I’ve always known about Judy Garland in one of two contexts. Most gay men visit Greenwich Village in New York City early in their coming-out process, where we learn, if we didn’t already know it (and I didn’t), that communal grief over her death in 1969 is credited as a contributing factor to the Stonewall Riots, the drag queen-led uprising widely acknowledged as the beginning of the modern Gay Rights Movement. And, of course, as everyone who ever had a television in their home as a child knows, Judy Garland was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But let’s be honest: from the viewpoint of a seven-year-old kid, Dorothy crawling through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is the most boring part of the movie.
But as Katie and I listened to “Judy at Carnegie Hall,” I started to understand what a young ga
