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Those of us who are in love with the Great American Songbook know the story of Michael Feinstein by heart. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1956 (he’s seven weeks older than I am), he stopped taking piano lessons very early in his childhood because he was more comfortable playing by ear, and age 20 he moved to Los Angeles, where he spent six years working as the personal archivist for the elderly lyricist Ira Gershwin. During those years, he became very close to Gershwin and his wife, Leonore, but also to the became closer to their next-door neighbor, the singer Rosemary Clooney, who came to think of Feinstein as a son. In the 1980s he took off on his own, singing and playing piano in clubs; his first CDs, on which he performed many of the old standards with charm and panache, were released in the mid to late 1980s, and the first time I heard one of his recordings on the radio I wrote him a fan letter. I almost never write fan letters. But he was that good. And I’m partial to anyone who, like me, loves the Great American Songbook.

Since then he’s gone from strength to strength, performing at the White House, opening his own nightclubs, conducting orchestras, and establishing the Great American Songbook Foundation, which possesses a rich library of musical treasures – rare recordings, lead sheets scribbled by famous songwriters, and the like – and offers a summer course in which high-school students are taught about America’s musical heritage. I’ve enjoyed a number of the YouTube videos in which Feinstein has presented materials from the foundation’s archives – such as the 130 boxes of items pertaining to the career of Meredith Willson, creator of the 1957 Broadway hit The Music Man – but Feinstein, alas, seems to have stopped making those videos several years ago.

Although Feinstein has never been terribly political, I’ve long had the impression – I’m not quite sure why – that he might be conservative. Perhaps it’s just the fact that during a period when all kinds of horrible music have owned the pop music charts, Feinstein has remained true to the tunes of Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Rodgers & Hart, and other masters of yore. I do know that when Feinstein married his longtime partner, Terrence Flannery, in 2008, the service was performed by the decidedly conservative Judge Judy, who is now a strong Trump supporter.

Alas, it turns out that while Feinstein may have some conservative leanings, he’s decidedly not MAGA. Far from it. The other day he took to Facebook to wax hysterical about Trump under the title “Fear of Queer?” He began by noting that he’d recently been invited to take part in an event at the Kennedy Center entitled “A Peacock among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride.” Headlined by the National Symphony Orchestra and scheduled for May 21-22, the event had been “abruptly and unceremoniously canceled” in February by President Trump – not long, that is, after the inauguration of President Trump. At the website of the Advocate, the gay newsmagazine for which I was a columnist a million years ago, I found some information about “A Peacock among Pigeons”: it was intended to be “part of the center’s acknowledgment of WorldPride 2025 in Washington, D.C.,” a “centerpiece of the Kennedy Center’s Conflux initiative – its flagship social impact partnership program,” and a celebration of “LGBTQ+ identity and visibility through music.” I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as part of the mission of a place like the Kennedy Center to acknowledge WorldPride 2025 or to celebrate “LGBTQ+ identity and visibility.” As for the “Conflux initiative,” it sounds like something that should be given the heave-ho prontissimo.

Now, since Donald Trump began his second term, it has been revealed that the Kennedy Center is in terrible shape – in terms of its infrastructure, its finances, and its programming, much of which has apparently been directed at niche audiences. For a long time, in short, the place has been under absolutely incompetent management. Trump’s interest in turning things around, and in making the Center everything it should be, is reflected in the fact that, despite everything he has on his plate, he appointed himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center – and named one of the most trusted members of his team, Richard Grenell, former Ambassador to Germany, former Acting Director of National Intelligence, and current Envoy for Special Missions, as the Center’s Acting Director. In February, Trump tweeted that the Kennedy Center’s presentation of “Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth” would “STOP”; Grenell, for his part, has complained about the Center’s proclivity for “DEI bullshit.”

These are legitimate complaints. But Feinstein, apparently influenced by the coverage in places like the Advocate, interpreted the cancellation of “A Peacock among Pigeons” as part of a villainous campaign to silence gay voices. “Art, in its purest form,” he asserted, “is where we suspend our differences to illuminate elements of the human condition.” Now, one suspects that the reason why “A Peacock among Pigeons” was canceled is that, as indicated by its very title, it didn’t suspend differences but fixate on them. Why compile a program of writers, artists, or composers based entirely on their sexual orientation?

This Kennedy Center brouhaha compels me to bring up a little ancient history. Years ago, while Feinstein was focused on advancing his music career and, with that in mind, was keeping mum about his sexual orientation, a few people like me were burning professional bridges in an effort to secure equal rights for gay people – not, mind you, to be patted on the head by reducing us, condescendingly, to an identity-group label. In 1993 I published a book about gay rights entitled A Place at the Table, and spent much of the next year traveling around the U.S. giving interviews about gay life and gay rights; in 1994, in an interview with the Advocate, Feinstein dodged questions about his own sexual orientation, saying that he “should have the right not to discuss [his] personal life.”

Well, that was the 1990s. Back then, it could mean career suicide to come out of the closet. Now it’s 2025, however, and there’s nothing cooler, in the view of the American cultural establishment, than being “LGBTQ+” (that stupid, meaningless label). So now Feinstein is out and proud. It’s also relevant here that our current president is a man who supported same-sex marriage at a time when Obama, Biden, and the Clintons were still officially against it. But Feinstein, his finger ever to the wind, has decided to parrot the leftist line that the decisions Trump and his people are now making about the Kennedy Center are motivated by a desire to prohibit any “acknowledg[ment] of [the] existence of Homosexuality,” and that “the next logical step” will be “to ban all works written by Homosexual, Bisexual, Omnisexual, Transsexual people, friends of Gay people or people suspected of being queer.” (It’s interesting, by the way, to note that, like our president, Feinstein is in the habit of capitalizing words that aren’t usually capitalized in English.)

Feinstein’s next sentence actually took my breath away: “It worked for the Nazis[,] right?” Since he’s not only gay but also Jewish, the glibness of this sentence is – well – beyond words. Does he really think we’re living in the early days of the Fourth Reich? If so, why the glibness? If not, why this utterly tasteless attempt to identify himself with the likes of Alban BergPaul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, and Kurt Weill, whose works were blacklisted by the real Nazis? There’s no better term for this, it seems to me, than Auschwitz Envy. Feinstein, the cabaret star, seems to be delighting in the exceedingly sick fantasy that he’s living in the Weimar Republic of Cabaret.

Anyway, after his line about the Nazis, Feinstein served up a list of famous musical works that were written or recorded by gay men or lesbians – from Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein to Lorenz Hart and Noel Coward to Little Richard and Freddie Mercury. “​Where will this end?” Feinstein asked. “W​here will this music and these artists be seen ​and heard in the future?​ We must rally against the forces that conspire to deny, erase and eradicate our culture.”

At the time I accessed Feinstein’s Facebook post on Wednesday evening, it had garnered 511 comments, almost all of them praising him to the skies. Examples:

• “It is the artists and activists that will save us. Never be silent.”
• “Bravo on taking a stand Michael.”
• “You are so right in that doing nothing, remaining silent is not an option.”
• “Thank you Michael, this administration is scary and evil.”
• “We must fight these dangerous fascists and Christian Nationalists attempting to impose their hateful beliefs on all Americans, to destroy our democracy, the voices of our artists, and the best of our cultural achievements.”

I would add the name of just one more gay man to Feinstein’s list: Richard Grenell, the man whom Trump put in charge of the Kennedy Center. My point being that this isn’t about being gay. It’s about so many things nowadays being about being gay. Or trans. Or black. Or female. Too many cultural institutions in our time have, in their enthusiasm to obsess over identity labels, forgotten their duty to art and have thus intensified the national divisions that began with the execrable Obama. Bad idea. Bottom line: I’ll cheer for any program of music by Cole Porter or Jerry Herman or Stephen Sondheim. But to promote such programs by shining a spotlight on the fact that these men were gay isn’t to celebrate them and their music – it’s to diminish them, to patronize them, and to make their wonderful works secondary to their utterly irrelevant sexual orientation. Get a clue, Michael. And, for heaven’s sake, grow a spine.