"Theatre critic circles are in desperate need of diverse voices, and these old white men cannot be the only arbiters of good and bad in the industry," and "it's not the feminist take you think it is to dismiss a show's negative reviews just because it's men who are raising the valid critiques you yourself see but can and will overlook because you're attached to a show you say is 'written for the girls, gays, etc." are two viewpoints that can coexist.

It might be easy to dismiss a male critic's pan of a show because it's meant for women. That's not feminism. That's gender essentialism. The show may be written for a queer female audience, but should queer women not also demand quality and cohesion in a show's book and score, or must we always be satisfied by the crumbs we are given? We should not be arguing that just because a show is geared towards a female audience, it must be above critique, or that the real and present flaws in the book and score are only important to men, and all women will like it anyway.

As a queer woman of color, had I been a critic, my review would have been mixed to negative just like all those men you dismissed because the problems do not change from a gendered perspective. The book is weak. The score disjointed. The protagonist watered-down. It's like the writers set out to say "it's a queer love story," but didn't do the work to delve any deeper, and hoped to carry the show on that alone. Queer stories deserve to be held to the same high standard as any other show, and boiling it down to "it's queer so you have to like it and critics are homophobic" is a ridiculous, immature, reductive statement.