manuel Miranda is admittedly very talented, but I’m not sure any man has ever had bigger straight musical theatre guy energy and that translates to the show itself.
28. The Lion King
Kayla: Feels more gay than lesbian. Maybe because of Elton John?
Riese: Straight.
27. Man of La Mancha
Riese: Kind of about a classic toxic relationship.
Kayla: Don Quixote is pretty queer coded but in a very specifically gay (toxic) bromance way.
26. Jersey Boys
Riese: I feel like this is a musical for Dads. Cis straight Dads specifically. It’s like a little treat for Dad after a day at the MOMA.
25. Aladdin
Kayla: I did a summer musical theater camp as a child where we were going to perform “A Whole New World” and I auditioned for Jasmine and thought I had it in the bag, because even though I am not Arab I figured the white adults who ran the camp would surely cast the only brown girl in the camp as Jasmine, but I probably should have known they would instead cast a white girl and cast the only brown girl who had very short hair as ALADDIN. As a closeted dyke, I suppose it could have gone either way and I could have loved playing Aladdin or hated it. Well, I hated it. I have since learned the Broadway musical took a “color blind” approach to casting, which resulted in a lot of white people being cast instead of giving Arab actors a chance to shine!!!!! Anyway, not a very lesbian show.
24. The Phantom of the Opera
Drew: I’m torn between my intense hatred of this show and the admittedly lesbian vibes of an outsider longing for a pretty girl and living in a performing arts venue.
Kayla: Two girls I went to high school with who secretly dated and who never came out were obsessed with this show, so…gay.
Riese: The grip this show had on the pre-adolescent mind in the late 80s is impossible to overstate. I gotta be honest though this whole show is some epically heterosexual nonsense.
23. The Book of Mormon
Drew: Trey Parker and Matt Stone are far better at songwriting than they are at satire. Opinion about the show’s quality aside, it’s very gay guy and not very lesbian at all.
22. Les Misérables
Drew: Extremely hetero BUT “On My Own” is about pining, and pining is lesbian so that has to count for something.
Riese: Les Mis is a slice of straight culture I can get behind. I have watched that enormous Christian family with 85 babies perform this song on YouTube way too many times. (After writing this, I spent 20 minutes watching One Day More tiktoks, covering the cinema film, rehearsal for said film, several live concert renditions, and random theater kids. It was so exciting.)
Kayla: Lesbians invented misery, so that also has to count for something. (And now I’m gonna go do what Riese did.)
21. Beauty and the Beast
Riese: This is one of those stories that is really sinister in a “dark arts of heterosexuality way” once you grow up and realize what it was all about.
20. The Producers
Kayla: Keep it gay, as they literally say.
19. Hello, Dolly!
Kayla: A fabulous widow-turned-matchmaker who loves to scheme has to be at least a little bit gay.
18. My Fair Lady
Drew: Not lesbian as much as it’s about an old queen educating the young twink he has a crush on. But I guess that classic gay male dynamic can sometimes happen with women.
17. 42nd Street
Drew: I’ve only seen the movie, not the stage version. But, I mean, it’s showgirls. How straight could it possibly be?
16. A Chorus Line
Drew: “What I Did For Love” has the angsty pining, but it’s “At the Ballet” that pushes this up for me. Escaping from daddy issues AND mommy issues by watching pretty women on a stage? Gay.
Kayla: One of my first vocal teachers was a gay man who was obsessed with A Chorus Line, and he had us singing “What I Did for Love” as 12-year-olds which in retrospect is such a wild choice but I have to respect it. He was always so mean to everyone except me! I like to think he saw my latent queerness. Also one time he came to music class so mad that someone had been rude to him in a grocery store that he spent half of the class on teaching us about grocery store etiquette instead of doing anything related to music. Anyway, idk why I keep sharing personal stories instead of engaging with the actual substance of the show but enjoy these mini essays!
15. Avenue Q
Drew: “There’s a fine, fine line between a lover and a friend” ??? LESBIAN. I mostly think this show I used to love does not hold up at all and ruins its many strengths with its 2000s “edgy” humor. But that song has to still count for something.
14. Kinky Boots
Kayla: We’ve got drag queens, the cabaret, and cunty ass boots. This musical is a high femme dyke. The sex is in the heel indeed.
13. Fiddler on the Roof
Drew: “Matchmaker” gives me comphet vibes and “Do You Love Me?” feels like an ode to lavender marriages. I might be stretching.
12. Mary Poppins
Drew: She flies into town in order to teach a bunch of children to follow society’s rules less strictly. She’s literally the heterosexual nightmare of a queer person.
Kayla: Yeah, Mary Poppins is literally a Lesbian Guide. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is the ultimate queering of language.
11. Mamma Mia!
Drew: Idk something kind of fruity about making your hetero wedding all about solving your parent issues.
Kayla: Yeah too many daddy issues to not be a little bit lesbian.
Riese: This feels lesbian to me because of how much Kayla has championed the films.
10. Hairspray
Riese: I think the casting of Divine in the original film has branded this show as eternally queer for me — but also it’s just so campy, and gays invented camp, so.
9. Beautiful: The Carole King Musical
Kayla: I always have to remind myself Carole King isn’t a lesbian.
Riese: My (lesbian) Mom used to play Carole King every Saturday morning to announce that it was time to get out of bed for breakfast (french toast made with challah) and the album cover in which she does look like a lesbian is seared in my mind!
8. Cats
Drew: Cats? Cats?? Lesbians?? Cats.
Kayla: Cats. Lesbians.
7. Annie
Drew: There are many lesbians who are into mean femmes because of Mrs. Hannigan.
Riese: Have you guys seen the documentary about Annie, like about all the girls who want to be Annie? We all wanted to be Annie. Instead we had to settle for being gay.
Kayla: Being an orphan is queer-coded.
6. Oh! Calcutta!
Kayla: This is one of the shows none of us have seen, as it ran from 1976 to 1989, but it’s an “erotic revue” that sounds absolutely bananas. There was full frontal, and sex and sexuality were the primary themes of the songs and sketches, including explicit references to lesbianism. As depicted above, Christian groups in London literally protested a UK run of the show because of it being too obscene and the obscenity department of the police also got involved, and that earns it a lot of gay points. Cops and Christians hating you? That’s so lesbian.
5. Grease
Riese: I feel like there is no shortage of queer perspectives on Grease on this website, but Grease feels gay to me because I saw Rosie O’Donnell play Rizzo in the 1994 tour and because of Kayla’s obsession with it.
Kayla: Grease is indeed the first feature film I can remember seeing, and even though we are not talking about the film here, the stage musical similarly is very lesbian, because it is about a closeted lesbian and a closeted gay boy attempting to change everything about themselves for each other in order to conform to society’s expectations — AND I WILL DIE ON THE HILL OF THIS READING!!!!!
4. Chicago
Drew: Matron Mama Morton is canonically lesbian and the whole thing is about killing men and being hot. I think the movie ups the lesbian vibes from the stage show but this still has to rank high.
Kayla: It’s very lesbian to kill your husband.
Riese: The first time I saw this performed live was on an R Family cruise (the gay vacation company started by Rosie O’Donnell and her then-wife Kelli, who runs the company now) and I feel like a gay man played Roxie or Velma? Mama Morton, girls in prison, stabbing people, two women battling for the spotlight — this is gay.
3. Wicked
Kayla: I mean, I don’t even call it subtext. It’s a lesbian TEXT. Why does Elphaba sing “kiss me goodbye” @ Glinda during “Defying Gravity”????? They’re lesbians, and they’ve always been lesbians. Elphaba and Fiyero has always given lavender marriage.
2. Cabaret
Drew: First of all, it’s the best musical of all time. Second of all, it’s a celebration of the queer subculture that was destroyed by the Nazis. Third of all, “Two Ladies” explicitly has some girl-on-girl action. Fourth of all, Sally Bowles definitely did some experimenting back in the day with her friend Elsie with whom she shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.
Riese: I also am of the mind that this is the best musical of all time, and on board with everything else Drew said.
1. Rent
Drew: I am not the biggest fan of this musical, but we’re not ranking these by how much we love them. We’re ranking them by lesbianism. And I take that responsibility very seriously. So yeah this is the winner.
Kayla: Objectively the most lesbian. I saw the national tour of it when they came to Richmond and it changed my life lol.
Riese: I am the biggest fan of this musical so I rank it high across all potential systems of ranking. Plus spent two years in arts boarding school singing along to this soundtrack in our dorms, like very formative. Also! At the time I had a Mom named Maureen who had just left her boyfriend Mark and started dating women so