THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

MUSIC AND QUEERNESS

 THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

MUSIC AND QUEERNESS

Edited by
FRED EVERETT MAUS AND SHEILA
WHITELEY
with
TAVIA NYONG’O AND ZOE SHERINIAN
Associate Editors
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Maus, Fred Everett, editor. | Whiteley, Sheila, editor. | Ochieng’ Nyongó, Tavia Amolo,
editor. | Sherinian, Zoe C. editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of music and queerness / edited by Fred Maus and Sheila Whiteley ;
with Tavia Nyong’o and Zoe Sherinian, associate editors.
Description: [1.] | New York : Oxford University Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033793 (print) | LCCN 2021033794 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199793525
(hardback) | ISBN 9780197607527 (epub) | ISBN 9780199793631 (ebook other) | ISBN
9780199984169 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Queer musicology. | Homosexuality and music. | Gender identity in music.
Classification: LCC ML3797.4 .O94 2021 (print) | LCC ML3797.4 (ebook) | DDC 780.72—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033793
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033794
ISBN 9780–19–979352–5
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 C

List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
F E M

PART I KINDS OF MUSIC

2. Whose Refuge, This House?: The Estrangement of Queers of Color in
Electronic Dance Music
L M G -M

3. The Queer Pleasures of Musicals

B R
4. The Gospel According to the Gays: Queering the Roots of Gospel
Music
E. P J

5. Queer as Trad: LGBTQ+ Performers and Irish Traditional Music in

the United States
T S
6. Gay Country, TransAmericana, and Queer Sincerity
S G -P

7. Queer Hip Hop: A Brief Historiography

S P S
 PART II VERSIONS
8. From Queer Musicology to Indecent Theology: Liberal and
Liberationist Protestant Theology and Musical Queerings of the Bible
D H
9. Operatic Adaptations and the Representation of Non-Normative
Sexualities
F J

10. Queer Audiovisual Creativity: Fan-Created Music Videos from Star

Trek to Bad Girls
N T

11. Karaoke, Queer Theory, Queer Performance: Dedicated to José

Esteban Muñoz
K T

PART III VOICES AND SOUNDS

12. Free as a Bird? Thinking with the Grain of Meshell Ndegeocello’s
Butch Voice
T N ’

13. Transgender Passing Guides and the Vocal Performance of Gender

and Sexuality
S P

14. Sound Desires: Auralism, the Sexual Fetishization of Music

J T

15. Transcripts: Toward A Queer Phenomenology of the Field Recording

D D
 PART IV LIVES
16. Queering Brighton
S W

17. (To) Queer: “A” Life to Music

E G

18. Endangered Tenderness: Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann

C F

19. Musical Awakenings: The Experiences of a Queer Music Therapist in

the Face of HIV and AIDS
C A L

20. Toward a Trans* Method in Musicology

D B

21. Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism

and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place
T S

22. Musical Abjects: Sounds and Objectionable Sexualities

J O J

PART V HISTORIES
23. Music in the Margins: Queerness in the Clerical Imagination, 1200–
1500
L C

24. The Queer History of the Castrato

E W
25. Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater
G M. R
26. Anglophone Songs about HIV/AIDS
M J. J

27. Queer Patriotism in the Eurovision Song Contest

I R

PART VI CROSS-CULTURAL QUEERNESS

28. Interdisciplinary Enqueeries from India: Moving Toward a Queer
Ethnomusicology
Z S
29. Kunqu Cross-Dressing as Artistic and/or Queer Performance
J S. C. L
30. Non-Ordinary Gender and Sexuality in Indonesian Performance
H S

31. Out in the Undercurrents: Queer Politics in Hong Kong Popular Music
Y F C and J K
32. How to Do Things with Theory: Cultural “Transcription,”
“Queerness,” and Ukrainian Pop
S A

Index
 L C

Stephen Amico, Associate Professor of Music, University of Bergen

Dana Baitz, Independent Musicologist, Toronto, Canada
Yiu Fai Chow, Associate Professor of Humanities, Hong Kong Baptist
University

Lisa Colton, Reader in Musicology, University of Huddersfield

Drew Daniel, Associate Professor, Department of English, Johns Hopkins
University
Jeroen de Kloet, Professor of Globalisation Studies, Department of Media
Studies, University of Amsterdam and the State Key Lab of Media
Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China,
Beijing

Charles Fisk, Phyllis H. Carey Professor Emeritus of Music, Wellesley

College
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology and Popular
Music Studies, University of Birmingham

Elizabeth Gould, Associate Professor Emerita, Music Education,

University of Toronto
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Assistant Professor of Music Studies,
Temple University

Freya Jarman, Reader in Music, University of Liverpool

E. Patrick Johnson, Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg
University Professor, Northwestern University
Jenny Olivia Johnson, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of
Music, Wellesley College

Matthew J. Jones, Independent Scholar, Houston, Texas

Joseph S. C. Lam, Professor of Musicology, University of Michigan

Colin Andrew Lee, Professor Emeritus of Music Therapy, Wilfrid Laurier
University

Fred Everett Maus, Associate Professor of Music, University of Virginia

Tavia Nyong’o, Chair and William Lampson Professor of Theater &

Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of
African American Studies, Yale University
Stephan Pennington, Associate Professor of Music, Tufts University

Ivan Raykoff, Associate Professor of Music, The New School

Gillian M. Rodger, Professor of Musicology & Ethnomusicology,

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Bradley Rogers, Lecturer in Musical Theatre and Performance,

Goldsmiths, University of London

Zoe Sherinian, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of the Division of

Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and Music, University of Oklahoma
Tes Slominski, Independent Scholar, Charlottesville, Virginia

Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Associate Professor of Black Studies,

Department of English & Faculty, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Institute
(CRES), St. John’s University

Henry Spiller, Professor of Music, University of California, Davis

Tim Stüttgen (1977–2013), Independent Scholar

Jodie Taylor, Chair of Scholarship and Research, SAE Creative Media
Institute, Brisbane, Australia

Karen Tongson, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, and

American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California

Nina Treadwell, Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Cruz

Dirk von der Horst, Instructor of Religious Studies, Mount St. Mary’s
University, Los Angeles

Sheila Whiteley(1941–2015), Professor Emeritus of Music, University of

Salford, and Research Fellow, Queen’s University, Herstmonceux

Emily Wilbourne, Associate Professor of Musicology, Queens College and

the Graduate Center, City University of New York
 A

The great debt of this book is to the writers and thinkers who have created
and sustained the field of queer music studies. Such work required courage
from the beginning and still does to the present.
Many authors in queer music studies identify as LGBTQ+ personally;
others who do not may be assumed to have close connections with
LGBTQ+ people. Either way, but especially for those who are LGBTQ+,
we have had to reckon with prevalent discrimination—homophobia,
transphobia, racism, classism—making decisions about self-presentation in
our lives and our workplaces and in our public professional work. The
Handbook chapters by Gould and Fisk describe personal longing and
struggle. It should be understood that every chapter in this book is the
outcome of a long series of commitments made in potentially hostile
environments. The content of this book should be savored not only as
knowledge but also as perseverance and integrity.
One strand of queer music studies identifies the inhibitions and
constraints of established paradigms of music research; Philip Brett was
eloquent on this topic. Music-scholarly norms have often suppressed
discourse about gender and sexuality in relation to musical life and have
discouraged personal discourse altogether. Writing about music and
queerness can have negative professional consequences. Anyone in the field
knows of superb scholars who sought but never found an appropriate
academic position, or who found it only after a long search. Identifying
oneself as queer or writing on queer topics adds to the already-inherent
stress and vulnerability at every point of scholarly professional life, from
the formation of a dissertation topic, to conference proposals and
publication submissions, to the job hunt, to application for tenure. Special
difficulties arise for ethnomusicologists, who often have to get their
research approved by foreign governments. Here is one way to show the
precarity that still characterizes queer music studies: despite the many
superb publications that have established the field, it seems there has never
been a music faculty position advertised simply as “Queer Music Studies”
or “LGBTQ Studies in Music”; neither I nor the people I asked about this
could remember even a search in “Gender and Sexuality Studies in
Music.”1
Queer music studies, if professionally risky, has also been intensely
rewarding to its practitioners, individually and in relationships with
colleagues. For many of us, feminist and queer research transformed what it
feels like to be an academic scholar of music. It opened up new possibilities
that academic research and writing can be personally expressive and
politically engaged. One aspect of queer music studies has been its repeated
turn to multi-author formations—conferences and conference panels, edited
collections, special issues of journals. Queer music studies is not just a
genre of writing; it creates communities and movements. And every public
gathering of queer music scholars, from conference session to Handbook,
calls out to potential new participants. At the same time, as communities
form, we must always be alert about marginalized or not-yet-included
people and topics.
I am deeply grateful to the contributors who have created this book. For
some chapters, there was little change from the initial submission to the
published version. In many other cases I collaborated with authors on
extensive revisions. In working with the authors on their chapters, I was an
interventionist editor, not in order to change ideas but to improve clarity.
Clarity is not a simple quality; it invites the question “clarity to whom?”
And the answer might be uncomfortable: perhaps “clarity to a normative
subjectivity,” perhaps that of a cisgender able-bodied straight white man.
There is tension between the goal of clarity and the love of diversity. I hope
the authors and I have found an appropriate accessibility that fully respects
difference. I am grateful to the authors who worked patiently with me on
revisions. I know each of the authors much better than when the project
started; that has been one of the great benefits of this work.
It was a pleasure to interact with my main OUP contacts Norm Hirschy
and Lauralee Yeary. Hirschy was strongly committed to this Handbook
from the beginning. How delightful to encounter Yeary in our new
relationship, after having been her teacher at UVA. Hirschy and Yeary were
consistently patient and supportive, and gentle with the quirks of my
personality. They made important, substantive interventions as we put this
book together. Anonymous reviewers commissioned by OUP responded to
the project with many useful comments at the proposal stage and partway
through the process of submission and revision of chapters.
Beyond my conversations with authors about their individual chapters, I
consulted about aspects of this project with many colleagues as the
Handbook took shape. They included Christina Baade, Dana Baitz, Andre
Cavalcante, Adrian Childs, Suzanne Cusick, Sam Dwinell, Shana Goldin-
Perschbacher, Sumanth Gopinath, E. Patrick Johnson, Matt Jones, Roberta
Lamb, Alejandro Madrid, Horace Maxile, William Meredith, Susan
McClary, Robert McRuer, Gregory Mitchell, Mitchell Morris, Stephan
Pennington, Emily Wilbourne, and others.
I am fortunate to work in the Department of Music at the University of
Virginia, where academic faculty have autonomy in choosing topics for
research and teaching and in designing our own courses. It was the perfect
environment to think about this book. Many schools of music and music
departments do not offer such freedom and flexibility. Colleagues Nomi
Dave, Bonnie Gordon, and Michelle Kisliuk, along with past colleagues
including Suzanne Cusick, Kyra Gaunt, and Elizabeth Hudson, have
ensured that UVA has a lively culture of thinking about gender and
sexuality in relation to music.
If I were to name all the loved ones and friends who have ensured my
happiness over the Handbook years, I would go on at length. Here are only
the most essential. I have no inkling who I would be, personally and
intellectually, apart from the wonderful time I spent with brilliant, kind,
loving Katharine. Teco continues to offer me joy of many kinds. Everett and
Sophie enrich my life immeasurably.
As mentioned in the Introduction, Rachel Cowgill and Sophie Fuller,
members of the original editorial group, made valuable contributions to the
formation of this project, up to the milestone of a contract with OUP. I
enjoyed our work together and was sad when they left.
Associate editors Tavia Nyong’o and Zoe Sherinian, who joined the
project after the contract was approved, were superb resources in thinking
about contributors and theoretical perspectives, editing chapters, and
pondering the shape of the book. The Handbook is much better because of
their collaboration.
Sadly, I need to name two participants who passed away before
completion of the Handbook.
Tim Stüttgen (1977–2013) is remembered by Tavia Nyong’o, who knew
him, as “a dynamic queer journalist, activist, curator and theorist who came
out of the punk scene in post-reunification Germany. He was born in 1977
in Solingen, and studied film studies, fine art, and gender-queer theory in
London, Hamburg, Maastricht, and Berlin. He was a member of the b-
books collective and a part of the cinematic post-porn poem Arret la
machine! postpone postpone happiness (2007). His posthumously published
monograph, In a Qu*A*re Time and Place: Post-Slavery Temporalities,
Blaxploitation, and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist between Intersectionality and
Heterogeneity exemplifies his radically open and imaginative mode of
researching, thinking, teaching, and writing.”2
The Handbook of Music and Queerness would not exist without my co-
editor Sheila Whiteley’s imagination and energy. Throughout her career
Whiteley, who died in 2015, was a force for innovation in popular music
studies; her numerous publications include monographs and edited
collections on counterculture, women and gender, space and place, cultural
meanings of Christmas, virtuality, and more. Conspicuously open and
friendly, she could also be firm when necessary, which was important in the
often-misogynist worlds of popular music studies and music studies
generally. Her edited and co-edited collections embody her enduring desire
to identify remarkable early-career scholars and publish their work. Her
warmth and imagination are sorely missed by many, and of course I missed
her terribly in the later stages of work toward this book. May this Handbook
stand as one more manifestation of her beautiful mind and spirit.
N
1. That is, a dedicated position, as opposed to a position that includes sexuality studies in a list of
possible areas.
2. Tim Stüttgen, ed. Daniel Hendrickson, Max Jorge Hinderer, and Margarita Tsomou, In a
Qu*A*re Time and Place: Post-Slavery Temporalities, Blaxploitation, and Sun Ra’s
Afrofuturism between Intersectionality and Heterogeneity, SUM Magazine (Berlin: b-books,
2014).
R
Stüttgen, Tim, ed. Daniel Hendrickson, Max Jorge Hinderer, and Margarita Tsomou. In a Q*A*re
Time and Place: Post-Slavery Temporalities, Blaxploitation, and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism between
Intersectionality and Heterogeneity. Berlin: b-books, 2014.
 CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION
F R E D E VE RE T T MAU S
 Q

T book was named The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness

before I joined the editorial group. Though I did not choose the title, I like it
a lot, and as the rubric under which contributions were invited it has had
excellent consequences for many of the chapters. There were other
possibilities for the title, as shown by books such as The Oxford Handbook
of Language and Sexuality or The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and
Sexual Diversity Politics. “Queer” is a special word in its contemporary
political uses and was a significant choice for this book.
For a long time, the word “queer” in English has meant unusual, odd,
eccentric. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from
1513. Later, starting in the United States, “queer” became a slang term,
derogatory and punitive, for people with same-gender sexual desires.1 The
first OED example for this use is from 1914.
From around 1990 to the present, dissident activists have used “queer”
as a defiantly positive term, reclaimed for self-naming. It can function as a
generalizing term that encompasses relatively specific identities. Initially
these would have been mostly the identities gay, lesbian, and bisexual; since
then many other dissident genders and sexualities have been articulated and
counted as queer. Understood politically, “queer” thus functions as an
invitation to alliance. But “queer” also makes a claim that one need not seek
a definite or stable identity; it is meant to include and encourage complex,
variable lives not well named by the more specific words for genders and
sexualities. In its derivation from abusive name-calling, the positive use of
“queer” was intentionally shocking: the term was a fierce reminder of a
history of hatred, exclusion, and violence. In return, this new political use
of “queer” promised ongoing resistance to heterosexual normality and
regimes of normality more generally. The older terms “gay” and “lesbian”
were adaptable for projects of assimilation; “queer” was chosen to
designate persistent refusal. In 1990, at the beginning of this usage, the
Queer Nation Manifesto was distributed during New York City’s Gay Pride
march. As the Manifesto puts it:
 Well, yes, “gay” is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in
the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer.
Using “queer” is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world…
And when spoken to other gays and lesbians it’s a way of suggesting we close ranks, and
forget (temporarily) our individual differences because we face a more insidious common
enemy. Yeah, queer can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal
from the homophobe’s hands and use against him.2

Thus “queer” became a political word expressing opposition to heterosexual

power; a word inviting coalition by setting aside distinct identities; a word
with affective force, urging people to maintain their anger at injustice. The
horrors of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the linked increase in homophobia
made rage an ever more appropriate response; Queer Nation and ACT UP
were close kin.
“Queer” also moved into academic settings, where queer theory and
queer studies remain as active fields of teaching and writing. It was
remarkable that an intentionally aggressive political word was accepted into
academia as the name of a research field. Brilliant critical and theoretical
writing appeared swiftly. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Tendencies (1993)
opens with the splendid essay “Queer and Now.” Asking “What’s ‘queer’?,”
Sedgwick notes the ways that disparate social institutions and practices pull
toward aligning together, and suggests that queerness can be
the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and
excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s
sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.3

She notes uses of “queer” that open onto the interactions of multiple
“identity-constituting, identity fracturing discourses”—interactions also
conceived since 1989 through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term
4
“intersectionality.” Further, she suggests that “a word so fraught as
‘queer’” cannot simply denote or connote, but always draws attention to the
relation between the word and the person who uses it, “dramatizes
locutionary position itself.” “Anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves
means differently from their use of it about someone else.”5
The intensity of “queer” has diminished since then, though unevenly.
The word sometimes feels close to pure denotation, an affectively and
politically neutral abbreviation referring in general to lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and other minority genders and sexualities. It has sometimes
seemed to mean simply “gay male,” for instance in the television titles
Queer as Folk (2000) or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003). But change
was inevitable, as Sedgwick marked with her title “Queer and Now.” Judith
Butler, in another now-classic essay “Critically Queer” (1993), wrote of a
risk that “the term will be taken as the summarizing moment.” Instead, she
proposed, “it is perhaps only the most recent.”6 Nonetheless, if usage has
sometimes become routine, even bland, “queer” remains the name under
which many groundbreaking projects continue to emerge: No Future: Queer
Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Black Queer Studies (2005), Cruising
Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), The Queer Art of
Failure (2011), and more.7 And to the present, academia uses the word
cautiously. It rarely appears in the names of college or university
departments (as in the possible but rare designation “Department of Queer
Studies”), and this is the only Oxford Handbook so far to use the word in its
title. Words with less political energy—“sexuality,” “LGBT” or “LGBTQ,”
“sexual minority”—are common in academia. The risky, defiant, anti-
normative potential of the term sometimes glows brighter, sometimes fades.
Despite the goal of stimulating an unpredictable, perhaps limitless
variety of anti-normative projects, “queer” has its own provincialism,
originating in a particular time and place: in the United States, with a
conspicuous early use in New York City in the Queer Nation Manifesto
quoted above, and in activist settings where white people, especially men,
were often dominant. Thus, despite the aim of broad inclusiveness, the term
could marginalize the already-marginalized, as Cathy J. Cohen showed in
her influential essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” (1997):
In its current rendition, queer politics is coded with class, gender, and race privilege, and
may have lost its potential to be a politically expedient organizing tool for addressing the
needs—and mobilizing the bodies—of people of color.8

Cohen emphasized that a movement founded primarily on an antipathy to

heterosexuality could not make the many distinctions and alliances that
were politically necessary. In 2001, E. Patrick Johnson introduced the term
“quare,” drawn from his grandmother’s speech, to orient a version of
queerness to Black lives, offering “a way to critique stable notions of
identity and, at the same time, to locate racialized and class knowledges.”9
Like “quare,” the phrase “queer of color critique” has been useful to many
writers.10
The generality of “queer” reduces its effectiveness in some political
contexts. The term disregards gender difference and thus risks obscuring
power differentials between genders. The terms “lesbian” and “lesbian
feminist,” in particular, remain crucial in many activist contexts.11
The provincialism of “queer” and other terms such as “gay” and
“lesbian” shows most clearly in relation to times and places beyond those of
the terms’ origin and continued use—earlier historical contexts, or cultures
with their own indigenous practices and conceptions of gender and
sexuality.
 M

Like “queer,” the term “music” is not simple. “Music” in European and
American academic settings—colleges and universities as well as schools
of music—has often been understood primarily as Western art music
(WAM), that is, music created by trained composers, mostly white and
male, in European historical settings, communicated and preserved in
written notation, along with other music understood as historically
continuous with it. Similarly, “musicology” has often meant “the academic
study of WAM.” Other areas of music study have been labeled—
"ethnomusicology,” “popular music studies”—and they have been
pursued both within and beyond music departments or schools of music.12
The centrality of WAM in academic institutions is widely recognized as
problematic. But academic habits change slowly. It remains common for a
music program to have individual faculty members for several different
time-periods of “music history” (Medieval, Baroque, Classical, Romantic,
etc.—period designations of European music), while having, perhaps, one
or two faculty designated as ethnomusicologists, identified with a
geographical specialty or area. Many researchers also have theoretical
specialties, such as gender studies, but are primarily identified by their time
period or geographic area. Ethnomusicologists may be charged with
teaching not only their research specialty and closely related material, but
also “world music,” a topic designation that many find to be obviously
problematic. (Music programs that offer the PhD in ethnomusicology will,
of course, have stronger staffing.) A music department might have one or
zero scholars active in popular music research or sound studies.13
Obviously this disproportionate staffing has consequences for the
distribution of power in academic programs.
This Handbook includes valuable chapters about WAM but intentionally
decenters it. The authors address many different kinds of music and
sometimes nonmusical sound.14 And they write from many different
perspectives. Authors include scholars from music programs, but many
come from other fields, among them American studies, performance
studies, media studies, and religious studies. Throughout, music is
considered, not as a collection of texts or sound objects, but (as Christopher
Small influentially put it) as musicking—any form of human activity in
relation to musical sound.15 Thus “music” is not set apart from the world
but is in the world, along with genders, sexualities, and the rest of life.
 Q M S B

Queer initiatives appeared at different times, and with different emphases,

in the scholarly organizations that frame different areas of music research.
LGBTQ studies of music has developed alongside, and with strong support
from, feminist studies.16 In the musicology of WAM, queer studies
developed within the broader framework that included music criticism, as
articulated by Joseph Kerman and others, and the initiatives sometimes
called New Musicology. In Britain such initiatives were often called critical
musicology.17
Starting in the late 1980s, the most publicly visible activity in queer
music scholarship took place through the American Musicological Society,
with an active interest group from 1989 on (initially the Gay and Lesbian
Study Group, later LGBTQ Study Group), significant programming and
social events at annual conferences, a vigorous newsletter from 1991 to
2007, and an annual prize inaugurated in 1997, the Philip Brett Award, for
“exceptional musicological work” in LGBTQ studies.18
In 1996, members of the Society for Ethnomusicology formed a
Sexualities and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered Concerns Committee,
later renamed as the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce. Since 2007, SEM
has offered an award, the Marcia Herndon Prize, for “exceptional
ethnomusicological work in gender and sexuality.” Ethnomusicology has a
distinguished tradition of scholarship on gender; queer topics and
perspectives have appeared less commonly, as Gregory Barz notes in his
introduction to a new collection that decisively disturbs the quiet.19
The Society for Music Theory began a Gay and Lesbian Discussion
Group in 1998, later renamed the Queer Resource Group; it has maintained
ongoing programming at meetings, and in 2020 was joined by an official
SMT Standing Committee on LGBTQ Issues.
These queer groups within professional societies address issues of
advocacy and support as well as generating plans for public scholarship on
queer topics. They have provided queer colleagues opportunities to meet
each other, forming alliances and friendships and communicating freely
about their experiences as LGBTQ scholars. Such groups provide
opportunities for professional mentoring and for conversations on complex
topics, for example issues of personal disclosure in professional contexts
such as the workplace or job applications. For many participants, meetings
of these groups have changed the experience of conference attendance
dramatically. By enhancing comfort and confidence in professional settings,
such groups have professional consequences far beyond the creation of
scholarly work on queer topics. Because interactions in these groups are
ephemeral and relatively private, it follows that important parts of the
history of queer activity in music scholarship cannot be known by looking
to public documents.20
Neither the International Association for the Study of Popular Music,
US Branch (IASPM-US) nor the international IASPM organization has had
an organized queer or LGBTQ interest group. The Society for American
Music, another valuable venue for popular music research, has an LGBTQ
Study Group, but it is not very active. Queer topics have appeared often in
publications about popular music and at popular music conferences
(IASPM meetings and SAM and, since 2002, the series of music
conferences that began at the Experience Music Project in Seattle,
continuing in other locations). It may be that organized queer-affirmative
groups are more likely to appear in scholarly societies where there is
perception of resistance or purposeful neglect, along with a consolidation of
academic power by the organization. Popular music research takes place
across many different academic departments. Unlike other fields of music
studies, it extends beyond academic research into a flourishing field of
journalism, and boundaries between academic and nonacademic writing
about popular music are permeable, with some of the best popular music
writing appearing in nonacademic contexts. It has long been obvious that
issues about sexuality are central in understanding popular music, though
there seems to have been some early shyness about explicit treatment of
queer topics.21
During the 1970s, a time of intense gay and lesbian activism in public,
nonacademic settings, there were a few achievements of lasting value in
music scholarship. In 1977, Brett interpreted Peter Grimes in relation to
Britten’s homosexuality.22 In 1979 Richard Dyer published a now-classic
essay on disco.23
From the late 1980s on, several events gave a cumulative boost to queer
studies of music. Ellen Koskoff’s ground-breaking collection Women and
Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective included a survey of contemporary
feminist and lesbian women’s music by Karen E. Petersen, and a cross-
cultural study by Carolina Robertson that includes a case study of a lesbian
feminist choral group in which she participated.24
Robertson’s essay ends brilliantly with a matrix for thinking cross-
culturally about women, music, and power. Under three headings—“Social
Authority,” “Gender and Access,” and “Notions of Power, Gender, and
Performance”—Robertson offers twenty useful questions to bring to
specific settings. For example: “How are decisions made? By whom? For
whom?” “Are men and women seen as opposites or as complements? How
do these attitudes appear in performance? How are they neutralized?” “How
is access to power sources within music defined and achieved?” Thus, her
specific observations about a lesbian feminist choir and her other case
studies are brought into relation with a broad theoretical framework.
Petersen’s and Robertson’s pioneering work would be followed by two
superb full-scale ethnographic studies of women’s music: a documentary
film, Radical Harmonies, by Dee Mosbacher and Boden Sandstrom (2002),
and Eileen M. Hayes’ Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics,
and Women’s Music (2010), a study of the roles of Black women in
women’s music festivals.25
At the Oakland meeting of the American Musicological Society in 1990,
three senior musicologists and a cultural studies scholar presented papers on
a session, “Composers and Sexuality.” Methods included biography, with
Gary C. Thomas asking whether George Frideric Handel was gay; criticism
and analysis, with Susan McClary building on Maynard Solomon’s
argument that Franz Schubert was homosexual, asking how that might
relate to Schubert’s music; reception history, with Malcolm Hamrick Brown
exploring the growing public awareness of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality
and the effect on descriptions of his music; and a rich mix of topics and
methods in Philip Brett’s essay on the role of closeted sexuality in WAM
and its scholarly study, Benjamin Britten figuring as the central example.
 In obvious ways the panel was conservative. Famous historical white
cisgender male composers were central to all four papers, and well-
established scholarly rhetorics of biography, analysis, and reception studies
were brought into relation with queerness or, more precisely, with the study
of historical men who desired, or may have desired, sex with men. But
nothing like that session had happened before in academic study of WAM,
and its conservative aspects were part of its strategic skill, queering
historical figures and scholarly methods that had long been central to WAM
studies and thus preemptively rebutting any charge of marginality.
Meanwhile Brett’s paper also broke new ground methodologically, drawing
on sociology and challenging music scholars to acknowledge the absence of
queer perspectives in music studies. In this paper and to the end of his
career, Brett directly exhorted music scholars to confront their professional
silences and, for many scholars, the gaps between their own queer lives and
their unqueer music studies.
One sometimes hears a complaint that music scholarship follows
innovations in other research fields only after a long time, or not at all. But
this session, bringing up issues of gay sexuality and scholarly evasion
around canonized composers, coincided in time with similar
groundbreaking work in literary studies by D.A. Miller (1989) and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), who recontextualized canonical English-
language literary works in relation to gay male sexuality and especially
issues of the closet.26 In both the musical and literary cases, the emphasis
on elite canons would seem limited in the following years.
The 1990 session might not have happened. The AMS Program
Committee, chaired by Anthony Newcomb, considered rejecting it. Brett
learned of this and intervened, threatening to picket at the conference unless
the session was scheduled.27 The event was tremendously empowering to
many scholars who continued or initiated their own research projects on
sexuality and WAM. It was infuriating to others, who hated to see the study
of WAM contaminated by discourse about sexuality. Some of these
opponents were gay men, in some cases out in their personal lives but
desiring a firm boundary between personal and professional matters.
A crucial event came in 1991, the conference “Feminist Theory and
Music.” This unprecedented conference attracted many speakers and was
revelatory to those who attended. Scholars, teachers, and composers who
had been thinking about gender and sexuality in relation to music, often in
relative isolation, discovered that there were many people with similar
interests. Presentations came from many areas of specialization—popular
music studies, ethnomusicology, study of WAM, music theory, and music
education. The conference showed the potential for gender and sexuality
studies to bridge divisions among different areas of music study. It became
the first in a series. Feminist Theory and Music has taken place every two
years since and continues to be a prime venue for the development of queer
perspectives, sustaining a valuable interaction between feminist and queer
studies of music along with, of course, disagreements and tensions at that
and other fault lines. Notably, for all its exhilarating collective sense of new
possibilities, the first conference gave little attention to race and ethnicity.
1991 also saw the publication of Susan McClary’s invaluable collection
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Like other important
feminist work of the time, Feminine Endings was deeply inspiring to music
scholars working on issues of minority sexualities, and it included an
interpretation of a homosexual narrative in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth
Symphony.28
Another early milestone in queer music studies, the 1994 edited
collection Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology,
includes three of the papers from the 1990 AMS session, papers from the
1991 Feminist Theory and Music, and other texts.29 Poet and critic Wayne
Koestenbaum opens the book with a collection of vignettes about queerness
and music, asking what it would mean to say “gay,” “dyke,” “queer,” used
as words of sexual self-naming, in the settings that constitute contemporary
musical life. His text is a moving celebration of the breakthrough that the
entire book represented. The chapters include studies of canonical male
composers (Handel, Schubert, and Britten) and also papers about listeners
and performers. One paper is from the perspective of a lesbian composer. A
conversation with US composer Ned Rorem is a reminder that, unlike
Britten, he and some other twentieth-century composers were out as gay;
there is interesting debate between Rorem and his interviewer about the
appropriate relation between personal queerness and artistic production.
Paul Attinello’s paper on gay and lesbian choruses addresses queer music-
based cultures outside academia; it uses ethnographic research, as another
chapter, consisting of an autoethnographic conversation between Kip
Pegley and Virginia Caputo, does in a different way. Just one chapter, by
Martha Mockus on k.d. lang., focuses on popular music; popular music
comes up alongside WAM in Pegley’s and Caputo’s chapter.
Two chapters in particular, by Brett and Suzanne G. Cusick, show queer
music studies developing its own new queer theories about music, while
also benefiting from theoretical models in non-musical thought. Brett draws
on sociologist and activist Mary McIntosh’s groundbreaking 1968 essay,
“The Homosexual Role,” which identifies the “homosexual” as a socially
created category that serves as a means of control over behavior.30 Through
cross-cultural and historical comparisons, McIntosh argues that the role of
“homosexual” exists only in certain times and places; through Kinsey’s
empirical study of sexual behavior, she shows that the role does not
remotely match the sexual practices of the society where it is deployed.
Brett’s remarkable contribution is to identify “musician” as, similarly, a
social role, invested with ambivalent prestige rather than the stigma
accorded people labeled homosexual. (As always, Brett has in mind WAM
musicians.) One attribute of the role “musician” is that it allows for a wide
range of nonstandard behavior, so long as socially disfavored behavior is
discreet. Thus, Brett argues, one may choose to accept the public role
“musician” and thereby gain acceptance of a quietly queer life.31
Cusick, asking what the relationship might be between her experiences
as a lesbian and her musical experiences, suggests that sexuality “is a
practice that allows movement within a field defined by power, intimacy,
and pleasure.”32 Music can be described in the same way, and the shared
structure allows Cusick to ask many productive, detailed questions about
relations between sexuality and music, and to find musical preferences that
match her lesbian sexuality.33
These essays by Brett and Cusick, along with Robertson’s essay
described above, show that queer music studies included ambitious theory
from the outset. In Queering the Pitch as a whole, the diversity of topics
and methods, mostly within the frame of WAM, was impressive, as was the
high quality of the essays. Large gaps, in particular the scant attention to
popular music, the relative lack of ethnographic research, and the whiteness
of contributors and topics invited questions about how to broaden the field.
The tension between the book’s title and subtitle (The New Gay and
Lesbian Musicology) was telling: gay and lesbian studies dominated the
book, and there was no impact of new conceptualizations of queerness.
Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century
Music, by John Gill, appeared in 1995.34 Though published by an academic
press, it revels in the opinionated, judgmental style that is possible in
journalistic music criticism. Much of the emphasis is on biography, and
especially on the question whether specific musicians were out or not. It
was valuable for its broad range across popular music, jazz, and art music,
unprecedented at the time. It marked out many topics that have been
explored in more detail subsequently. A year before, a brief, sophisticated
essay by Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,”
showed a more interpretive approach, offering a comprehensive
interpretation of disco as gay male identity formation and drawing on
theoretical work of Leo Bersani.35
In 1997 the call for papers for the annual conference of the Society for
Ethnomusicology invited submissions on queer theory; feminist scholar
Ellen Koskoff was the chair of the Program Committee. The conference
included a session on “Queering Ethnomusicology”; the speakers
articulated many issues that remain fundamental. Jennifer Fraser, an MA
student at the time, identified general issues that arise for a queer
ethnomusicologist. Is it safe to be out in academic settings? Will someone
researching a queer topic be at a disadvantage for funding? How will a
queer research project look on a resume or in a job application? It is safe to
be out in fieldwork? How should one identify in fieldwork? Is
ethnomusicology ready for reflexive writing that includes queer sexuality?
After her MA thesis, Fraser moved to more familiar research areas,
believing that the time had not arrived for queer ethnomusicology.
Gillian Rodger and Zoe Sherinian both addressed the complex position
of a researcher, inhabiting an identity within a particular contingent set of
concepts and practices of gender and sexuality while interpreting gender
and sexuality in another time or place. Rodger, reflecting on her research on
nineteenth-century cross-dressed performers in the United States,
emphasized the importance of recognizing the limitations of one’s own
assumptions. Sherinian explored the possibility of a cross-cultural queer
ethnomusicology by reading existing anthropological ethnographies of
India (Nanda) and Papua New Guinea (Herdt) considering how local
musical subjectivities of identity can further the understanding and
deconstruction of Euro-American categories. Rodger and Sherinian have
picked up the threads from this early work in their recent contributions to
Queering the Field and this Handbook.36 In 1997, both were advanced
graduate students, preparing to apply for academic jobs, and wary about the
possible consequences of their public queer scholarship.
Brett, on loan from historical musicology and the only senior scholar on
the session, noted the recurring evocations of gamelan in compositions by
twentieth-century gay male composers. He asked about the intricate power
relations when Euro-American men, separated from their own culture by
stigmatized sexuality, borrow, identify with, and perhaps exploit the sounds
of Asian music.37 Billy Vaughn and Matti Bunzl, graduate students at the
University of Chicago, gave an exhilarating account of a well-attended
Rainbow Parade in Vienna in 1996. They argued that the event successfully
deployed a positive conception of queerness and was much more effective
in Austria than earlier liberationist gay and lesbian activism. They
emphasized the event’s queering of the waltz, an Austrian national symbol
associated with heterosexual eroticism.
It is remarkable that this session was assembled and mostly presented by
graduate students, people of obvious professional vulnerability. They were
brave. In view of the superb quality of this session, one can wonder why
there was little visible follow-up in subsequent ethnomusicology
scholarship. Over the next years, there were individual accomplishments of
high quality. In the first seven years of the Philip Brett Award of the
American Musicological Society, the prize went twice to
ethnomusicologists (Gillian Rodger and Boden Sandstrom). But as a senior
feminist ethnomusicologist told me, “There were certainly individual signs,
but no big aha moment for SEM.”
The 1997 session itself offers some answers. Fraser, Rodger, and
Sherinian articulated practical and conceptual challenges to queer
ethnomusicology. Concerns like Fraser’s are salient up to the present.
Access to information about sexuality may be very difficult in the field, for
various reasons including secrecy and stigma. Governments and local
cultures may be homophobic, creating further obstacles to research. All
queer scholars face decisions about personal disclosure in their academic
and professional settings; to these are added, for ethnomusicologists, a role
in their academic departments that may already be disempowered (as noted
above, many music departments are disproportionately staffed with
specialists in WAM), as well as the complexities of self-presentation in the
field. And as Rodger and Sherinian showed, cross-cultural comparison of
practices and concepts of gender and sexuality brings fascinating but
profound interpretive challenges. Two case studies on the session (by Brett
and Vaughn/Bunzl) were about Euro-American settings where versions of
LGBTQ identities were common; the same was true of Robertson’s study of
a lesbian-feminist chorus in Washington, DC. And subsequent contributions
to queer ethnomusicology have often addressed cultures or subcultures
where queer scholars can be out, and where Euro-American-style LGBTQ
identities are intelligible; the most daunting cross-cultural issues of research
and interpretation of gender and sexuality do not arise. Examples include
L:uis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta on electronic dance music scenes; Hayes
and Sandstrom on US women’s music festivals; Stephen Amico on Russian
gay men; Moshe Morad on secretive gay groups in Cuba; Tes Slominski on
Irish music.38
As I noted above, there is more to queer activity in a professional society
than the creation of publicly available scholarship. The Gender and
Sexualities Taskforce was an invaluable resource for its participants, who in
early years were early-career women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, or
queer. There was support from other women studying gender, and Marcia
Herndon and Carolina Robertson were committed mentors. Otherwise,
senior scholars and men were absent. The nature and significance of queer
activities in ethnomusicology cannot be assessed only from the record of
publications.39
In music theory, the first conference session devoted to queer topics took
place at the 1999 SMT meeting. The event was complicated first by official
conference signage in the building that failed to announce the topic of the
session, perhaps out of caution; and then the session was interrupted four
times by fire alarms requiring the large audience to empty the room and
await permission to return. The false alarms seemed to be intentional
harassment, since no other session was disrupted in that way; no culprit was
identified.40 Another session followed in 2001, this time without drama.
Music theory and analysis might seem an unlikely site of queer studies.
Theory and analysis often seem to conjure a purely musical world, with no
connection to meaning or social context. Indeed, the field has been
criticized repeatedly for this esoteric purism by advocates of music
criticism and interpretation, from Kerman’s “How We Got into Analysis,
and How to Get Out” onward.41 On the other hand, various projects had
sought to bring together music theory and the interpretation of musical
meaning. The study of “music and narrative,” using musical analysis in the
articulation of story-like qualities of instrumental music, was well
established in the 1980s. Feminine Endings showed how the narrative
approach could merge with feminist interpretation, and in McClary’s
interpretations of music by Tchaikovsky and Schubert, narrative
interpretation contributed to queer music studies.42
The first two SMT queer studies sessions showed many different ways
of relating music to sexuality. Charles Fisk offered narrative and personal
analysis of music by Schubert. Martin Scherzinger explored connections
between inversion in early twentieth-century music and contemporaneous
theories of sexual inversion. Jennifer Rycenga described queer form in the
music of Yes. Ivan Raykoff suggested that ideas about musical
transcription, often framed in terms of fidelity and transgression, rhyme
with cultural attitudes about legally sanctioned heterosexual reproduction
and its perverse alternatives. Thus, commitment to the authentic musical
work, which forms the basis of almost all analytical practice, reflects an
ideology to which there are attractive alternatives with, perhaps, an aura of
perversity. Nadine Hubbs showed that the contrast between tonal and
nontonal music is not just a matter of musical systems but was embodied in
a prominent group of gay male modernists who wrote tonal music. I
explored the rhetoric of power and submission in music theory and analysis,
suggesting a parallel with eroticized power relations. These and others in
the group of twelve presentations showed many directions for queer music
theory.43 To the present, research on music theory and sexuality has not
settled into fixed paradigms but continues to explore new possibilities. The
first collection of essays on queer music theory, edited by Gavin Lee, is
presently in preparation, to be published by Oxford University Press.44
Two impressive texts from the early 2000s offered broad surveys of the
field: the 2001 Grove Dictionary article “Lesbian and Gay Music” by Philip
Brett and Elizabeth Wood, and Judith Peraino’s book Listening to the Sirens
in 2005.45
Popular music studies has addressed queerness in a growing
accumulation of essays and books, punctuated by collections—a “Gender
and Sexuality” issue of Popular Music (2002), a queer studies issue of the
Journal of Popular Music Studies (2006), a “Trans/Queer” issue of the
Journal of Popular Music Studies (2013).46 Whiteley organized a thematic
area, “Queering the Practice,” for the 2003 international meeting of IASPM,
which became the basis for a collection co-edited with Jennifer Rycenga,
Queering the Popular Pitch (2006).47 This collection is remarkably
international in its topics, an excellent model for moving beyond the
Anglophone musical repertory of much Anglophone popular music studies.
With five contributions by ethnomusicologists, it is also a significant
moment in the development of queer ethnomusicology.
Whiteley was fascinated by Queering the Pitch and the potential of
queer music studies. As part of the 2003 conference, she gathered five
contributors to Queering the Pitch to reflect on the book as it approached its
tenth anniversary. These papers, published in the newsletter of the Gay and
Lesbian Study Group of AMS, are not well known, but they are valuable.48
Cusick and Mockus wrote emphatically about the omission of scholars of
color and music by people of color; to which Mockus added the further
omission of class.
 Q M S T

In the 1990s, the scholarly conjunction of music and queerness felt rare and
bold. That has changed, in that such scholarship is now abundant, though it
remains a courageous act for a music scholar to work on queer topics. I do
not think it is possible to give a coherent, unified narrative of developments
in queer music studies between its origins and the present; the quantity and
scope of research have expanded in many directions. Possibly specialists in
specific areas of music studies would see plotlines that I do not.
The 2019 update of the excellent Cumulative LGBTQ Music
Bibliography, an unannotated, uncategorized list of academic publications
in queer music studies, takes up sixty-two single-spaced pages and has
1,178 entries.49 The bibliography reveals two main areas of concentrated
work: WAM, especially in Europe and North America, and white
Anglophone popular music, including musical theater and film music.50 It
lists about 300 articles and books on WAM composers. These include work
on Schubert (mostly from the 1990s), Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, and especially
Britten; also valuable work on the US modernists Thomson, Copland,
Bernstein, and others, and the US experimental tradition of Cowell, Cage,
Harrison, and Oliveros. A smaller group of texts on WAM performance
includes distinguished work on topics such as castrati, queer performers,
and cultures around performance such as opera queens. Books and essays
on popular music include studies of famous queer musicians and musicians
with large queer followings such as Lady Gaga. There are fine studies of
women’s music and disco.
The bibliography also shows excellent, though less abundant, material
on Black musicians and music cultures. Hip hop, by Black and also white
musicians, has received the most attention. There are queer studies of recent
popular music by Black artists, gospel, and women blues singers, a few on
jazz, and essays about specific figures in relation to sexuality—Josephine
Baker, Julius Eastman, Michael Jackson, Billy Strayhorn. A few queer
studies of popular music in Latin America and other non-Anglophone areas
appear in the bibliography, as do studies of Asian and Asian American
music and Latinx music in the United States. The compilers have not
attempted to include studies written in languages other than English.
It is relatively easy to assemble scholarly resources about WAM, a
unified field sustained through music departments and schools of music, the
American Musicological Society and similar organizations in other
countries, and a handful of scholarly journals. Similarly, ethnomusicology
comes together in dedicated scholarly organizations and journals. It is
harder to get an overview of queer scholarly work about popular music.
Popular music scholarship exists in many different academic fields and is
published in journals of various disciplines; it is only partly unified by the
existence of IASPM, itself a large and dispersed multi-national
organization.
The very useful Cumulative Bibliography is under continuous revision
to keep up with new publications and previously omitted material.51
The need for more research on queer topics related to Black people and
people of color persisted for a long time; however, see the list of new books
at the end of this section for terrific recent work. Eileen Hayes’s book,
mentioned earlier, was an outstanding early contribution. In 2016 a
symposium took place in Vancouver, “Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship,”
held just before the joint annual meeting of SMT and AMS; papers from the
symposium made up a special issue of Women & Music in 2018.52 In 2020
Current Musicology published a special issue, “Queering and Quaring
Musicology.”53
As often happens, the B and T of LGBTQ have received relatively little
emphasis in queer music studies. This is especially conspicuous for
transgender issues, where there is, meanwhile, drastic discrimination and
violence in non-musical life, along with significant attention, some of it
positive, some malign, in non-musical public discourse and popular culture.
Trans music-making exists in many forms, some of it described by Shana
Goldin-Perschbacher and Dana Baitz in their chapters for this book; in
general there has been little uptake in academic research. A forthcoming
book by Goldin-Perschbacher will be valuable in offsetting this
inattention.54
In two practical fields with their own research literatures, queer studies
has recently gathered momentum. Four Symposia on LGBTQ Studies and
Music Education have taken place (2010, 2012, 2016, and 2021). During
the same time, there has been more publication than before on queer and
trans issues of music education; there was little before 2009.55 No public
bibliography on queerness and music education exists.56
There has been a recent increase in LGBTQ-related writing for music
therapists. Again, no public bibliography exists. Colin Lee kindly shared his
unpublished bibliography with me. It shows a trickle of publications from
1990 on, among them Lee’s beautiful case study Music at the Edge: The
Music Therapy Experiences of a Musician with AIDS.57 Typically there
were one or two publications per year, or none, until 2017, when suddenly
there were seven. 2019 brought a bumper crop, partly because of a special
issue of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy on “Queering Music
Therapy.”58 This subfield of music therapy is established now, and an
Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy, edited by Colin Lee,
is in preparation.59
As work on this Handbook reaches its end, superb new publications in
queer music studies continue to appear, breaking new ground in topics and
methods: Karen Tongson, Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019); Susan Fast
and Craig Jennex, editors, Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer
and Feminist Interventions (2019); Moshe Morad, Fiesta de diez pesos:
Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (2019); Vincent L.
Stephens, Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace,
and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music (2019); Gregory Barz and William
Cheng, editors, Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (2020);
Ashon T. Crawley, The Lonely Letters (2020); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Cool
Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed
American Culture (2020); Alisha Lola Jones, Flaming?: The Peculiar
Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (2020);
Matthew J. Jones, Love Don’t Need a Reason: The Life & Music of Michael
Callen (2020); Tes Slominski, Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in
Irish Traditional Music (2020); and more.60 The field is thriving and is in
motion in wonderful ways. This exciting situation does, though, raise
questions of what a Handbook about these topics might be.
 A H

A Handbook of Music and Queerness must somehow find its place in a

productive, fragmented terrain, and must take into account the complexities
of its defining terms “queerness” and “music.” According to Oxford
University Press’s summary of the Handbook series,
Each Handbook offers thorough introductions to topics and a critical survey of the current
state of scholarship, creating an original conception of the field and setting the agenda for
new research. Handbook articles review the key issues and cutting-edge debates, as well as
providing arguments for how those debates might evolve.61

Perhaps this description has in mind a more coherent and delimited research
field than “music and queerness”; surely the project of “a critical survey of
the current state of scholarship” falters in light of the conspicuously
heterogeneous sixty-two-page bibliography just described. In my view, the
most accurate “conception of the field” is that it is characterized by
diversification of topics and methods, ever-increasingly so; that is part of
what is good about it. The motion of queer music studies is centrifugal,
rather than centered, and a Handbook should find a way to represent that.
I initially joined this project as the fourth member of a four-person
editorial group that included Rachel Cowgill and Sophie Fuller along with
Whiteley. We worked together on a proposal for the Press, an enjoyable
process that was well underway when I arrived. Once the proposal was
accepted by OUP, Cowgill and Fuller left the group for other projects. This
was a reasonable decision; they had already put a great deal of work and
insight into the project. Deep gratitude to them!
We had struggled to define the scope of a Handbook on queerness and
music and, even at the time of the contract, had not resolved some
significant doubts.
An early draft of the proposal listed seventy chapters, all by different
authors, each author paired with a specific topic. Despite this large number
of topics, the proposal was problematic in its heavy emphasis on the history
of European music and the recent past of Anglophone popular music. And
even within those topic areas, there were many obvious gaps. Further,
almost every proposed chapter seemed to invite an author who had already
published on its topic to come back and say a little more; this orientation to
past research was dispiriting. We kept working.
The revised proposal that was accepted by the Press still had many,
many proposed authors, with chapters now organized in a chronological
plan: two sections on music before 1918, almost all on WAM, and a large
section on music after 1918 that included art music topics, popular music
studies, and ethnomusicology. We had moved away from the idea of
assigning specific topics to authors, but the proposal still matched each
potential contributor with a likely research area. We expected to
commission about fifty chapters, ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 words in
length. Nonetheless there were still obvious omissions of potential topics.
The idea of coverage was not working out well.
When it was time for Whiteley and me, contract in hand, to begin
inviting authors, we made several decisions that reoriented the project.
We brought two new Associate Editors, Tavia Nyong’o and Zoe
Sherinian, into the project, with responsibility for recommending
contributors and reviewing chapter drafts in their areas of knowledge,
African American studies and performance studies (Nyong’o) and
ethnomusicology (Sherinian). Their ideas transformed the project.
And we decided to invite prospective authors to contribute their most
exciting current work, with no specification of subject matter beyond the
book title itself. This meant giving up the idea of coverage, curated by the
editors, in favor of unpredictable topics. I think the result is thrilling. Many
chapters undertake work that an editor could not have imagined; sometimes
they represent new departures for the authors themselves. The idea of
including short chapters of 4,000 words had been an accommodation to the
goal of coverage; we set that aside in favor of fewer, longer chapters. In
selecting authors, we chose to represent the expansiveness of the field by
inviting contributors from a wide range of academic specializations. We
chose not to emphasize senior scholars whose work was already well-
established, and we did not give priority to the WAM research that has
sometimes dominated music studies.
 With no attempt to control the topics of chapters, we also gave up any
hope of foreseeing the structure of the book. The chronological organization
of our proposal was uninspiring; we knew this, and the proposal expressed
hope for something else. We were, perhaps, strangely confident that a
satisfying structure would emerge.
We did not ask contributors to agree to a specific interpretation of
queerness, nor specify for them the role that it would have in their chapters.
The result is a wide variety of relations to the term, itself a fascinating
aspect of the collection.
Sheila Whiteley’s death in June 2015 left a great gap in popular music
studies and was a painful loss for her many friends. It slowed the progress
of this book and meant that I had to move forward without her wonderful
imagination and insight. The content of the completed book embodies our
collaborative planning. The editing of most chapters fell to me, along with
Nyong’o and Sherinian for some topics. The organization of the book is
mine; I am sure it would have pleased Whiteley.
 R M Q

The sections of this book reflect a grouping of chapters by what one might
call approaches, or styles of thought, or topics; I like the term “rhetorics,”
which emphasizes the process of organizing material into persuasive verbal
artifacts. Not surprisingly, the chapters of this book participate in various
traditions of writing about music and queerness. I have gathered them into
groups within which the chapters share a particular rhetorical orientation.
Obviously, many relationships link chapters and cut across the rhetorical
sections. Many chapters have ethnographic aspects, drawing in various
ways on ethnography, participant-observation, oral history, and
autoethnography. Not surprisingly, issues of gender identity and gender
performance come up in many chapters. There are chapters on African
American music and audiences (Garcia-Mispireta who writes about Black
people and other queers of color, Patrick Johnson, Smalls, Nyong’o,
Stüttgen). There are chapters on transgender issues (Goldin-Perschbacher,
Pennington, Baitz). Two chapters draw on Sarah Ahmed’s brilliant Queer
Phenomenology (Daniel, Baitz). Two chapters rework Cusick’s reflections
on “music as sex” in imaginative ways (Taylor, Wilbourne). And so on—I
hope that the exploration of such links will be part of the pleasure of this
collection.
Comments on the rhetoric-based sections and the individual chapters
follow.
 K M

Sexual minorities have often been associated with specific kinds of music.
These kinds may be intentionally created within communities that have
distinct queer identities, as in the disco of the 1970s or the women’s music
of the 1970s and 1980s. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s chapter identifies,
in commonly told narratives of electronic dance music, an intermittent role
for queers of color. Such narratives obscure the continuous participation of
queers of color, from disco to the present, in a wide range of dance music
scenes.
Sometimes there is a constitutive but partially hidden presence of queer
people in a kind of music. Many gay men contributed to the creation of US
musical theater. Performed for a broad audience, musicals can yield special
meanings for queer audiences, constituting communication with the creators
that is typically unobserved by straight fans. Bradley Rogers’s chapter
inquires into this possibility, lingering over a reading of Mame. The
presence of gay men in Black gospel performance is widely known but not
openly acknowledged in the context of churches that teach against
homosexuality. E. Patrick Johnson’s chapter brings queer creativity to the
fore in a revised history of gospel music, drawing on oral history and fiction
for details.
In other cases, kinds of music may be created and consumed without
special attention to queer people, who may nonetheless have roles as
creators and performers or in audiences. Through interviews, Tes Slominski
finds ways that queer performers of Irish traditional music and dance in the
United States negotiate their identities in a scene that often seems uniformly
heterosexual. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher and Shanté Paradigm Smalls
write about queer artists’ uses of kinds of music—country and hip hop—of
which the musicians and audiences might be assumed to be sexually
normative or homophobic.
 V

Art is always made out of other art; sometimes the relationship is especially
direct, when one artifact is plainly a reworking or version of another.
Creating versions through dissident interpretations can be a way of
responding to a dominant culture, as argued in Birmingham School
accounts of subcultures.62 More generally, the assumption of the superior
validity of an original over an imitation has been challenged in many ways
over the last decades, for example in Jacques Derrida’s mischievous phrase
“originary trace,” which builds regression into any attempt to privilege an
original.63 Judith Butler’s important work on performativity cuts against
any account of heterosexuality as more authentic than queerness; both are
practices of repetition.64 Sue-Ellen Case rejects the depiction of lesbian
butch-femme roles as derivative from heterosexuality, offering instead a
contrast between playful camp theater and drab realistic theater.65 The
rejection of the traditional hierarchy of original over copy or version is
welcome in queer music studies.66
In various ways Dirk von der Horst, Freya Jarman, Nina Treadwell, and
Karen Tongson show the creative resources of versions. Von der Horst
describes two anti-homophobic musical settings of Biblical passages, and
then finds resonances to their meanings in contemporary theology. Jarman
articulates the fresh meanings that emerge as two novellas are made into
operas and films. Treadwell reports on fan music videos as a queer practice
and augments previous interpretations by emphasizing the contributions of
music. Tongson takes us from reflections on karaoke to a meditation on
repetition in queer thought.
 V S

Music is made of sounds, though this knowledge is sometimes lost in

academic writing. The chapters in this section take music and sound in
different queer directions. Tavia Nyong’o plays between the sense of voice
as socially meaningful vocal sound and its more general sense as expressive
presence. Stephan Pennington directs our attention to transgender passing
guides that give detailed instructions for transgender people to perform
masculinity and femininity through speech, and then shows how that
knowledge can clarify musical performances of gender by cisgender
singers. Jodie Taylor gives detailed accounts of desire and sexuality in
interactions with music and recognizes auralism as a form of fetishism
practiced by women, challenging Freud’s belief that fetishism is a male
phenomenon.
Drew Daniel suggests that sound itself is queer. This is an unfamiliar
and startling claim; for that reason I offer more commentary here than I
have for other chapters. Skimming off sound from its multisensory
surroundings, in part through recording, Daniel shows that sound often fails
to match what one might otherwise know about an environment, creating its
own surreal world of evocations. This matches Sedgwick’s sense of
queerness, quoted above: difference is unresolved, phenomena do not
“signify monolithically.” Daniel’s process of recording sound, then learning
by listening to the recording, is close to an experience lesbian composer
Pauline Oliveros identified as “a most important discovery and major
influence on my work.” In 1958, she listened to environmental sound and
simultaneously made a recording; listening to the recording after, she
realized how much sound she had not noticed during her previous
unmediated listening. “From that moment, I determined that I must expand
my awareness of the entire sound field. I gave myself the seemingly
impossible task of listening to everything all the time.”67 Indeed, two great
queer artists, Oliveros and John Cage, devoted much of their lives to letting
sounds be themselves. What is the straight alternative to this sonic
queerness? Perhaps Tim Ingold’s argument against the concept of
soundscape:
The environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the
lines of the sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same
world, whatever path we take, and in perceiving it, each of us acts as an undivided center of
movement and awareness.68

Daniel himself is an accomplished sound artist, half of the duo Matmos.

 L

The category of “lives,” as the basis of a distinct section, is specious; every

chapter in the book is about lives, queer lives mostly, in relation to music
and sound. Other chapters might happily have held a place in this section.
The seven chapters gathered here, diverse and moving, offer rich material to
reflect on this aspect of queer music studies.
Depiction of individual lives has been at the center of queer music
studies. Sexually frank biographical studies have been indispensable, for
instance Howard Pollack on Aaron Copland, Martha Mockus on Pauline
Oliveros, Joshua Gamson on Sylvester, Alice Echols on Janis Joplin.69 And
queer music scholars have sometimes brought their own lives into their
professional writing, elaborating the practice of situated knowledge,
previously well-established in feminism.70 The latter style—disconcerting
in relation to some mainstream academic norms—manifested in some of the
most magnificent early texts of queer music studies, among them Wayne
Koestenbaum’s book on opera queens, D.A. Miller’s book on musicals,
Cusick’s essay on lesbian musicality mentioned above, and Brett’s essay on
Schubert.71
Brett ended his 1990 conference paper (and chapter in Queering the
Pitch) with these resonant words: “‘The question was, and is,’ as Neil
Bartlett says of the trial of 1895 in his moving book about Oscar Wilde,
‘who speaks, and when, and for whom, and why.’”72 In 1996 when Brett
intervened in the intense musicological discussion about Schubert’s
sexuality and its relation (or not) to his music—a conversation that
developed in response to Maynard Solomon’s 1989 argument that Schubert
was homosexual73—he pointed out that “no lesbian or gay scholar has so
far entered the debate.”74 The essay continues by describing Brett’s own
experiences of playing Schubert piano duets with another gay man,
describing the ways Schubert’s music interacts with his and his duet-
partner’s life experiences. Carefully articulating what can be known and
what cannot about Schubert’s sexuality, Brett indicates how Schubert’s
circumstances might have led to the creation of music that can resonate
with the lives of present-day gay men. Brett closes by describing the use of
Schubert’s music in a recent film; the stereotypes and homophobia of the
film suggest that a “gay” Schubert in popular culture may not be a positive
phenomenon. Such a personal approach rebuffs two dubious rhetorics of
objectivity, one in the professional description of music, the other in the
more general discourse of scholarly communication. Memorably, Brett
writes: “Criticism is radical in musicology because it is subjective and has
no authority whatsoever.”75
What criterion would one use to determine when personal material is
appropriate in writing about music? Perhaps it is simple: personal material
is relevant whenever it changes the understanding of the musical issues at
hand.76 Non-LGBTQ-identified music scholars have often responded
warmly to the personal qualities of queer music studies, perhaps above all
to Cusick’s “On a Lesbian Relationship.”77
Sheila Whiteley, a heterosexual woman who easily formed close
friendships with gay men, made important contributions to LGBTQ studies
as a straight participant. This is somewhat like Susan McClary, whose work
on Tchaikovsky and Schubert was foundational for queer music studies; and
somewhat like Eve Sedgwick, who reflected memorably on her
identification with gay male subjectivity but who was married to a man and
who resisted labels for her own sexuality. Whiteley’s tender sketch of queer
life in Brighton includes an account of her induction into the city’s queer
musical scene; it is an origin story for her involvement with queer life and
queer music studies. Whiteley was prescient in seeing the skill of her friend
John McCullough’s poetry, included in the chapter; in 2020 his new
collection, Reckless Paper Birds, won a major award, the Hawthornden
Prize.78
Elizabeth Gould’s chapter brings together many aspects of her personal,
professional, and political worlds, experienced through a feminist and
lesbian life. Charles Fisk’s very different rhetoric shrinks the world to
enthralled encounters between a pianist and the music he plays or hears,
infused with longing and mysteries of identity. Colin Lee recalls his work as
a gay man offering music therapy to clients with HIV/AIDS early in the
epidemic. Some readers may be unfamiliar with music therapy, a small,
specialized field; Lee’s descriptions of specific therapy sessions, and the
related sound example and painting (which enhances the cover of this
book), draw us into a world of intense meaning and communication.
Dana Baitz, partly by drawing on her own experience, distinguishes a
common queer interpretive style, centered on signification, from a less
common trans* and specifically transsexual style of interpretation in which
embodiment and materiality are central. Tim Stüttgen brings a wide range
of conceptual resources to bear on Sun Ra’s imaginative presentation of
himself in the film Space Is the Place. Jenny Johnson writes with great care
and complexity about the lives of choirboys violated by sexual abuse, and
the possible effects on their musical performances.
 H

As already mentioned, “queer,” as a positive political word, dates to around

1990 and has its specific range of uses and limitations. Other words such as
“gay,” “lesbian,” and famously “homosexual” also have specific temporal
and geographical histories.79 Historical discourse will vary in whether it
admits those terms as appropriate, and whether there are other resources
within a specific historical setting for descriptions of sexuality. The first
three chapters in this section drop us into times when we may be at a loss
for words and introduce us to practices of gender and sexuality strikingly
different from those of the Euro-American present—Lisa Colton’s bouquet
of obscene marginal illustrations of marginal behaviors; Emily Wilbourne’s
account of the glamour of castrati; Gillian Rodger’s examples of male
impersonation as working class entertainment. Wilbourne’s argument is
exemplary in contrasting a modern reception of castrati, as irreparably
mutilated, with a historical understanding of castrati as successful and
desirable. Matthew J. Jones draws attention to the understudied role of
popular song in negotiating public experiences of HIV/AIDS. Ivan Raykoff
articulates European concepts of nationalism, different from those of the
United States, and shows ways they can interact with queerness.
 C - Q

The chapters in the final section all concern locations beyond Western
Europe and the Americas. In these settings, concepts and practices of
gender and sexuality may be very different from Euro-American ones.
Superficial resemblances may tempt assimilation of such phenomena to
Euro-American concepts; these chapters resist such conflation. At the same
time, Euro-American concepts and political goals have sometimes been
adopted alongside indigenous practices. And, as Zoe Sherinian argues, it
may be wrong to insist on a complete cross-cultural otherness of
expressions of sexuality and gender.
Sherinian, an accomplished ethnographer, in her chapter turns to the
ethnographic work of other scholars, asking what happens if we view their
material through the lens of queerness. She offers a series of important
methodological suggestions about queer ethnomusicology. Joseph Lam
considers the complex meanings of cross-dressing in performances of
kunqu, a type of Chinese opera. Henry Spiller discusses a range of
Indonesian performances that diverge from Euro-American conceptions of
normative gender, asking what they mean, not to the Euro-American
imagination but to indigenous understanding. Yiu-Fai Chow and Jeroen de
Kloet describe a shift in the public visibility of gay popular music stars in
Hong Kong around 2012 and a mingling of local and Euro-American
concepts of sexuality. Stephen Amico’s conceptually ambitious essay
ponders the appropriateness of concepts of queerness in understanding the
gender play of a Ukrainian pop group; Amico offers an attractive analogy to
musical transcription for thinking about cross-cultural understanding.
May this unusual, indeed rather queer Handbook lead its readers to
many new discoveries and unforeseen trajectories!80
N
1. Should that be “same-gender sexual desires” or “same-sex sexual desires”? This use of “same-
sex,” for some, evokes undesirable biological essentialism and binarism. But it is possible to
hear “sex” as drawing attention to embodiment without essentialism or binarism. “Gender”
works for me, but there is a range of arguments and stakeholders in this choice.
2. “The Queer Nation Manifesto,” 1990. Available on the site History is a Weapon,
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/queernation.html. Note the persistence of the
categories “gay” and “lesbian” in this early statement.
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
4. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist
Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of
Chicago Legal Forum 1989, 1 (1989): 139–167.
5. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8–9.
6. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 223.
7. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004); E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There
of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009); Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
8. Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” GLQ 3 (1997): 449.
9. E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I
Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 2001): 3.
10. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
11. See, for example, Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2017). Valuable political uses of “lesbian feminist” may be distinguished from radical feminist
positions that feature an antipathy to trans women.
12. I have used “music studies” as the encompassing term for all ways of studying any kind of
music. Some scholars have argued that the term “musicology” could be used in that very general
way. I like this proposal. But the term “musicology” still retains a strong association with the
historical study of WAM, and some people do not hear it in the more general sense. On
“musicology” as a general term for music studies, see Stephen Amico, “‘We are All
Musicologists Now,’ or, the End of Ethnomusicology,” The Journal of Musicology 37, no. 1
(Winter 2020): 1–32.
13. For an excellent account of the problematic role of classical music in musical academia, see
Loren Kajikawa, “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of
White Supremacy in U. S. Schools and Departments of Music,” in Kimberlé Williams
Crenshaw, ed., Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019), 155–174.
 Were this project to be undertaken afresh in the present time, I would want to have a stronger
14. representation of sound studies.
15. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
16. Queer scholarly studies of music have been primarily Anglophone; my own orientation to U.S.
research will be obvious in this introduction, and this book was created by editors and associate
editors in the United States and England. I regret any parochialism reflected in this introduction
and the broad editorial decisions of this Handbook, and I urge people with different knowledge
to press ahead with their work and develop their areas of inquiry in all the ways they can.
17. I offered a sketch of these developments in “What was Critical Musicology?,” Radical
Musicology 5 (2010–2011): unpaginated.
18. See http://ams-lgbtq.org.
19. Gregory Barz, “Queering the Field: An Introduction,” in Gregory Barz and William Cheng, eds.,
Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University Press,
2020), 7–27.
20. It might be imagined that there is not, at present, LGBTQ+-related discrimination in
workplaces, or in professional settings such as conferences; nor anxieties about what to include
in a resume or what to say in a job application. That would be wrong. See, for instance, Fred
Everett Maus, “LGBTQ+ Lives in Professional Music Theory,” Music Theory Online 26, no. 1
(March 2020), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.1/mto.20.26.1.maus.html. Queer groups in
professional organizations remain important resources in many ways.
21. Introductions to special journal issues on gender and sexuality take note of this reticence.
Barbara Bradby and Dave Laing, “Introduction to ‘Gender and Sexuality’ Special Issue,”
Popular Music 20, no. 3 (2001): 295–300; Aaron Lecklider, “Introduction,” Journal of Popular
Music Studies 18, no. 2 (2006): 117–123.
22. Philip Brett, “Britten and Grimes,” in Music and Sexuality in Britten, ed. George E. Haggerty
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 11–24. First published in
Musical Times, 1977.
23. Richard Dyer, “In Defence of Disco,” in Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 151–
160. First published in Gay Left, 1979.
24. Karen E. Petersen, “An Investigation into Women-Identified Music in the United States,” in
Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Ellen Koskoff (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1987), 203–212. Carolina Robertson (as Carol E. Robertson), “Power and Gender in the
Musical Experiences of Women,” in Koskoff, Women and Music, 225–244.
25. Dee Mosbacher and Boden Sandstrom, Radical Harmonies (Woman Vision, 2002). Eileen M.
Hayes, Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2010).
26. D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). First published 1990.
27. Susan McClary, “Introduction,” in Philip Brett, Music and Sexuality in Britten, ed. George E.
Haggerty (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 3.
28. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002). First published 1991. On Tchaikovsky, see “Sexual
 Politics in Classical Music,” 53–79.
29. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and
Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). First published 1994.
30. Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems 16, 2 (Autumn 1968): 182–192.
31. Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Queering
the Pitch, 9–26.
32. Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Attempt Not to Think
Straight,” in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Women and Music, 71.
33. Ibid., 67–83.
34. John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
35. Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth
Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 147–
157.
36. Zoe C. Sherinian, “Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology: Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes
and performance,” in Barz and Cheng, Queering the Field, 31-52, and Gillian M. Rodger,
“Queer in the Field? What Happens When Neither ‘Queer’ Nor ‘The Field’ Is Clearly
Defined?,” op. cit., 67–90.
37. A version of this paper was published posthumously. Brett, “Queer Musical Orientalism,” in
Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 9, no. 1 (2009): unpaginated.
38. Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta (as Luis-Manuel Garcia), “‘Can You Feel it Too?’: Intimacy and
Affect at Electronic Dance Music Events in Paris, Chicago, and Berlin” (PhD diss., University
of Chicago, 2011), and subsequent publications. Mosbacher and Sandstrom, Radical Harmonies.
Hayes, Songs in Black and Lavender. Stephen Amico, Roll Over, Tchaikovsky!: Russian Popular
Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
Moshe Morad, Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (New
York: Routledge, 2019). Tes Slominski, Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish
Traditional Music (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020).
39. For other recent texts touching on the history of queer ethnomusicology, see Gregory Barz,
“Queering the Field: An Introduction,” in Barz and Cheng, Queering the Field, 7–27; and
Steven Moon, “Queer Theory, Ethno/Musicology, and the Disorientation of the Field,” Current
Musicology 106 (2020): 9–33.
40. For a lively account, see Martin Scherzinger, “Please Resume Your Normal Activities: Music
Theory and Queer Issues at SMT 1999,” in GLSG Newsletter 10, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 2–4,
http://ams-lgbtq.org/newsletters-archive.
41. Joseph Kerman, “How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2
(Winter 1980): 311–331.
42. McClary, “Sexual Politics in Classical Music,” in Feminine Endings, 53–79; “Constructions of
Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music,” in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Queering the Pitch, 205–233.
43. Versions of the papers mentioned were all published, though not in music theory journals.
Charles Fisk, “Schubertian Confidences,” GLSG Newsletter 10, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 4–7. Martin
Scherzinger (with Neville Hoad), “Anton Webern and the Concept of Symmetrical Inversion: A
Reconsideration on the Terrain of Gender,” repercussions 6, no. 2 (1997): 63–147. Jennifer
Rycenga, “Endless Caresses: Queer Exuberance in Large-Scale Form in Rock,” in Queering the
 Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2006), 235–
247. Ivan Raykoff, “Transcription, Transgression, and the (Pro)creative Urge,” in Queer
Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Champaign-
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 150–176. Nadine Hubbs, “A French Connection:
Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 3
(2000): 389–412. Fred Everett Maus, “The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis,” in Beyond
Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 13–43.
44. Gavin Lee, ed., Queer Music Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, in preparation).
45. Brett and Wood was commissioned for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians but
suffered unwelcome editorial interventions. It is best read in its original form, as published in
the GLSG Newsletter or the second edition of Queering the Pitch. Brett and Wood, “The
ORIGINAL Version of the New Grove Article,” GLSG Newsletter 11, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 3–
14. Brett and Wood, “Lesbian and Gay Music,” in Brett, Wood, and Thomas, Queering the
Pitch, 351–378. Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity
from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
46. Barbara Bradby and David Laing, eds., “Gender and Sexuality,” special issue, Popular Music
20, no. 3 (March 2002). Aaron Lecklider, ed., “Queer Studies,” special issue, Journal of
Popular Music Studies 18, no. 2 (August 2006). Tavia Nyong’o and Francesca Royster,
eds.,“Trans/Queer,” special issue, Journal of Popular Music Studies 25, no. 4 (December 2013).
47. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, eds., Queering the Popular Pitch (New York: Routledge,
2006).
48. Sheila Whiteley, Kip Pegley, Jennifer Rycenga, Suzanne G. Cusick, Martha Mockus, and Paul
Attinello, “Queering the Pitch: Past, Present, and Future,” GLSG Newsletter 14, no. 1 (Spring
2004): 1–15, http://ams-lgbtq.org/newsletters-archive.
49. Jacob Sagrans, Keith Wace, and Lloyd Whitesell, eds. Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography,
2019. Access at http://ams-lgbtq.org/queer-musicology-bibliography or
https://libraryguides.mcgill.ca/sexuality. Whitesell has also published a superb brief annotated
bibliography, “Queer Musicology,” in Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2020,
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/.
50. The categorization by subject matter as classical and popular is not part of the bibliography,
which does not sort the entries. It is mine, and matches my sense of disciplinary conversations.
It is not exhaustive; many entries do not fit either category.
51. Suggestions for additional references may be sent to Lloyd Whitesell; the address is at the
beginning of the Bibliography.
52. Emily Wilbourne, ed., “Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship,” special issue, Women & Music: A
Journal of Gender and Culture 22 (2018).
53. Laina Dawes, ed. “Queering and Quaring Musicology,” special issue, Current Musicology 106
(July 2020).
54. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Queer Country (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
forthcoming).
55. But see Roberta Lamb, “Music Trouble: Desire, Discourse, Education,” Canadian University
Music Review 18, no. 1 (1997): 84–98; Elizabeth Gould, “Desperately Seeking Marsha: Music
and Lesbian Imagination,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 4, no. 3
(September 2005): unpaginated.
56. The Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography includes entries on music education. Material from
the first conference appears in Gregory F. DeNardo and Allen R.Legutki, eds., “Establishing
Identity: LGBT Studies & Music Education—Select Conference Proceedings,” Bulletin of the
Council for Research in Music Education 188 (Spring 2011): 9–64.
57. Colin Andrew Lee, Music at the Edge: The Music Therapy Experiences of a Musician with
AIDS (New York and London, Routledge, 1996).
58. “A Special Issue on Queering Music Therapy,” Candice Bain and Maevon Gumble, eds., Voices:
A World Forum for Music Therapy 19, no. 3 (2019).
59. Colin Lee, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy (New York: Oxford
University Press, in preparation).
60. Karen Tongson, Why Karen Carpenter Matters (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019). Susan
Fast and Craig Jennex, eds., Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist
Interventions (New York: Routledge, 2019). Morad, Fiesta de diez pesos. Vincent L. Stephens,
Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered
Pop Music (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019). Gregory Barz and William
Cheng, eds., Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2020). Ashon T. Crawley, The Lonely Letters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and
Changed American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Alisha
Lola Jones, Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel
Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Matthew J. Jones, Love Don’t Need a
Reason: The Life & Music of Michael Callen (Goleta: Punctum Books, 2020). Slominski, Trad
Nation.
61. Available at https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/page/about.
62. For example, Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 1979).
63. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 40th-anniversary ed.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). First published 1976.
64. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31.
65. Sue-Ellen Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Discourse 11, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1988–
1989): 55–73.
66. Excellent earlier studies of queer versions in music include Mark J. Butler, “Taking it Seriously:
Intertextuality and Authenticity in Two Covers by the Pet Shop Boys,” Popular Music 22, no.
11 (January 2003): 1–19, and Raykoff, “Transcription, Transgression, and the (Pro)creative
Urge,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Fuller and Whitesell, 150–176.
67. Pauline Oliveros, Software for People: Collected Writings 1963–1980 (Baltimore: Smith
Publications, 1984), 182.
68. Tim Ingold, “Four Objections to the Concept of Soundscape,” in Being Alive: Essays on
Movement, Knowledge, and Description (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 136. Ingold
specifically warns that sound recording is misleading in its separation of sound from the world
(136–137).
69. Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life & Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1999). Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian
 Musicality (New York: Routledge, 2008). Joshua Gamson, The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend,
the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco (New York: Picador, 2005). Alice Echols, Scars of
Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
2000).
70. See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991).
71. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
(New York: Poseiden Press, 1993). D.A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Cusick: see note 32. Philip Brett, “Piano Four-
Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 2
(Autumn 1997), 149–176.
72. Brett, “Musicality,” 23.
73. Maynard Solomon, “Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-Century
Music 12, no. 3 (1989), 193–206.
74. Brett, “Piano Four-Hands,” 150.
75. Ibid., 171.
76. This is somewhat like Michelle Kisliuk’s criterion for personal material in ethnomusicology:
“Most anthropologists and other ethnographers have not been trained to distinguish between
self-indulgence and ethnographically-relevant experience, and have thereby impaired
themselves and their readers. The way to distinguish, I suggest, is to ask ourselves whether an
experience changed us in a way that significantly affected how we viewed, reacted to, or
interpreted the ethnographic material (and to write with those connections in mind).”
“(Un)doing Fieldwork: Sharing Songs, Sharing Lives,” in Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley,
Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 2nd ed. (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
77. See Marion A. Guck, “Music Loving, or the Relationship with the Piece,” Journal of
Musicology 15, no. 3 (Summer 1997), 343–352.
78. John McCullough, Reckless Paper Birds (London: Penned in the Margins, 2019).
79. Michel Foucault’s transformative proposal that sexuality has a history includes, influentially, his
dating of homosexuality to the late nineteenth century. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An
Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
80. I am grateful to many people who helped me think about aspects of this Introduction: Christina
Baade, Matti Bunzl, Andre Cavalcante, Jennifer Fraser, Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Matthew
Jones, Ellen Koskoff, Horace Maxile, Susan McClary, Gregory Mitchell, Mitchell Morris, Tavia
Nyong’o, Ann Powers, Gillian Rodger, Tes Slominski, Stephen Stuempfle, and Lloyd Whitesell.
Special thanks to Associate Editor Zoe Sherinian for detailed, insightful, consequential
comments on a draft of the full introduction.
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 PA RT I

KINDS OF MUSIC
 CHAPTER 2

WHOSE REFUGE, THIS HOUSE?

The Estrangement of Queers of Color in
Electronic Dance Music
 L UI S MAN UE L GARCI A- MI S P I RE TA

E dance music (EDM)1 scenes have long had to deal with the
impact of cycles of wider popularity and exposure, which have often
strained their connection to the original contexts of their emergence. For
many of these scenes, their origins can be traced to the urban nocturnal
worlds of sexual and ethnic/racial minorities. Such worlds have historically
played an important role in queer lives as “counterpublics”2—that is,
protected spaces where nonnormative forms of embodied stranger-sociality
can flourish and alternate modes of collective life can be temporarily
sustained. Therefore, given the importance of these originating music
scenes to their minoritized participants as spaces of survival, comfort,
recognition, and community-building, it is equally important to examine
this pattern of estrangement and assess its stakes for the queers of color3
who have played a pivotal role in this music’s development.
This chapter seeks to redress the lacunae of conventional electronic
dance music historiography by providing a revised (and necessarily
condensed) account that focuses on issues of sexuality and race in the early
years of disco, house, garage, and techno. Furthermore, it traces queer
counterhistories into the present, which militate against the apparent
disappearance of queers of color from the scenes where electronic dance
music has continued to develop. Nonlinear, fragmentary, and scattered
geographically by necessity, these counterhistories include the midtown
Manhattan deep-house scene of the 1990s, vogue balls, circuit parties
(yearly, large-scale, highly commercialized gay men’s dance events), Paris’s
queer women’s dance scene, the continuing queer scene of Berlin, and a
transnational network of South Asian queer dance nights.
Audiences change, music travels, new substyles emerge, and the music
industry’s marketing methods often intervene. From disco to the
innumerable sample-based dance music styles that have spawned in its
wake, a double transformation continues to take place, wherein the
participation of queers of color seems to decline, while their mythical status
as originators ossifies in layers of nostalgia and fetishized projection. This
double transformation is apparent in current-day Berlin, for example, a city
that has regained its status as an international center for electronic dance
music during the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Notably, the years since around 2010 have seen a resurgence in the
popularity of disco and early house music—both styles historically and
imaginatively associated with racialized queerness. After the implosion of
Berlin’s 1990s rave scene—centered mostly around harder versions of
techno and trance styles—the city’s dance music scenes reemerged with
their own minimal substyle, which featured starkly minimalist textures
taken from techno, swinging drum patterns taken from house music, and an
emphasis on hypnotic, slowly shifting patterns. But by the end of the
decade, a backlash against this apparently overplayed and overexposed
minimal style was taking shape both in Berlin and abroad, and soon certain
DJs, venues, and event promoters began to show a renewed interest in disco
and the classic, “old-school” house music of the 1980s and 1990s.
For example, many of the resident DJs of Panorama Bar/Berghain, such
as Tama Sumo, ND_Baumecker, Boris, and (until 2012) Prosumer, have
risen to prominence with a repertoire that ranges from early disco to mid-
1990s “deep house,” along with new tracks that have a classic sound (e.g.,
in 2013, this included productions by SoundStream, Morgan Geist, and
Bicep, as well as recent releases on Rush Hour Recordings). It is likely no
coincidence that these disco-friendly DJs are all queer-identified, holding
residencies at a nightclub that has its origins in queer fetish parties.
This renewed appetite for early disco and house-music tracks has come
with a strong sense of nostalgia for the golden age of these styles, and this
yearning for a charmed past has brought with it images (and imaginings) of
the queer, racialized clientele that filled such clubs as The Loft (New York),
Paradise Garage (New York), and The Warehouse (Chicago). This retro turn
has generated a sharp rise in demand for veteran American DJs from the
early years of house music—most of them men of African-American or
Afro-Caribbean descent, and some also queer—in Berlin’s clubs, as well as
all over Europe. Further, against the background of predominantly white
European audiences, these DJs’ perceived race and sexuality often take on
renewed symbolic significance as markers of authenticity, as living links to
a lost era of plenitude. Since the early 2010s, electronic dance music fans in
Berlin have been willing to wait in hourlong queues and squeeze into
overcapacity venues to see a real house DJ, where “real” often stands for
some combination of American, Black, Latinx, and queer.4
This investment in a historically freighted, aura-imbued, sexual-racial
nexus of identities is by no means unique to Berlin, nor is the diminishing
profile of queer and/or nonwhite participants in electronic dance music
scenes a recent, Berlin-specific development. In 2011, for example,
unreleased material recorded by early Chicago house-music artists more
than 20 years earlier was published to great international success by a
Dutch record label. Rush Hour Recordings released Resurrection (2011,
RH-113-BOX), a five-LP box set of 30 previously unreleased tracks by the
1980s house duo Virgo Four, personally selected by the label’s manager
from hundreds of four-track demo tapes.
In all the advertising for Resurrection, Rush Hour never failed to
mention that all the tracks were previously unreleased, recorded between
1984 and 1990 in various home studios. Despite the steep price-tag of 45
euros (not including shipping for a very heavy box of vinyl), Resurrection
sold out quickly, and soon the box set appeared on secondhand vinyl
websites like Discogs.com, with a substantial markup.5 One of the singles
from the collection, “It’s a Crime,” became a worldwide club anthem over
the summer of 2011. The collection was well received in Chicago, where
house-music fans (both young and old) were pleased to see a renewed
international interest in the city’s music producers (albeit with a historical
slant). And yet, in a city that still is racially hypersegregated, many of the
predominantly white and straight house-music fans of Chicago’s North Side
scene were only discovering this dimension of their city’s music history
through a Dutch recording label, 20 years later. Meanwhile, Chicago’s
original queer Black scenes are alive and well, still partying in the
interstices of the urban landscape.
Diverse queer dance-music scenes continue to thrive today, largely out
of the view of the globalized master narratives of electronic dance music
historiography. But if these scenes are the modern-day incarnations of those
that founded electronic dance music’s central cluster of genres, why are
they not attracting more attention and reverence? The remainder of this
chapter is composed of histories and counterhistories.
I first recount the conventional and oft-repeated histories of disco and its
inheritors, noting where queers and people of color both entered and exited
the scene of storytelling. I then turn to a cluster of counternarratives,
traversing a set of case studies that ranges from vogue balls to circuit parties
to Parisian lesbian discothèques to Berlin’s ongoing queer dance scene, in
order to trace continuities in queer dance-music activity right into the
present. In this sense, my project here is a historical-revisionist one, but it is
also critically presentist:6 it reveals how electronic dance music
historiography occludes the present-day musical worlds of queers of color.
Why have queerness and Blackness/brownness been frozen in the past—
like the “primitive” research subjects of early anthropology—to be
aestheticized, fetishized, and mourned as “lost,” when the corresponding
scenes continue to flourish in the present?
 H

At the beginning of the 1970s in New York City, queers of African-

American and Latin-Caribbean (primarily Puerto Rican) descent, drag
queens of many shades, and straight-but-not-narrow allies came together to
create small pockets of space in the urban landscape where they could be
safe, be themselves, be someone else for a while, and be with others in
ways not permitted in the wider world, structured as it is by
heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Music was an essential part of these
gatherings, and the musical soundtrack of these events would eventually
develop into a musical genre called “disco.” A mix of soul, funk, and Latin
music, with a steady, driving, four-four, kick-drum pattern, disco took its
name from “discotheque,” the name given to nightlife venues dedicated
exclusively to the playback of recorded music. But most histories of disco
locate its origins outside of commercial nightlife venues, pointing instead to
David Mancuso’s series of private parties held in his loft (“The Loft”) on
the Lower East Side of Manhattan.7 Mancuso invited an eclectic mix of
partygoers across a range of sexualities, gender expressions, and ethnicities,
over which he presided as the DJ and master of ceremonies from beginning
to end.
Discotheques in lower and midtown Manhattan soon began catering to
this emergent musical scene, and by 1973, disco had sufficiently
crystallized for music journalist Vince Aletti to pen the first article on the
genre for Rolling Stone,8 identifying a number of Philly soul and rhythm ‘n’
blues (R&B) songs that had become disco hits at the time: the O’Jays’
“Love Train” (Philadelphia International, 1972); Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl
You Need A Change of Mind” (Tamla, 1973); the Intruders’ “I’ll Always
Love My Mama” (Epic, 1973); the Pointer Sisters’ “Yes We Can Can”
(Blue Thumb, 1973); and the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”
(Gordy, 1972). Aletti also identified a recent hit that he considered to be the
epitome of the “disco sound”: Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” (Fiesta,
1972), a slow-burning Afrobeat single with a loose, percussive groove.
Notably, Aletti historicized the recent revitalization of the local discotheque
scene by pointing to a thriving “underground” scene of “juice bars, after-
hours clubs, [and] private lofts open on weekends to members only,” driven
by a “hardcore dance crowd—Blacks, Latins, gays.”9
It was only some time later in the 1970s, after The Loft had closed at its
initial location, that New York’s disco scene developed a degree of
institutional stability and durability through its integration into the local
entertainment economy—one of the earliest examples of an aboveground
disco nightclub was Nicky Siano’s The Gallery.10 In a later interview, Aletti
described being struck by the social mixing at these early disco clubs,
describing them as “completely mixed, racially and sexually, where there
wasn’t any sense of someone being more important than someone else.”11
From then on, disco saw a rapid rise in popularity, spilling over into
mainstream discotheques, gaining national and international radio play, and
attracting a growing audience of white, heterosexual, and middle-class
dance-music fans. This period saw the opening of purpose-built disco clubs
such as Studio 54 (1977) and Paradise Garage (1976) in New York, as well
as the End-Up (1973) and the Trocadero Transfer (1977) in San Francisco.
This was also when some of disco’s most emblematic artists launched their
careers, including Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, KC and the Sunshine
Band, and Chic.
The 1977 release of the film Saturday Night Fever12 is frequently cited
as the apex of disco’s popularity—as well as the beginning of its decline.
Starring John Travolta and directed by John Badham, the film repackaged
the disco scene for a mainstream American audience, largely underplaying
the participation of queers of color while presenting a more palatable
personification of disco for mainstream audiences by replacing the genre’s
queer Black and Latinx dancers with a heterosexual, Italian-American, fair-
skinned protagonist.13 At the same time, disco recordings began to flood the
music market as major record labels saw a lucrative opportunity for their
catalogs of extended-play (EP) singles.
Often at the behest of label management, nondisco artists began to
record crossover disco songs and include disco remixes on the B-sides of
their EP releases, while disco cover bands and studio producers created
“disco-fied” versions of popular rock and pop songs. By the end of the
decade, disco’s soundtrack to queer utopian nightlife worlds had been
thoroughly commercialized, commodified, and sanitized, such that the
erotic and affective contexts of its development were largely invisible to
consumers—or at least were easier to ignore.
Although opposition to disco in some quarters emerged at the same time
as disco itself, it converged into a widespread backlash during the period
following the release of Saturday Night Fever. The film apparently did not
succeed in sanitizing disco’s image, unable to relieve American mainstream
music consumers of their queasiness regarding disco’s queer, racialized
origins. Indeed, the battle cry of disco’s opponents, “Disco sucks,” was not
just metaphorical: it aimed to make explicit the association between disco
and the “cock-sucking fags” who loved it.14
Some Black artists and audiences also rejected disco, seeing in its
sensual femininity, queer ambiguity, and ecstatic artifice a white corruption
of Black American musical traditions such as R&B, soul, and funk;15
ironically, New York’s Black discos would later serve as some of the first
venues for early hip-hop events.16 In any case, with increasingly formulaic
disco releases saturating the airwaves, this homophobic, genderphobic, and
racist unease combined with rockist resentment at disco’s ubiquity to create
sometimes violent results.
On July 12, 1979, Chicago DJ Steve Dahl organized “Disco Demolition
Night” at Comiskey Park. Dahl and the promotions team at WLUP radio
encouraged attendees to bring their unwanted disco records with them,
which they could exchange for a steeply reduced entry fee. Then, the
records were to be gathered in a crate and, during the break between the
games of this Chicago White Sox/Detroit Tigers doubleheader, the records
would be blown up with dynamite. Attendance at the event was
overwhelming, and when Dahl detonated the dynamite under the old disco
records after leading the crowd in a chant of “Disco sucks,” fans flooded
onto the field and started to riot.17
But these collective antidisco outbursts were not as spontaneous or
grass-roots as it was later made out to be in the press; indeed, this backlash
was to a large extent organized by a handful of disgruntled radio
professionals (Dahl, but also Lee Abrams and Kent Burkhart), who
orchestrated a shift in rhetoric and programming across several radio
stations to profit from the ensuing antidisco backlash.18
 “Disco Demolition Night” was widely heralded as the end of the disco
era, but disco sales had already been weakening before that, as robust EP
singles sales failed to translate into more lucrative LP album sales, and
disco’s decline continued well into the early 1980s. Nonetheless, as if trying
desperately to convince themselves, innumerable American pop-cultural
sources—from television sitcoms to comic books to magazine editorials—
repeatedly announced, “Disco is dead.”
While disco scenes outside the United States mostly persisted and
transitioned to 1980s dance-pop, New Wave, and industrial repertoires, the
music seemed to vanish from the American popular music landscape,
leaving behind only the echoes of its backlash. Numerous venues closed
and countless careers ended in the early 1980s; only a few dance clubs
stayed open to form the underground of the postdisco dance era. In New
York City, Paradise Garage was the foremost of these surviving clubs,
maintaining a loyal following that was primarily (but not exclusively)
queer, Black, and/or Latin-Caribbean. The club’s resident DJ, Larry Levan,
developed his own distinctive sound—named “garage,” after the nightclub
—which became emblematic of New York’s underground dance music
scene at the time; this style would later be classified by electronic dance
music historians as either a precursor, a parallel, or a substyle of house
music.
Musically, garage featured a lower-tempo mix of disco, R&B, soul, and
funk, along with contemporary tracks that were groove-oriented, soulful,
and often centered on gospel-inflected vocal samples. Throughout the
1980s, Manhattan clubs like the Paradise Garage and the Saint, as well as
Zanzibar (in Newark, New Jersey), kept the postdisco tradition alive,
sustaining counterpublics that were alternately gay and white (the Saint),
straight and Black (Zanzibar), or queer, Black, and Latin-Caribbean
(Paradise Garage), while newer clubs such as Sound Factory (1989–1995)
and Twilo (1995–2001) continued this scene into the next decade,
dovetailing with the New York rave scene.
Over in Chicago, the postdisco scene dovetailed closely with the early
house-music scene. Most narratives of Chicago house19 music begin with
the arrival of Frankie Knuckles, a disco DJ who had honed his skills with
Larry Levan at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse in New York.20 A
new nightclub was slated to open in Chicago’s West Loop area in 1977, and
the club’s director, Robert Williams, invited Levan to relocate to the city to
work as the club’s resident DJ. By then, Levan had already secured a
permanent residency at the Paradise Garage, so he recommended Knuckles
instead. Knuckles then moved to Chicago and took over responsibility for
the music at the Warehouse, a club that catered primarily to gay Black and
Latino men. In 1982, Knuckles grew dissatisfied with the Warehouse and
left his residency, opening a new club called the Power Plant. In response,
Williams renamed his club the Music Box and invited local DJ Ron Hardy
to take over as resident DJ.
Chicago house music developed in these primarily queer or mixed-
sexuality clubs, emerging from an eclectic mix of older disco, Italo-disco,
funk, hip-hop, and European electro-pop. In contrast to the gospel- and
soul-inflected garage sound of New York, Chicago house drew more
directly from funk, with an emphasis on driving percussion, prominent bass
drum kicks, and higher tempos. By the late 1980s, house music and its
grittier, psychedelic substyle, “acid house,” were finding international
success in Europe, fueling the acid-house party/rave scene in the United
Kingdom (UK) at the end of the decade. As a result, Chicago house-music
producers and DJs soon found themselves booked at nightclubs in Europe
for primarily white and straight crowds, as all the while, their music scene
received almost no attention from the mainstream music market in Chicago.
Therefore, despite “Disco Demolition Night” taking place in that city in
1979, disco did not die in Chicago; rather, it went underground into its
queer dance scenes and returned in a new, stripped-down, and harder form.
Queers of any color are much less visible in the origin stories of Detroit
techno than they are in Chicago house, New York garage, or disco. While
race was an important, explicit identity category for members of Detroit’s
techno scene, categories like sexuality and gender did not seem to be.21
Most histories of the techno scene22 tend to characterize Detroit as the
straight, middle-class, serious, sober, and sexually restrained counterpart to
Chicago’s queer, working-class, druggy, messy, excessive, and horny
crowd. These accounts focus on Detroit’s significant middle-class Black
population at the time, mostly employed in the city’s unionized and
integrated car-manufacturing industry. Among the youth of this milieu there
emerged a network of exclusive “social clubs,” usually named after
European fashion houses, who organized a circuit of competing dance
parties.23
Into this scene entered the “Belleville Three”—Derrick May, Juan
Atkins, and Kevin Saunderson—who were high-school classmates in the
suburban town of Belleville. Through their shared interests in European
synthpop, electronic rock, electro-funk, and futurism, they began producing
music in their basements—a new, futuristic-sounding dance music that
drew heavily from electronic funk, relied more heavily on synthesized
samples instead of acoustic ones, replaced gospel-inflected female vocals
with sparse, male spoken-word samples—or did away with human voices
entirely—and stripped away the warmer textures of Chicago and New York
house music.
In the process of being marketed to international markets as a new, local
substyle of house music, Detroit’s electronic sound came to be known as
“techno,” in contradistinction to Chicago’s “house music.” In a sense, this
branching of stylistic taxonomy could be seen as an early symptom of the
historiographic tendency to disidentify Detroit’s electronic music scenes
from those of Chicago, but it is also clear that the city’s techno producers—
both this first wave of the mid-1980s and the second wave in the 1990s of
younger, minimalist producers such as Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, and Richie
Hawtin (aka Plastikman)—were eager to establish the sound of Detroit as
something specific to the city.24 Nonetheless, Detroit’s queers were
significantly active in the city’s techno scene as dancers, producers, DJs,
event promoters, label managers, and venue staff; recent ethnographic
research is only just now beginning to unearth some of these previously
ignored queer voices.25
To begin with, many of the nightclubs that survived the disco crash of
the late 1970s (e.g., Chessmate, Todd’s) were gay, queer, or both, becoming
more sexually integrated in the early 1980s and providing a crucible for
mixing, networking, and mentorship between a long-standing queer
nightlife community and a nascent techno scene. There is already a long
tradition of cross-generational mentorship and cultural transfer in queer
communities in general—especially since being excluded from
heteroreproductive life narratives can have the effect of also feeling
released from social expectations to “retire” from clubbing at a particular
life-stage—and in Detroit, this already existing sexual-musical world
provided many of the venues, studios, producers, DJs, and dancers that
nurtured and shaped early techno.26
Over in the United Kingdom,27 starting from around 1985, the first
Chicago house and acid-house tracks made their way into the repertoire of
Manchester’s all-night warehouse scene (dubbed “Madchester”), where
they were played alongside northern soul, funk, electro, and alternative
rock.28 A few years later, acid-house rapidly became popular in London,
with the gay nightclub Heaven being one of the first venues to host acid-
house nights. Danny Rampling opened the first dedicated acid-house club,
Shoom, in 1987, after his return from a stay in Ibiza with DJs Paul
Oakenfold and Nicky Holloway, where they all had been exposed to house
music and experimented with the empathogenic drug, ecstasy (3,4-
methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA). A year later, Nicky
Halloway opened Trip, another acid-house club.
Both clubs enjoyed great success, but their high attendance, intense
parties, and late closing hours soon found them on the wrong side of UK
nightlife ordinances. Police pressure made throwing acid-house parties
increasingly difficult, and soon promoters began to organize clandestine
events in warehouses and out-of-town locations. These illicit warehouse
parties came to be called “raves,” blossoming into a massive scene over a
couple of years. Some commentators dubbed 1989 the “Second Summer of
Love”—in comparison to the hippie “Summer of Love” of 1967—noting
the massive, outdoor acid-house events that approached Woodstock in size;
the revival of interest in psychedelic aesthetics and practices; the multiracial
and mixed-class crowds; and the effects of widespread ecstasy use.29
The rave phenomenon arrived on American shores relatively quickly
thereafter, when Scottish expatriates in Toronto (Mark Oliver, Anthony
Donnelly, and John Angus) and a DJ in New York (Frankie Bones) sought
to re-create the events that they had attended while visiting the United
Kingdom. The former founded Toronto’s first rave promotion group,
Exodus, in 1991, while the latter inaugurated the “Storm Rave” series in
1990. In Chicago, the house scene still existed in the form of small loft and
warehouse parties, but rave promoters nonetheless began organizing events
in 1991, which primarily featured hard techno and early “breakbeat” genres
(e.g. electro, hardcore, breaks, jungle, drum‘n’bass) instead of house. The
first generation of Chicago’s house DJs was already busy with more
lucrative bookings in Europe and elsewhere in the world, but a younger
generation of local house DJs infiltrated this budding scene and made house
music a hallmark of the Chicago rave scene.
Across all these locations (and in most other urban centers in North
America), these new rave events tended to attract young, white, middle-
class, and predominantly heterosexual partygoers (although some scenes
were more gay-friendly than others).30 Tommie Sunshine, a well-known
personality in the early Chicago rave scene, claimed, “The way I found out
about house—I think the way most white kids in Chicago found out about it
—was by reading about what was going on in our city in the British [music
weeklies] Melody Maker and NME.”31
Therefore, there is an irony in the fact that Chicago’s mostly white raver
community discovered the recent musical heritage of their city through the
mediation of nightlife scenes on another continent, as meanwhile, Chicago’s
original queer dance scenes continued to survive and thrive out of the view
of the rave “massive”—that is, the imagined translocal community of ravers
frequently evoked in contemporary underground radio, mixtapes, and event
flyers. In some ways, this speaks to the hypersegregation that still shapes
Chicago’s urban landscape today.32 While each neighborhood in Chicago
has a unique ethnic history bound up with waves of migration, the overall
fabric of the city has changed over the twentieth century into a few broad
ethnic and racial zones: whites live predominantly in the north and
northwest neighborhoods (with the exception of a remaining Irish enclave
in Bridgeport); Black residents are concentrated in the southern part of the
city (the South Side) and along a corridor directly west from the Loop;
Latinxs (predominantly of Mexican ancestry) had lived in various
neighborhoods during early periods of migration, but processes of
gentrification continue to push them out of neighborhoods such as Wicker
Park, Logan Square, and Pilsen, toward the southwest quadrant of the city.
Urban segregation has left its mark on Chicago’s nightlife scenes (and
not only those related to electronic dance music), with many venues
attracting either a predominantly white, Black, or Latinx crowd, based on
where they are located and which promoters are organizing a particular
event. Points of racial and sexual overlap have existed in the past, as well as
in the present (e.g., the Boystown nightclub Berlin, which often featured a
sexually mixed crowd on Friday nights; the now-defunct monthly house-
music night, “Boom Boom Room,” which drew a racially mixed queer
crowd where transgender33 people were prominent and held important
roles; or the more recent “Queen!” and “Hugo Ball” events at SmartBar,
which have made great efforts to bring a racially and sexually mixed crowd
to the North Side), but the racial and ethnic striations of the city remain
palpable in the local electronic dance music scenes.
These are but a few, thin historical threads, focusing mostly on those
styles of electronic dance music where queers of color had some mention in
the official history. This account does not cover the Bhangra scene of the
1980s and 1990s,34 nor does it deal with the entire “hardcore continuum”35
of electronic dance music (e.g., breakbeat, drum ‘n’ bass, jungle, hardcore,
dubstep), which had their roots in the United Kingdom’s South Asian and
Black-Caribbean migrant social scenes. In comparison to disco, house, or
acid-house, these scenes were hardly open to queers at the time of their
emergence—but that does not mean that there are no queer narratives to be
found there. Indeed, there are many more queer, “other” narratives than
those that appear in the prevailing history of electronic dance music.
 C

The dominant narratives of electronic dance music history depict a pattern

of decline among queers of color—one of dwindling relevance and meager
musical innovation. And yet queer nightlife scenes thrive in numerous
urban centers, often in plain view of the electronic dance music scenes that
seem to have forgotten or discounted them.
Take, for example, that mixture of music, dance, performance art,
fashion design, and gender-play that goes by the name “drag ball,” “vogue
ball,” “drag pageant,” “ballroom,” or simply “ball culture.” Both glorifying
and satirizing beauty pageants, these competitive events constitute an
exuberant living tradition. While drag ball culture in New York can be
traced at least as far back as the Harlem Renaissance’s costume balls of the
1930s,36 and ethnographic interest in it as early as the 1970s,37 drag culture
came to wider attention at the beginning of the 1990s, due in large part to
three prominent cultural texts: the documentary Paris Is Burning; 38 Gender
Trouble, Judith Butler’s analysis of drag performance as the basis of her
influential theory of gender performativity,39 and Madonna’s hit 1990 dance
single based on (and named after) the emblematic dance style of 1980s drag
balls, “Vogue.”40 Since then, these events have served as both a crucible
and an archive of postdisco dance styles, developing and refining a
vocabulary of dance and stylized bodily movement that has influenced
modern dance culture well beyond the confines of electronic dance music
scenes.41
Especially since the 1990s, the “ballroom scene” has nurtured its own
substyle of high-intensity, vocal-oriented house music, such as Tronco
Traxx’s “Walk for Me” (Henry Street Music, 1996), Kevin Aviance’s
“Cunty” (Strictly Rhythm, 1996), E. G. Fullalove’s “Didn’t I Know (Divas
to the Dancefloor…Please)” (Emotive Records, 1994), Moi Rene’s “Miss
Honey” (Project X Records, 1992), and Master at Work’s classic “The Ha
Dance” (Cutting Records, 1991), which went on to form the basis of an
entire genre of vogueing tracks.
 As a form of performance, competition, personal reinvention, and
collective life, drag balls have primarily been the domain of queers of color,
although these scenes include a minority of white, straight, and/or
cisgendered participants. As such, ballroom scenes are some of the few
social spaces available to transgender people of various gender expressions
in which they can enjoy a degree of social and cultural authority; at these
events, they play a central role as emblematic performers while often
holding positions of power within local ball-scene hierarchies. Not only are
drag balls a safe space for queer expression (and critical deconstruction) of
gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and so on, they are also a place for
recognition and validation: the entire competitive system, with its plethora
of awards and trophies and honors and tiaras, serves as a counterweight to
the rejection and humiliation that transgender people, nonbinary people, and
other queers endure in everyday life.
During the 1990s, vogue balls were not the only queer worlds in New
York City to keep postdisco dance music alive. Alongside and intertwined
with ball culture was the midtown Manhattan “deep house” scene,
struggling to survive under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s increasingly
oppressive “cabaret laws” (specifically targeting dance venues with
prohibitively expensive alcohol licensing fees) and red-light zoning
regulations—and all the while providing a safer gathering space for the
city’s queers of various gender expressions and racial/ethnic identities.42
This, too, was a scene where queers of color could participate as valued
actors and stakeholders—albeit under the precarious conditions and
gentrifying pressures of the nation’s capital of neoliberal finance.43
The significance of this scene is made abundantly and painfully clear in
DJ Sprinkles/Terre Thaemlitz’s spoken-word introduction to the 2009
album Midtown 120 Blues (Mule Musiq, 2009). An essayist, multigenre
composer-producer, transperson, political activist and educator, Thaemlitz’s
choice of album title carries a triple significance: the notorious 42nd Street
strip where Thaemlitz frequently worked as a DJ in the transgender bar
Sally’s II before its closure in 1990; deep house’s relatively slow tempo of
120 beats per minute; and a much older, African-American musical
tradition characterized by a melancholic affective tone that marks loss,
despair, and painful remembering. In the album’s spoken-word introductory
track, subtended by a quintessential deep-house instrumental loop,
Thaemlitz is sharply critical of the naive, universalist platitudes of
mainstream house-music culture:
House isn’t so much a sound as a situation.
There must be a hundred records with voice-overs asking, “What is house?” The answer
is always some greeting-card bullshit about “life, love, happiness…” The House Nation likes
to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering, but suffering is in here with us.
[…]
Let’s keep sight of the things you’re trying to momentarily escape from. After all, it’s that
larger context that created the house movement and brought you here. House is not universal,
house is hyper-specific.
[…]
Twenty years later, major distribution gives us classic house, the same way soundtracks in
Vietnam War films gave us classic rock. The contexts from which the deep house sound
emerged are forgotten: sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, Black-market
hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Tompkins Square
Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment, and censorship—all at
120 beats per minute.
This is the Midtown 120 Blues.44

In barely two minutes of deadpan monologue, Thaemlitz engages in a

forceful, critically revisionist historiography of New York’s house music
scene. Here, house music is neither panacea nor refuge, but rather a
poignant, melancholy expression of particular problems, specific spaces,
and individual injuries. Also, in a narrative turn that evokes the contours of
this chapter, deep house is repackaged and returned to the market as
memorabilia, a museum piece for long-departed, historical queers.45 Yet
Thaemlitz released this album under the moniker “DJ Sprinkles,” a persona
intended to function as “a signifier of the unheard DJs, unplayed records,
and undocumented outcasts.” Why frame a deep-house-music project in
terms of oblivion and obscurity? “Because,” Thaemlitz goes on to explain
in an interview shortly after the album’s release, “ultimately, I think house
culture revolves around disenfranchised people attempting to construct a
space in which we feel important.”46 The stakes of queer nightlife (and this
chapter) could not be more starkly outlined.
But not all queer nightlife scenes have been restricted to the shadows of
urban interstices. At present, there exists a worldwide network of gay
“circuit parties,” which now occupies an ambivalent position in queer
politics as a potent marker of both gay (male, white, privileged) identity and
its progressive commercialization and commodification. Circuit parties
developed out of the post-Stonewall “tea dances” (daytime, post-brunch
dance events that skirted nightlife policing) and seasonal parties at Fire
Island and other queer resort areas on the eastern coast of the United States.
By the late 1980s, these parties had grown and professionalized into a
circuit of massive, all-night electronic dance music events located in gay
tourism destinations such as resorts and certain large cities (e.g., Montreal,
New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, or Toronto).
Musically, these events initially featured “Hi-NRG” (an uptempo,
synthesizer-heavy variant of disco especially popular in San Francisco) and
early vocal house, later incorporating hard-house, tribal house, and trance as
these substyles crystallized during the 1990s. Some commentators have
since explained the world of circuit parties to their straight reading
audiences by characterizing these events as “gay raves”;47 this
nomenclature is rather ironic, considering that the contemporary rave scene
itself could be traced via the United Kingdom to the same postdisco dance
scenes that gave rise to circuit parties. One could ask why raves are not
framed as “straight circuit parties” instead.
Admittedly, circuit parties indeed share a number of characteristics with
raves, such as their all-night running hours, the prominence of electronic
dance music genres, the ubiquity of ecstasy and other so-called club drugs,
and a penchant for overpriced energy drinks. But circuit parties differ from
raves in a number of factors, the most visible of which is their level of
professionalization and concomitant commercialization; from very early in
their history, circuit parties have been almost always large-scale, legal,
merchandized, and financed by corporate sponsors. For many both inside
and outside of these scenes, circuit parties have come to act as a metonymic
signifier for “mainstream gay male culture.” Despite this
commercialization, only some circuit parties are run for profit, with many
of the most well known events functioning as fundraisers for charities often
devoted to HIV/AIDS or other so-called gay men’s health causes. Much
like drag balls, circuit parties served as crucial points of community-
building, awareness-raising, and sex education during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
 Unlike rave scenes—which have been studied from a wide array of
disciplinary perspectives focusing on numerous facets of the phenomenon
—circuit parties have hardly been studied outside of epidemiological
research focusing on the public health issues of crystal methamphetamine
use and barebacking practices.48 What made the utopian music scenes of
straight, white, middle-class youth more compelling than the utopian queer
scenes active in the same cities at the same time? If the problem was
commercialization of circuit parties, then what about rave’s thorough
commercialization by the late 1990s? That has not prevented scholars from
studying the more commercial end of rave scenes—or any sort of
commercialized music industry, for that matter. So why are circuit parties
reduced to drug use and risky sex, when both were in abundant supply at
raves, too? Indeed, drug use has also been a concern in research on rave
culture,49 and rave events are often described as relatively less sexualized
than mainstream contemporary club culture.50
Many queer dance music scenes have been dominated by gay men—
circuit parties especially so—but queer women also have a long history of
developing and sustaining music scenes, although these scenes are less
often centered on electronic dance music.51 Nonetheless, in some cities
such as Paris, queer women have played leading roles in the local electronic
dance music scene. They have been highly visible throughout most of
Paris’s nightclub history, acting as DJs, event promoters, bar staff, and fans.
During the late 2000s (when I was conducting fieldwork there), lesbian
women were especially active in the éléctro52 and minimale53 subscenes;
for example, the lesbian club Le Pulp hosted a mixed-sexuality éléctro
event every Thursday night, where straight and queer music fans danced
under rows of “feminist fist” and “lesbian pride” posters. At the time of its
founding in 1997, lesbian DJ icon (and roommate of Le Pulp’s owner) DJ
SexToy (aka Delphine Palatsi) quickly gathered a crew of primarily queer
DJ residents for the club, including Jennifer Cardini, Fany Coral, Fabrice
Desprez, and Ivan Smagghe;54 this established Le Pulp as a center for
underground dance music that attracted a public well beyond the local
lesbian scene (in part due to their decidedly open, nonseparatist door
policy), while also introducing a generation of young queer women to
dance music over its 10-year run.
 Queer women as well as men continue to be well represented as both
organizational and service staff at Paris’s most famous electronic dance
music club, Le Rex, which used to attract a mixed-sexuality crowd in its
earlier years. On a narrow side street in the city’s principal gay district, Le
Marais, the lesbian event-organizing collective Les Ginettes Armées (The
Armed Ginettes) ran a small bistro-bar called Le Troisième Lieu (The Third
Place), which was tied to a neighboring restaurant (Les Filles de Paris) and
a record shop (My Electro Kitchen). On the weekends, the bar was
regularly transformed into an intimate club featuring a variety of dance
music styles. During the summer, a small chaletlike cafe-restaurant in Parc
Buttes-Chaumont, an English garden–style park located in the 20th
arrondissement, hosted a weekly series of queer dance events under the
name “Rosa Bonheur” (Rosa Happiness), organized by former members of
Le Pulp’s management.
Other women-run queer event promoters include La Petite Maison
Éléctronique, La Babydoll, Corps vs. Machine, and Barbieturix, the last of
which also produces a magazine. In addition to the resident DJs of Le Pulp,
several high-profile queer women DJs, producers, and promoters have come
up in the Paris scene, including Chloé, Clara Moto, Maud Scratch Massive,
Fantômette, Léonie Pernet (affiliated with Corps vs. Machine), and
Ragnhild Nongrata (affiliated with Barbieturix). The lesbian clubbing
landscape of Paris has been under significant pressure, however. Mostly due
to rapid gentrification and escalating operating costs, Le Pulp’s building
was bought by the city in 2007 in order to erect a housing project and a
parking lot; Le Babydoll ceased operations sometime at the end of that
decade; and Le Troisième Lieu and its associated businesses closed in 2012.
Of course, Paris is only one of several examples where queer women are
visible in local electronic dance music scenes. San Francisco, for example,
is widely recognized as having the highest concentration of active and high-
profile women DJs, a substantial proportion of whom identify as queer, of
color, or both.55
Returning to the discussion that opened this chapter, Berlin is one of the
few cities where queers have a long and unbroken history of central
participation in the electronic dance music scene—which renders all the
more ironic the local scenes’ recent fetishization of the chronologically- and
geographically distant queer nightlife worlds of house music’s origins. The
most visible example of this queer legacy is probably the techno/house
nightclub Berghain, housed in an East German–era former electrical power
plant, which remains one of very few queer nightlife venues anywhere to
maintain an international profile for its electronic dance music
programming. Open since 2004 as a successor to an earlier queer nightclub
(OstGut) that itself spawned from an itinerant gay men’s fetish event-series,
Berghain now attracts out-of-town visitors that include queer and straight
electronic dance music fans alike. Beyond Berghain, there are several
monthly or bimonthly queer electronic dance music events that maintain a
high profile within the local electronic dance music scene and command
respect for their DJ bookings, including “Homopatik,” “CockTail
d’Amore,” “Gegen Party,” “Room 4 Resistance” (of which the author is a
member), “Buttons,” and “Horse Meat Disco” (a satellite of the original
queer disco night based in London).
While these queer dance events attract a relatively diverse crowd, few of
them explicitly welcome queers of color or invoke comparable identity
categories. This does occur, however, at “Gayhane,” a monthly “oriental”
dance event that caters to queers with immigrant backgrounds—
predominantly Turkish-German and Kurdish-German. Founded in 1997 and
held in the legendary Kreuzberg punk venue SO36, “Gayhane” features a
mixture of Turkish, Arabic, and South Asian dance music, curated and
usually performed by the event’s resident DJ, DJ Ipek.
The event series quickly gained a loyal following, and its success and
growing visibility beyond the queer postmigrant community eventually
created difficulty for its organizers. First, there was an increase in
attendance by nonimmigrant, primarily white European gay men, some of
whom came with orientalist erotic expectations that the event’s original
clientele did not necessarily share; later, straight-identified Turkish-German
and Kurdish-German women discovered that “Gayhane” was a venue where
they could dance to music they enjoyed without unwelcome advances from
men; and, finally, straight-identified men began to attend the event in large
numbers.56 Although each of these arrivals raised concerns with the
organizers about displacing the event’s core audience, the last development
was followed by genderphobic, homophobic, and transphobic incidents of
violence at and around the venue.
This left the “Gayhane” organizers in the awkward position of enforcing
an increasingly exclusive door policy at an event that was conceived to be
inclusive across a wide range of identities. This pressure is keenly felt by
the event’s bouncers and door staff, who are charged with maintaining the
“right” mix of people inside the venue by refusing entry to many straight-
identified, nonimmigrant partygoers. For this task, they must rely on their
ability to “read” sexuality from the bodies of those in line, using the few
moments they have at the entrance to assess dress, body posture, vocal
inflection, facial expressions, gestures, grooming, eye contact, and
responses to one or two questions.57
This policy has not been without controversy, giving rise to accusations
in some quarters of racism, sexism, and heterophobia; these criticisms sit
uncomfortably with the migrant-centric and gender-equal ideals of
“Gayhane,” given the broadly held view that young, straight-identified men
with immigrant backgrounds are frequently the subject of racist exclusion
in the city’s wider nightlife scene. Rather than languishing in oblivion, this
queer postmigrant scene finds itself struggling with an excess of popularity
and visibility.
Berlin is certainly not the only city in which migrant and postmigrant
queers have been organizing dance events where they can feel, safe, valued,
but also blissfully unremarkable. In Chicago, for example, the queer
Bollywood dance night “Jai Ho” has been running successfully since 2009.
At present, it takes place every two to three months and is organized as a
fundraiser by Trikone-Chicago (an LGBT South Asian organization).
Musically, the events focus on Bollywood (from the 1970s to the present),
Bhangra, South Asian pop songs, and the occasional disco or Western pop
track. Also, Jai Ho’s DJs take advantage of the fact that newer Bollywood
films frequently include club remixes of their songs in their official
soundtracks.
As a focal point for the event, there is always some sort of show at
midnight, whether it is a drag performance, a dance number, a song, or even
a small competition. At the beginning of its run, Jai Ho’s founder, Kareem
Khubchandani, served as the event’s resident drag performer, appearing
under the moniker, “LaWhore Vagistan.” Similar events have been running
in many other cities with a prominent South Asian migrant population, such
as “Besharam” and “Rangeela” in Toronto, “Urban Desi” and “Club Kali”
in London, and “Sholay” and “Color Me Queer” in New York City.
There are far more counternarratives than can be recounted here. For
example, this brief overview leaves out the vibrant “sissy bounce” scene in
New Orleans, which been an important part of the city’s wider “New
Orleans bounce” hip-hop scene. Nor does this overview tell the story of
Toronto’s “Vazaleen,” a queer punk/alternative rock night from the early
2000s that diversified the musical offerings of the city’s gay nightlife scene
while also providing a space where queers of various gender expressions
and ethnicities could hang out together. Indeed, urban centers outside of
Europe and North America are not covered at all. But, if anything, the fact
that this review of queer counterhistories far exceeds the bounds of this
chapter supports my historical-revisionist argument all the more: queer
electronic dance music scenes are alive and thriving, if you care to look.
 F O U

Indeed, there is much, much more to electronic dance music history than
what appears on the web pages of its dominant historians—and the
undeniably political dimension of this situation is that the musical worlds of
queers of color are conspicuously left out of the story. Instead, they are
relegated to the distant historical past, left to imbue electronic dance
music’s genesis story with an aura of subcultural authenticity while
apparently remaining absent from its current mainstream—or even its
cutting edge. Meanwhile, present-day queer nightlife scenes appear to float
at the margins, unmoored from electronic dance music’s historical
timeline.58
Perhaps this is because classical historiography tends to see beginnings
and endings where there were gradual shifts, emergences, and
metamorphoses. The counterhistories related thus far, in contrast, describe
ever-changing continuities that link successive generations of queer dancers
and music-lovers. Many of these scenes are both progressive and
conservative, keeping queer musical/dance traditions alive while altering
and adapting them to changing circumstances. Further, despite their relative
obscurity, they continue to serve as crucibles for far-reaching cultural
developments in mainstream media.
But perhaps this state of affairs has something to do with a felt absence
in the middle of electronic dance music scenes themselves. As this cluster
of musical styles have gained in popularity, its demographics have changed,
shifting the discursive center of these musical counterpublics and
progressively weakening their claims to subcultural, countercultural, and
outsider status. Whose refuge is this “House Nation,” when it has become
the domain of white, middle-class, straight, privileged partygoers?
So, in the electronic dance music scenes of Berlin, Paris, London,
Chicago, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere, the dwindling
presence of queers of color seems to be registered as a degradation in the
scene’s subcultural authenticity—like a faded photograph, bleached of
color. This felt loss, in turn, generates anxieties that are sublimated into a
yearning for a dark, culturally rich queer past of vibrant colors and affective
intensity. While present-day queer dance culture would only serve to
remind these larger, more mainstream scenes of this absence, this disco-era
and house-era imaginary holds out the promise to imbue electronic dance
music scenes with a sense of subcultural “realness.” And, while the veteran
Black and Latinx DJs of these early electronic dance music scenes enjoy
renewed attention during this most recent retro turn in house music, they
may also serve a more problematic purpose. Rather than the popular
romantic view of DJs as spiritual leaders or shamans, minority-identified
DJs risk becoming fetishized as totems of racial and queer authenticity,
bestowing validation with their presence upon music events that may have
little to do with their own experiences and affinities.
“What has happened to the minority-identity-politic music?” asks Pablo
“Beaner” Roman-Alcalá, a Chicano-American house DJ who also serves as
the slapstick-but-deadly serious evangelist for the political artists’
collective, La Mission, “Is it now only being played for privileged
honkies?” Based in Berlin, La Mission operates as an ongoing queer Latinx
performance art project, an anticapitalist record label, and a horizonalist-
syndicalist art collective—all of it expressed through a camp pastiche of
charismatic doomsday cults and references to the satirical film Network
(1976). I have found myself recruited to the cause since La Mission’s
founding in 2012, contributing essays to the magazines that are distributed
with the collective’s vinyl EP releases.59
Politically, the members of La Mission are invested in the transformative
potential of utopianism, particularly in the politically engaged sense
developed by Ernest Bloch and José Estéban Muñoz.60 In this view, queer
utopias are not merely escapist refuges for society’s outcasts, but also
rehearsal spaces for a better tomorrow—places where one can stage a more
livable world and then ask why it is not already a reality.
Thus the importance of Roman-Alcalá’s provocatively phrased question.
Early disco and house scenes undoubtedly served utopian functions within
minoritized queer communities, providing a safe space where these
marginalized “others” could build worlds that made survival possible and
improvement imaginable. So, what are the stakes when both the soundtrack
and the imagery of minoritized groups’ utopias are turned into the fodder of
mainstream consumption? What is lost and what is gained when queers of
color are frozen into history, to serve as a subcultural fetish for the
authenticity that more privileged consumers feel they have lost?
If, as Thaemlitz suggests, house-music culture is primarily shaped by the
efforts of marginalized peoples to construct a space where they can feel
important, what are we to make of more recent resurgences in this culture,
where these same groups seem to be only valued in absentia? Where does
that leave the queer nightlife scenes that still thrive today? Certainly, similar
questions have already been asked in relation to the shifting listenership and
mainstreaming of jazz, salsa, hip-hop, and other forms of racially and
ethnically marked expressive culture—but that does not make this problem
any less pressing. Whose house is this, anyway?
In the time that has elapsed from the first draft of this chapter until the
last, developments in global politics, as well as the electronic dance music
industry, seem to have provided some preliminary answers to these
questions. The electronic dance music boom that has been taking place
since at least 2010 has mainstreamed this genre in a manner that profitably
repackages queer, Latinx, and Black culture for the consumption of
predominantly white, straight, and cisgendered audiences—a pattern
recognizable in the history of other Afrodiasporic music genres within
popular music industries (e.g., jazz, blues, rock, hip-hop, reggaetón). And
as the prevailing logics of “ethical consumption” encourage consumers to
view their choices as endorsement or material support, the enjoyment of
Afrodiasporic, queer, and transgender musical subculture enables more
privileged electronic dance music fans to view their tastes as proof of their
progressive values, leaving unexamined the workings of patriarchy and
white supremacy within their own scenes. Notably, the fascination with
visual and aural representations of historically distant queers of color serves
to cover the absence of living ones on their dance floors.
The political incoherence pooling under electronic dance music has
become more apparent in 2016–2017, as the resurgence of right-wing,
neofascist politics in the United States and Europe has drawn latent bigotry
back into the public sphere. While many artists, labels, and event organizers
have publicly positioned themselves in opposition to this conservative turn
—invoking the Black, brown, queer, and transgender histories of the music
scene as an ethical call to arms—there has also been a spate of
controversies within electronic music discourse about bigoted statements or
instances of harassment and assault. The heated and increasingly polarized
debate surrounding these controversies has exposed a seam of reactionary
conservatism under the surface of electronic dance music culture.
The most depressing answer to the questions this chapter asks might be
that contemporary electronic dance music culture has been coopted and
perverted into a fig leaf for the persistence of systems of oppression. A
slightly more optimistic answer may be that these controversies are the
inevitable outcome of queers of color, women, and transfolk having more
success in intervening within these fields of cultural production (and profit).
Indeed, a persistent theme in online political discourse of these past few
years is how unsurprised queers of color are by this resurgent conservatism:
they always knew that mainstream popular culture did not welcome them as
much as their creativity. It is nonetheless a rude awakening for many in
electronic dance music scenes, but one that may yet prove salutary.
N
1. “Electronic dance music (EDM)” is a broad term originally developed in academic and
journalistic contexts to refer to any style of postdisco, sample-based dance music without
reducing it to its venues (e.g., club music, rave music), prioritizing one style over others (e.g.,
techno music), or conflating it with very different musical fields that have already laid claim to
“electronic music” (e.g. electroacoustic music). A recent popularization of the term—especially
the acronym—in mainstream media, however, has complicated the semantic field, such that it
can also refer to a more limited spectrum of dance music genres that have gained mainstream
popularity in North America since 2010 (e.g., dubstep, moombahton, trap). Nonetheless, the
usage of “electronic dance music” in this chapter refers to the term’s initial use as an analytic
metacategory; when discussing concrete cases, I will instead employ case-specific terms such as
“deep house” or “minimal techno.” In any case, the scholarly use of the term “electronic dance
music” continues with the 2009 inauguration of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music
Culture. For examples of this scholarly usage, see Kai Fikentscher, “You Better Work!”
Underground Dance Music in New York City (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000);
David Hesmondhalgh, “International Times: Fusions, Exoticisms, and Antiracism in Electronic
Dance Music,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation
in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2000); Susana Loza, “Sampling (Hetero)Sexuality: Diva-Ness and
Discipline in Electronic Dance Music,” Popular Music 20, no. 3 (2001); Kembrew McLeod,
“Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres, and More: Musical and Social Differentiation with
Electronic/Dance Music Communities,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 13, no. 1 (2001);
Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, “On and
On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music,” Music Theory Online 11,
no. 4 (2005): http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.html; Mark J.
Butler, Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Rebekah Farrugia, Beyond the Dance Floor:
Female DJs, Technology and Electronic Dance Music Culture (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012);
Alistair Fraser, “The Spaces, Politics, and Cultural Economies of Electronic Dance Music,”
Geography Compass 6, no. 8 (2012): 500–511.
2. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
3. In keeping with the theoretical framing of this volume, I use “queers of color” here as an
inclusive category that can span a range of sexualities, gender expressions, and ethnic/racial
identities. I do so advisedly, however, with the understanding that such terms may not have been
in use or predominant in the various scenes that I discuss here. I use more specific categories of
gender, sexuality, and ethnicity as appropriate in the descriptions of individual scenes, but
“queers of color” remains the metaconcept that permits me to suture these case studies into a
larger narrative.
4. Some examples from 2015 include Joe Claussell, Shaun J. Wright, Carlos Souffront, Miss
Honey Dijon, Sadar Bahar, Ron Trent, and Rahaan.
5. For the listing on Discogs, see http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?release_id=2743970&ev=rb.
 6. Readers will no doubt note that the historical and counterhistorical narratives presented here
lack truly global breadth, leaving out the Global South and East Asian regions. This is partially
because the initial lines of flight for disco and its successors are anchored in North American
and European urban centers, but this does not mean that there are no stories to tell about
electronic dance music elsewhere in the world. Indeed, much historical work remains to be done
on the early days of electronic dance music outside the West and the North.
7. Anthony Haden-Guest, The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night (New
York: William Morrow, 1997); Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music
and Dance Culture (London: Picador, 1998); Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a
DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York: Grove Press, 2000); Tim
Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret
History of Disco (New York: Faber and Faber, 2005); Alice Echols, Hot Stuff: Disco and the
Remaking of American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
8. Vince Aletti, “Discotheque Rock ’72: Paaaaarty!” Rolling Stone, September 13, 1973.
9. Ibid.
10. For an account of Siano’s founding of The Gallery, just as Mancuso’s Loft was drawing to a
close, see Lawrence, Love Saves the Day: 99–112.
11. Vince Aletti, “Vince Aletti Interviewed,” in The Disco Files 1973–78: New York’s Underground,
Week by Week, ed. Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster (London: DJhistory.com, 2009), 455.
12. John Badham, Saturday Night Fever (United States: Paramount Pictures, 1977).
13. This displacement was likely facilitated by the sort of perceived pan-Mediterranean cultural and
affective continuities between Hispanic and Italian ethnicities that Nadine Hubbs identifies in
the American reception of late-1970s disco. Nadine Hubbs, “‘I Will Survive’: Musical
Mappings of Queer Social Space in a Disco Anthem,” Popular Music 26, no. 2 (2007): 231–
244.
14. Gillian Frank, “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash Against Disco,” Journal
of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 2 (2007): 276–306; Hubbs, “‘I Will Survive’: Musical
Mappings of Queer Social Space”; Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and
Disco,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia
Rose (London: Routledge, 1994); Carolyn Krasnow, “Fear and Loathing in the 70s: Race,
Sexuality, and Disco,” Stanford Humanities Review III, no. 2 (1993): 37–45; Nyong’o, Tavia. “I
Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents.” Criticism 50, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 101–12; Frank Rose,
“Discophobia: Rock & Roll Fights Back,” Village Voice, November 12, 1979, 35.
15. Echols, Hot Stuff, 207–208; Fink, Repeating Ourselves, 241–242n16; Frank, “Discophobia,”
290n50; Reynolds, Energy Flash, 24.
16. Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
17. There are now several historical accounts that cover this event in great detail: Echols, Hot Stuff;
Frank, “Discophobia”; Lawrence, Love Saves the Day; Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around.
18. Echols, Hot Stuff; Frank, “Discophobia”; Rose, “Discophobia: Rock & Roll Fights Back.”
19. For instance, Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life; Reynolds, Energy Flash;
Hillegonda Rietveld, This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces, and Technologies
(Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998).
 Strangely enough, a monograph-length history of Chicago’s postdisco dance music scenes has
20.
yet to be written. Nonetheless, the city appears prominently in nearly every historical account of
house music: Brewster and Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life; Matthew Collin and
John Godfrey, Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House (London: Serpent’s
Tail, 1997); Marcel Feige and Kai-Uwe Müller, Deep in Techno: Die Ganze Geschichte des
Movements [Deep in Techno: A History of the Movement in Its Entirety] (Berlin: Schwarzkopf
& Schwarzkopf, Germany, 2000); Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson, Discographies: Dance
Music, Culture, and the Politics of Sound (New York: Routledge, 1999); Ariel Kyrou, Techno
Rebelle: Un Siècle de Musiques Électroniques (Paris: Denoël, 2002); Alejandro L. Madrid, Nor-
Tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008); Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Energy Flash; Rietveld, This Is Our House; Hillegonda Rietveld,
“Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance
Music Culture 2, no. 1 (2011): 4–23; Mireille Silcott, Rave America: New School Dancescapes
(Toronto: ECW Press, 1999); Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural
Capital (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996).
21. Sean Albiez, “Post-Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early Detroit
Techno,” European Journal of American Culture 24, no. 2 (2005): 131–152; Christoph Schaub,
“Beyond the Hood? Detroit Techno, Underground Resistance, and African American
Metropolitan Identity Politics,” Forum for Inter-American Research 2, no. 2 (2009),
http://www.interamerica.de/category/volume-2-2/.
22. Albiez, “Post-Soul Futurama”; Reynolds, Energy Flash; Schaub, “Beyond the Hood?”; Dan
Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (New York: Billboard Books, 1999).
23. It is telling that no published history of Detroit techno to date has compared this competitive,
fashion house–inspired social-club system to the “house”/“family” systems of vogue ball
culture, even though this latter system was already largely in place by the late 1970s in larger
US cities. See also notes 36–41.
24. Albiez, “Post-Soul Futurama”; Schaub, “Beyond the Hood?”
25. Carleton S. Gholz, “‘Where the Mix Is Perfect’: Voices from the Post-Motown Soundscape”
(PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2011).
26. Carleton S. Gholz, interview with author, September 10, 2013.
27. See Collin and Godfrey, Altered State; Reynolds, Energy Flash; Thornton, Club Cultures.
28. Keith H. Halfacree and Robert M. Kitchin, “‘Madchester Rave On’: Placing the Fragments of
Popular Music,” Area 28, no. 1 (1996): 47–55; Steve Redhead, Subculture to Clubcultures: An
Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997).
29. Mark Heley and Matthew Collin, “Summer of Love 1989,” i-D, September 1989.
30. Silcott, Rave America.
31. Ibid., 103.
32. For more on the notion of hypersegregation, which was developed in part to describe the racial
landscape of Chicago, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “Hypersegregation in U.S.
Metropolitan Areas: Black and Hispanic Segregation Along Five Dimensions,” Demography 26,
no. 3 (1989): 373–391; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid:
Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993); Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality
 (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008); Rima Wilkes and John Iceland, “Hypersegregation in the
Twenty-First Century,” Demography 41, no. 1 (2004): 23–36.
33. In popular discourse, “transgender” is often assumed to refer only to binary-identified people
(i.e., trans men and trans women), but the term describes all those whose gender identity does
not align with their socially-ascribed sex, thus including identities such as nonbinary,
genderqueer, genderfluid, and so on.
34. Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani
Sharma, Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1996).
35. Simon Reynolds, “The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate,” Dancecult:
Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1, no. 2 (2010): 69–76.
36. Roger Baker, Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts (New York:
New York University Press, 1995); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture,
and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994),
http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/cul/resolve?clio6986554; Eric Graber, “A Spectacle in Color:
The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the
Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New
York: NAL Books, 1989); Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality,
Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); James Wilson, “‘That’s the Kind of
Gal I Am’: Drag Balls, Lulu Belles, and ‘Sexual Perversion’ in the Harlem Renaissance,” in
Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, ed. Kim Marra and Robert A.
Schanke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
37. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1972).
38. Jennie Livingston, Paris Is Burning (United States: Miramax, 1990). For the debate surrounding
the film and the gender impersonation it portrays, see Judith P. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Ann Cvetkovich, “The Powers of
Seeing and Being Seen: Truth or Dare and Paris Is Burning,” in Film Theory Goes to the
Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge 1993):
155–169; Phillip Brian Harper, “‘The Subversive Edge’: Paris Is Burning, Social Critique, and
the Limits of Subjective Agency,” Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (1994): 90–103; Lucas Hilderbrand,
Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic (Vancouver, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013); bell
hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” Z Magazine, 1991: 60–64; bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and
Class at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996).
39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990); Butler, Bodies That Matter.
40. Madonna, “Vogue” (Sire W-9851-T, vinyl EP, 12”). Also released on CD and cassette tape. For
more commentary—both academic and journalistic—on this video, see Marcos Becquer and
Jose Gatti, “Elements of Vogue,” Third Text 5, nos. 16–17 (1991): 65–81; Carol Benson and
Allen Metz, The Madonna Companion: Two Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer
Books, 1999); David Fraser, “Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction: The Madonna Question,
Sex, and the House of Lords,” Australasian Gay & Lesbian LJ 3 (1993): 1; José I. Prieto-
Arranz, “The Semiotics of Performance and Success in Madonna,” Journal of Popular Culture
45, no. 1 (2012): 173–196.
 Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in
41. Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013); Becquer and Gatti, “Elements of
Vogue”; Jonathan David Jackson, “Improvisation in African-American Vernacular Dancing,”
Dance Research Journal 33, no. 2 (2001): 40–53; Jonathan David Jackson, “The Social World
of Voguing,” Journal of the Anthropological Study of Human Movement 12, no. 2 (2002): 26–
42; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York:
New York University Press, 2009).
42. Fiona Buckland’s monograph on Manhattan’s queer club world in the 1990s provides a nuanced
and critical ethnographic account of this transformation, including its impact both on the
availability of safer spaces for nonheteronomative sociability and on the personal life-worlds of
individual partygoers. Fiona Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-
Making (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
43. Fikentscher, “You Better Work!”
44. Ken Taylor, “DJ Sprinkles: House of Mirrors,” XLR8R, May 5, 2009.
http://www.xlr8r.com/features/2009/05/dj-sprinkles-house-mirrors.
45. In preparation for a similarly themed magazine article for Resident Advisor, I conducted a
lengthy interview with Terre Thaemlitz via email, which is archived in unabridged form here:
https://lmgmblog.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/terrethaemlitzinterview/.
46. Taylor, “DJ Sprinkles: House of Mirrors.”
47. See journalist Mireille Silcott’s book, which includes a chapter on gay circuit parties: Silcott,
Rave America, 149–182.
48. For example, Grant N. Colfax, Gordon Mansergh, Robert Guzman, Eric Vittinghoff, Gary
Marks, Melissa Rader, and Susan Buchbinder, “Drug Use and Sexual Risk Behavior Among
Gay and Bisexual Men Who Attend Circuit Parties: A Venue-Based Comparison,” Journal of
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes 28, no. 4 (2001): 373–379; Steven J. Lee, Marc
Galanter, Helen Dermatis, and David McDowell, “Circuit Parties and Patterns of Drug Use in a
Subset of Gay Men,” Journal of Addictive Diseases 22, no. 4 (2004): 47–60; Andrew M.
Mattison, Michael W. Ross, Tanya Wolfson, and Donald Franklin, “Circuit Party Attendance,
Club Drug Use, and Unsafe Sex in Gay Men,” Journal of Substance Abuse 13, nos. 1–2 (2001):
119–126; Patrick O’Byrne and Dave Holmes, “Desire, Drug Use, and Unsafe Sex: A Qualitative
Examination of Gay Men Who Attend Gay Circuit Parties,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 13, no.
1 (2010): 1–13; but see also Kane Race, “The Death of the Dance Party,” Australian Humanities
Review, no. 30 (2003), http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-October-
2003/race.html; Kane Race, Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Russell Westhaver, “‘Coming Out of Your Skin’:
Circuit Parties, Pleasure, and the Subject,” Sexualities 8, no. 3 (2005): 347–374; Russell
Westhaver, “Flaunting and Empowerment: Thinking About Circuit Parties, the Body, and
Power,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35, no. 6 (2006): 611–644.
49. Tammy L. Anderson, Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Thierry Colombié, Nacer Lalam, and Michel
Schiray, Drogue et Techno: Les Trafiquants de Rave (Paris: Stock, 2000); Kyle Grayson, “The
(Geo)Politics of Dancing: Illicit Drugs and Canadian Rave,” in Chasing Dragons: Security,
Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Sean Hier,
“Raves, Risks, and the Ecstasy Panic: A Case Study in the Subversive Nature of Moral
Regulation,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 27, no. 1 (2002): 89–105; Geoffrey Hunt, Molly
 Moloney, and Kristin Evans, Youth, Drugs, and Night Life (New York: Routledge, 2010);
Thornton, Club Cultures.
50. Maria Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001).
51. For example, Judith Halberstam, “What’s That Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural
Lives,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (2003): 313–333; Elspeth Probyn,
Outside Belongings (New York: Routledge, 1996); Karen Tongson, “Tickle Me Emo: Lesbian
Balladeering, Straight-Boy Emo, and the Politics of Affect,” in Queering the Popular Pitch, ed.
Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2006), 55–66.
52. This is an abbreviation of “electroclash,” a style emergent in the early 2000s that fused
contemporary house with 1980s electro-pop, New Wave, and synth-rock. It is characterized by a
preponderance of arpeggiated synthesizer chords, heavy use of equalizer filters, distortion, and
deadpan vocals, all of which signal a certain nostalgia for the sounds of 1980s music.
53. “Minimale” was a term used in Paris music scenes during the late 2000s that referred to sparse,
minimalist renditions of both house and techno styles of electronic dance music. This category
is roughly equivalent to the “minimal” associated with Berlin, as described in the introduction of
this chapter.
54. Jennifer Cardini, interview with author, September 19, 2013.
55. Farrugia, Beyond the Dance Floor.
56. Kira Kosnick, “Out on the Scene: Queer Migrant Clubbing and Urban Diversity,” Ethnologia
Europaea 38, no. 2 (2008): 20.
57. Ibid., 21.
58. This state of affairs has shifted somewhat while this chapter was in progress. In 2014, I wrote
and published a similarly themed feature article for the online electronic dance music magazine
Resident Advisor, which received a surprising amount of attention. Since then, other electronic
dance music media outlets such as Thump (a subsidiary of Vice magazine), Red Bull Music
Academy, and DJ Broadcast have all been publishing feature-length articles engaging with
sexuality in club culture. See Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, “An Alternate History of Sexuality
in Club Culture,” Resident Advisor, January 28, 2014;
http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1927.
59. See also La Mission’s website, available at http://www.joinlamission.com/.
60. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1938–1947; repr.,
1986); Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
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 CHAPTER 3

THE QUEER PLEASURES OF

MUSICALS
 B R ADL E Y ROG E R S

I a 1988 episode of The Golden Girls, Blanche’s brother, Clayton,

confides to Rose that he is gay.1 Although Rose refuses to disclose the
secret to Sophia, Sophia herself announces that this secret is in fact no
secret at all: “The man’s as gay as a picnic basket!” When Dorothy asks
Sophia how she made such an uncannily perceptive observation, Sophia
reveals, “I heard him singing in the shower. He’s the only man I ever knew
who knows all the words to ‘Send In the Clowns’!” This contemporary
association between queerness and musical theater remains a venerable
trope in popular culture, and indeed betokens the deep investment that
many queer people—and in particular, gay men—have in the genre. Why
should this be? A generally middlebrow genre often categorized as “family
entertainment,” the musical’s conventional investment in boy-meets-girl
romance makes it an unlikely locus of queer energy—so how can we
account for this unexpected connection between a form of desire and an
aesthetic genre?
In order to examine this question, I begin by considering the queer
pleasures offered by a canonical piece of musical theater, the 1966 musical
Mame.2 The plot of Mame focuses on the titular bohemian aunt who
unexpectedly finds herself entrusted with her orphaned nephew, Patrick.
After she teaches him—as well as his mousey nanny, Agnes Gooch—her
zestful approach to life, Mame marries a Southerner, with whom she
gallivants around the world. After her husband dies, Mame returns to
discover that Patrick, now an elitist snob, plans to marry an insufferable
young debutante. Mame sets out to reveal to Patrick his folly, and Patrick,
ultimately seeing the error of his ways, ends up marrying someone far more
charming. The play ends as Mame begins to teach her grand-nephew,
Patrick’s son, her unique philosophy of life. With its plot involving two
heterosexual marriages and two births, Mame would seem—like most
musicals—to offer little in the way of avowed queerness. However, like the
genre itself, Mame reveals its sublimated queer desire with but the slightest
hermeneutic pressure.
To understand how queer desire might be sublimated into a theatrical
genre, we can look to a mise en abîme: Mame’s best friend is Vera Charles,
an acerbic baritone introduced as “one of the great ladies of the musical
theater.”3 In the one scene where we see Vera working as an actress, she
plays “a lady astronomer” who has made a “universe-shaking discovery.”4
Recalling Bea Arthur’s performance as Vera in the first preview, composer-
lyricist Jerry Herman writes:
Bea came right down to the edge of the stage and sang very earnestly and sincerely, directly
to the audience…Bea peered into her telescope, took a loooong pause, looked straight into
the front row of the orchestra, and sang…Well, the roar that went up from the audience
lasted a full minute. Bea had to stand there forever with that telescope pressed to her eye
before the audience would let her go on. Talk about stopping a show…5

In this moment are concentrated so many of the queer pleasures of musical

theater—but significantly, they all begin with “stopping a show,” the
highest praise that can be accorded a performer or a song. Indeed, the act of
stopping the show is central to explaining the relationship between queer
desire and the structure of musical theater.
The musical revels in its ability to interrupt its narrative, providing
moments in which dramatic scenes halt while singing and dancing bodies
usher spectators into other realms of affective experience. Flagrantly
soliciting audience engagement through the exhibitionistic nature of
performance, these spectacular musical interruptions necessarily
marginalize the dramatic book scenes. The very act of performing is often
asserted to have transformational possibility—as, for example, in Jerry
Herman’s exhortation in a lyric from Mack and Mabel to “tap your troubles
away.” This is the utopian dimension of musical theater, with the possibility
that the stylized act of musical performance itself can change the world and
open horizons that were not possible in the drearier realm of dialog. By
inviting us to tap our feet, to hum along, and to applaud, the musical invites
us to share in the revolutionary, utopian potential offered by its exclamatory
moments of performance.
 The musical’s episodic structure thus introduces numerous impediments
to the heteronormative drive of narrative. By introducing these ruptures into
the plot—which as a species of comedy is disposed towards narratives of
heterosexual marriage and reproduction—the musical emphasizes the
possibilities of transcending narrative, offering different modes of
identification and pleasure.6 In this sense, every song functions much like
Mame’s “Open A New Window,” in which she advises Patrick to be
“slightly unconventional,” urging him to “dance to a new rhythm” and to
“whistle a new love song.”7 Indeed, this invitation to “whistle a new love
song” is precisely what occurs when the musical indulges its interruptive
aesthetic. And when the narrative inevitably returns, it can never remotely
contain what has just transpired; on the contrary, the dramatic situation
pales by comparison to the radical energies unleashed by the musical event.
One central moment in Mame exemplifies the drastic performative
potential of “whistling a new love song”: as Vera and Mame sing “Bosom
Buddies,” they perform one of the female duets that, as Stacy Wolf has
deftly shown, destabilize the heterosexual unions that ostensibly resolve the
plots of many mid-century musicals. Examining numbers from Guys and
Dolls, Wonderful Town, and West Side Story, Wolf demonstrates how “the
homosociality or homoeroticism of a female duet forces a wedge into the
1950s musicals’ resilient heterosexual project.”8 As Mame and her best
friend Vera sing of how their abiding friendship permits brutal honesty—in
the form of bitchy camp wit—the queer resonance of these two women
harmonizing receives textual affirmation in the lyric’s assurance that Mame
will “always be Alice Toklas if [Vera will] be Gertrude Stein.”9 The
dramaturgical structure of Mame thus promotes conflicting desires: while
the narrative suggests that Beauregard is her principal love interest, the
performative weight of her duet with Vera suggests that theirs is a more
significant relationship than the brief one she has with her virtually mute
husband.
Indeed, the conflicting demands of a musical’s narrative and its
spectacular musical episodes provide fissures whose instabilities can be
exploited to various ends as performers bring these unruly moments to life.
For David Van Leer, the failed seduction scene of Damn Yankees—in which
Joe’s matrimonial fidelity inures him against the seductive powers of Lola’s
“Whatever Lola Wants” dance—reveals how musical performances can call
into question the norms, sexual and otherwise, that the piece purports to
uphold. Damn Yankees revisits the Faust legend in the form of a middle-
aged baseball fan, Joe Boyd, who sells his soul to the devilish Mr.
Applegate, in exchange for a victory for Boyd’s favorite baseball team. Mr.
Applegate transforms Joe Boyd into a successful young ballplayer, Joe
Hardy, who leads his team to victory. Joe, however, misses his wife, Meg—
and so to distract Joe from pining for his wife, Mr. Applegate sends in his
top “home-wrecker,” Lola, who attempts to seduce Joe with her song and
dance, “Whatever Lola Wants (Lola Gets).”
Like many of the most satisfying moments of musical theater, this scene
offers performative pleasures that contradict narrative demands: we delight
in Lola’s seductive performance, yet we want Joe to return to Meg. While
the dance is one of the highlights of the musical, the plot thus requires that
Joe—fixated on his wife—demonstrate his love for Meg through his
seemingly implausible indifference to Lola’s feminine wiles. As Van Leer
notes, Joe’s “refusal of temptation looks like the absence of desire.”10 In
Van Leer’s reading, Joe’s inexplicable lack of response becomes richer in
the performance of Tab Hunter, an “invisible gay man” of 1950s Hollywood
who played Joe Hardy in the 1958 film version of the musical. While
Hunter’s character isn’t suggested to be gay, “[t]he movie asks us to believe
the contradictory propositions that a certain sexual situation would be by
definition irresistible, and that in one particular case a man resisted it…
Wherever the tensions between masculinity and morality increase, so does
the homosexual subtext.”11 Thus “[p]erplexed by Hardy’s fidelity,
audiences are invited to translate feelings of moral inferiority (‘I don’t
know how he can resist that’) into sexual complacency (‘We all know what
that means’).”12 While the musical ostensibly uses Hunter’s homosexuality
to “disguise irregularities in plot and characterization,” it also ultimately
invites us to identify with Hunter’s position. For Van Leer, Joe’s pact with
the Devil enables “the heterosexual Boyd” to become “a homosexual
Hardy”—and “in the show’s conflicting injunctions to watch Lola and
return to Meg, the audience regularly finds itself caught in the middle,
sharing with Hunter the spectatorial space of the bemused homosexual.”13
In this way, while Joe’s lack of passion ostensibly testifies to the
unwavering appeal of all sorts of mid-century values—among them the
unquestioned certainty that marriage and domestic tranquility are the
ultimate desires of all men—Hunter’s and co-star Gwen Verdon’s playful
performances invite spectators to question what is motivating the lack of
passion in the first place.
The pleasures to be found in the incongruities between the narrative and
performative moments of musicals have a strong parallel in the pleasures
that queer fans may take in lyrics that seem to offer incongruously queer
meanings beneath an unobjectionable veneer. To understand Mame’s
exhortation to “dance to a new rhythm” as suggestive of queerness
represents a kind of reading that musicals seem often to invite—and that
queer spectators seem to enjoy, as for example in John Clum’s eagerness to
hear something suggestive in the lovers of “Manhattan” who sing that
Greenwich Village is “[w]here modern men itch/To be free.”14 Reflecting
on the ease with which piano bar patrons can queer these Broadway song
lyrics, D.A. Miller remarks that “though this practice consists of nothing
more than putting the words of songs into a certain vocal italics, the
metamorphic force of the latter is so radical that…every lyric now becomes
a figure for present-day metropolitan homosexuality.”15 Though one often
takes pleasure in this willful “mis-reading” because of its absurdity, Miller
observes that at other times, this act of lyrical creativity becomes
work of an altogether different kind: an archaeological excavation that unearths a joint
between these gay meanings and the received ones that, contrary to previous impression,
oddly appear to be based on them, like a medieval church laid on the foundation of a razed
pagan temple, or an archaic palace erected over a still older place of sacrifice of which the
people had grown ashamed.16

In pursuing this “archaeological excavation,” to invoke Miller’s felicitous

phrasing, we discover that “[b]y contrast to the opera, or Bette Davis
movies, or any other general cultural phenomenon that enjoys…a gay
following—in other words, that gay subjectivity comes to invest only after a
creation at which it wasn’t presumably present—the Broadway musical,
with ‘disproportionate numbers’ of gay men among its major architects, is
determined from the inside out by an Open Secret.”17 In order to gain
access to the world of mass culture, the gay men who create it are forced to
“surrender all right to being recognized in this identity.”18
In surrendering this recognition and sublimating their desire, many of
the men who created the musical displaced their queer energies into a form
that celebrated women. Not insignificantly, the universe-shaking discovery
of Mame’s own lady astronomer Vera Charles, the announcement of which
stopped the show, was precisely that “[t]he man in the moon is a lady.”19
Thus revealed as a woman, the heretofore unremarkable moon may instead
become the focus of the entire operetta taking place onstage, invoking what
Miller articulates as the governing rule of musical theater:
though male and female alike may and indeed must appear on the musical stage, they are
not equally welcome there: the female performer will always enjoy the advantage of also
being thought to represent this stage…while the male tends to be suffered on condition that,
by the inferiority or subjection of his own talents, he assist the enhancement of hers.20

Mame takes this veneration of woman to an extreme, campily finding men

relatively useless except for occasional and fleeting moments of genetic or
financial necessity. Discussing the original rehearsal period, actress Jane
Connell, who played Agnes Gooch, remarked that “[m]any things worried
me about the show. For instance, there weren’t any dominant men, the roles
were really all strong women. That rather bothered me.”21 In one
particularly egregious example, Mame loses everything in the Depression,
yet almost immediately meets Beauregard Burnside, a wealthy Southerner.
In the scene following her obligatory pilgrimage to “Peckerwood,” his
ancestral home, we learn indirectly that Mame has married Beau—and
immediately thereafter, Patrick’s bank trustee reports that “that damn fool
husband of hers did a damn fool thing. Fell off a goddam Alp.”22 As the
trustee dutifully notes in the same breath, “Just remember this makes your
Aunt a very rich woman in her own right.” Mame’s destitution no longer an
issue, the plot can continue—without Beau consuming any narrative energy.
The canon of musical theater abounds with strong roles for women, and
indeed, the musical marshals the power of the diva, and the cultural
valuation of her as spectacle, in order to resist the inertia of narrative. In
fact, one of the pivotal contradictions that the musical upholds is precisely
that women’s bodies are deployed as spectacular interruptions, yet instated
as powerful subjects.23 While many creative genres work to domesticate the
radical nature of the female body, the musical celebrates and exploits this
energy. This exceptional nature of the musical genre can be seen in Laura
Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in which
she examines the role of woman as visual spectacle in classic Hollywood-
style narrative cinema. Mulvey argues that “[t]he presence of woman is an
indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual
presence tends to work against the development of story-line, to freeze the
flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”24 In order to
domesticate this untamed visual spectacle, Mulvey claims, the spectator is
made to identify with the ideal ego of the glamorous male movie star,
whose gaze (upon the woman) is now safely embedded within the diegetic
world of the film. In this way, mainstream cinematic spectatorship,
structured as it is by the patriarchal unconscious, resolves the “split between
spectacle and narrative” by embedding the feminine spectacular element as
an object for the male hero whose position as agent of the narrative is
unquestioned. Thus, Mulvey can assert that “mainstream film neatly
combines spectacle and narrative”—yet even more fascinating is her
parenthetical aside to the reader: “(Note, however, how in the musical song-
and-dance numbers interrupt the flow of the diegesis.)”25 Here, Mulvey
seems to recognize that musicals cannot structurally integrate narrative and
spectacle—leaving a gap that provides a space of resistance for the female
performer or the spectator.
Indeed, through the power of the female body to interrupt narrative, the
musical play shifts its register of address and disrupts the heteronormative
impulses of narrative. In this way, the musical rewards performers whose
style exceeds the narrative, and who are unable to “disappear into the
character.” No character can suppress the profound force of personality that
is Ethel Merman, Carol Channing, or Patti LuPone. No matter how subtle
their acting, these actresses always retain their stylistic trademarks, their
unmistakable timbres, and their fan bases eager to see the flickers of the
diva that distinguish the star and buoy her above the production. These
kinds of performers and their trademark qualities—the caustic earthiness of
Susan Johnson and Elaine Stritch, the heightened femininity of Jeanette
MacDonald and Bernadette Peters, and the born-in-a-trunk razzmatazz of
Ann Miller and Karen Morrow, for example—all insist upon the domination
of their style over whatever role, part, speech, or characterization might be
asked of them. This is precisely the intersection of the camp qualities of the
star and those of the generic form, whose numbers always exceed the
narrative.
Constitutionally unable to mute her personality, the diva often finds her
most satisfying roles when the character seems to be based on the life of the
performer herself. In these cases, far from subjugating herself to narrative
demands, the diva commandeers the entire narrative structure, making the
narrative quite literally revolve around her. In oscillating between the
theatricality of the role and the theatricality of the performer, the diva
rehearses the central lesson of camp: that of “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”26
Eliding the gaps between performer and character, these performances
invite spectators to relate the performer’s real life and her dramatic creation.
After Judy Garland’s emotional suffering became well known, for example,
it became possible to read emotional trauma into films made long before
her tribulations were publicly disclosed—and as Judith Staiger has shown,
the goal of gay readings of A Star Is Born is “not…to solve the riddles of
the text, nor is it to be entertained. It is, rather, to provide a hermeneutics of
Garland’s life.”27 In a less melancholy register, the elision between star and
material explains the riveting nature of, for example, Patti LuPone’s diva
turn singing “Buenos Aires” in Evita, where she celebrates her own “brand
of star quality”; or of the compelling hybrid of cabaret concert, one-woman
show, and book musical that characterized Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. By
conflating the biographical and the theatrical, these performances insist
upon the ways in which the musical performer, with her distinctive voice
and body, resists subordinating herself to the register of narrative.
Significantly, in assuming this unique position beyond the narrative
frame, the diva presents her body as a potential site for identification.
Communing with these diva performances, the gay fan goes well beyond
sharing the female character’s investment in the leading man, reaching
toward an investment in the diva’s transgressive femininity—a camp
femininity whose theatricality shows the instability of the very category
itself. Richard Tyler Jordan writes that Patrick Dennis, the man who created
Auntie Mame, once “said to friends, ‘Anybody who knows me knows who
Auntie Mame really is…’ Then he pointed to himself.”28 This identification
with femininity reached its paradigmatic expression when composer Jerry
Herman and author Patrick Dennis each conjured Mame herself precisely
through an act of feminine identification—indeed, by imagining themselves
as mothers. Composer Jerry Herman cited his own mother, Ruth Herman, as
his inspiration for the character. Recalling that the line “It’s Today!” was
one that his mother actually said to him as a child, the openly gay composer
wrote, “I had my song, and so much more. I realized that my own mother
was the best reference point for Mame I could possibly imagine. The score
simply poured out of me.”29 Fascinatingly, author Patrick Dennis settled on
the name “Mame” as something that “would suggest ‘mamma’ in a super-
cosmopolitan way.”30 Then, after giving his character the last name
“Dennis” as an urbane counterpoint, he legally adopted the fictive surname
as his own.
These queer relationships to motherhood find striking parallels in the
show itself: discovering Patrick enrolled at the unconventional “Laboratory
of Life” School, his conservator Mr. Babcock is horrified to find the
schoolchildren naked, playing a game called “Fish Families.” As Patrick
explains the game, “Mrs. Devine and all the girls crouch down on the floor
under the sun lamps—and they pretend to be lady fishes, depositing their
eggs in the sand. Then Mr. Devine and all the boys do what gentlemen fish
do.”31 In her living room “filled with pictures and statues of mothers and
madonnas,” Mame defends the game—“What could be more wholesome or
natural?”—and indeed, the entire show defends unconventional family
structures, queering the family by minimizing the role of fatherhood—with
the entire show set in motion by the death of Patrick’s father, whom we do
not even meet as a character. The most flagrant depiction of queer
motherhood occurs when Mame and Vera try to transform Agnes from a
homely nanny into a fierce seductress. After the dowdy Gooch reveals that
she has never had a date with “a member of the opposite you-know-what,”
Mame exclaims, “Agnes, you’re coming out!”32 Once she is turned into a
vamp wearing a “sexy red dress,” Agnes joins Mame and Vera in a dance,
with the stage directions indicating that “it’s as if Agnes has joined the
team.” When she returns in the next scene, pregnant, Mame insists on
inviting the “bachelor-girl” to live in her home, arguing, “I planted the seed
of adventure in that girl’s soul. I know it’s biologically impossible, but
ethically, I’m the father of her child.”33
In creating this parthenogenetic world that celebrates motherhood above
all, Mame exemplifies the central impulse of this aesthetic form. Writing of
the genre’s structural investment in a fantasmatic relationship to
motherhood, Miller argues that “the Broadway musical is the unique genre
of mass culture to be elaborated in the name of the mother.”34 The musical
revolves precisely around a dominating female star; as Miller notes, in
Gypsy, “[e]very female who enters the star spot is paired with a less
brightly lit male figure, ridiculous or pathetic, of whom it is variously
demonstrated that he may not take her place there.”35 Despite the musical’s
structural disdain for male performers, however, there is a “universalized”
desire to play on the stage36—hearkening back to a primal memory of
“performing in [the mother’s] vicinity, within range of her voice.”37 In
desiring to perform on this stage, then, the man must imagine himself as a
woman: according to Miller,
[t]he distinctiveness, then, of the Broadway musical in post-war mass culture is not that it
leads a woman to inhabit the socially given idea of her gender…but that it seduces a man to
inhabit the same idea. Stimulated by the mimetic mechanism of the number to the
spectacular pleasures of femininity, the male spectator finds himself placed in a fantasy
scenario whose inseparable, almost indistinguishable players are mother and child…38

Miller’s theory—that musicals revisit the pleasures and anxieties of

maternal vocality—echoes Edward Baron Turk’s earlier study of soprano
Jeanette MacDonald. Theorizing why the soprano voice has long been both
savored and reviled, Turk argues that these divergent yet intense responses
relate to how viewers feel “within a cinematic environment that privileges
maternal incantation over male logocentrism.”39 He goes on to suggest that
[i]f birth trauma is the prototype of anxiety activating the respiratory organs and the vocal
apparatus, the singing voice, and especially the female singing voice, has the capacity to
invoke in listeners both the calming sensory orderliness of intrauterine existence (pleasure)
and the invasive onslaught of uncontrollable auditory stimuli attendant upon separation from
the mother (unpleasure).40

Thus, “Mother’s voice may be associated with the lullaby, oral gratification,
and regressive sleep. But it may also reactivate primitive fears of
psychobiological destruction.” Turk’s argument regarding the soprano voice
seems to suggest a theory potentially more broadly applicable to female
vocality in musical theater. To extend Turk’s claims, the polarized responses
often engendered by the musical—either eager fandom, or embarrassed
pleasure, or outright rejection—seem plausible as a response to the various
pleasures and anxieties generated by the female voice within a narrative
medium.41
Miller’s and Turk’s arguments about motherhood also recall Alexander
Doty’s “My Beautiful Wickedness,” an essay in which Doty argues that The
Wizard of Oz fixates on motherhood as a vehicle for an exploration of
different Sapphic identities. While the narrative centers on Dorothy’s return
to the maternal figure of Auntie Em, there is no doubt that the Oz sequences
—particularly those involving the Wicked Witch—are the most significant.
For Doty, the Oz sequences depict a world governed by two kinds of
witches, and indeed two kinds of lesbians: the aggressive, butch Wicked
Witch, and the good invisible femme, embodied by Glinda.42 As Doty
writes,
When a puzzled Glinda asks the tomboyish yet gingham dressed Dorothy if she “is a good
witch—or a bad witch” (a femme or a butch) Dorothy denies being any kind of witch,
because, as culture has told her, all witches are old and ugly. It is here that Dorothy’s fantasy
reveals that Glinda is also a witch, thereby establishing a model through which she can
begin to explore and come to terms with her own lesbian desires under cover of witch
femme-ininity. But while Glinda provides her with a safe, because straight appearing, outlet
for lesbian expressiveness, Dorothy invests the Wicked Witches of the East and West with
the most power and fascination of anyone in her fantasy.43

In this way, The Wizard of Oz, with its plot revolving around the safe return
of a child to her mother figure, punctuates that narrative of maternal
bonding by allowing exploration of different models of femininity. Doty’s
readings help us to understand how this structure can enable an exploration
of transformational possibility, particularly one involving lesbian desire.
Stacy Wolf has published a number of remarkable studies arguing for the
significance of lesbian spectatorship to the genre. Her work has shown how
Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, and Julie Andrews—three of the greatest
divas of the stage—have presented powerful depictions of three iconic
lesbian roles: the tomboy, the butch, and the femme.44 In her reading of
Peter Pan, for example, Wolf persuasively argues that Mary Martin’s turn
as Peter Pan employs a gestural vocabulary and a vocal technique that
signifies her as a femme-tomboy lesbian in a narrative that opposes her both
to Wendy—who acts briefly as Peter’s “wife”—and to Cyril Ritchard’s
campily fey Captain Hook, with whom Martin’s Peter Pan becomes a
lesbian playing opposite a gay man.45 Peter’s unwillingness to “grow up”
signifies an unwillingness to conform to heterosexual norms, and while the
plot asks Peter to remain asexually oblivious to Wendy’s desire for him, the
actress portraying Peter registers desire for the act of performing as a boy.
Wolf similarly understands both the stage and film versions of The
Sound of Music to support lesbian readings of its performances and themes.
In these readings, the narrative thus becomes one in which “Maria
represents an unsocialized femininity, and the musical ultimately values
Maria’s disorder and negates the discipline of the nuns, of the Captain, of
the Nazis.”46 The musical concludes as Maria has successfully upended the
conservative worlds of the family. While she herself has also been tamed
through her romance with the Captain, theirs is not a passionate love affair,
but instead an unconvincingly docile partnership—which, along with her
trademark individuality and courage, permits an ongoing Sapphic
investment despite her marriage.
Even the most casual exegesis of Mame would find it hard to deny that
Patrick’s own mother figure is rich with lesbian overtones: Patrick avows
early in the play that he will “be exactly like [Auntie Mame] and keep my
relations with the opposing sex—plutonic,” after which revelation he
mentions that he learned the word “lesbian” at one of Mame’s parties.47 The
following morning, Vera finds herself hung over, and as Mame leaves her
own bedroom, Vera crawls into the bed, which she refers to as “No Man’s
Land.” Mame’s greatest critique of heterosexual romance occurs precisely
when Mame and Vera attempt to refashion Agnes and endow the homely
girl with conventional allure: after discarding Agnes’ eyeglasses, removing
her orthopedic Oxfords, and ordering her to close her pores, Mame
summons her butler to find Mame’s “sexy gown” and “all my cosmetics:
face creams, eyebrow pencils, lipstick.”48 “And a chisel,” Vera adds. After
the “dowdy nanny” is immediately transformed, the book directs the three
women to “strut off in the best burlesque-esque style.”49 The process of
turning a woman into the conventional representation of femininity is here
treated as a comic scene whose ultimate punchline occurs just a minute
later, when Agnes returns, once again dowdy but this time pregnant.
Steven Cohan has shown how MGM awkwardly deployed stars like
Judy Garland and Debbie Reynolds in numbers that—much like Agnes’
“coming out” scene—“enac[t] a camp’s recognition of the incongruities
arising from glamour’s operation as a cultural mechanism of
heterosexualization.”50 Cohan’s reading of Garland’s “Ziegfeld Girls”
number (in the 1941 MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl) understands the star as
representing “a camp subjectivity finding humor, not pain, in the balancing
act required of femininity, particularly when acting out its most idealized,
heterosexualized, and incongruous cultural expression, glamour.”51 Further,
the chorus boys who often surround Garland in these kinds of numbers
seem to share her knowledge, uniting these likely queer men and the diva in
mutual understanding of the unsustainable demands of conventional gender
norms and compulsory heterosexuality.
Furthermore, while women are generally made the focus of musical
theater, the exceptions which glorify men—in particular, the works of Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly—affirm Steve Neale’s comment that the film
musical was “the only genre in which the male body has been unashamedly
put on display in mainstream cinema in any consistent way.”52 The
spectacularization of the male body in these performances enacts yet
another fascinating contradiction between narrative and performance in the
genre: as Cohan writes, the musical’s fascination with the male body
“challenges the very gendered division of labor which it keeps reproducing
in its generic plots.”53 Cohan argues that Astaire provides “a highly
theatricalized representation of maleness on screen which oscillates
between, on the one hand, a fictional character grounded in the static and
reductive binarism of traditional gender roles and, on the other, a musical
persona whose energy choreographs a libidinal force that revises
conventional masculinity and linear desire.”54 Thus, a great deal of
Astaire’s appeal emerges from how the musical genre deploys his dancing
body in a way that reorients cultural assumptions about gender: he becomes
the spectacle, taking the place conventionally assigned to women, yet his
spectacularity is mediated by his uniquely masculine reconfigurations of the
conventionally feminine tropes of “narcissism (in his solo performances and
special-effects numbers)…, exhibitionism (in his show numbers…)…and
masquerade (in his dandyish costuming…).”55 For Cohan, this “revaluation
of the male star and his ‘dancing persona’ in terms of spectacle over
narrative” finds its ultimate expression in Gene Kelly’s film The Pirate, in
which Kelly’s character, Serafin the actor, “whose playful and performative
masculinity is based in spectacle,” ultimately draws the attention of Judy
Garland’s Manuela from her competing, narrative-driven desire for the
conventionally masculine Macoco.56 Further, Kelly’s own lifelong attempt
to associate his dance with butch athleticism can be seen as another strategy
for reframing the anxieties produced by spectacularizing the male body.
Exceptionally efficient at hiding gay desire within every nook and
crevice, Mame represents the culmination of an era—and in occasionally
allowing the queer tensions to edge closer to visibility, the piece anticipates
how this tensive structure would give way to increasingly overt displays of
homosexuality and queerness in musicals that followed shortly thereafter. In
one scene of the 1970 musical Applause, a musicalization of the film All
About Eve, Margo Channing goes with her gay dresser, Duane, to a bar in
Greenwich Village. As Comden and Green’s stage directions gingerly
indicate, “[t]he place is filled with people, all of them dancing, and it
becomes apparent that all of them are male, dressed in various flamboyant
attire.”57 The 1973 musical Seesaw contains a similarly stereotypical role:
Tommy Tune played the part of David, a gay choreographer who’s “got
wonderful ideas about decorating.”58
By the mid-1970s, the use of gay characters for mild comic relief began
to give way to more complex portrayals. A climactic moment in the 1976
musical A Chorus Line features the monologue of Paul, one of the dancers
auditioning to be part of the eponymous line. In it, he describes with
touching detail his childhood love of movie musicals, and how they
fostered in him a desire to imitate Cyd Charisse. He eventually ends up
performing in drag at the Jewel Box Revue, and he movingly tells of how
his parents inadvertently saw him in his costume, looking “like Anna May
Wong.”59 As Paul tells it, his father—at the theater in order to say goodbye
to him before the show traveled to Chicago—“turned to the producer and
said: ‘Take care of my son…’ That was the first time he ever called me
that…I…ah…I…ah. (He breaks down.)” Despite the dramaturgically odd
choice that the revelation is delivered in a monologue—and not in a song—
it nonetheless marks a significant moment in musical theater.60
William Finn’s and James Lapine’s March of the Falsettos, originally
produced in 1981 at Playwrights Horizons, centered on the family dynamics
of Marvin, a man who leaves his wife for a man.61 This unconventional
musical explores the complicated bonds—and the manifold forms of love,
regret, and confusion—that develop between Marvin, his son, his new
partner, his ex-wife, and his psychiatrist. A sequel, Falsettoland, first
produced off-Broadway in 1990, picks up the story of the family in the
AIDS crisis of the Reagan years, as the unconventional family—along with
two lesbian neighbors—deal with the adolescence of Marvin’s son
alongside the sickness of Marvin’s boyfriend, Whizzer Brown.
The AIDS crisis was also depicted in Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Rent,
which celebrates the warmth and community among bohemians in the
Lower East Side as they fight not only the ravages of disease, but also the
pain of rejection and the displacement of the group by gentrification. The
piece follows two principal relationships: one heterosexual—between
songwriter Roger and the S&M performer Mimi, both of whom are living
with HIV—and one homosexual—between revolutionary intellectual Tom
Collins and cross-dressing street performer Angel, both of whom are people
with AIDS. In addition to these two couples, the piece also depicts a
significant lesbian relationship involving Joanne and performance artist
Maureen, who organize a protest against the group’s eviction.62 Opening
not long after Rent, the extremely popular 1998 off-Broadway musical
Hedwig and the Angry Inch encouraged audiences to identify with the title
character, a genderqueer singer whose botched operation leaves Hedwig in
a liminal space between genders and sexualities.63 Hedwig, in particular,
revealed the usefulness of the form to address complex issues related to
sexuality. The 2005 stage musical The Color Purple focused intently on the
lesbian relationship of characters Celie and Shug, and more recently, the
extraordinary 2013 off-Broadway musical Fun Home, which musicalized
the coming-of-age memoir of Alison Bechdel, featured a remarkable score
by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron that situated the cartoonist’s own emergent
lesbian sexuality alongside the queer desires of her father.
 However, perhaps the turning point in the representation of
homosexuality on the Broadway stage was the 1983 musical La Cage aux
folles, which might as well have been a revival of Mame.64 Like Mame, it
concerned a son who resents his unconventional family as he courts a
woman from a more conservative background; however, in this case, the
son’s family includes his father and his father’s partner, a flamboyant drag
diva. Thus, La Cage aux folles invites the closeted characters of Mame to
come out and profess their desire—situating openly gay characters within
the classic structure of musical comedy. Having noted the similarities of La
Cage to Mame, John Clum remarks most perceptively that “[f]or the most
part, openly gay musicals are less ‘gay,’ in all senses of the word, than their
closeted Broadway predecessors.”65 As Miller observes,
the theme of homosexuality in La Cage works against recognizing the homosexualizing
fantasmatic structure of the Broadway musical in general. While the structure is seducing
any man engaged by it into a feminine identification, the theme moves to deny this
identification by confining it within, precisely, a “cage” of extreme cases.66

In other words, the generic form seduces men to engage with their queer
desires, yet the plot of La Cage, with its conventional notions of sexual
domesticity alongside its cartoonish depictions of flamboyance, works to
contain that very desire. For Miller, the beauty of the classic Broadway
musical is that its closeted aesthetic suggests a richness of queer desire and
affect that cannot be fully comprehended by the notion of gay identity:
Identity…stands in an essentially reductive relation to the desire on which it is based: a kind
of homogeneous precipitate that can never in itself suggest how variously such desire
continues to determine the density, color, taste of the whole richly embroiled solution out of
which, in so settled a state, only a small quantity of it has fallen…the featuring of
homosexuals on the Broadway stage…works positively against the recognition of the
homosexual desire that diffused through ‘other’ subjects, objects, relations, all over the
form. Indeed, by the contrary application of the same cruel logic, Gypsy and its closeted
kind can now seem to have rendered a far richer account of this desire than anything we are
likely to owe to a counter-tradition of gay avowal.67

Thus, the problem with which we began—the musical’s investment in boy-

meets-girl romance—proves in fact to be paradoxically central to the queer
dimensions of the genre: the musical’s unique structure exacerbated the
potential for queer energies to erupt in unexpected places, revealing the
omnipresence of those queer energies—or, as Miller puts it, the musical, as
a closeted genre, permitted us to “perceive the multitude of conditions
under which closeting was possible, to glimpse, even as it was being
denied, the homosexual disposition of the world.”68
For Miller, then, the increasingly direct representations of homosexual
characters and relationships ultimately work to marginalize the genre’s
political power, diluting its erstwhile radical queerness by misrepresenting
queer desire. However, I will conclude by suggesting that we may find
consolation in some compelling contemporary moments that transcend this
dichotomy between closeted structures and the representations of identity.
For example, late in 2013, Roundabout Theatre Company announced that it
would stage a reading of the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical Company in
which the main character, Bobby, would be reconfigured as a “gay man
with commitment issues and multiple boyfriends.”69 Roundabout Artistic
Director Todd Haimes announced that “[t]he reading provides a safe
environment for our artists to explore bold choices.”70 How bold could it
be, though, to out a 35-year-old bachelor with anxieties about marriage?
One opening night review of the 1970 production noted that “[i]n case you
had any doubts about his sexual inclinations—and I am not sure that I did—
he has three girls on the side.”71 However, those three girls complained in
the musical about how Bobby treated them and how they would be able to
comprehend that kind of behavior “if a person was a fag.”72 As Martin
Gottfried noted in his comprehensive study of the Broadway musical, “it is
[Bobby’s] pessimism toward marriage and [his] inability to love a woman
that make his heterosexuality suspect. Depending on one’s sensitivity
toward this, a subtle element of homosexuality might be considered a
distracting aspect of Company.”73 The 1996 printed edition of the script
even includes an additional scene in which one character questions Bobby
about whether he’s had any homosexual experiences, and then propositions
him. Bobby admits to having had a homosexual experience, yet claims that
he isn’t gay. He grows increasingly uncomfortable and laughs when Peter
propositions him, acting as though Peter were surely playing a joke. Given
the character and this history, it is difficult to be anything but
underwhelmed by the idea of Bobby being represented as a gay man—
which makes Haimes’ comment about the boldness of this production just
as confusing as Sondheim’s remark that he was “intrigued” by the
opportunity to reconceive the character as a gay man. To be sure, whatever
revelation that this show might offer comes not in the idea of an actor
playing Joanne in male drag, but in the idea that anyone could pretend that
this reading was not there all along. However, lest we view the creators’
comments as regressive, we might instead elect to understand them as
escaping the binary of representation and the closet: after all, surely
feigning surprise at the idea of Bobby being a gay man represents perhaps
the greatest camp gesture of them all! Indeed, even as the queer political
landscape changes almost daily, musicals—even pieces from generations
before—remain today a remarkably potent vehicle through which we
continue to articulate our complex relationships to genders and sexualities.
Or, as the final sentence of the book of Mame reads: “Ah, the zest of Mame
is perpetual!”74
N
1. Christopher Lloyd, “Scared Straight.” The Golden Girls 4:9 December 10, 1988. DVD.
2. Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, and Jerry Herman, Mame (New York: Random House, 1967).
3. Ibid., 12–13.
4. Ibid., 39.
5. Jerry Herman and Marilyn Stasio, Showtune: A Memoir (New York: Dutton, 1996), 113–114.
6. See Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000).
7. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, Mame, 29.
8. Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 26–27.
9. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, Mame, 94.
10. David Van Leer, The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 176.
11. Ibid., 177.
12. Ibid., 177. Van Leer’s elegant reading demonstrates how the fairly mundane invocation of
gendered, ethnic, and sexual stereotypes in this scene actually allows for these otherwise
marginalized voices to question those stereotypes, ultimately undermining the musical’s
ostensibly central values. For a similarly excellent discussion of the intricate relationship
between race and sexuality in West Side Story, see Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s account of how
“West Side Story is a racialized tale visualized as a musical feast of gay style: a spectacle of
desire for working-class, gentile, ‘rough’ ethnic men, as well as a tribute to performative
femininity.” In Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2004), 71.
13. Ibid., 179.
14. John Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s,
1999), 65–66.
15. D.A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 34. See also Suzanne G. Cusick’s review of Place for Us in Women & Music 6
(2002); and David M. Halperin, How To Be Gay (Cambridge: Belknap, 2012).
16. Ibid., 37.
17. Ibid., 39.
18. Ibid., 37.
19. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, Mame, 39.
20. Miller, Place for Us, 71.
21. Richard Tyler Jordan, But Darling, I’m Your Auntie Mame!: The Amazing History of the World’s
Favorite Madcap Aunt (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1998), 158.
22. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, Mame, 84.
23. See Bradley Rogers, “The Interpellations of Interpolation, or the Disintegrating Female Musical
Body,” Camera Obscura 67 (2008): 88–111.
24. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Vincent Leitch, ed., The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2010), 2088.
25. Ibid.
26. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the
Performing Subject: A Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 56.
27. Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 174.
28. Jordan, But Darling, I’m Your Auntie Mame!, 215.
29. Jordan, But Darling, I’m Your Auntie Mame!, xii.
30. Stephen Citron, Jerry Herman: Poet of the Showtune (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 122.
31. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, Mame, 35.
32. Ibid., 95.
33. Ibid., 106.
34. Miller, Place for Us, 83.
35. Ibid., 73.
36. Ibid., 81.
37. Ibid., 86.
38. Ibid., 89–90.
39. Edward Baron Turk, “Deriding the Voice of Jeanette MacDonald: Notes on Psychoanalysis and
the American Film Musical,” Camera Obscura 25–26 (1991): 227.
40. Ibid., 237.
41. See, for example, Guy Rosolato’s comment that “[t]he maternal voice helps to constitute for the
infant the pleasurable milieu which surrounds, sustains and cherishes him…One could argue
that it is the first model of auditory pleasure and that music finds its roots…in [this] original
atmosphere, which might be called a sonorous womb….” Quoted in Kaja Silverman, The
Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 84–85. Indeed, by thinking a bit more abstractly about all forms of
sonic pleasure as incarnations of the auditory environment of the womb, we can encompass all
of the musical’s interruptive moments—whether sung by mothers, women, or men—as invoking
that originary site of aural satisfaction.
42. Doty argues that the film makes its allegorical dimensions clear in the montage of fevered
dream images depicted outside Dorothy’s window: most significantly, the pedaling spinster
Almira Gulch transforms into the frightening image of the Wicked Witch of the West. Here,
according to Doty, the film links two prominent lesbian images: the “matronly spinster” and the
“butch dyke.”
43. Alexander Doty, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000), 62.
44. See Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
45. Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian
Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997), 493–509.
46. Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 223.
47. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, 18.
48. Ibid., 97.
49. Ibid., 98–99.
50. Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 93.
51. Ibid., 104–105.
52. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” Screen,
24:6 (1983), 15.
53. Steven Cohan, “Feminizing the Song-and-Dance Man,” in Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds.,
Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993),
46–47.
54. Ibid., 63–64.
55. Ibid., 63.
56. Ibid., 65.
57. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Applause (New York: Random House, 1971), 23.
58. Michael Bennett, Seesaw: A Musical (New York: Samuel French, 1975), 27.
59. James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause, 1995), 103.
60. Fascinatingly, actor Sammy Williams, who portrayed Paul in the original company, recalled that
Hamlisch and Kleban did in fact write a song for Paul: “Finally they wrote me a song and they
had me sing it one day after rehearsal at the Shakespeare Festival. I never sang it in a
performance. It went, ‘I remember you, mama, or ‘I loved you, mama,’ something like that.”
See Robert Viagas, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh, On the Line: The Creation of A Chorus
Line (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 197–198.
61. See also In Trousers, a piece first performed in 1979, which is anthologized with March of the
Fallsettos and Falsettoland, in William Finn and James Lapine, Falsettos (New York: Penguin,
1993).
62. For a fascinating essay on the relationship between lesbian representation, authenticity, and
culture in Rent and more generally, see Sarah Schulman’s Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the
Marketing of Gay America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
63. See Wendy Hsu, “Reading and Queering Plato in Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” in Thomas
Peele, ed., Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 103–118.
64. See, for example, Michael Bronski’s comment that “[a]fter the gala opening of La Cage Aux
Folles, a disgruntled queen muttered that ‘It’s nothing more than Mame in drag.’ The obvious
answer, proffered by a close-standing wag, was: ‘But, my dear, Mame was Mame in drag.” In
Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 131.
65. Clum, Something for the Boys, 246.
66. Miller, Place for Us, 130.
67. Ibid., 132.
68. Ibid., 133, emphasis Miller’s.
69. Michael Gioia, “Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Comments on Gender-Bending Company Reading,
Featuring Alan Cumming, Bobby Steggert, Michael Urie,” Playbill, October 16, 2013,
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/roundabouts-todd-haimes-comments-on-gender-bending-
company-reading-featurin-210636.
70. Ibid.
71. Clive Barnes, “‘Company’ Offers a Guide to New York’s Marital Jungle,” in Joan Marlowe and
Betty Blake, eds., New York Theatre Critics Reviews 31 (1970): 262.
72. George Furth and Stephen Sondheim, Company (New York: Random House, 1970), 46.
73. Martin Gottfried, Broadway Musicals (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 322.
74. Lawrence, Lee, and Herman, 137.
R
Barnes, Clive. “‘Company’ Offers a Guide to New York’s Marital Jungle.” In New York Theatre
Critics’ Reviews 1970, edited by Joan Marlowe and Betty Blake, 261–262. New York: Critics
Reviews, 1970.
Bennett, Michael. Seesaw: A Musical. New York: Samuel French, 1975.
Bronski, Michael. Culture Clash: The Making of a Gay Sensibility. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
Citron, Stephen. Jerry Herman: Poet of the Showtune. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Clum, John. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin’s,
1999.
Cohan, Steven. “Feminizing the Song-and-Dance Man.” In Screening the Male: Exploring
Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 46–69. London:
Routledge, 1993.
Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005.
Comden, Betty and Adolph Green. Applause. New York: Random House, 1971.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical,” review of Place for Us: Essay
on the Broadway Musical, by D.A. Miller. Women & Music 6 (2002): 51.
Doty, Alexander. Flaming Classic: Queering the Film Canon. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Farmer, Brett. Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000.
Finn, William and James Lapine. Falsettos. New York: Penguin, 1993.
Furth, George and Stephen Sondheim. Company. New York: Random House, 1970.
Gioia, Michael. “Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Comments on Gender-Bending Company Reading,
Featuring Alan Cumming, Bobby Steggert, Michael Urie,” published October 16, 2013.
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/roundabouts-todd-haimes-comments-on-gender-bending-
company-reading-featurin-210636.
Golden Girls, The, “Scared Straight.” Written by Christopher Lloyd. USA: Witt/Thomas/Harris
Productions, 1988, DVD.
Gottfried, Martin. Broadway Musicals. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979.
Halperin, David M. How to Be Gay. Cambridge: Belknap, 2012.
Herman, Jerry and Marilyn Stasio. Showtune: A Memoir. New York: Dutton, 1996.
Hsu, Wendy. “Reading and Queering Plato in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” In Queer Popular
Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television, edited by Thomas Peele, 103–118. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Jordan, Richard Tyler. But Darling, I’m Your Auntie Mame!: The Amazing History of the World’s
Favorite Madcap Aunt. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1998.
Kirkwood, James and Nicholas Dante. A Chorus Line. New York: Applause, 1995.
Lawrence, Jerome, Robert E. Lee, and Jerry Herman. Mame. New York: Random House, 1967.
Leer, David Van. The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society. New York: Routledge,
1995.
Miller, D.A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1998.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch, 2084–2094. New York: Norton, 2010.
Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen 24,
no. 6 (1983): 2–17.
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture.
New York: New York University Press, 2004.
Rogers, Bradley. “The Interpellations of Interpolation, or the Disintegrating Female Musical Body.”
Camera Obscura 67 (2008): 89–111.
Schulman, Sarah. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1998.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader,
edited by Fabio Cleto, 53–65. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Staiger, Janet. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Turk, Edward Baron. “Deriding the Voice of Jeanette MacDonald: Notes on Psychoanalysis and the
American Film Musical.” Camera Obscura 25–26 (1991): 224–249.
Viagas, Robert, Baayork Lee, and Thommie Walsh. On the Line: The Creation of a Chorus Line.
New York: William Morrow, 1990.
Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Wolf, Stacy. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011.
Wolf, Stacy. “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account
of Mary Martin as Peter Pan.” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (December 1997): 493–509.
 CHAPTER 4

T H E G O S P E L A C C O R D I N G TO
T H E G AY S
Queering the Roots of Gospel Music
 E . PAT RI CK JOH NS O N

F its beginning, gospel music has always played an integral role in

African American culture. Alongside spirituals and blues, gospel music has
been heralded as the music of a people who have overcome trials and
tribulations, heartaches and strife, social and political struggle. A less
acknowledged aspect of gospel music, however, is its queer roots, as a site
of both communion and affirmation among gay parishioners. In countless
worship services, gospel choir concerts, and revival services, one can
witness the over-the-top choreography of the choir, the blurring of the
sacred and the secular, and the way that someone caught up in the spirit has
leeway to dance something other than a “holy” dance.
Chicago is the birthplace of what we now know as contemporary gospel
music. Arizona Dranes, a blind pianist from Dallas, Texas, is credited with
creating in the 1920s what became known as the “gospel beat,” with a
heavy accent on the first beat in musical units of two beats and on two and
four in musical units of four. Thomas Dorsey (1899–1993), however, first
used the term “gospel music” in 1921 to describe his first written song, “If I
Don’t Get There.” Despite starting as a blues musician who played blues
and jazz on Saturday night and sacred music on Sunday morning, Dorsey
became known as the “Father of Gospel Music.” Thus, one of the
controversies surrounding the advent of gospel music is its connection to
other secular forms such as blues and jazz.
Even after Dorsey had given up playing the blues, his gospel
compositions reflected the imagery and rhythms of the blues. Despite the
objections of many of the “saints” in the church, gospel music took hold
because it arose during the Great Depression, when worldly troubles were
not easily soothed by traditional hymns and spirituals. According to Dorsey,
“I wrote to give them something to lift them out of that Depression. They
could sing at church but the singing had no life, no spirit.”1 Thus, blurring
of the secular and the sacred was inevitable, and with that melding, gospel
provided a space for those who were not necessarily accepted around the
welcome table—namely, sexual and gender nonconformists—to participate
in the musical form’s continued growth and innovation. From its built-in
theatricality and bluesy beats to its suggestive lyrics, gospel became a
vehicle for the expression of more than just spirituality.
This chapter highlights key figures of the Black queer community who
have played a significant role in the history of gospel music. Because of the
silence around sexuality in the church in general and homosexuality in
particular, many of the figures that I discuss never confirmed or denied their
sexuality; rather, speculation, hearsay, and oral histories of those who were
close to them or alleged lovers form the basis of their categorization as
queer. As Gayle Wald writes: “Notwithstanding the question of their truth,
rumors contain meaning, especially in the insular world of mid-century
gospel. Like other artistic realms, the gospel circuit had its own protocols of
private and public behavior, of what could be said out loud and what could
only be whispered about or not said at all.”2 I also share my own and
others’ stories of growing up in the church choir as what I call “church
sissies,” who used the choir to affirm our budding homosexuality. Finally, I
discuss some of the aesthetics of gospel that make queer performance
possible.
The great migration of Southern Blacks to Chicago in the 1930s and
1940s made Chicago a central hub for the creation and dissemination of
gospel music. The city was rich with musicians who played both secular
and sacred music. The abundance of musicians and singers in Chicago,
especially blues and jazz performers, made it an attractive stop for
musicians traveling across the country, some of whom called the city their
home. One such musician was guitar-playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–
1973), a gospel artist whose music constantly straddled the line between the
secular and the sacred. Garnering most of her popularity in the 1930s and
1940s, Tharpe combined the sacred vocals of her church background with
jazz and blues guitar, recording many songs with homosexual undertones.
For example, Tharpe recorded Thomas Dorsey’s “Hide Me in Thy Bosom,”
which she also recorded as “Rock Me” under the Decca label. Because God
or Jesus is never referenced in the song, the lyrics remain suggestive: “Hide
me in thy bosom till the storm of life is over/Rock me in the cradle of thy
love.” Rosetta’s handling of her guitar and the double entendre of the lyrics
only buttressed rumors about her lesbian dalliances, especially with
“Madame” Marie Knight, a sanctified singer from New Jersey with whom
Tharpe recorded several songs. While I cannot detect whether he is
signifying or not, gospel music historian Clarence Boyer’s description of
the duet speaks volumes:
Their most outstanding recording was “Up above My Head” from a November 1947 session
in which Tharpe provides the call and Knight the response. Although Knight’s voice is
darker than Tharpe’s, they made the perfect gospel duet, even on the chorus after Tharpe’s
solo interlude where Knight assumes the role of the male bass from gospel quartets,
essaying her range from the top to the bottom.3

While Knight denied the rumors about her and Tharpe, many of those
closest to Tharpe suggested that she was intimate not only with Knight, but
also with other women as well, even while she was married. Whatever the
case, it is clear that Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s unconventional style—onstage
and off—queered gospel music of the era and perhaps offered other
“possibilities of intimacy in a world where lines of gender and sexuality
were religiously policed.”4
Chicago is also the birthplace of one the most famous gay pioneers of
gospel music, Reverend James Cleveland (1931–1991), known as the
“crown prince of gospel.” Anyone listening to Cleveland’s records today
would never guess that he had been a boy soprano. As a member of the
children’s choir under the direction of Thomas Dorsey at Pilgrim Baptist
Church, Cleveland sang solo on many songs and began studying piano at
age five. As a teenager, he joined a local group, the Thorne Crusaders, with
whom he sang for eight years. The combination of a lower register brought
on by puberty and vocal strain from singing with the Thorne Crusaders left
him with the “gruff, unpretty voice” that was so distinctive.5
Over his more than 40-year career, Cleveland worked with some of the
greatest gospel singers and musicians in the country, many of whom were
both his mentors and protégés. These include Roberta Martin and Albertina
Walker, for whom he served as a composer, arranger, pianist, and
occasional singer/narrator for her all female group, the Caravans. Walker
provided Cleveland with the opportunity to make his first recording,
convincing her record company to record him. He quit the Caravans
temporarily a number of times to join other groups. His recording of “Peace
Be Still” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, thanks to Cleveland’s
comforting growl and emotional command.
Cleveland founded his own choir, the Southern California Community
Choir, as well as a church, Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church, in Los
Angeles that, at the time of his death, boasted more than 7,000 members.
Indeed, it was Cleveland’s work with choirs that made his legacy so
enduring. In his vocal arrangements, he removed the bass part, creating
three-part harmony instead of four. This is one of the reasons why the tenor
part in many gospel compositions is so unforgiving on the male voice (no
doubt influenced by his own strained voice as a child), often requiring
tenors to hit and sustain G, A flat, and even B flat above middle C. But the
choir was also a space where, as I discuss later in this chapter, gay men
could show off their vocal virtuosity. Cleveland recorded most of his songs
live and loved the vamp (the repetition of a line), and the songs he wrote
spoke of everyday trials and tribulations of being Black in the United
States.
His most enduring legacy, however, is the Gospel Music Workshop of
America (GMWA), a convention that he organized in 1968 and that
continues today. GMWA has more than 30,000 members in 150 chapters
and has produced some of the world’s most popular contemporary gospel
singers and musicians, such as John P. Kee and Kirk Franklin. The GMWA
is also widely known as a place where queers in the gospel scene cruise and
party, which is why in some circles, GMWA is called “Gay Men and
Women of America.”
Cleveland himself is rumored to have had a penchant for his younger
male protégés who were constantly around him during the convention. As
in the church itself, it was not uncommon for queer singers and musicians
to use the occasion of a “holy” conference for secular purposes. Even the
National Baptist Convention provided a site for queer desire to spring
eternal. In her autobiography, Willa Ward-Royster, the sister of famous
gospel great Clara Ward, described how her sister was outed at a convention
gathering:
We had met plenty of gays and usually had great fun in their company—it was easy enough
to admire their creativity and wit—but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why Clara
and I had been invited to such a party.
 I soon got my explanation when one of the young men we had come with bounced down the
stairs in a T-shirt and a towel, on his way to get some ice. In passing he excused himself for
not entertaining us but offered, “Honey, I’m on a mission. When Mother gets back upstairs,
she’s gone dive right in the middle of all that flesh. Clara, if I’d have thought about it, I
would have invited someone for you. I know this sharp young child who’d just love you,
she’s a Stone man, Honey.” The guy probably thought I knew, but until then, I had no idea
that my sister had dabbled in homosexual activities. She was really embarrassed that I had
heard, and we were both so uncomfortable that we left.6

While we must take Willa’s story at face value since Clara is deceased,
rumor and willful silences are some of the only ways in which we can
document homosexuality within these communities. Historian John Howard
calls recollections such as Willa’s “twice-told stories.” He states: “This
hearsay evidence—inadmissible in court, unacceptable to some historians—
is essential to the recuperation of queer histories. The age-old squelching of
our words and desires can be replicated over time when we adhere to ill-
suited and unbending standards of historical methodology.”7 Relying on
hearsay and rumor to document homosexuality in the gospel world is
particularly important because keeping one’s sexuality a secret would have
been critical not only to one’s livelihood, but also to one’s acceptance in the
church.
Cleveland passed away in 1991 in Los Angeles. Although an official
statement declared that he died of natural causes, many in the Black queer
community knew that Cleveland died of complications due to AIDS. Not
until months after his death, when his foster son and alleged lover,
Christopher Harris, filed a patrimony suit against his estate, did folks began
to wonder if Cleveland was the man they thought they knew. In fact,
probably most of his church and choir members knew about his sexuality
but chose to overlook it or deny it altogether. This willful denial speaks to
the investment that many Black communities have in perceptions of those
outside the race. As Gayle Wald puts it:
Homosexuality ranked as a different order of sin…reflecting broader social and cultural
prohibitions on sexual identities that violated…the natural, God-given order of things. For
many Black people, homosexuality threatened to hinder the progress of “the race” as a
whole, insofar as they believed progress to be predicated on mainstream acceptance.8
This investment in respectability manifests in what I believe to be an
unholy trinity: shame, guilt, and denial. Parishioners see what they want to
see, deny what they do not want to see, or feel shame or guilt about what is
hidden in plain sight. This is a blessing and curse for queer singers and
musicians, who are ostracized for being an “abomination,” but also
celebrated for their gifts and talents at the same time.
The latter does provide some leeway for gender nonconformity in the
name of the Holy Spirit. How else could one explain the number of
flamboyant singers such as Little Richard, who grew up in and returned to
the church, whose sexuality seems to have never been an issue? The same
can be said of gender nonconformity. An example is Willmer “Little Ax”
Broadnax (1916–1994), one of the great postwar gospel quartet singers.
Broadnax was a diminutive man with a big voice. He and his brother,
William “Big Ax,” were born in Houston and formed a quartet called the
Golden Echoes in southern California. William eventually left for Atlanta,
where he joined the Five Trumpets, but Willmer stayed on as lead singer. In
1950, Willmer joined the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, one of the best gospel
quartets to ever record. Although his time with the quartet lasted only two
years, he went on to perform with other great groups like the Fairfield Four
and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, with whom he recorded into the
1970s and 1980s. Upon his death in 1994, it was discovered that Broadnax
was assigned female at birth but had been passing as a man his whole life.9
Not all queer gospel singers led hidden or clandestine lives, however.
Sylvester, the high-priestess drag queen of the 1970s disco era, started
singing at Palm Lane, which was a member of the Church of God in Christ
(COGIC). Born in 1944, Sylvester James, known as “Dooni” as a child,
grew up in South Central Los Angeles.10 Known for featuring a powerful
falsetto (despite Sylvester also having a rich baritone voice), Sylvester’s
music is undeniably tinged with the gospel music that he sang as a child,
especially on songs such as “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which
became a disco anthem and maintains the 4/4 rhythm that gospel is known
for. Although Sylvester was celebrated by secular disco fans, he was also
embraced by progressive churches such as the Love Center Church in East
Oakland, founded by the Reverend Walter Hawkins (of “Oh Happy Day”
fame). Hawkins often invited Sylvester to sing at the church, and he was
sometimes accompanied by Hawkins and his brother, Edwin. Walter
Hawkins also gave the eulogy at Sylvester’s funeral.
One of Sylvester’s friends and cosingers at the Love Center in East
Oakland was the Reverend Yvette Flunder. An out lesbian and activist,
Flunder is a native San Franciscan and a third-generation preacher with
roots in COGIC. She was licensed in COGIC and later ordained by Walter
Hawkins of Love Center Ministries; she served as the associate pastor and
administrator at Hawkins’s Love Center Church. In 1984, Flunder began
performing and recording with Walter Hawkins and the Family and the
Love Center Choir. Flunder is also an ordained minister of the United
Church of Christ (UCC) and a graduate of the Ministry Studies and Master
of Arts programs at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.
She founded the City of Refuge Community Church UCC in 1991 to unite a
gospel ministry with a social ministry. City of Refuge is a thriving, inner-
city congregation that celebrates the radically inclusive love of Jesus Christ.
Preaching a message of action, the church has experienced steady numerical
and spiritual growth and is now located in the South of Market (SoMa) area
of San Francisco. The song for which she is most known is “Thank You,”
recorded in 1990 on Walter Hawkins’s Love Alive IV album.
The lives and careers of these gospel artists—both those open about
their sexuality and those not—reflect the array of queer performers and the
ways in which they negotiated, reconciled, and celebrated their spirituality
and sexuality. Their stories, however, are not unique. Many “church sissies”
and “church butches,” who have not become famous for their singing but
who were raised in the church choir, have similar stories. Some of these
experiences have been captured in oral histories and in literature. It takes
rumor, hearsay, oral history, and fiction to capture the fullness of the history
of gospel.
Some of these stories are in my book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the
South—An Oral History. For example, Chaz/Chastity, a gender
nonconforming person who lives in North Carolina, who for several years
lived her life as “Chastity” Monday through Saturday and as
“Chaz/Charles” on Sunday, explained that he and other little boys in the
children’s choir used catching the spirit as a guise to be flamboyant, and
later as a way to signify their homosexuality:
 Oh yes. We say all the time, well she’s just a big ole sissy, referring to a guy that’s in the
choir, or possibly the director, or you know, someone who’s very flamboyant as far as the
choir’s movements, because in Black choirs a lot of times there’s a lot of…emotion in the
song, not just in the way that the song is sung but in the way that you move to the song.….
So yes, even now when I’m observing some youth choirs, [I] can see the traits, especially
with some little boys. Sometimes [when] I’m observing youth choirs, [I] can see the little
boy that’s got the tambourine. He’s just going on, and I mean, very much on time with the
beating, and he’s just more into it than the other kids; a lot of the times it’s because of his
artistic nature, and through time, you’ll be able to see that I was right.11

Thus, the choir serves as a nurturing site for one’s “creativity” and “artistic
nature” for effeminate boys who otherwise might be ostracized outside the
confines of that particular space. Indeed, as Bobby from Atlanta declared,
“Where else but in the Black church can a queen be a star whether she has
talent or not? Baby, it ain’t the army where you can be all that you can be,
it’s the church. Homophobic or not, church folk will give you your props.”
Black gay men have surmised that the church is a place to express their
talents vis-à-vis the choir and other church performance venues. I want to
be clear, however, that I am not calling into question the authenticity of the
Black queer’s faith, but rather suggesting that the manifestation of that faith
in performance provides a vehicle through which one can also express
queerness in covert ways. On the other hand, I would venture to say that
there are some queens who are conscious about the limitless possibilities of
queer expression via church performances and who exploit those
possibilities for what they are worth—who actually take pleasure in pushing
the boundaries of gender theatricality within the confines of the church. For
example, Anthony “First Lady” Hardaway, who was born in Memphis,
Tennessee, got his name because of his imitation of women from his
church. He says:
First Lady comes from the Southern church. It came from when I was in Jackson,
Mississippi, in college in 1990. I imitated a lot of the women in my church. I didn’t imitate
the men; I imitated the women—they were dressier. There was something about them.
These women wore the biggest hats. They were the nurturers of the church. There was
something about them. Us gay boys, we immediately imitated them.…I wore big hats, the
furs. It really had nothing to do with the spirituality part. My gay friends locally and
nationally named me because of the way I dressed and conducted myself. They said I
carried the church with me…and the name stuck.
Why do you think there are so many Black gay men in the church, and
particularly in the choir?
We have such a talent. Well, first let me use the word “gift.” We have such a profound gift.
And when I go back to Mother Africa, everything was ceremonial—beads, feathers, masks,
movement, music, sound, drums, that the church is our haven and the Black Mecca in the
Black world. That’s our haven. If you don’t have anything else, you got the church. So
singing has always been a way for a lot of us to release. And again, to express ourselves. So,
I mean, think about it, I’m a part of something that has a lot of sound to it. I’m making
movement with it. I’m able to express myself. And in doing this, I’m helping to heal me.
[…] And I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re in the choirs and different areas. And it
gives us a chance to be in a production, so to speak. The bigger the choir, the better the
choir, the more you can get away with certain things. And even in your home church. If this
musician is wearing this piano or organ out and you’re able to really direct this choir or sing
this song, then everybody is in the spirit of rejoicing, so they’re really not going to ridicule
you for that, at that moment. Do you know what I mean? So I believe that’s one of the
reasons why so many of us, it gives us the opportunity to express ourselves in the church a
little bit more than if you were in any other auxiliary of the church, if you know what I
mean. If you’re an usher, you can’t do a whole lot, you just usher. If you’re a Sunday school
teacher, you just teach. If you’re a minister, you still have to be poised and refined. But in
that choir stand, I can get away with some stuff. I can see what I need to see. I can do what I
need to do. And that’s the truth what I’m saying. So it’s all right to be in the choir because,
first of all, this robe allows me to sometimes fantasize about some things. It can be a gown;
it can be whatever. I remember doing that. I remember doing—this robe made me, I was
able to flow. If I did certain things, maybe I wouldn’t be ostracized, if I twirled a little bit
and hit this note, because that was like a Sam Cooke to them, that was like a James Brown
movement to them, so they could identify with that, and I can get away with it, because this
robe is really going to hide this twist I got. So I believe that’s one of the reasons why the
choir has always been the glamour, to a point, of the church, to me.12

First Lady Hardaway’s narrative is instructive of the ways that queers use
the church, and specifically the choir, as a site to express their queerness.
Many scholars on the Black church have noted its built-in “theatricality,” its
improvisational components, and its rituals of performance. Few have made
the connection between these aesthetics of the Black church—all of which I
consider to be a part of its camp aesthetic—and the manifestation of the
holy/unholy spirit as a vehicle for queer performativity. First Lady
Hardaway’s testimony shows how singing was a “release” for him, and how
he and other queers employed the camp aesthetic of the church to “get
away” with expressing their sexuality and not be ostracized.
Some of the pleasure and duplicity enjoyed by church sissies is also
represented well in African American literature. Much of James Baldwin’s
fiction captured the tension between spirituality and sexuality, piety and
worldliness, and holy rapture and sexual ecstasy. In the following scene
from his novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, the narrator’s description of the
character Elisha playing the piano is significant:
At one moment, head thrown back, eyes closed, sweat standing on his brow, he sat at the
piano, singing and playing; and then like a great Black cat in trouble in the jungle, he
stiffened and trembled, and cried out. Jesus, Jesus, Oh Lord Jesus. He struck on the piano
one last, wild note, and threw up his hands, palms upward, stretched wide apart. The
tambourines raced to fill the vacuum left by his silent piano, and his cry drew answering
cries. Then he was on his feet, turning, blind, his face congested, contorted with this rage,
and the muscles leaping and swelling in his long, dark neck. It seemed that he could not
breathe, that his body could not contain this passion, that he would be, before their eyes,
dispersed into the waiting air. His hands, rigid to the very fingertips, moved outward back
against his hips, his sightless eyes looked upward, and he began to dance. Then his hands
closed into fists, and his head snapped downward, his sweat loosening the grease that
slicked down his hair; and the rhythm of all the others quickened to match Elisha’s rhythm;
his thighs moved terribly against the cloth of his suit, his heels beat on the floor, and his fists
moved beside his body as though he was beating his own drum. And so, for a while, in the
center of the dancers, head down, fists beating, on, on, unbearably, until it seemed the walls
of the church would fall for very sound; and then, in a moment, with a cry, head up, arms
high in the air, sweat pouring from his forehead, and all his body dancing as if it would
never stop. Sometimes he did not stop until he fell—until he dropped like some animal
felled by a hammer—moaning, on his face. And then, a great moaning filled the church.13

Gospel historian Tony Heilbut describes James Cleveland’s praise and

worship in a similar fashion:
When moved by something, the spirit, a well-phrased line, a high note by any of the male
sopranos he likes to feature, he’ll rub his head and make a pained face, moaning “Ooooh.”
It’s a spirited, orgasmic kind of pain, and if it continues, he’ll bang his feet .…When he
shouts, he tends to turn in position, take a few backward steps, then kick forth with Holy
Ghost Abandon.14

In both instances, the conjuring of the spirit through music manifests

through a sexualized body. Baldwin’s description of Elisha’s piano-playing
sounds more like a description of sexual intercourse, especially since the
reader knows that he is viewed through the longing eyes of the novel’s
narrator, John. And Heilbut’s description of Cleveland catching the spirit
also implies Cleveland’s queerness since his “shout” was brought on by “a
high note by any of the male sopranos he likes to feature.”
 Beyond the manifestation of the spirit, another vehicle for pushing the
boundaries between secular and the sacred is the “costuming” for certain
roles, like the choir or preacher’s robe. The robe itself literally expresses
excess when the ample material making up its sleeves and bodice bellows
and balloons as though caught up in wind. Thus, during spirit possession,
directing the choir, or twirling down the aisle, the robe’s expanded volume
complements the excess of the performance itself and also functions for
“cross” purposes—a celebration of spirit and cross dressing.
Freddie, a narrator in Sweet Tea, suggests the following about the choir
robe: “This might sound really silly. That robe is very much like a dress.
And they carry on and shout in that sort of legitimate dress…I have
observed gay men really shouting and carrying on in these robes—working
the robe.”15 Given these narratives, we come to recognize how the “props
and costumes”—tambourines and robes—of the worship service are
deployed for duplicitous purposes: they are integral to the conjuring of the
spirit, but they also provide a space to perform nonnormative gender and
sexual identity.
The church, however, is not always a hospitable place for its queer
members. Many struggle with reconciling their spirituality and sexuality
because of the condemnation that they receive from the pulpit and
congregation, despite the integral role that they play in the church. Ordained
minister and cultural critic Michael Dyson captured this contradiction well:
“A Black minister will preach against sexual ills, especially homosexuality.
At the close of the sermon, a soloist, who everybody knows is gay, will rise
to perform a moving number, as the preacher extends an invitation to
visitors to join the church. The soloist is, in effect, being asked to sing, and
to sign, his theological death sentence.”16
Unfortunately, many queer church members choose to endure this
bigotry because their church family is like their first family—in other
words, it was their community before they came to an understanding of
their sexuality. Thus, leaving the church once one comes to terms with his
or her sexuality is not as easy as it may seem. In the worst-case scenario,
many queer churchgoers begin to internalize the homophobia of the church,
engaging in the very bigotry and condemnation of which they are victims.
 This is why so many popular gospel singers are closeted about their
sexuality. They spit fire and brimstone in their concerts, and yet, behind
closed doors, indulge their homosexual desires. One singer, Donnie
McClurkin, went through various stages with his homosexuality—from
being closeted, to being openly gay, to professing that he has been
“delivered” from gayness. Born and raised in Copiague, New York, in 1959,
McClurkin’s childhood was filled with tragedy and trauma. Before the age
of 13, he had experienced the death of his 2-year-old brother who was hit
and killed by a speeding car, and he also had been raped by an uncle, and
later by his uncle’s son. McClurkin’s aunt, who sang background vocals for
gospel singer and composer Andre Crouch, rescued him from his family
dysfunction. After staying close to Crouch throughout his boyhood, he
began to play piano and sing with his church youth choir. He formed the
McClurkin Singers by the time he was a teenager and later established the
New York Restoration Choir.
He now has his own church, Perfecting Faith Church in New York,
which boasts more than 1,000 members. McClurkin has spoken out against
homosexuality on several occasions. He states that homosexuality is a
spiritual issue, from which one can be delivered by the power and grace of
God. In his book, Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor, he says that he came to the
realization that his homosexuality was abnormal, not a part of God’s plan.17
He then described himself as having gone through a process by which he
became “a saved and sanctified man.” Despite 20 years of being gay, after
his conversion McClurkin disavowed his homosexuality and began
preaching openly against it and accusing Black men of the church of being
sexual predators.
While McClurkin’s self-hatred is one extreme example, it does reflect
how difficult it is for queer churchgoers to come to terms with their
spirituality and sexuality in a way that leaves them feeling like whole
individuals. How ironic then, that one of McClurkin’s more popular songs,
“Stand,” is a testament to how one can overcome internal struggles with
spirituality and sexuality just by holding fast to the conviction that one is
fearfully and wonderfully made.
Many of these gifted voices, magical hands, and eloquent speakers have
been taken away from us, but they have left an indelible mark on a music
that comforts the soul and conjures the spirit. They have also laid the
groundwork for queer musicians who have come after them, some of whom
do not have to hide their sexuality, such as the hip-hop gospel singer Tonéx,
to date the only male gospel singer to acknowledge his homosexuality.18 In
her article on the scandal in the gospel music industry brought on by
Tonéx’s coming out, Kelefa Sanneh writes:
Gospel music has offered generations of same-gender-loving singers a place to call home, in
exchange for their obedience, or their silence. This tricky and sometimes hard bargain
shaped the genre, guiding its transfigured love songs, its expressions of praise and sorrow,
its twinning of the orthodox and the outrageous. And there’s no telling what gospel will
sound like when that tacit arrangement no longer holds.19

As gospel music continues to morph, to speak to the daily struggles and

challenges as well as to the tastes of its listeners, hopefully the queer
brothers and sisters who are a part of the church family will be able to
worship openly and proudly.
N
1. Quoted in Tony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News in Bad Times (New York: Simon and
Schuster), 65.
2. Gayle Wald, Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of a Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2007), 90.
3. Clarence Boyer, How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel (Washington, DC: Elliott and
Clark, 1995), 159; my emphasis.
4. Wald, Shout, Sister, 91.
5. Heilbut, The Gospel Sound, 233.
6. Willa Ward Royster, How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-Famous Ward Singers
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 68–69.
7. John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 5.
8. Wald, Shout, Sister, 87–88.
9. For more on Willmer’s gender, see Tony Heilbut’s liner notes to Kings of the Gospel Highway
(Heilbut 2000).
10. For a great biography of Sylvester, see Joshua Gamson, The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend,
the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
11. E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press), 360–362. At the time of the interview, Charles identified as
transgender, but he currently identifies as a “celibate Black gay man.”
12. E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 208–216.
13. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Dell, 1952), 15–16.
14. Heilbut, The Gospel Sound, 239; emphasis added.
15. Johnson, Sweet Tea, 217.
16. Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1996), 105.
17. Donnie McClurkin, Eternal Victim/Eternal Victor (Lanham, MD: Pneuma Life, 2001).
18. For more on Tonéx’s coming-out story, see Kelefa Sanneh, “Revelations,” The New Yorker,
February 8, 2010. 48.
19. Sanneh, “Revelations.” 56.
R
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Dell, 1952.
Boyer, Horace Clarence, and Lloyd Yearwood. How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel.
Washington, DC: Elliott & Clark, 1995.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Gamson, Joshua. The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco.
New York City: Macmillan, 2006.
Heibut, Anthony. The Fan Who Knew Too Much: The Secret Closets of American Culture. Berkeley,
CA: Soft Skull Press, 2013.
Heilbut, Anthony. The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times. Updated and rev., 1st Limelight
ed., New York: Limelight Editions; distributed by Harper & Row, 1985.
Heilbut, Anthony. Liner notes. Kings of the Gospel Highway: The Golden Age of Gospel Quartets.
CD compilation, various performers. New York: Shanachie Records, 2000.
Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999.
Johnson, E. Patrick. Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
McClurkin, Donnie. Eternal Victim/Eternal Victor. Lanham, MD: Pneuma Life, 2001.
Sanneh, Kelefa. “Revelations.” The New Yorker. February 8, 2010,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/08/revelations-3.
Wald, Gayle. Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta
Tharpe. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.
Ward-Royster, Willa, and Toni Rose. How I Got Over: Clara Ward and the World-famous Ward
Singers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997.
 CHAPTER 5

QUEER AS TRAD
LGBTQ+ Performers and Irish Traditional
Music in the United States
T E S S L O MI NS K I
 I

W are the benefits of thinking about difference as an asset in both the

production of musical sound and the creation and maintenance of
community? What’s at stake when we consider the intersection of social
identities and performance in music and dance? These questions are vital to
genres—including Irish traditional music and Western art music—in which
narratives of the power of “the music itself” divert attention away from
social and institutional practices of exclusion based on difference. In this
chapter, I ask such questions to challenge the status quo of a genre
organized around sounds labeled both “Irish” and “traditional”—categories
that suggest ethnic homogeneity among players and a conservative
approach to performance. Here, I demonstrate that studying the experiences
of queer musicians and dancers has the potential to help us begin to
understand the relationships among music, selfhood, and social identities in
Irish traditional music. While some North American music scholarship
about other genres has explored these connections, Irish traditional music
has not. By beginning to articulate them, I question the recurrent and
conversation-ending assertion in Irish traditional music, “But sure, it
doesn’t matter—we’re all just here to play the music!”
By breaking the silence around LGBTQ+ performers of Irish traditional
music through ethnographic interviews with queer musicians in the United
States and reflections on my own participant observation in the scene, this
chapter addresses the paradox that non-normative participants experience
musical performance as simultaneously liberatory and confining. Playing
trad, my interlocutors attest, can express parts of one’s selfhood in ways
that are powerful and difficult to access elsewhere in United States culture.1
At the same time, statements about the transcendency of “the music” seek
to erase difference through unspoken pressure to conform to social norms
around performance—but the liberation offered by “the music itself” is
often only intermittently possible for those engaged in non-normative
lifeways. Thus, to use Slobin’s terms as articulated in Subcultural Sounds,
for LGBTQ+ trad musicians, translations between an affinity for sounds
and belonging in the subculture are precarious, since the subculture’s
“internal superculture” seeks to minimize differences among practitioners
through discourses of musical transcendence without first granting
recognition to non-normative participants.2 As my interlocutors assert,
recognition is necessary, even if transcendence through musical practice
also remains a goal shared with non-queer traditional musicians.
Not surprisingly, the historical record and ethnographic evidence
complicate easy definitions of Irish traditional music and its musicians.
Trad, as its exponents call it, remains a popular pastime in many parts of
Ireland, where it continues to bear subtle nationalist overtones despite (or
perhaps because of) Ireland’s increasing identification with the European
Union. In some areas—and especially in Northern Ireland—the sounds of
Irish traditional music carry overt religious connections with Catholicism.3
The genre is also popular in the Irish diaspora, as well as in many locations
without direct ties to the music’s home: while North America and Britain
have the largest and most active trad scenes outside Ireland, France,
Germany, Sweden, Japan, and other countries are home to ethnically non-
Irish players and listeners.
These transnational intersecting scenes share many social, musical, and
discursive practices. Trad’s repertoire reaches back several centuries
through the medium of published tune collections, but its most well-known
institution—the session, where musicians share tunes usually learned
aurally—is a mid-twentieth-century invention.4 Often held in pubs or
homes, these informal musical gatherings blur boundaries between public
space and intimate musical and social connection, and participants balance
tunes with conversations about music, current events, and common
acquaintances.5 By now, sessions are so integral to “the tradition” and so
common a site of inclusion and exclusion that the term “session etiquette”
yields a host of Internet search results, including detailed lists of “session
rules” and online discussions about particularly striking breaches of
etiquette.6 Thus, members of Irish traditional music communities do
sometimes enforce musical and social norms overtly—but demographic
norms usually remain unspoken and often unspeakable. To bring up
exclusion based on race, gender, or sexuality among one’s casual
acquaintances often results in silence or, in the argot of current social justice
discourse, ‘splaining—attempts by members of a dominant demographic to
talk over or explain away oppressions described by the non-dominant.7 As a
result, most women musicians do not talk about gender, queer musicians do
not “out themselves,” and non-white musicians do not mention race in the
context of a session, thus maintaining the illusion that everyone in the scene
is happy with the current arrangements, and that differences in race, gender,
and sexuality are of no consequence. When the topic does come up,
musicians of all kinds will often assert that good musicianship transcends
difference. And in fairness, sometimes it might—but a visitor to most
sessions in Ireland and the United States would likely conclude that the
Irish traditional music scene is primarily the domain of heterosexual white
men, with a smaller population of women who perform conventional
femininities that, in whatever age group, anticipate the presence and power
of the male gaze.8 In this realm, non-white musicians are exceptional, as are
openly queer musicians—especially overtly butch women and trans
individuals.
This article explores queer sexuality in Irish traditional music and dance
(“trad”) scenes in the United States. Such scenes reflect local tastes and
politics, but share a focus on informal, social music-making. By choosing to
interview musicians and dancers from a variety of locations and
backgrounds, I foreground the fluidity of the term “Irish,” since it may refer
either to musical styles or to the bodies that play those styles, and often
invokes fantasies that bear little resemblance to realities in Ireland or its
diaspora. As with third wave feminist conceptions of gender and sexuality,
the term “Irish” thus becomes negotiable when cultural practices and bodily
performances exceed the containers of national and ethnic identity. Such
queering of the adjective “Irish” occurs in musical communities outside and
within Ireland, where differences in class, religion, gender, and sexuality
complicate singular narratives of music and nation.9
If Irish traditional music functions as an “orientation”—a commitment
some demographically “normal” trad musicians have described as more
powerful than enactments of gender and sexuality—then does discursive
and social space exist for performers whose social identities also include the
orientations symbolized by the rainbow flag?10 Following the passage of
the Irish marriage equality referendum in May 2015, and the United States
Supreme Court’s similar ruling in June 2015, LGBTQ+ performers of trad
have been granted increased legal space in both countries, but if discursive
and social space can be measured by open conversations about sexuality
and the presence of queer-identified musicians in proportions near the
estimated LGBTQ+ population among the general public, then this space
does not yet fully exist. This disjuncture between philosophy and practice
drives my argument that equality in discourse and social practice in Irish
traditional music are not happening at the same rate: if sexuality does not
matter because one’s orientation toward the tunes is of utmost importance,
then why are there so few openly LGBTQ+ trad musicians in both Ireland
and the United States? This chapter is one of the first forays in print of a
conversation that is slowly beginning in both United States and Irish trad
communities. The openness of the individuals who have chosen to be
interviewed represents a new direction in the world of Irish traditional
music, in which the closet is still a powerful metaphor and an openly
LGBTQ+ population is only now emerging.
Because the trad scene in the United States is relatively small—and the
subset of LGBTQ+ performers even smaller—I met most of my
interviewees through sessions, festivals, and social networks and media. I
conducted most of my interviews over the phone or via Skype, although
several participants preferred to provide their input in written form. In most
cases, I have had follow-up conversations in person since I conducted these
interviews in 2013. Because my interviewees and I share an affinity for
Irish traditional music and, in some cases, have known each other for years,
many of these interviews began with discussions of shared experience—but
because of the “tunes first” orientation that has shaped many of our
interactions in the scene, I had never spoken about sexuality and trad with
many of my interlocutors beyond the “You’re gay? Me too! Who else might
be?” exchanges that necessarily preceded these interviews. Although I have
chosen not to narrate my own experiences in this chapter, my experiences as
a queer trad musician inevitably inform this study.
The eleven participants in this study identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender, range in age from their twenties to fifties, and live in the
United States in the Northeast (5), South (2), Midwest (1), and Northwest
(3). In interviews and in this article, I have used “queer” as an expansive
descriptor of non-normative sexualities, but while I acknowledge the fallacy
of monolithic conceptions of heterosexuality, this study does not address
nonmonogamy/polyamory, BDSM, or other non-normative affiliations and
practices.11 Four identify as women and seven as men, and based on
anecdotal evidence, this ratio of women to men seems to reflect the current
gender demographics of the population of the wider trad scene. At this
moment, I can make no claims about how well this sample reflects the
numbers of LGBTQ+ musicians in the scene more generally, although so
far, I have encountered many more openly gay men than lesbians in scenes
in the United States and Ireland. Bisexuals remain largely invisible, and
trans and non-binary musicians seem to be few at the time of this writing. I
have chosen to use pseudonyms for my interlocutors throughout—a choice
driven by the current polarization of United States society, in which
LGBTQIA+ people remain vulnerable. I acknowledge that this choice is
also simultaneously at odds with several of my interlocutors’ (and my own)
desire to be fully out of the closet in all areas of our lives, and regret that we
live in a society wherein concern about the safety of queer subjects remains.
 C O

In a scene that assumes that everyone is heterosexual, and that sexuality

does not matter in the social practice of Irish traditional music, discussing
queer participation first requires us to think about the closet.12 Zeke, a flute
player,13 writes,
I came out to friends, family, and myself in 1990 but I was not out in the trad scene for a
long time. I began to come out one [on] one with players I trusted. I had one public coming
out moment during my second year in the Catskills [a festival]. A young openly gay traddie
was joking with a crowd about being the “one gay in the ‘Skills” and I trumped him.
Surprised a bunch of folks (including myself) on the porch of Furlong’s and felt strangely
liberated…

Many of the performers I spoke with shared a willingness to be out but a

feeling that the speech act of coming out in Irish traditional music contexts
can be awkward, as Liam, a singer and concertina player in his thirties,
describes:
I mean, I’m out. I don’t hide—I don’t necessarily pull out the flag as a common rule, but if
it happens to come out, you know, the conversation goes that way or someone asks me, I
would tell them.

My interlocutors reported a variety of responses, including acceptance,

surprise (or lack of surprise), and what Liam calls “a neutral response:”
For the most part, whether it’s in Ireland or here in America, it’s been a general neutral
response, because even if they don’t agree, the Irish are very inclined to not make a fuss
about things, so you wouldn’t really know if they thought negatively about it until after the
fact.

Much of the public conversation between sets of tunes involves music or

relatively non-contentious discussions of current events or sports, good-
natured teasing, and news and gossip about absent acquaintances, and a
common thread in interviews was that conversations about coming out
often happen casually as part of another conversation or, if a more serious
conversation is required, in private. As Liam implies, gossip does circulate
fairly rapidly in the scene, and although a queer musician may not choose to
come out to everyone in the session, everyone may eventually find out.
For many, the least awkward way of coming out to session-mates has
been to casually mention a same-sex partner, although as fiddler Eva
describes, this approach demonstrates the potential difficulties of being
otherwise in a culture that assumes all its participants are heterosexual:
The words “my husband is coming to pick me up”—it means nothing—and they don’t think
that they’re saying the thing that if we were saying it, it outs you, and people are like, “Why
are you mentioning your lover? Why do I have to know that your partner is the same gender
as you? Can’t you say ‘someone’ is coming to pick you up?” You know what I mean? It’s
the smallest little thing!

This assumption leads to further discomfort when session-mates attempt to

matchmake. Vincent, a concertina player, tells of unremitting pressure from
his session-mates to ask one of the women in the session out on a date, and
Sebastian, a fiddler, corroborates his story by pointing out that he comes out
early and often to ensure that he can avoid such situations.
As in mainstream North American culture, bisexual and transgender
musicians and dancers face particular challenges around being out and
being taken seriously. Eva, who has been dating a male trad musician for
the past 7 years, describes being bisexual as “kind of closeting,” and doesn’t
know exactly who in the scene knows about her sexuality because her
“world is so straight-looking.” Laoise, a dancer and fiddler, invoked sex
columnist Dan Savage in speaking of bi invisibility in the trad scene, citing
his recommendation that bisexuals come out more often.14 Unlike Eva and
Laoise, Rowan, the one transgender participant in this study, has not had the
option to remain closeted in the scene:
I’ve been in the trad scene since I was 13. And that scene is small. I don’t have a damn
choice about being out as trans in the trad scene, or anywhere else that people have known
me for more than 5 years. [emphasis his]

Despite having a hard time coming out in the early stages of transitioning,
he reports generally positive experiences in the scene:
There’s this “live-and-let-live” facet of Irish culture that seems to have carried over into the
trad scene: most trad musicians really don’t seem to give two fucks about what’s in my
 pants or who I sleep with. They’ve got more important things to think about, like making
music.

Rowan thus invokes the idea that the music transcends difference, but
Laoise expresses fear that difference can influence the way other musicians
and dancers interpret one’s performance as more or less “traditional”: for
someone who is already not the “traditional” norm in Ireland—white, male,
and Irish—adding another form of difference may increase that person’s
perceived distance from the center of “the tradition,” thereby lowering their
potential status.15
Not surprisingly, geography and cultural context are significant factors
in choices about being out, and most participants responded that they are
selectively out in the trad scene, often completely open with close friends
and age peers but not with casual acquaintances or older or especially
religious musicians. Anne, a fiddler, expresses her frustration about her
local scene in Texas:
It’s [an] intolerant atmosphere, and it bleeds into everything. And so, I’m not out right now,
but I’m hoping that I can change that.…It’s like trying on clothes that are four sizes too
small….

Even the performers who live in particularly progressive parts of the US

rely on demographic cues in deciding whether to out themselves. Some also
suggested that they feel less comfortable being out around Irish people.
Theo, a flute player, remembers,
When I was [first] playing in sessions in Queens…there were more expat Irish people
around, and I would’ve definitely kept more under wraps with them.…I wasn’t completely
out yet, and it was made known to me that…some people had kind of hostile feelings
towards gay people.

Despite what I and most of my interlocutors consider a relatively accepting

scene, being out in it is still often complicated: tolerance, acceptance, and
belonging are not synonymous, and by not embodying norms, LGBTQ+
musicians are often caught in the bind between silence and vocality. Either
may distance players from the social center of the music—a distance that
can disrupt the musical intimacies that draw many traddies to the genre.
 (H ) F

With the LGBT16 movement’s recent focus on same-sex marriage as a

mainstream measure of progress and the United States Supreme Court’s
June 2015 decision in favor of marriage equality, it is perhaps not surprising
that one of the most oft-expressed sentiments in my interviews was a
wistful desire to enjoy one of the trad scene’s most heteronormative
institutions—dating within the scene. Eva remarks on how “coupleish” her
local sessions are, and how her participation in the scene increased when
she started dating a male musician. Theo reminisces about wishing his
dating and musical lives could be more integrated: “I remember thinking to
myself that I wish there was another person who was gay and I was
attracted to.…I look at Sebastian and Vincent, and I’m, like, isn’t that nice!”
Sebastian and Vincent, who are one of two openly gay couples I know of in
the United States scene, acknowledge that they have lots of fun playing
tunes together, but are quick to point out that the relationship would not be
as strong as it is if they did not also share other interests. As the population
in trad becomes more visible and perhaps larger, same-sex dating within the
scene may become more common, but as in the wider LGBTQ+ world,
adopting the norms of monogamy, domesticity, and pair-based socialization
represented by marriage may tend to further marginalize queer practices,
including the pursuit of multiple affective commitments and participation in
non-normative domestic arrangements.
Today, this desire for romance within the scene is usually thwarted by
the dearth of out LGBTQ+ musicians and dancers. But if coupling up
within the scene is less likely for those seeking same-sex partners, many of
my interlocutors describe the closeness of their relationships within the
scene as familial. This kinship is built through shared affinity for music and
dance, and is not limited to queer performers: indeed, the intentional
families created through trad cross generational and geographic lines. Some
performers value these familial relationships to the extent that they choose
not to date within the scene. Frances, a flute player and singer, likens
coming out to fellow traddies to coming out to family members: “For me,
the trad communities…have been sort of like families wherever I’ve been.
[There’s] a lot of the same angst about coming out to family as there is
coming out in the scene.” Others point out that their trad families have been
more accepting of their queerness than their biological families have been.
Several queer participants describe tensions between their experiences in
the trad and mainstream LGBTQ+ scenes. If queer sexuality challenges the
norms of the trad scene, some of my interlocutors find that their interest in
Irish traditional music and dance is also at odds with the practices and
interests of organized LGBT political and social institutions, including
dance and listening practices that revolve around clubs. Both Theo and
Liam assert that they have little interest in stereotypical gay culture, even if
they appreciate its existence, and both claim that the trad scene offers them
more depth. Theo says,
I had no interest in mainstream gay culture beyond the possibility of occasionally having
sex. My interest was entirely in music…mainstream gay culture is so uniform that I was
always grateful that I had something [else] that I loved and could do and was good at.

For Anne, who was active in her local LGBTQ+ scene in the 1980s before
she encountered Irish traditional music, her interests in both punk and trad
caused some to question her sexuality. She reasons that this policing of
norms was partly the product of a wider conservative cultural context, but
found it restrictive:
I guess the few lesbian guitar players…were accepted, and the stuff that was played at the
clubs was accepted, but I was like, “No! I like punk!” And they were, like, “Well, that’s just
wrong—maybe you’re not really a lesbian. Maybe you’re bisexual or something.” And I’m
like, “What does what I like have to do with who I know I want to get with?”…And then I
discovered Irish music…and that was just out of the question—you weren’t supposed to like
that.

Laoise also suggested that it’s weirder to be a traddie in the queer

community where she lives than it is to be queer in the trad community.
Thus, if the “tradition” in “trad” means that its musicians and dancers are
illegible within mainstream LGBTQ+ culture, then it is possible that the
dearth of out queer performers in the trad scene may be as much a result of
pressure from the LGBTQ+ mainstream as from the Irish music world.
 T

In each interview, I asked participants about bad experiences around

sexuality or gender in the scene. Nobody reported physical violence, but
hate speech and bullying emerged as common threads, especially in
encounters with conservative Irish American Catholics. Liam describes one
situation in which he was surprised by the reaction of an Irish American
musician from a large metropolitan area:
A few individuals were quite taken aback at [my] being queer…and how that didn’t jive
with the whole Irish Catholic American world view.…I was kind of shocked to experience
that with such a young person, you know? It still happens, you know—hate is still a family
value, and the Irish American identity is still very much tied to the Catholic identity in a
way that Ireland is kind of falling away from that Catholic identity, and so of course it
would’ve been here in the States that I experienced that, not back in Ireland.17

Others were quick to distinguish between their experiences with American,

Irish, and Irish American people. Frances, who now lives in the Northwest
but began playing trad in the South, points out that perceptions from outside
about “traditional” art forms are often mistaken: “Most of the people I
know who play Irish traditional music are far more liberal than the people I
know who don’t.” Liam and others also reported neutral experiences around
sexuality in Ireland. Interestingly, several indicated that sectarianism and
sexuality in Northern Ireland bear a different relationship than one might
expect, as Theo describes:
When I was in the North, they were all cool with [my sexuality].…The only actual friction I
had between being gay and playing music there was the fact that my boyfriend was a
Protestant, and he was from Antrim, and he refused to go anywhere in West Belfast where
all the music was…because he knew they would hear his accent or see his features and give
him shit—or that’s what he thought, anyway.…So the reason there was a separation
[between my gay and trad scenes] was because of sectarian stuff.18

In that context, the difference of religious denomination outweighed the

difference of sexuality.
 Social media outlets, especially Facebook, play a growing role in
connecting performers, and online interactions afford opportunities for
participants to build friendships. But as in other online communities, they
also provide openings for bullying. Several of my interviewees referred to
their dismay at seeing homophobic postings by traditional musicians on
Facebook, and remarked on the disconnect between several musicians’ in-
person social presences and their online personas. This disingenuousness is
a hallmark of online bullying, and Rowan indignantly notes that a trad
friend’s brother “was super nice to my face and then did a lot of really
awful trans-bashing on Facebook.”19
As work on intersectionality has demonstrated, sexism and homophobia
are inextricably linked. Rowan, a transman, tells one story of the slippages
between the two:
There was one…musician who was nasty to me when I came out. It was my first summer at
[the Catskills] after I started transitioning. I was looking for my flute workshop, and this
guy…came up to me and asked me what my name was.…Evidently, he decided that Rowan
was a girl’s name, because he said, “Good. I’m glad to know I’m allowed to look at your
ass.” And the rest of the week he kept calling me by female pronouns, even though my
teacher and the rest of my flute class seemed reasonably clear on the point that I was a dude,
or at least wanted to be treated like one.

Not surprisingly, most of the women I interviewed also brought up sexism

in the trad scene, and several musicians discussed the scene’s homosocial
male tendencies and the “machismo” of instrumental traditional music.20
While my interlocutors expressed frustration with sex/gender dynamics in
the Irish traditional music scene today, the general consensus seems to be
that these dynamics are slowly improving, though not at the same pace in
every place—and at this point, the silence of censure is often
indistinguishable from the silence of acceptance, since the Irish traditional
music scene is necessarily affected by the supercultures of the educated
middle-class in both Ireland and the United States, where explicitly anti-
LGBT sentiments are becoming less acceptable. But even an accepting
silence does not achieve the social and political work of recognition
bestowed.
 M + S = ?

I asked my interlocutors if they notice intersections between their

sexualities and how they perform Irish traditional music/dance. Their
reflections varied widely: several concluded that no connections exist or
that attention to technique and repertoire offers an escape from everyday
life, including relationships and sexuality, while others discussed
intersections between sexuality and music in terms of sense of self and
difference. In our conversations, my interlocutors articulated some of the
ways that their social identities are constantly present—and also ways that
playing trad transcends the non-musician parts of their subjectivities.
Anne and Rowan both discuss the ways that the experience of playing
Irish traditional music allows them an escape. For Anne, playing trad is a
way to sidestep potential disagreements—perhaps in part because session
participants’ social energies are directed toward making music rather than
debating local and national politics. She says:
The music for me is so utterly different than gender or sexuality.…It’s just free of all the
politics and all the power struggle, and just everything that goes along with [that].…It’s like,
ok, we’re doing music now—that’s what we’re doing, and it has nothing to do with the other
stuff.

Rowan takes a more introspective view, and for him, the embodied activity
of playing music provided a way to embody his understanding of himself at
a time when other ways were less available:
I think that music is the most important nongendered act that I do. Before I transitioned,
making music was the one thing I could do where I really felt good in my body, where I was
interacting with the world and creating this magical thing that had absolutely nothing to do
with gender. It was the only time that I really felt like I was fully inhabiting my body.

For Rowan, the embodied practice of making music takes on a special

importance because it brings feelings of having transcended the social
exigencies of gender and/or sexuality. Here, I believe that the experiences
of non-normative musicians may elucidate some of the attraction players
feel toward trad—that learning to channel one’s bodily energies into
producing sounds that are “right” produces the power players of all
identities ascribe to “the music itself.” It’s not (just) sound that brings
liberation—it is the skill, effort, and attention that goes into producing it
appropriately.21
Zeke and Oliver, on the other hand, talk about being constantly aware of
their difference, and choose to enact it for both fun and to make a statement.
Zeke describes his presence in “I’m here and I’m queer” terms:
There’s a certain subtle musical defiance that colors my persona in the trad community. I
think maybe it’s an “outsider” thing. Gay, Italian, adult-learner-of-the-tunes; I study good
old music but I dig in, rail it up, add harmonies ...

In adding harmonies, Zeke steps outside the conventional boundaries of

Irish trad, which is heterophonic and tends to eschew harmonies from
melody players except in some staged performances. Thus, his choice to
“stick out” musically mirrors other forms of difference. Oliver, a dancer
who draws from a variety of movement vocabularies outside Irish
traditional dance, also displays an awareness of his position as outside the
symbolic order of heteronormativity. He writes, “Jonathan Dollimore writes
about a ‘dissident aesthetic,’ and I suppose that weighs in heavily for me
when I think about my work as a social practice and a personal statement.”
Both Zeke and Oliver have made conscious choices to be out and to push
generic as well as social boundaries—choices that may not have been
available to musicians in previous generations. That they articulate their
artistic choices as different demonstrates the power of normative practices
in determining what Irish traditional music is.22
 C

Given that the genre is relatively slow to change, queer musicians will
probably continue to experience engagement with Irish traditional music as
simultaneously liberatory and confining for a while longer, but the question
of whether sexuality matters in trad also has the potential to be productive
for understanding normative musicians’ experiences. As Eva says:
People just think, “Oh, that’s fine. Like, we don’t care—we don’t care what your different
thing that you bring is. You’re still welcome here.” But what they’re also saying is “We
don’t recognize the value that what you are might bring.”

Put positively, tolerance is good and active acceptance is better—but active

recognition of difference promotes an expansive approach for thinking
about what Irish traditional musicians and dancers of all genders,
sexualities, and ethnicities do—musically, socially, and in relation to the
mainstream cultures in which we all operate. By simultaneously exploring
musicians’ feelingful experiences of “the music itself” as an escape and by
challenging discourses of transcendence through an examination of the
issues queer musicians face in gaining recognition in the Irish traditional
music scene, this chapter opens up space for future work that thinks
differently about and around the nationalism still implicit in the
(re)production of the sounds and bodily practices considered “Irish.” I leave
you with a question that several generations of traddies and a multitude of
immigrants to Ireland are now asking of Irish society: can cultural and
musical practices take precedence over bodies that don’t “belong”?
N
1. This connection between performance and subjectivity is analogous to phenomenological
discussions of art music performance. Here, I am thinking particularly of Elisabeth LeGuin’s
Boccherini’s Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
2. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 1993), 55–57. Politics of recognition are, of course, fraught with unpredictable effects and
often contrary meanings, as Elizabeth Povinelli demonstrates in The Cunning of Recognition:
Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke, 2002).
3. Predictably, these connections are strongest in Northern Ireland, where sectarian associations
have been much more pronounced. In my experience, most people in the Republic assume that
anyone playing traditional music is Catholic, but conversations about religion in trad settings
(mostly pub sessions and festivals) are rare. By contrast, first- and second-generation Irish
immigrants seem to take pride in their Catholicism, and churches in these communities become
important centers for the transmission and performance of traditional music and especially
social dance.
4. For more about the invention of pub sessions, see Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, The Pocket History
of Irish Traditional Music (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1998).
5. Some sessions also include singing, but the playing of reels, jigs, and other instrumental dance
tunes is the norm in these gatherings.
6. For an example of such online discussions, see www.thesession.org. Helen O’Shea also
discusses session etiquette in The Making of Irish Traditional Music (Cork: University of Cork
Press, 2008). Note, however, that most participants in these discussions of session etiquette are
based outside Ireland—the impulse to think consciously about appropriate behavior is
understandably stronger among those enculturated differently.
7. For example, see Kelly Hayes, “How to Stop Mansplaining and Whitesplaining Your Way
Through the World of Social Justice,” 2015.
8. Sartorial and instrument choices, as well as body language and among some, a willingness to be
in the background, constitute such performances of conventional femininity.
9. Even in Ireland, performance of and engaged listening to traditional music occupy a minority of
the island’s residents, however embedded its melodies and rhythms are in the national(ist)
soundscape. For more information on gender and music in the Irish nationalist imagination, see
my article “‘Clever Young Artistes’ and ‘The Queen of Irish Fiddlers’: Intelligibility, Gender,
and the Irish Nationalist Imagination.” Ethnomusicology Ireland 2, no. 3 (2013), 1–21.
10. Thinking about orientation as the direction of attention in a particular direction derives from
Sara Ahmed’s work, especially Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006),
and conversations with traditional musicians in the US and Ireland have led me in this
theoretical direction.
11. Despite—or perhaps because of—its connection with middle-class whiteness, “queer” seems the
most logical adjective to use in place of the “alphabet soup” acronym.
12. The metaphor of the closet may well also match up with some of the genre’s most deeply held
aesthetic conventions, including the value of understatement and musical tension between
what’s hidden and what’s open.
13. At this point, I know of no correlations or rhetorical connections between instruments and
sexuality. The instrument choices of my interlocutors do, however, reflect gendered associations
with instruments, including the tendency of men to play flute, and the likelihood that women
musicians will play fiddle. The concertina is an interesting case: though associated with women
players for much of its history, it has also become closely associated with male virtuosos over
the last several decades. None of the musicians I interviewed play the uilleann pipes, an
instrument associated with men—and I have not identified any correlation between women
pipers and non-normative sexualities.
14. Dan Savage, “Bisexuals: You Need to Come Out to Your Friends and Spouses—Now,” The
Stranger, June 22, 2011.
15. While the number of women performers of Irish traditional music has increased significantly
over the past few decades, male musicians are still more common. An informal count suggests
that women comprise about a third of instrumental trad musicians in Ireland and the United
States. Further complicating matters for Laoise is the association of men with sean-nós dance in
Ireland, which contrasts with the United States, where most sean-nós dance teachers and
students are women.
16. Here and elsewhere, I use “LGBT” instead of “LGBTQ+” to indicate the political erasure of
queer practices and orientations like nonmonogamy and asexuality.
17. Trad musicians who travel regularly between Ireland and Irish American enclaves are familiar
with the contrast between the relatively relaxed Irish-in-Ireland attitude toward Catholicism and
its tenets and the more conservative religiosity of many Irish Americans.
18. As in other places (see Zoe Sherinian, “Musical Style and the Changing Social Identity of Tamil
Christians,” Ethnomusicology 51, no. 2 [2007], 238–280), sound and identities are linked. In
Northern Ireland, repertoire, style, and instrumentation considered “Irish traditional” are coded
Catholic, even if realities are more complicated, with shared melodies, ornamentation, and
inflection. See David Cooper, The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora
(Farham: Ashgate, 2009) for a full discussion of how musical style is coded in Northern Ireland.
19. For more on cyberbullying, see the United States Department of Health and Human Services
publication “Cyberbullying.”
20. Liam chose “machismo” to describe instrumental trad in contrast with sean-nós song, a style of
unaccompanied singing, often heavily ornamented and usually in the Irish language, in which
delicacies of phrasing and nuances of expression are highly valued.
21. This thought is in keeping with Suzanne Cusick’s meditation on knife and hand skills in “A
Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight” in Queering the
Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994). On another
register, the experience of playing traditional music often brings musicians into a flow state. See
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and
Row, 1990).
22. In my monograph Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music I
demonstrate that the location of “authenticity” in Irish traditional music has shifted in the last
century or so from the Irishness of bodies to stylistic parameters.
R
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Cooper, David. The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora. Farham: Ashgate,
2009.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and
Row, 1990.
Cusick, Suzanne. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.”
In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, eds. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood,
and Gary C. Thomas, 67–83. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Hayes, Kelly. “How to Stop Mansplaining and Whitesplaining Your Way Through the World of
Social Justice,” Transformative Spaces blog, October 7, 2015. http://transformativespaces.org
LeGuin, Elisabeth. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006.
Ó hAllmhuráin, Gearóid. The Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music. Dublin: O’Brien Press,
1998.
O’Shea, Helen. The Making of Irish Traditional Music. Cork: Cork University Press, 2008.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian
Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
Savage, Dan. “Bisexuals: You Need to Come Out to Your Friends and Spouses—Now,” The
Stranger, June 22, 2011.
Sherinian, Zoe. “Musical Style and the Changing Social Identity of Tamil Christians.”
Ethnomusicology 51, no. 2 (2007), 238–280.
Slobin, Mark. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 1993.
Slominski, Tes. “‘Clever Young Artistes’ and ‘The Queen of Irish Fiddlers:’ Intelligibility, Gender,
and the Irish Nationalist Imagination.” Ethnomusicology Ireland 2, no. 3 (2013), 1–21.
United States Department of Health and Human Services. “Cyberbullying.” (www.stopbullying.gov).
 CHAPTER 6

G AY C O U N T RY,
TRANSAMERICANA, AND
QUEER SINCERITY
 S H ANA GOL DI N- P E RS CH BA CH E R

T first openly gay country music album came about when Patrick
Haggerty, the son of Washington tenant dairy farmers, put together a band
of gay and allied friends in 1972 to get out “the information” about being
gay to isolated listeners.1 Despite having what he later realized was an
unusually progressive and loving family for a gay kid in the 1950s, he had
experienced confusion and trauma and lacked sources of knowledge and
advice from other gay people.2 Passing on “the information” felt like a
crucial project to Haggerty. The record Lavender Country was released in a
pressing of one thousand copies in 1973 through Gay Community Social
Services in Seattle. The band put ads in gay bookstores and underground
gay newspapers and sold the record from a post office box. When asked,
forty years later, to account for the album’s value, Haggerty responded quite
honestly, “I would like to say it’s remarkable because it’s such a fabulous
album, but that would not be the truth—even though it may be. What’s truer
is how thirsty all of us were for any kind of information at the time. We
were coming up with information, out of whole cloth, by ourselves; nobody
was telling us anything about what it means to be gay. Any kind of
information we could get from anywhere, we were just gobbling it up.
That’s what happened with Lavender Country.”3 As for genre, he said, “I
stuck with country because that’s what I knew best.”4 “Maybe it was a
brazen thing to do, to come out with a gay country album. On the other
hand, why not? I think we forget that gay people come from everywhere.
And I came from Dry Creek.”5
What strikes me about this story is that the artist prioritized country
music as a medium for sharing desperately-needed knowledge about the
experience of being gay6; his choice of genre was practical and also the
most truthful means to deliver “the information”; and his album was
produced not by a record company but by a gay community center, with
sixty percent of proceeds donated “back into community-oriented projects
for the sexual minority communities.”7 Haggerty’s voice is both earnest and
campy, invitingly singing “You all come out, come out my dears to
Lavender Country,” a phrase that served as the name of the band, the song,
and the album, as well as creating a possible genre and a physical or
metaphorical space. The LP’s back cover reads, “We’d like to tell you about
Lavender Country. For many, it means a land of fear, confusion, and
loneliness; for the rest of us, it means a life of struggling towards liberation
and an affirmation of Gayness.”8 The album intersectionally critiques white
supremacist patriarchy, homophobia, and capitalism, and calls listeners to
rise up against the period’s psychiatric (mis)treatment of gay people.9 It also
offers gay and lesbian love songs and campy jokes. In the song “Crying
These Cocksucking Tears” you might hear the pain of rejection and the
anger over patriarchy/homophobia in Haggerty’s modest yet evocative
voice, as well as the humor of his full-voiced lesbian backup singer Eve
Morris’s impassioned chorus singing in the “most earnest Joan Baez voice
you’ve ever heard the name of the song over and over again like it’s
‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”10
When music scholars write about genres that appeal to North American
queer and/or transgender participants (or appeal to us as scholars for
making the sorts of claims we’re interested in exploring about trans and
queer identities), we have tended to look to almost any other type of
popular or art music besides country. One notable exception is musician
k.d. lang, whose popular performances of country music since the 1980s
have been analyzed for their ambiguous, queer, and sometimes camp and/or
performance art aesthetics.11 And yet in this discourse, lang is typically
understood as an anomaly and outsider to the commercial country music
industry. Her self-described “cross-pollinized”12 musical style, which
included “rock-a-billy surfer, punk, honky-tonk, yodeling, polka, torch
song, and 1940s jazz,” was considered so broad as to seem problematic.13
Further, her shift in genre (away from country to torch songs and adult
contemporary), and her enormous growth in sales and recognition after this
change, seem to suggest to some critics that she was never really a country
musician.14 Country and related genres and its listeners are regularly
assumed to invest in concepts of tradition, stasis, naturalness, conservative
Christian religiosity, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy, ways of
structuring life that make existence difficult for many trans and queer
people. Country music, connected in theory if not always in practice with
the rural, is understood as bigoted. Nadine Hubbs’s 2014 book Rednecks,
Queers, and Country Music complicates this assumption, noting that the
rural and working class, who are often themselves stigmatized as non-
normative, were at one time more accepting of queerness than the middle
class was; it was only in the 1970s and 80s when middle class people
shifted from elitism to cultural omnivorousness that they projected their
own former intolerance onto the working class.15 At least one hundred
bands or solo acts of transgender and/or queer musicians have played
country, Americana, old time, bluegrass, roots, folk, or alt.country over the
last forty-five years, mostly in the last fifteen. When I’ve heard these genres
played by transgender and queer musicians, the styles and genre
descriptions intermingle in different ways than they might when played by
straight and/or cisgender musicians; queer and/or trans community
networks and activism tend to be prioritized over traditional musical
pairings or being featured by mainstream commercial musical venues.
While one musician hosts a regular show with rotating artists called “Queer
Country Quarterly,” other musicians express reservations about being
labeled as country.16 Thus, I also employ the sociomusical term
“transAmericana,” a label coined by journalist Sylvia Sukop but not
typically used as a genre description.17
When scholars and journalists address transgender and/or queer people’s
musical performances, we have tended to focus on camp aesthetics or
rebellious styles. For example, k.d. lang’s country music performances have
been widely discussed for their camp appeal. While lesbian fans worldwide
adored lang’s country music, it was frequently viewed with suspicion by
both journalists and the country music industry, despite her repeated claims
of honest appreciation for country music and her view that loving a genre
included having a sense of humor about it.18 But gay and transgender
country and Americana musicians since Lavender Country have developed
sincere and politically activist aesthetics using roots styles. Esteemed
country songwriter Harlan Howard is credited with saying that country
music is “three chords and the truth.”19 While scholars such as sociologist
Richard Peterson have demonstrated how country music has been
commercially fabricated around the concept of authenticity, what we can
draw from often-repeated quotes such as Howard’s is a sense of how
country music tells its story, as well as why someone like Patrick Haggerty
might want to use country music to communicate about being gay when
there were few sources of affirming narratives, especially in this style.20 As
he explained, “[N]obody ever dreamed of accusing Lavender Country of
being invalid. It was valid information; it sure was. It still is, for that matter.
That’s what people loved about it—it was honest information about the
topic.”21
The notion of truthfulness is compelling in the North American popular
music industry, suggesting that listeners will get a real sense of an artist’s
life and perspective. But cultural notions of what honesty entails have also
created problems and danger for people with marginalized gender and/or
sexuality. The narrative of the “out and proud” urban coastal queer has
made life difficult for rural gay and trans people, as ethnographer Mary
Gray found in her study of LGBT teens in Kentucky at the turn of the
twenty-first century. Although the rural is often situated rhetorically as the
closet of North America, if not a space of death for queer and trans people,
Gray and other scholars have found that rural queers develop different ways
of surviving and, in some cases, thriving in their settings.22 While today,
gender- and/or sexually-diverse people are expected to move to an urban
and especially coastal area and to visibly and audibly differentiate from
straight (and, for some, also cisgender) people, Gray argues that this
narrative creates problems for a core structural value of rural life,
“familiarity.” In a small rural town, residents depend on one another for the
basic services that would be provided by large institutions and government
in a city. Out gay Appalachian folk musician from Southwest Virginia Sam
Gleaves invokes rural familiarity directly in the title of his debut album,
Ain’t We Brothers.23 The title prompts the imagined homophobic listener to
reconsider the relationship between himself and his gay neighbors, based on
the rural ethics of familiarity in which they should be considered socially
tied.
One way to approach gay country and transAmericana musical
performances of honesty and familiarity might be as expressions of “queer
sincerity.” At least since 1973’s Lavender Country, sincerity has been an
appealing and yet complicated concept for queer and trans country
musicians. The concept of sincerity traditionally depends on a notion of
inner truth, or authenticity, expressed outwards. Thus, it appears to be
essentialized and conflicts with postmodern understanding of identity. And
yet theater scholar Siân Adiseshiah argues that there is possibility of
rethinking sincerity in light of “poststructuralist irony, cynicism, and
fatigue” without rehabilitating an “essentialist self.” Adiseshiah identifies a
performative aesthetic in experimental theater: “a genuine, communicative
encounter, where trusted and trusting, inter-connected spectators are
interpellated as part of a conversation about things that matter in the world,
but where residues of an ironic affect continue to trouble the encounter,
ironic moments that exist within the space of sincerity, and the authentic is
always in question.”24 Rather than setting sincerity at odds with camp, we
might hear queer sincerity as expressing yearned-for earnestness with room
for a camp wink. After all, camp includes a deep attachment to straight
culture’s discarded objects and identifications. Queer theorist Ann
Pellegrini explores such relationships using the term “camp sincerity,”
building on critical theorist Susan Sontag’s writing on camp. Navigating
Sontag’s decades of changing and cryptically autobiographical theorizing
about camp, Pellegrini finds that Sontag drew an unnecessary line between
gay male aesthetic camp and Jewish, as well as lesbian, moral seriousness.
She explores examples that are both camp and morally serious, finding that
these modes of expression may have commonality, depending on the author,
audience, and intent. Pellegrini argues for “a precious form of queer
resilience, imagination, and…‘moral seriousness’ in the face of
vulnerability.”25 Pellegrini notes that Sontag described feeling vulnerable as
she navigated her own queerness, Jewishness, and exposedness as an author
whose explorations intersected with her own life.
For queer and/or transgender country and Americana musicians, sincere
autobiographical writing is important, though risky, both as country
musicians and as queer and transgender people. Transgender people are
regularly asked to account for their gender identification in a way not asked
of most people.26 And while a person’s disclosure of lesbian, gay, or
bisexual identification may lead a hearer to believe that the speaker has
shared an inner truth—something that offers deeper and more intimate
understanding of the person than outer appearances or pleasantries—those
learning about a person’s transgender identity may feel deceived, as though
a person’s outer appearance is incongruous with a notion of “inner truth” in
which the hearer believes.27 The expectation of this audible “truth” extends
to the perceived gendering of a person’s voice. Stephan Pennington writes
in this volume that, “At a time when the relationship between bodies and
identities is ever more complex, the voice is clung to as the locus of
essential, non-alterable gender ‘truth.’ The eyes may deceive, but the voice
never lies.”28 Faced with this sort of rhetoric, the choice of irony over
truthfulness may not be surprising, as it avoids reinvesting in cisgender
notions of essentialist identity. But given that country music is said to be,
simply, “three chords and the truth,” what work might this and related
genres do for transgender and queer musicians? And what might these
particular musicians’ experiences tell us about Americana as well as North
American identities?
Country and Americana have a history of unmarked middle-class
stakeholders stereotyping marginalized identities. Music historian Karl
Hagstrom Miller notes that while Black and white southern musicians could
sing or play many styles of music, the industry pigeonholed them into
racialized and regionalized roles.29 This stereotyping is a common
experience for oppressed people. Sociologist Beverly Skeggs argues that
culturally devalued people such as the working class and people of color
tend to have their identities fixed in place, essentialized, and diminished.
She claims that this process allows middle-class people to temporarily
borrow from fixed and devalued identifications in ways that offer value to
the borrowers while fixing the borrowed-from as valueless and
pathologized.30 These fixed selves and cultural borrowing make money for
the music industry, but the musicians on both sides of this equation may be
caught in a tough place navigating expectations of genre and truthfulness.
For example, in Murray Lerner’s 1967 documentary Festival! about the
early years of the Newport Folk Festival, blues musician Mike Bloomfield
identifies himself as a white Jewish man, and suburban-raised son of a
millionaire, and implies that while he has learned to play the blues, Black
southern musician Son House is the blues.31 While this statement is meant
to praise House’s musicality, Bloomfield’s rhetoric fixes House in a
racially-, regionally-, and socioeconomically-marked position. Once fixed
like this, House’s sociomusicality is available for Bloomfield to borrow
without shedding his own racial, regional, and class privilege. These
stereotyped, marginalized identities are appealing to middle-class people
through what historian Benjamin Filene identifies as the irony of the appeal
of “outsider populism” in which othered citizens are positioned (often by
the middle class) as exemplary “common people,” a process that both
solidifies a sense of otherness and yet draws audience identification with
othered peoples’ “grit and character.”32 Filene’s example is John and Alan
Lomax’s marketing of Lead Belly, who, by intimate accounts, was a sharp
dresser and gentle person, yet pushed to perform barefoot wearing his old
prison uniform, and marketed as a dangerous Black man coming to
Northeast colleges to play some songs between committing homicides. Gay
country and transAmericana have inherited this “outsider populism.” Artists
must be visibly or audibly different in order to be appreciated by straight
(and/or cisgender) audiences for their “grit and character” as othered
people, yet tell recognizable stories to be accepted as “common people.”
Queer and trans audiences may want more varied stories and humor from
artists, whereas straight and/or cisgender audiences may want the artist’s
“coming out” song included in each performance.33 Artists’ queer sincerity
can be useful to articulate experiences of difference and similarity, politics,
and modes of solidarity to mixed audiences that include both queer and/or
trans people looking for camaraderie, humor, tears, and activism, as well as
cisgender and/or straight audience members consuming artists via “outsider
populism.”
So if “queer sincerity” in country music in 1973 invited listeners to a
sometimes painful, yet also revolutionary musical land called “lavender
country,” how might a queer transgender professional country musician in
the twenty-first century navigate similar issues involving identity,
authenticity, genre, and humor? In the autobiographical book Gender
Failure, Canadian musician and author Rae Spoon writes, “How do you
become a transgender country singer? For some, it’s easier to be
transgender from the start and then work towards becoming a singer. For
others, it’s better to play music first, and then come out as transgender.
About ten years ago, I managed to do both in the space of a few months.”34
This passage invites a number of reactions. How does one become a
transgender country singer, and why? Why pick country, of all musical
genres, when you are a singer-songwriter who identifies as a transgender
man who has decided not to use testosterone because it will affect your
soprano voice? (Spoon has since “retired from gender,” identifying as
nonbinary and transgender, and uses “they.”35) Is country music a
hospitable genre for trans singers (or for trans pedal steel players, fiddlers,
and banjo players)? Further, is Spoon teasing readers a little, responding to
anticipated reactions of disbelief by ignoring the seeming juxtaposition,
instead offering a playful list of “best practices” around becoming a trans
country singer, letting us know that there are many paths, but assuming that
we know that there are plenty of transgender country singers?36
Spoon’s music has explored different understandings of whether or not
rural spaces are safe to queer and trans people. Their song “Keep the
Engine Running” is about crossing the United States-Canadian border by
car to tour the American Midwest.37 They’ve discussed with me the added
stress of crossing the border into America, paying for a visa to play here,
and needing connections to make good on the investment of the trip; a US
tour requires participation in the country’s more specialized musical
markets and territory, as compared to fewer Canadian venues, which
typically, for financial and practical reasons, welcome musicians of all
genres. The song features their strategy of keeping the car running at rest
stops in case they’re threatened, delivered musically with both solemnity
and humor. Spoon’s delicate voice against a spare banjo part is poignantly
vulnerable, and yet their lyrics and enunciation poke fun: Spoon sings that
people at the station are so impressed by their “Sunday best” that they
“want to know all about us.” Of course as an atheist and former Pentecostal,
Spoon is wearing their musical stage costume and not going to church. And
the people’s curiosity may or may not be friendly. Spoon’s yodeling
melisma on the phrase “gas station” makes it sound like “gay station.”38
Spoon counters the notion of the rural as a potential space of death for
queers in songs about queer and trans people of the Canadian prairies, like
“A message from the Queer Trans Prairie Tourism Co.,” which seems to use
“queer sincerity” to counter audiences’ “outsider populism.”
 At the 2016 joint meeting of the US and Canadian chapters of the
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, fellow music and
queer studies scholar Craig Jennex and I hosted Rae Spoon for a concert
and stage conversation. During their performance of this song, Spoon
cheerfully reassured our audience, “Don’t worry, this isn’t a ‘tourism
Alberta’ song, it’s for tourists in the queer community,” and explained that
the song is “a tuneful sing-along and a good way to test a room.”39 The last
line of the chorus stands out from the rhythm of the rest of that verse,
partially for making an ideological point of including both “queer” and also
“trans” in the tourism company name (an unlikely, and thus funny, name for
a company), as well as squeezing in more words than the rest of the lines
(which is also more awkward, and less easy to anticipate, for the audience’s
singalong). Yet how audience members react to this experience could “test
the room” for willingness to experience discomfort, laugh, or consider the
idea of perhaps being “tourists in the queer community” simply by being
straight or cisgender and in the audience at that moment.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual,
Transgender and transsexual
It’s better to ask if you don’t know
A message from the Queer Trans Prairie Tourism Co.
Moustaches, cowboys, and the stampede
You might not think there’s a queer trans scene
But Brokeback Mountain filmed some scenes
Fifteen miles from Calgary.40

Spoon’s generous humor had many of our audience members in stitches

during this song and much of the show, yet not so much that we missed
their profound range of emotional expression over an hour-long set.
Spoon’s explanation of becoming a transgender country singer in
Gender Failure concludes:
Half a year after moving to Vancouver from Alberta, country music started to swirl in my
head. I had put all of myself into escaping from Calgary to the more liberal west coast. I had
changed my last name a few days before I moved, and I was keen on reinventing myself. I
was queer, and that had been hard in Alberta. I thought that I would put those difficulties
behind me and wake up a new person in Vancouver, but the temperate climate and
easygoing people there had reaffirmed the sense that I was still quite Albertan on the inside.
It’s not like the moment I put my foot down in British Columbia, I was wholly inspired to
 start making surfer music. The music that had surrounded me my entire life started to creep
into my own.41

Spoon sings about this feeling, “my prairie home fits like a Sunday dress,”
commenting on feeling stifled both by their family’s Pentecostal religion
and also by forced femininity.42 Spoon’s sense of being “Albertan on the
inside” could sound like essentialism, but we might also think about Pierre
Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” the ways people come to embody cultural
capital.43 Artists are encouraged to leverage features from their upbringing
to create a compelling artistic voice. Yet as Beverly Skeggs argues, the
value of these qualities is contextual and intersectional. For example, once
Spoon identified as a transgender man living in Vancouver, country music
(and its references to Albertan lifestyles) became more appealing to utilize
than it had been to them when living in Alberta. Based on her intersectional
analysis, Skeggs rethinks “habitus” in relation to concepts of identity in late
capitalism, defining the “self” as “a metaphoric space in which to store and
display resources.”44 Gender and sexuality are thus “resources” that one
may (or may not) have access to deploy to realize value in the self. Skeggs
worked ethnographically with white working-class women, who, like Lead
Belly and Son House, are seen as fixed by their status and thus are unable to
deploy the traits of others. She notes, “some people use the classifications
and characteristics of race, sexuality, class, and gender as resources even as
others are denied their use because they are positioned as those
classifications and are fixed by them.”45 I’ve noticed in Spoon’s music and
autobiographical texts, and in our conversations, the way they draw
resources from their past in ways that feel accurate and ethical, and when
encountering a rigidity of category that does not fit with their sense of self,
a disidentification with or move away from using that category.46 Spoon’s
artistic ethical code requires some personal connection as permission to
write about a topic.47
Spoon recalls their early role models, their uncles who, at times, rescued
the family from Spoon’s abusive father:
Sometimes, in daydreams, I pictured myself as one of them, out in the middle of the prairies
driving alone in my truck, blowing smoke out the window, and sleeping in hotels and
temporary trailers. I would listen to Garth Brooks, Willie Nelson, and Randy Travis. My
hands would be dirty with crude oil. I wanted to be a cowboy so that I could hold back my
 tears and protect my family. I used to smoke and drink, but then I quit both. I never learned
how to drive, work the oil rigs, or ride a horse, but I did write songs about these things. I
was not a cowboy in reality, but my heart always felt lonely enough to sing about it with
conviction.48

This passage lends insight into the musical habitus of queer sincerity,
which offers a sense of authentic self despite not having personally
experienced each of those activities. Spoon wrote the song “Cowboy” as a
kind of post-country song for Chelsea McMullan’s 2013 documentary about
Spoon, My Prairie Home.49 Rather than claiming lived experience as proof
of musical authenticity, “Cowboy” compares Spoon’s queer and trans exile
from Alberta to lonely cowboy life:
I wanted you to think I was a cowboy,
So I told you where I was from.
But all I ever did was run from trucks
And I never held a gun.
…
I wanted you to think I was a cowboy
So I told you where I am from.
And I walked around like I didn’t care
That I lost everyone.50

Spoon remembers finding a Hank Williams album at a record store shortly

after the move to Vancouver and listening to it on repeat, “He was almost
too twangy for my taste, but he sounded as misplaced as I felt.”51 Like
Williams, Spoon grew up working class. Spoon spent their young adulthood
working at gas stations, did not attend college, and is a self- and friend-
taught musician. Spoon’s instinct about the loneliness of Williams’ music is
prescient. It was intended for rural men who had migrated to cities for work
and who were lonesome for home. To Spoon, the significant connection is
an emotional one with the “sound” and feeling of being “misplaced.”
Spoon stopped playing country music “after five years of constant
touring.” Their friend had asked for a list of queer-friendly and non-sexist
prairie venues and Spoon could barely come up with any suggestions. “I
realized that I had been very unkind to myself” by continuing to play there
and censoring obvious queerness.52 Spoon still travels back to the prairies,
blending some country styling and/or themes with indie pop and electronic
dance beats. They now think of some of their country music as
“performance art.”53 They explained to me when I asked about the wide
range of venues they play, including queer anarchist squats in Europe as
well as the only music venue in some rural places,
I’ve always tried to make music that I could play in a little hall in a small town [for] mostly
everyone like aunts, uncles, and gender neutral relatives of that name we haven’t come up
with.…Something I could play in a club in Berlin at midnight but also play in the Yukon for
a bunch of folks who have only heard about my country music.…I think I will sometimes
sing “A Message From the Queer Trans Prairie Tourism Co.”…—usually people love that,
if you’re at a festival and you get the whole room going, even if it’s a mixed crowd, because
you’re inviting them into your community and inviting them to celebrate LGBTQIIAA
people. It’s almost like instead of “we are different” you can just say, “oh, you can also clap
along to it.” It’s like, “you don’t have to be queer to clap along. You know who you are!”
People kind of chill out. Like, “oh, this is a part of the world and we can all hang out and
sing together, it’s fine,” which is ridiculous, it sounds really silly, but there’s a way to use
your difference to make yourself more appealing as a performer. This is what’s different
about me. It doesn’t mean we can’t relate.54

What we might learn from these examples is that for the last forty-five
years, out gay and transgender country and Americana musicians have self-
resourced selectively from their life experiences, creating music that is
meant to communicate in an activist as well as an artistic fashion. This
practice affects their genre choices and performance venues. But their
audiences are by necessity mixed in terms of sexuality, gender,
socioeconomic status, and musical taste. The “outsider populism” they have
inherited from folk music marketing becomes a way to articulate
personhood and community relationships, even across stark divisions. But
with that outsider populism comes the fixity of stereotypes that can
pigeonhole an othered artist. Queer sincerity, with its moral seriousness as
well as its winks to knowing listeners, may cut through some of those
stereotypes, and offer artists in these positions a sense of agency and an
avenue for truthful expression.
N
1. Haggerty explains that tenant dairy farmers are “essentially sharecroppers for the dairy
industry”; Patrick Haggerty, Lavender Country, Paradise of Bachelors PoB-12, 2014, compact
disc. Originally released in 1973 by Gay Community Social Services of Seattle. Available at
http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-12/.
2. Ibid., 3–4 and 8–10.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. Ibid., 8.
5. Ibid., 7.
6. One could compare Haggerty and friends’ “coming up with information, out of whole cloth, by
ourselves…about what it means to be gay” with Joanne Meyerowitz’s account of how, in the
twentieth century, word traveled between trans people via autobiographies, newspaper articles,
and medical texts about favorable experiences with sympathetic doctors. Meyerowitz notes the
importance of these documents and their circulation, but also discusses the limitations—doctors
used these accounts as the standard by which to assess future patients’ descriptions of gender
identity and so when speaking with doctors, transgender people learned to repeat “acceptable”
stories whether they were representative of their own experiences or not. See Joanne
Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) as well as a challenge to the effects of these constrained
and medicalized transgender narratives in Dean Spade, “Mutilating Gender,” in The
Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge,
2006), 315–332.
7. Haggerty, Lavender Country, 1973, back cover.
8. Haggerty, Lavender Country, 1973, back cover.
9. Haggerty was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital following his ejection from the Peace
Corps for being gay and describes the experience as traumatic in the song “Waltzing Will
Trilogy” and in the 2014 liner notes (8–11).
10. Patrick Haggerty, “Crying These Cocksucking Tears,” Lavender Country, 2014. Pitchfork writer
Jayson Greene interviewed in director Dan Taberski’s documentary short, These C*cksucking
Tears, 2016, Vimeo video, 15:50, http://www.thesec-cksuckingtears.com/.
11. Lang’s country music achievements include two Grammy Awards, the Entertainer of the Year
Award by the Canadian Country Music Association, and an appearance singing at the Winter
Olympics. Scholarship about gender and sexuality in lang’s country music includes: Keith
Negus, “Country, k.d. lang and lesbian style,” Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 130–133; Stella Bruzzi, “Mannish Girl: k.d.,
from Cowpunk to Androgyny,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila
Whiteley (London: Routledge Press, 1997), 191–206; Martha Mockus, “Queer Thoughts on
Country Music and k.d. lang,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology,
ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 257–271;
Sheila Whiteley, “k.d. lang, a Certain Kind of Woman,” Women and Popular Music: Sexuality,
 Identity and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2000), 152–170; John M. Sloop, “‘So Long,
Chaps and Spurs, and Howdy—er, Bon Jour—to the Wounded Songbird’: k.d. lang, Ambiguity,
and the Politics of Genre/Gender,” Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in
Contemporary U.S Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), p. 83–103; and
Zoe C. Sherinian, “K.D. Lang and Gender Performance,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of
World Music, vol. 3, The United States and Canada, ed. Ellen Koskoff (New York: Garland
Publishing, 2001), 107–110.
12. Brendan Lemon, “Virgin territory: k. d. lang,” The Advocate 605 (16 June 1992), 38.
13. Sherinian, “K.D. Lang and Gender Performance,” 108.
14. John Sloop argues persuasively that journalists rhetorically disciplined lang in reviews of her
country music performances for their ambiguity of gender, sexuality, and genre commitment.
Her humor was seen as criticism of the genre, rather than a mark of affection for it and/or ease
in it. lang’s simultaneous genre shift and coming out seemed to signal to journalists that her
music from Ingenue onwards was more “honest,” and showed musical and ideological
progression, maturity, and commitment. Sloop notes that although lang was now an out lesbian,
her shift from low cultural value country music to higher cultural value torch singing and easy
listening led to approval from journalists. Sloop’s stance marks a distinct difference from Sheila
Whiteley’s, which suggests that ambiguity allowed lang some safety to navigate popularity
without having to officially come out. I would anticipate that Vincent Stephens, who has written
on the post-World War II history of male performers in the United States and the “open secret,”
would agree that ambiguity allows a performer more flexibility, sales, and career longevity.
Sloop, Disciplining Gender; Whiteley, Women and Popular Music; Vincent Stephens, Rocking
the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
15. Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2014).
16. Karen Pittelman, of Karen and the Sorrows, has hosted Queer Country Quarterly in Brooklyn
since 2011. Eli Conley has organized related “Queer Country West” concerts in San Francisco
since 2015.
17. Sylvia Sukop, “Transamericana: From Folk Roots Up and Out,” Huffington Post, March 18,
2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sylvia-sukop/transamericana-from-folk_b_424035.html.
18. Interview with Dave Jennings, “The Twang’s the Thang: k.d. lang,” Melody Maker (May 26,
1990): 41, quoted in Mockus, “Queer Thoughts,” 260 and 264, and Rich Kienzel, “Review:
Absolute Torch and Twang,” Country Music (Sept/Oct 1989): 59, quoted in Mockus, “Queer
Thoughts,” n. 24.
19. Tony Russell, “Obituary: Harlan Howard: Prolific Writer of Country Music Hits,” The
Guardian, 5 March 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/mar/06/guardianobituaries.
20. Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1997).
21. Haggerty, Lavender Country, 2014, 19.
22. Mary Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New
York: New York University Press, 2009). Some of the growing body of scholarship on LGBTQ+
rural life includes: John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
(New York: New York University Press, 2010). The most recent bibliography of rural queer
 studies may be found in Mary Gray, Colin R. Johnson, and Brian J. Gilley, eds., Queering the
Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (New York: New York University Press,
2016).
23. Sam Gleaves, Ain’t We Brothers, Community Music 2015 CMCD301. Available at
http://www.samgleaves.com/buy-a-cd.php.
24. Siân Adiseshiah, “Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced
Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties,” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4/1 (2016):
186 and 189.
25. Ann Pellegrini, “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp,” in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2007), 174.
26. Analysis about identity formation and how music contributes to sense of self are fraught and
have often relied on discussion about (and not with) transgender people as examples, as Stephan
Pennington’s essay in this collection argues.
27. Author conversation with Marcus Desmond Harmon, November 8, 2014. I discuss the
repercussions from one musician’s onstage disclosures in Shana Goldin-Perschbacher,
“TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” New Literary History 46, no. 4 (2015), 786–
788.
28. Pennington, this volume.
29. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim
Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
30. Beverly Skeggs, “Uneasy Alignments, Resourcing Respectable Subjectivity,” GLQ 10, no. 2
(2004): 291–298.
31. Murray Lerner, Festival! Patchke Productions/Eagle Rock Entertainment EE391019R2, 1967,
DVD.
32. Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 64.
33. Transgender Americana musician Joe Stevens has regularly said to me (between our first
interaction in April 2010 and the present) that he calls his most famous song, “Guy Named Joe,”
his “You’ve Got a Friend.” But unlike Carole King’s 1971 hit that she is expected to play at each
show, Stevens’ song delivers information about a facet of his identity that he feels is central to
him, and is one that he built his early career around sharing musically. I discuss this in: Goldin-
Perschbacher, “TransAmericana,” 2015. Coyote Grace, “A Guy Named Joe,” Boxes & Bags,
Mile After Mile 2006, MAM0001 and mashup “Joelvis,” Buck Naked, Mile After Mile, 2010.
Available at https://www.coyotegrace.com/albums.
34. Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote, Gender Failure (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014), 129.
While this book is co-authored, chapters are credited to individual authors, and thus addressed
as such in following notes.
35. Spoon, Gender Failure, 249–252.
36. In addition to Rae Spoon, I know of at least fourteen transgender singer-instrumentalists who
perform country, Americana, old time, folk, and related styles of music.
37. Rae Spoon, “Keep the Engine Running,” Your Trailer Door, 2005 Washboard Records
621365082120. website defunct and album not available for sale. Lyrics reproduced with the
artist’s permission.
38. Gas stations are not always unpleasant or dangerous places for queer or trans people on the road,
though. As ethnographer Anne Balay discusses, queer and trans people (and the diverse array of
people attracted to them) regularly have consensual sex at truck stops. Anne Balay, Semi Queer:
Stories of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2018).
39. Rae Spoon in concert, International Association for the Study of Popular Music United States
and Canadian chapters’ joint meeting, May 28, 2016, in Calgary, Alberta.
40. Rae Spoon, “A Message from the Queer Trans Prairie Tourism Co.” (unpublished). Lyrics
reproduced with the artist’s consent.
41. Spoon, Gender Failure, 129–130.
42. Rae Spoon, “Sunday Dress,” My Prairie Home, SOCAN 2013. Available at
https://raespoon.bandcamp.com/album/my-prairie-home. Lyrics reproduced with the artist’s
permission.
43. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
44. Skeggs, “Uneasy Alignments,” 292.
45. Skeggs, “Uneasy Alignments,” 293.
46. The term “disidentification” was developed by queer performance studies scholar José Esteban
Muñoz to describe the creative ways that queers of color craft a sense of self in critical relation
to existing normative categories, because it is impossible to create a space entirely apart from
existing categories. Disidentification may also used by White queer and transgender people,
such as Spoon, who has “retired from gender,” rather than refusing any relationship with the
system of gender. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
47. Spoon, conversation with the author, Calgary, May 29, 2016.
48. Spoon, Gender Failure, 62.
49. Chelsea McMullan, My Prairie Home (Montreal: National Film Board of Canada C9913425,
2013). DVD, 76 minutes.
50. Rae Spoon, “Cowboy,” My Prairie Home, SOCAN 2013. Available at
https://raespoon.bandcamp.com/album/my-prairie-home. Lyrics reproduced with the artist’s
permission.
51. Spoon, Gender Failure, 130.
52. Spoon, Gender Failure, 135–136.
53. Spoon, phone conversation with the author, December 19, 2015.
54. Spoon, phone conversation with the author, December 19, 2015.
R
Adiseshiah, Siân. “Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced
Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016):
180–195.
Balay, Anne. Semi Queer: Stories of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2018.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Bruzzi, Stella. “Mannish Girl: k.d., from Cowpunk to Androgyny.” In Sexing the Groove: Popular
Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 191–206. London: Routledge Press, 1997.
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana. “TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey.” New Literary History
46, no. 4 (2015): 775–803.
Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana. Queer Country. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2022.
Gray, Mary. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York:
New York University Press, 2009.
Hubbs, Nadine. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2014.
Hubbs, Nadine. “‘Jolene,’ Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s
Loving Address of the Other Woman,” Women & Music 19 (2015), 71–76.
Lemon, Brendan. “Virgin territory: k. d. lang.” The Advocate 605 (16 June 1992), 34–46.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Mockus, Martha. “Queer Thoughts on Country Music and k.d. lang.” In Queering the Pitch: The
New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, 257–271, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C.
Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Pellegrini, Ann. “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp.” In A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, 168–193. Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
Peterson, Richard. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1997.
Sherinian, Zoe C. “K.D. Lang and Gender Performance.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World
Music, vol. 3, The United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 107–110. New York:
Garland Publishing, 2001.
Skeggs, Beverly. “Uneasy Alignments, Resourcing Respectable Subjectivity.” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004):
291–298.
Sloop, John M. “‘So Long, Chaps and Spurs, and Howdy—er, Bon Jour—to the Wounded Songbird’:
k.d. lang, Ambiguity, and the Politics of Genre/Gender.” In Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex
Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture, 83–103. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
2004.
Spoon, Rae, and Ivan E. Coyote. Gender Failure. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014.
Spade, Dean. “Mutilating Gender.” In The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker and
Stephen Whittle, 315–332. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Stephens, Vincent. Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny
Mathis Queered Pop Music Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019
Sukop, Sylvia. “Transamericana: From Folk Roots Up and Out.” Huffington Post (March 18, 2010),
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sylvia-sukop/transamericana-from-folk_b_424035.html.
Whiteley, Sheila. “k.d. lang, a Certain Kind of Woman.” Women and Popular Music: Sexuality,
Identity and Subjectivity, 152–170. London: Routledge, 2000.
Discography and Filmography
Coyote Grace. Boxes & Bags. Mile After Mile MAM0001, 2006, compact disc.
Coyote Grace. Buck Naked. Mile After Mile, 2010, compact disc.
Gleaves, Sam. Ain’t We Brothers. Community Music CMCD301, 2015, compact disc.
Lavender Country. Lavender Country. Paradise of Bachelors PoB-12, 2014 (originally released by
Gay Community Social Services of Seattle, 1973).
Lerner, Murray. Festival! Patchke Productions/Eagle Rock Entertainment EE391019R2, 1967, DVD.
97 minutes.
McMullan, Chelsea. My Prairie Home. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada C9913425, 2013,
DVD. 76 minutes.
Spoon, Rae. My Prairie Home, SOCAN 2013, compact disc.
Spoon, Rae. Your Trailer Door. Washboard Records 621365082120, 2005, compact disc.
Taberski, Dan. These C*cksucking Tears, 2016. Vimeo video, 15:50. http://www.thesec-
cksuckingtears.com/.
 CHAPTER 7

QUEER HIP HOP

A Brief Historiography
 S HANT É PARAD I GM S MA L L S

T chapter maps two contemporary moments related to queer performers

inside hip hop culture. The first mapping starts in the late 1970s, wherein I
look to articulations of Black heteromasculinity vis-à-vis an imagined queer
foil and then I turn to the first recorded queer hip hop group, Age of
Consent, founded in 1981. The second mapping picks up in the 2000s by
turning to new iterations of sonic, identificatory, and affective queerness in
the work of millennial hip hop artists. These mappings give a broad view of
how queer hip hop artists emerged, submerged, and reemerged in
mainstream hip hop cultural productions—sometimes as quirky outcasts or
human interest stories, at other times as actors poised to take over the
mainstream stage, and at still other times, as performers whose queerness is
identified through musical genealogies and social media musings.
This chapter is meant to index and codify the ways that queer and
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) hip hop artists have
negotiated their artistic work lives alongside a changing landscape related
to queerness, Blackness, and hip hop. The discussion is meant to be
exemplary, although certainly not exhaustive of the wide-ranging—and still
developing—historiography of queer or queer/LGBT hip hop artists. To that
end, I think through both the ways that queer artists render themselves and
how queerness is used as an antithesis to “real” hip hop identity. In addition,
the second contemporary moment—starting in the early 2000s but breaking
through in the 2010s—demonstrates how language and posturing around
queer masculinity, queer femininity, transness, male effeminacy, and female
butchness have changed over the 30-odd-year period I consider in this
chapter. As the hip hop cultural production landscape has shifted to include
broader (and often contested) musical subgenres or offshoots [trap,
electronic dance music (EDM), mumblecore, Southern], fashion
sensibilities, and lyrical and vocal diversity, the ideal hip hop artist has
expanded just so to include butch queer women (Young MA), butch straight
women (Remy Ma), queer social media personalities (Azealia Banks),
YouTube and other digital mainstream stars (Leif), genderqueer icons
(Mykki Blanco), and infectious queer one-hit wonders (Zebra Katz). These
changes in the hip hop cultural landscape have reflected and refracted the
US and global cultural landscapes related to gender, queerness, transness,
and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) civil
rights, managing to incorporate both heteronormativity and
homonormativity, as well as maintain the bizarre, the surprising, the
outrageous, and other odd sensibilities long associated with queerness. This
chapter sketches some of those movements and changes in an effort to
demarcate the ways that queer hip hop artists and queerness inside of hip
hop music production have influenced, changed, and evolved with the
genre.
 T Q A

On July 4, 2012, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA)
member Frank Ocean publicly came out on his Tumblr blog, stating that he
had had a love affair with a man.1 Although Frank Ocean is a honey-voiced
singer who also sometimes raps, his public proclamation made giant waves
in and out of the hip hop community, as he is a part of a notorious and
prolific hip hop crew that is often criticized for its homophobia and
misogyny. Even though Odd Future had an openly lesbian member, the
producer/DJ Syd the Kid, a cofounder of The Internet (one of Odd Future’s
many spin-off groups), the skater rap group’s consistent and overt violent
verbal treatment of women and queers put them under constant scrutiny.2
Frank Ocean’s coming out was indeed important, signaling a shift for
mainstream popular culture, hip hop, and hip hop–R&B,3 but it was neither
the beginning nor the end of open and out LGBTQ hip hop artists.
In fact, almost a decade earlier, 2005 marked a watershed year for queer
hip hop.4 In that year, two major LGBTQ hip hop festivals occurred:
PeaceOut World Homohop Festival,5 the original queer and queer-ally hip
hop festival in the Oakland/San Francisco area; and Peace Out East,6 New
York City’s LGBTQ hip hop festival.7 That was also the year that LGBTQ
hip hop artists were codified in the documentary film Pick Up the Mic,
directed by Alex Hinton, which premiered at the Toronto International Film
Festival on September 11. The festivals and film, imperfect and not
exhaustive of the panoply of LGBTQ hip hop artists who came before and
after them, nevertheless matter to the history of queer music, performance,
and culture; hip hop culture; performance and music; and independent art-
making.
Writing a queer hip hop historiography is bound to be a fraught project.
LGBT and queer, intersex, genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming
(QIGGNC) bodies have been both integral to US hip hop cultural
production and denied as integral to said production. Queer culture and hip
hop culture have been arranged as antagonistic, both internally in each
respective culture and externally by news outlets, thinkers, and pundits.8
Yet many queer hip hop artists speak to the immense import of hip hop on
their queer identity. Hanifah Walidah, a Brooklyn- and Massachusetts-based
rapper, producer, singer, and filmmaker, noted that when she was closeted,
“[she] could see through [her] body language that [her] body was tight, that
[she] was holding something in.”9 Queer hip hop pioneer Dutchboy reveals
that “ironically, I didn’t get back into hip hop until after my coming out
process.” He continues, “I first became involved in performing hip hop…as
an extension of my finding a place within…the queer or the LGBT
community.”10 These artists underscore the relationality of their queerness
and their hip hop identities.
This chapter reflects a broader trend in hip hop studies to reclaim and
publicize hip hop history beyond the sanctioned orthodoxy of New York
City as the only site of rap and hip hop production.11 I attempt to map a
queer genealogy within hip hop cultural production—one that is archival,
performative, and speculative. This text will plot how I’m using “queer” to
think with and about hip hop music. It will also touch on wider definitions
of queerness within hip hop music that are not necessarily related to bodies
and subjects who claim queerness as an identity or affect, but who may
have a queer affect or effect in their work. I delineate some pivotal queer
performance moments: the appearance of the first “queer” relation in the
form of the hypermasculine man and the sonic-visually constructed “fairy”
in the first rap hit, “Rapper’s Delight” (1979); the first gay-identified rap
group, Age of Consent; and some of the major moments in the “Golden
Era” of queer hip hop. I end with a speculation on queer hip hop futures. I
hope that current and future hip hop artists, scholars, participants,
researchers, and activists will add correctives, revisions, and contestations
to this work.
L Q , L H H

Calling hip hop “queer” is certain to irritate, or even enrage, some hip hop
artists and fans. The current hip hop moment is filled with strict (although
ever-changing) sites of categorization of the authentic, the real, and the
’hood as metonyms for a particular kind of Black-popular-masculine affect.
This presents a normative conundrum for a queer or queered project. It is a
challenge for some to learn of hip hop’s queerness—past, present, and
future. This chapter indexes queer being (identity, subjectivity), doing
(performance, performativity), and effects/affects. “Queer” is deployed here
as a denaturalizing and destabilizing force—the coitus interruptus into hip
hop heteronormativity, hetereopatriarchy, and racial authenticity. As
Annamarie Jagose claims, “[Q]ueer opts for denaturalisation as its primary
strategy,”12 and so I use it as a temporal, cognitive, and affective disruption
to the apparent seamlessness of a unified hip hop presentation.
Concurrently, I attend to the racialized and gendered dynamics and
meanings associated with the terms “hip hop” and “queer” in order to tease
out some of the axes on which they rotate.
Cathy Cohen’s insight into the limits of queer politics informs my
thinking, in which she calls on queer theory to expand notions of queer to
include straight or heterosexual bodies and performances that interrupt
hegemonic heteronormativity, whether purposefully or not. She continues
that “instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of sexual
identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies between
the heterosexual and everything ‘queer’.”13
Hip hop cultural production and performance, including music, theater,
dance, fashion, sound, visual art, and poetry, constitute an ongoing
repertoire and arts movement.14 Although hip hop has its archival and
genealogical strains,15 narratives are constantly being contested and revised.
Hip hop is expansive. As Jeff Chang argues in his edited volume Total
Chaos, he “intends to document some of the [hip hop arts] movement’s
historical vectors, capture a snapshot of some of its pressing issues,
illuminate marginalized and emergent aspects of the movement, and, above
all, suggest the breadth and the beauty of hip-hop arts.”16 Both queer and
hip hop definitions suggest expansiveness, deconstruction, inclusivity,
mixology, and creativity. Thinking about hip hop and its aesthetics queerly
is an attempt to illuminate the artistic contributions of LGBTQ people and
themes, showing how their creativity and musicality enriched both hip hop
and queer arts movements.
 Q N , Q P : O ,
W D W M W W S
“B ”?

Many scholars and artists have convincingly argued that rap music, and
sometimes hip hop culture writ large, is “Black American music,” and that
its central characteristics are Black, African American, or both.17 Others
note “hip-hop’s undeniable African American origins [and endeavor to]
query […] the formation of distinct identities within hip-hop[,] while
simultaneously interrogating the definitions of authenticity that often
dominate discussions pertaining to cultural hybridity and the risk of
appropriation as hip-hop circulates ever further afield and is more deeply
embraced in the social mainstream.”18 Perry and Forman clarify some of
the troubling ways that hip hop’s inherent cultural, aesthetic, historical, and
material hybridity has been used to wrest hip hop cultural production and
performance away from Black American and Black diasporic peoples,
cultures, and traditions. While Forman gestures toward the pitfalls of
authenticity as a response to the anxieties caused by hybridity, he moves too
quickly to the threat of appropriation by a larger social mainstream. Black
authenticity and hip hop authenticity present unique problems for Black
people and Black artists negotiating nonauthentic Black subjectivities.
When Blackness becomes a metonym for authenticity or an essential,
authentic Blackness, according to Gust Yep and John Elia, it is “linked to
masculinity in its most patriarchal significations…this particular brand of
masculinity epitomizes the imperialism of heterosexism, sexism, and
homophobia.”19 Yep and Elia offer the Logo TV series Noah’s Arc as an
example of a contra-authentic Black cultural product. The series ran from
October 2005 to October 2006 and centered on the lives of Black gay men
living in Los Angeles. It “open[ed] up the discursive field to new horizons
and possibilities for imagining, embodying, performing, renegotiating, and
unfixing hegemonic Blackness…Noah’s Arc is queering/quaring authentic
Blackness.”20 While music and television are different media, and
representation is a fraught project, images of Black men and women do
have an impact on viewers, listeners, and industries.21
Over the last two decades of hip hop music, the range of Black
performance has decreased. The overwhelming current trope for men is the
über-rich hip hop man as hustler/gangsta/pimp, while women are limited to
the vixen, female hustler, or thug, or sometimes a more positive role. These
conservative and restricted modalities of Black possibility are transmitted to
and codified in the popular imaginary. The Black performer who strays
from the contemporary sanctioned roles of masculinity is often labeled with
invective imagined to be the most damaging: something related to being
gay, a faggot, or possessing a “feminine” quality. In the next section, I offer
a revisionary reading of Black heterosexual masculine performance that
queers itself through the dismissal of a “failed” heterosexual white male
gender performance. Next, I follow that reading with a recounting of the
first known gay hip hop (GHH) group, made up of two white gay men and
one straight white woman.
 H H F P : “R ’
D ” A C

The story of the Sugarhill Gang, the male rap group that record mogul
Sylvia Robinson put together and signed to Sugarhill Records, and their
smash hit “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), is well known.22 Though the New
Jersey–based trio was a constructed “boy band” (and therefore considered
inauthentic by many rappers toiling to make their art), their record was a
commercial smash. Selling more than 2 million units in three months, the
song, based on an interpolation of Chic’s disco record “Good Times,”
launched rap music and hip hop culture into American and global
mainstream culture.23 “Rapper’s Delight” is a fun song filled with
braggadocio, hyperbole, catchy phrases, and simple but memorable rhymes.
As the sonic undergirding for the song, Chic’s “Good Times” is a near-
perfect party song and was a smash hit the previous year.24 Of the three
rappers in the group, Big Bank Hank (Henry “Hank” Jackson) is the one
who plays the ladies’ man. Hank, in a raspy, cool, tenor timbre, introduces
himself as “the C-A-S-A-N the O-V-A and the rest is F-L-Y.”25 Hank
presents himself as the paradigmatic heterosexual male, informing us of his
height (six foot one), his impeccable style, and his desirable material
possessions (a color television, a Lincoln Continental, and a Cadillac).
Wonder Mike, who recites the first verse, focuses on addressing the
audience and getting the party started. Master Gee, the third member of the
Sugarhill Gang, does mention that “all the foxy ladies and fly girls” know
his name, and he specifically tells the “ladies [he’s here at the party] to
hypnotize.”26 But it is Big Hank who returns time and again to his
hegemonic Black masculinity as his rap qualifier. Hank’s boasts don’t touch
as much on his ability to move the crowd or his lyrical ability as they do on
his masculine prowess.
In his second verse, Hank shifts the lyrical locus from his heterosexual
desirability to his lyrical and rhyming superiority over other rappers, but
then he detours back to his Casanova persona in a fantasized encounter with
the iconic reporter from DC Comics, Lois Lane. Lois Lane is, of course, the
paramour of the DC Comics legend Superman. How does one compete
against the Man of Steel? Hank resolves this conundrum by imagining Lane
choosing him—“just lemme [sic] quit my boyfriend Superman”—and also
by disaggregating Superman from suitable heteromasculinity by pointing to
his gender trespass—[Superman] “flyin’ through the air, wearing
pantyhose.” Big Hank asserts Superman is unsuitable as Lois’s mate: “he’s
a fairy, I do suppose.” One way to circumvent Superman’s impenetrable
masculinity is to presuppose that his masculinity fails at the level of dress.
His “pantyhose”—his Superman tights—contrast with the fly, gender-
appropriate clothes that Big Hank wears.27
Unable to leave Superman alone, Big Hank reconsiders Superman’s
appeal in the next verse, even as he again disses him: “He may be very sexy
or even cute, but he looks like a sucka in a blue and red suit.” Hank’s erotic
gaze fixes on Superman, evaluating him not as simply sexy, but as very
sexy. But Superman fails this particular articulation of hip hop masculinity
because for all of his “very sexy”-ness, he is also a fairy and a sucka. Hank
counters Superman’s powers of flight with own power to “rock a party ’til
the early light.”
The dénouement firmly returns to exemplary Black male heterosexuality
through a specious stereotype about white and Black male anatomy:
Superman ultimately fails as a proper heterosexual masculine subject due to
his “little worm.” Big Bank Hank, by contrast, is most suitable for Lois
Lane, as he can “bust her out with [his] super sperm” (emphasis added).
Hank’s boast depends both on his superlative heteronormative performance
and his homoerotic gaze.
In her reading of Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id, Judith Butler
argues that heterosexual male identity is a melancholic one. This reading
aids me in locating Big Bank Hank’s managed hyperbolic heterosexual
male desire and his homoerotic attachment. Butler argues that “the
prohibition against homosexuality is culturally pervasive,” and that the
“‘loss’ of homosexual love is precipitated through a prohibition which is
repeated and ritualized through culture.”28 Big Hank rehearses his loss and
the repudiation of his erotic attachment to Superman as a figure of
admiration, but Hank also usurps Superman as the idealized version of
heterosexual masculinity. Not only is Hank performing “fairy-phobia,” he’s
simultaneously displacing white heterosexual masculinity as paradigmatic.
Ironically, Hank is the least well dressed and traditionally handsome of
the three members of Sugarhill Gang. In a 1979 televised recording of
“Rapper’s Delight” at the Soap Factory in Palisades Park, New Jersey, the
rap trio presents a visual picture that contours their sonic personas. Wonder
Mike and Master Gee both wear form-fitting sweaters that accentuate their
taut, well-muscled bodies. Mike has well-trimmed muttonchops along with
his short natural hairstyle, while Master Gee rocks a gloriously beautiful
Afro.
Meanwhile, Hank is slovenly in comparison: His yellow T-shirt looks
plain and ill fitting, especially as he’s surrounded by partiers in their
resplendent club outfits. His white Kangol Bermuda Casual adds a dash of
cool to his underwhelming appearance, but as he shimmies and shakes and
smiles for the dance revelers, it’s a stark (and welcome) contrast to his
Casanova persona. In this visual moment, he’s more reminiscent of the late
dancer, actor, and comedian Fred Berry (1951–2003), who played Rerun on
the popular US television sitcom What’s Happening!! (1976–1979) than of
Muhammad Ali, Shaft, or other Black “cool cats” that he references. Like
Cathy Cohen, I’m interested in Hank’s performative disjunctures at the
level of race, gender, sexuality, and body image.29 Hank’s sonic masculine
triumph over Superman has a queer effect. Hank articulates Superman’s
desirability, concurrently spelling out Superman’s sexual impotence and
highlighting his own sexual prowess. Superman, imagined as a tights-
wearing, sexy, and cute fairy with a “little worm,” is trumped in the realm
of desire by the sonic boom of an affable, pudgy, former pizza shop worker
remade as an indomitable emcee.
 A C

If Big Hank used rapping as a way to negotiate and bolster marginalized

Black heteromasculinity in relation to white normative heteromasculinity,
the Los Angeles–based rap trio Age of Consent used rap to carve out a
space for queer, white male “fags” in the masculinist worlds of US rap and
punk. The group emerged in the summer of 1981, at the beginning of the
Reagan era. Both AIDS and the crack epidemic were making their silent
and deadly mark: Crack had begun to appear in US cities, including Los
Angeles, and the “Morbidity and Mortality” newsletter from the Centers of
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made reference to five unusual
cases of pneumonia in the city in June 1981. It was in this context that co-
founder John Callahan, an East Coast transplant to Los Angeles, and co-
founder David Hughes formed The Age of Consent group after meeting at a
presentation on contemporary music and getting into a disagreement
regarding Hughes’s dismissive critique of disco music—a foundational
element of rap music.30 Andrea Gardiner joined the group later in 1981 and
was replaced the same year by Thea Other. All three members were
working on experimental music and performance art. Hughes was even
producing an experimental art series called “Sound and Vision.”
Age of Consent (not to be confused with the Bronksi Beat record of the
same name) made the first known openly gay rap record. Their first song as
a group was “Fight Back” (1981), which protested gay-bashing and
celebrated “fag rap.”31 Night of the Night (Callahan) and Master Bee
(Hughes) managed to pay homage to the then-experimental New York rap
tradition while employing rap’s form—rhythmic rhyming, repetition,
citationality, Black vernacular idioms, and call and response—to promote a
political message based on their identity as radical white “faggots.”
Musically, their live band sounded like a part funk, part rhythm ‘n’ blues
(R&B) band: the deep, rolling baseline, the bluesy guitar, and the steady
drum beat keeping time. Night of the Night rapped, “From the streets of
New York town, came Black-rhythm-rap, funky sounds/from the streets of
LA town, fag rap is spreadin’ around/…you might say, what’s this shit?
Rappin’ white fags, just don’t fit.”32 Night of the Night, the more adept
rapper of the two, drew the musical connection between New York City rap
and Los Angeles rap, particularly through the timbre of his gravelly tenor
and his controlled but bombastic projection. His sonic genealogy is in the
familiar vein of Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa, and other early
rappers.
Age of Consent formed just two years after the massive success of the
Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. It makes sense that the first
queer hip hop record would happen far from the bourgeoning hip hop of
New York City streets, as there was growing resentment over the success of
so-called interlopers like Sugarhill Gang. The heterodoxy of Night of the
Night’s verses (five measures for the first three verses, seven for the fourth,
and two for the final) was the sonic equivalent of the audacity of his and
Master Bee’s appearance as “rappin’ white fags.”33 The deft flow and
lyrical delivery of Night of the Night’s verses placed him squarely in early
hip hop’s lexicon. He understood his race (white), sexuality (gay), gender
(fag), and location (Los Angeles) to be outside the normative expectations
of rap. He was able to locate rap as alien—queer—to the city’s performance
art/punk/nu wave scene located at the group’s first performance at the ON
Klub.
Brad Rader recalls meeting Callahan—his future husband—in 1985 at
another punk/nu wave club, the AntiClub. Rader, who first heard of Age of
Consent on the KPFK radio station’s Lesbian/Gay Day,34 recalls that “the
trio’s raps were political, humorous; two gay white guys and a white
straight chick [Other] making absolutely no attempt whatsoever to sound
soulful or Black. I was an immediate fan.”35 Rader’s fandom depended on
Age of Consent sounding neither soulful nor Black, but rather like “two gay
white guys and a white straight chick.”
This rendering is troubling in a number of ways: Rader’s identitarian
fandom emerged at the exciting juncture of whiteness, gayness, and
maleness (and perhaps straight “chickness”), explicitly delocating rap music
and rap sound from any Black sonic traditions. Rader assumed that the trio
was not “making an attempt…to sound soulful or Black.” The fact that he
could recognize said sound calls to question what sounds he identified as
Black, soulful, and straight. In this formation, sounding soulful or sounding
Black resonates negatively.36
In her review of Age of Consent’s first live in-person performance, Los
Angeles Herald Examiner music journalist Darcy Diamond was struck by
the appearance of rap in the city, and especially by the white gay male
bodies through which it arrived. Diamond queried, “A rap group in LA?…
unlike the majority of rap artists, a [group that] is not Black?…that also
addresses the issue of repression of homosexuals?”37 Their geographic
place (Los Angeles), racial status (white), and sexuality (gay) marked them
as a journalistic curiosity, but Night of the Night scripted his participation in
rap as an outgrowth of his relationship to Black culture and performance.38
He commented that he was “always into Black music, growing up on the
East Coast. Rhythm and blues, and then even disco became music of
interest to me.”39 Master Bee agreed, noting that “white people have always
ripped off Black music…we’re trying to expand [rap]. As a minority group
ourselves, we’re using it to say some things.”40 Night of the Night and
Master Bee made explicit that they deployed Black popular music as protest
music in the service of gay liberation. They were not displacing or replacing
the “Black” elements of Black popular music for a (white) gay one—their
narration of their subject positions relates to experiences of other whites in
early hip hop performance who used Black musical forms to announce a
message that white cultural forms couldn’t deliver.
In his foundational work on white youth’s love of hip hop, Why White
Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of
Race in America, Bakari Kitwana addresses white male participation in
early hip hop culture, arguing that progressive and radical social and
political messages in hip hop music and culture attracted white punk
youth.41 Kitwana reasons, “[For] many white kids who got into hip-hop in
this period, being down with hip-hop was as much a political statement as it
was an alternative musical choice.”42 Although he’s speaking about a
slightly later period of hip hop (the mid-1980s to mid-1990s), Kitwana
illuminates the long-standing draw of twentieth-century Black popular
music for white youth.
Age of Consent’s “Fight Back” is an amalgamation of the group
members’ individual political work with the United Farm Workers, their
performance art involvement, Night of the Night’s teaching background,
and their love of punk, nu wave, and rap music. “Fight Back” gets early rap
elements right: history or genealogy lessons (“from the streets of New York
town came Black-rhythm rap”), self-introductions/proclamations (“I am
Night of the Night, when evening comes I spread delight”), and
boasts/posturing (“none [of the well-known contemporary rappers] can
match the faggot rap of Night of the Night and me”). Master Bee’s high,
lilting voice, with just a hint of a lisp, is jarring, especially considering the
moment that he and Age of Consent emerge (neither Gardiner nor Hughes
is on this song). Night of the Night has already introduced Master Bee as
“queer,” and they’ve identified as “fags” or “faggots,” but Master Bee
draws the line at any further gender trespass when he quips, “[I]f you want
to keep your face in just one place, you better not call me she.” “Queer,” in
this moment, delineates a fag masculinity that is affronted by being called
“she.” Master Bee may have a stereotyped “faggy” voice—high, fey,
lisping, and cutting—but he still asserts his “manness” inside of converging
masculinist projects (blues, funk, rap, nu wave, and punk). Although this
might not reach the levels of what Fred Maus calls masculine discourse,43
this illuminates the limits of a queer identity that expressed the tension in
the conflation of gender, sexuality, and sex.
Age of Consent innovated in other ways: They created a sonic landscape
signature different from New York City, based on a live band rather than
disco records. Concurrently, the group grounded themselves with other
aspects of gay culture, especially in their funky party rap song “History
Rap,” which rehearsed a truncated, contemporaneous “history, herstory, our
history, gay story,”44 starting with the Stonewall Riots. Age of Consent
formed a mere 12 years after the Stonewall Riots in New York City—the
acknowledged jumping-off point for the contemporary LGBT civil rights
movement.
As a gay white rap trio, Age of Consent embodied and performed the
experimental, incongruous, and revolutionary possibilities of the genre. As
Watkins narrates, “1979 represents both the beginning and end of the hip-
hop movement…Hip-hop, once invisible, became visible to the wider
public.”45 The commercialization and global success of hip hop culture and
aesthetics created a profitable and powerful industry and possible avenues
of success for marginalized people. At the same time, that industry is quite
conservative—concerned with the increase of profit—and that type of
conservatism avoids market risks like unmarketable queers.
Age of Consent, though never commercially successful, helps historicize
queer political rap. Instead of being cast aside as a mimetic fad/fag, queer
hip hoppers can note that they have been in the rap game since 1981, some
30-plus years, at this point. Recordings and history of queer, independently
made rap also closely align it with the history of early rap music, much of
which was independently produced.46 The group disbanded in 1983, but
Callahan continued to perform with a live band under the group’s name
until 1985, bringing his unique brand of East Coast–inspired, Los Angeles–
bred performance art rap to the world of hip hop and queer music.
 T G A Q H H

In 1997, the now-defunct Connecticut magazine One Nut published the

infamous “Confessions of a Gay Rapper” article, written by Jamal X.47 The
article was a supposed tell-all from a Billboard top-selling rap act. The
anonymous rapper agreed to speak to X about his queerness. The magazine
and article didn’t get much traction until Wendy Williams, then a local New
York City radio personality, read “Confessions” live on her top-rated show.
She argued that it wasn’t simply a rapper who was gay, but many: “Not
rapper, rappers!”48 This helped to usher in an era (that has yet to end) of
visible and audible panic in hip hop (especially in rap and DJing cultures)
around male homosexuality, queerness, or attraction to transgender women.
The volatile mixture of hypermasculinity, gay panic, an explosion in hip
hop record sales and popularity, and a much more visible LGBTQ
population in the United States created the perfect storm for repositioning
authentic hip hop masculinity as antithetical to male homosexuality or
bisexuality. Decades earlier, James Baldwin explicated the uncertainty and
hostility that the queer person of color faced inside the “queer world.”
Baldwin noted he was “Black in that world, and…was used in that way, and
by people who truly mean me no harm…they could not have meant me
harm, because they did not see me.”49 There is harm done by going unseen
or misseen. This not-seeing of the queer takes place in hip hop culture
through dominant voices speaking for or about the queer. This shapes the
queer as threatening to dominate Black masculinity and produces a
discursive visual archetype of the gender-variant queer that should be
avoided by those adhering to authentic hip hop, Black, masculine ideals.
An encouraging situation that preceded and followed the “gay rapper”
article was the public dialogue that people involved in the hip hop industry
and fandom began to have about homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender. It
wasn’t always pretty, but it was occurring. In July 1997, Davey D, a
respected DJ, hip hop historian, journalist, and community activist based in
Oakland, California, wrote an editorial “Gays, Lesbians, and Hip Hop
Culture,” in recognition of Gay Pride Week. Although he hadn’t yet written
about the nascent San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ hip hop scene (he would
later), he wanted to talk about “the role gays and lesbians have played in hip
hop culture,” something that he said “we’ve laughed about, smirked about,
and felt uncomfortable about, but have not resolved.”50 The same month
that the One Nut article was published, The Source, the longest-running hip
hop magazine, published three articles about gay men and hip hop.
Lesbians and queer women in hip hop often weren’t covered in depth in
hip hop magazines, although they were elsewhere. Although Queen Pen,
featuring Me’Shell Ndeogeocello on the remix version, made the song
“Girlfriend,” bragging about stealing a woman from her boyfriend,51 gay
men, “down-low” men, and bisexual men were the focus of hip hop’s queer
obsession. One of the three articles on gay men featured the article about
Wendy Williams’s reveal of “gay rappers” that was already mentioned.
Another was an article by R. K. Byers, in which he ventured to the
legendary Black and Latino gay club, the Warehouse, located in the South
Bronx, to experience “hip hop’s gay underground.”52 Byers encountered
men of color who frequented the Warehouse, as well as the Octagon,
another hip hop gay club in Manhattan. He was shocked to find gay men
who looked like him or other straight Black and Latino men he knew. He
rendered them as “crime-looking cats” that were partying at a club “straight
outta Love Jones.”53
The final article, in the same issue of The Source, was an open letter
from gay writer and entrepreneur James Earl Hardy titled “Boys Will B-
Boys: An Open Letter to All My Homie-Sexuals in Hip Hop.” Hardy,
author of the Afrocentric, same-gender-loving (SGL), hip hop B-Boy Blues
novels, offered this missive:
You’ve been talked about, written about, gossiped about—especially in the late last year and
a half, no doubt because of that article. But whatever nerves have been struck by that article,
it hasn’t forced most inside and outside hip-hop to truly acknowledge that homosexuals and
rap artists can be, and are, one in the same (sic).54

Hardy’s words, directed solely at Black men who love, like, or have sex
with other Black men, were important for The Source’s audience to read.
They gave further voice and imagery to the imagined/famous, unknown,
gay or bisexual, Black, male rapper.
 As mentioned, there were already out LGBTQ rappers, but none of them
were famous. Some involved in hip hop are more interested in using “gay”
as the anti–hip hop identity, rather than being curious about those who
seamlessly embody “gay,” “queer,” or “trans” and “hip hop.” Queer emcees
started releasing albums and increasingly performed locally, regionally, and
nationally in 1998. Perhaps all the “gay rapper” hype was helpful because it
made listening audiences curious about the work of gay, trans, and queer
emcees. The rise of visible, prominent LGBTQ entertainers and politicians,
the consolidation of wealthy lesbian and gay individuals and organizations
like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) into serious political forces, and
the visibility of LGBTQ youth all helped queer hip hop to make sense as a
phenomenon in the late 1990s.
Cyrus (pronounced “ser-e-ous”), a prolific lyricist, played Pride events
and other shows in the mid-1990s and released her album The Lyricist in
1998 on Outpunk founder Matt Wobensmith’s now-defunct Queercorps
record label. Cyrus, currently a music producer in Columbus, Georgia,
joined the military in the late 1990s and then faded into obscurity after
being discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT). Her song “Y Us”
reflects her fierce rhyming style; it narrates the dynamic between an out
lesbian and a queer female friend who passed for straight, and the ways that
passing affected both of them. Cyrus raps, “You doin’ your own thing a
portrait of success, congratulations! You’ve been nominated best supporting
actress, I certainly hope the enemy is impressed. Now I carry the struggle
on my shoulders cuz I’ve inherited your stress.”55
“Y Us” articulated the effects of passing that are “positive” for Cyrus’s
friend: she achieved some level of success for playing the role of a straight
woman in mainstream society. The stress that the friend alleviated for
herself through her passing fell onto those who could not or would not pass
for straight. These narratives between friends and lovers inside LGBTQ
communities don’t often appear in the hip hop lexicon. Hearing the
frustration, complexity, and terror that heterosexism and patriarchy placed
on the queer or gender-nonconforming body relocated listeners from
considering heteronomative narratives as natural or benign. Rather, the
subversive narrative of songs like “Y Us” underscored heteronormativity as
a ruse in which one may participate to varying degrees.
H , Q H H , G ’90

In this section, I gloss three influential queer hip hop musical entities:
Rainbow Flava, a highly influential LGBT rap group that arguably
popularized queer hip hop in the 1990s; Deep Dickcollective (D/DC), an
Afrocentric Black group active in the late 1990s through the late 2000s; and
Hanifah Walidah, a multigenre artist who innovated under a big record label
deal and made way for women in hip hop production. Although they read as
short bibliographical sketches, they are meant to exemplify the breadth of
queer hip hop creativity in a shorter format. I discuss some of these artists
and others in my forthcoming book Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in
New York City (NYU Press, 2022), wherein I focus in depth on the
aesthetic, artistic, and political import of LGBTQ hip hop artists in New
York City in the chapter on queer hip hop. For the purposes of this chapter,
however, I mention these artists to archive their achievements and the ways
that they intervened in the difficult world of independent and major record
labels and the treacherous waters of the music business.
Rainbow Flava: The Birth of the HomoHop
Movement
The musical group Rainbow Flava and the record label and production
company Phat Family helped to usher queer hip hoppers into the wider
world of hip hop culture. Both were inside hip hop culture and queer culture
—they carved out a more visible space for homohop. Rainbow Flava, a San
Francisco–based, multiracial, and multigender LGBTQ hip group,
performed together from 1996–2001. The group’s members rotated and
included rapper and spoken-word artist Juba Kalamka, a founding member
of D/DC and the founder of the PeaceOut World Homohop festival;
Dutchboy, producer, rapper, DJ, founder of Phat Family, and cofounder of
Peace Out East and the hip hop soul group, B.Q.E. (I was the other
cofounder of the last two groups); Tori Fixx, a rapper, producer, and DJ
who produced songs for some of queer hip hop’s Golden Era luminaries; DJ
Monkay, a hip hop and drum-and-bass producer/DJ; N.I. Double K.I., one
of the foremost and foundational queer female rappers; and Reh-Shawn, a
rapper who was an early member of the group. The group made three
albums: the out-of-print Rainbow Flava Soundsystem (1998), Digital Dope
(2000), and Family Business (2001) before disbanding in 2001.
Rainbow Flava and some its individual members were directly
responsible for the visibility and explosion of LGBTQ hip hop artists in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. The group
formed to create a queer presence in hip hop and to build a community
around queerness in hip hop. Dutchboy recounted in an interview that his
evolution as an artist occurred partly due to the generational disconnect
with the wider LGBTQ popular culture, a sentiment shared by other queer
youth and young adults who were part of LYRIC, a queer youth center in
San Francisco.56 Rainbow Flava emerged from a specifically queer youth
and young adult context: Some of the artists knew each other from LYRIC,
while others met at Club Freaky, an all-ages club frequented by many local
LGBTQ youth and young adults. They signaled a shift from queers rapping
as an isolated entity, and differed from a quietly queer-identified person
making a hip hop record. They were a queer group whose main function
was to produce, spin, and play hip hop that bridged the gap between two of
the communities of which the youth were a part. They were also attempting
to recalibrate the marginalized status of those youth within both hip hop and
queer cultures.
Rainbow Flava’s visibility increased considerably in 2001. That was, in
part, due to the mainstream LGBTQ press beginning to take interest in hip
hop’s lyrics, particularly at the moment that the rapper Eminem was gaining
mainstream prominence.57 The group’s biggest influences and contributions
were the records that they released. Beside putting out their own albums,
which had guest appearances by the Houston-based artist and producer
Miss Money, D/DC, and MC Lymus, and myself, Phat Family Records put
out three compilations: Volume 1: The Dozens (2002), Volume 2: Down 4
the Swerve (2002), and Volume 3:Freaks Come Out (2003). These albums
showcased other artists in the nascent scene, including Deadlee, God-Des,
Janiah, JenRo, Q-Formed, Chaser, and others, and also helped to codify the
Golden Era of Queer Hip Hop.58
Not only did the group and its chief architect, Dutchboy, create a strong
web presence, pre-Myspace, with their website (www.rainbowflava.com)
and the Phat Family Records website (www.phat-family.org)59 (both now
defunct), they mounted a 30-city US tour in 2001 that significantly raised
the visibility of LGBTQ hip hop. Rainbow Flava was the prototype for the
twenty-first-century queer hip hop group or performer: They were rooted in
hip hop culture, they were do-it-yourself they were youths or young adults,
and they were technically skilled in various areas of the hip hop elements
(DJing, rapping, producing, graffiti, although not b-boying/b-girling),
connected to their local queer communities, web-savvy, and capable of and
invested in building posses—loosely formed associations of artists,
managers, and supporters.
Black Queer Masculinities: D/DC’s Intersections
D/DC was a Black, queer, Afrocentric, homohop group based in Oakland,
California. Founded in 2000 by Juba Kalamka (pointfivefag), Tim’m T.
West (25Percenter), and Philip Atiba Goff (lightskinneded), the group, in its
many permutations, performed officially until 2008. The three founders met
through various venues—Goff and West knew one another from Stanford
University, where both were enrolled in PhD programs; and West and
Kalamka were familiar with one another from the local spoken-word and
hip hop scenes. D/DC were consummate performers, but they also tapped a
vital nerve inside and across queer hip hop: they were queer Black men,
some with a more masculine presentation and others a more feminine one,
and they were doing hip hop, and doing it well. Their material bodies and
sonic material investigated the intersections of Blackness, Afrocentricity,
masculinity, queerness, and hip hop.
I first encountered members of D/DC as part of “Homo Hop Massive” in
New York City in April 2002. I knew of Tim’m T. West through the usual
queer channels: He and my then-girlfriend had gone to undergraduate study
together at Duke University, and I was friends and work colleagues with
one of Tim’m’s ex-boyfriends. A number of us were scheduled to perform
at the legendary dyke club, Meow Mix, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Over the course of the two-day festival, comedian-singer-poet Robin Cloud,
Dutchboy, Tim’m T. West, Juba Kalamka, G-Minus of D/DC, DJs Ross
Hogg and Daryl Raymond, and I performed. It was an exhilarating time.
The packed crowd put Meow Mix at capacity; there were also standing-
room-only audiences at the related panel discussion at People of Color in
Crisis, a social service center in Brooklyn catering to gay and bisexual men,
Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), and transgender women.
The crowd at Meow Mix on that Saturday, April 27, was filled with hip
hop heads, queer folks, and others who refused easy identification. It was
breathtaking to see thug-looking men of all colors hanging side by side with
shaved-headed Black, brown, and white lesbians. Everyone wanted to hear
and see queer folks doing hip hop. Tim’m performed “Blingizm,” which
moved the crowd to dance as it critiqued the obsession in hip hop and
American culture with “bling”—objects and evidence of material wealth.60
Tim’m, a powerfully built, handsome, dark-skinned Black man from the US
South, looked like the archetypal hip hop artist: He was dressed all in blue
—deep blue jeans, a sea blue Triple Five Soul T-shirt, and a midnight and
sea blue knit cap—and his see-through “stunna” sunglasses gleamed under
the small bar’s lighting as he held the mic in one hand. His other arm,
muscles flexing, pulled us in with its gesticulations, compelling us to listen
while we moved to his words:
Bling, bling! How many times can you sing “Bling, bling”? How many lives lost in pursuit
of the dream…So shiny and metallic, metabolism stings the Sun…FUBU will take your
Benjamins, leaving you Washington. Boys look pretty in the city, what a pity they’re
cloaked in labels.61

That night, I felt part of something incredibly special. Like other queer
hip hop artists and fans, I had experienced isolation, in thinking that I was
the only one who lived and breathed hip hop. After the show, many of us
vowed to stay in touch—these connections were how I heard of the
PeaceOut festival and secured an invitation to perform at the event in
Oakland in September 2002. The power of seeing queer Black men doing
hip hop cannot be overstated. It’s problematic, of course, that so much
emphasis is placed upon Black masculinity in hip hop, but it’s
understandable that the veneration of Black men happens in this space, one
of the few where Black men reign supreme in the United States.
Many young and not-so-young Black people have deep emotional
investments in hip hop and its legacy. Imani Perry has called hip hop (rap
music, specifically)“masculine space,” and indeed, it is a space that Black
men have carved out as a site for creative articulation. At the same time, hip
hop is an open space, ungendered and unfixed. There is value to the queer,
Black, male, hip hop performer as an analog to his straight, Black
counterpart. In fact, he is needed to validate queer hip hop, so it will not be
dismissed as an undertaking done by “them” (read: white queers) or only
“femcees” (female rappers) or rappers of non-Black racialized groups.
For better or for worse, these attitudes exist, and D/DC is a powerful
corrective to the notion that queer Black men couldn’t be dope emcees. In
fact, D/DC is one of the groups whose lyrics are included in the
groundbreaking Yale Anthology of Rap (2010), a volume intended to
canonize the best of rap’s lyrics and lyricism. Over their eight-year formal
existence, D/DC’s members were Kalamka, West, Goff, Ralowe
Trinitrotulene Ampu (G-Minus), dancer Doug E., Dazié R. Grego, Jeree
Brown (JBRap), Marcus René Van (Mr. ManMan), Leslie “Buttaflysoul”
Taylor, Soulnubian, Salas B. Lalgee, and Baraka Noel.
Hanifah Walidah: The Renaissance Artist
Hanifah Walidah is arguably the most successful queer person who has
made a hip hop album, although she wasn’t out at the time that her album
debuted. S. Craig Watkins addresses the challenges of being Black and
female in hip hop and the invisibility of Black girls’ stories. He argues,
“[hip hop films]…[reveal] a strong bias toward the plight of young Black
males…corporate rap is dominated by the stories that young male MCs
create. And despite the proliferation of hip-hop magazines there are
virtually no empowering images of Black women.”62 As a queer Black
woman making music, film, and theater for over 20 years, Walidah is a
powerful example of independent creativity and fortitude in three industries
that are routinely disempowering to Blacks, queers, and women.
Going by the name of Sha-Key, Walidah (neé Hanifah Johnson) released
the acclaimed A Headnadda’s Journey to Adidi-Skizm (1994) on the
Imago/BGM label. The album blended hip hop, soul, house music, and
spoken word in the vein of De La Soul, Soul II Soul, A Tribe Called Quest,
and Saul Williams. Walidah, who does not call herself a queer hip hop
artist, nonetheless is an out lesbian who has supported and participated in
LGBTQ-focused hip hop festivals, including PeaceOut and Peace Out East.
Her prolific career includes being a producer, writer, and lead vocalist for
Brooklyn Funk Essentials and releasing a hip hop opera called Adidi-The
Untold Story (2004), starring the actor and spoken word artist Saul
Williams and the Def Jam poet and actor Mums the Schemer, and featuring
the music of the AntiPop Consortium’s Earl Blaize.
Walidah is currently the front woman for the futuristic blues-rock,
electro, and hip hop group St. Lô. Walidah wrote the one-woman show
“Black Folks Guide to Black Folks,” as well as a film called White Lies
Black Sheep (2007), cowritten with Afropunk (2003) director James
Spooner. She also wrote the GLAAD Media Award–winning documentary
U People (2009), about three days in the lives of queer and straight women
and transgender people of color. Walidah, a bald, thin, sharp-cheekboned,
gloriously androgynous butch woman, has negotiated the male-dominated
space of music-making and directing. Imani Perry states that by finding a
place for themselves inside of hip hop’s highly masculinized space, women
“occup[ied] styles of presentation and archetypal roles coded as male in the
world of hip hop or in the larger world of Black popular culture.”63 If this is
true, the female queer Black hip hop artist is in a double bind, as her
queerness is already mistakenly conflated with a desire to be male. This
double bind is further complicated if the queer female is butch,
androgynous, or gender-nonconforming.
A way to radicalize Perry’s concept is to divorce masculinity (gender
presentation) from sex (male/female/intersex). This applies to queer
women, as well as straight women in hip hop culture who feel more
comfortable with hip hop masculine styles. There’s also an aspect to Perry’s
statement that can be interpreted to be about safety; if female hip hoppers
do not wish to be overtly sexualized (if they can maintain any say over their
presentation)—that is, if they want to be heard before they are seen—
certain clothing styles might aid this. It’s not unproblematic, but wearing
certain clothing styles codes female rappers as serious about rhyming and
may be a strategy to resist unwanted misogynistic sexualization. As Perry
reminds us, to be taken seriously as artists, “women must become subjects
instead of objects.”64
Walidah made space for other artists for whom she produces music or
directs; she also paved the way for independent, technologically savvy
Black female artists. As a highly collaborative artist, she’s generous with
and to her art forms. She’s a Renaissance woman who continues to reinvent
and reinvest herself in music- and art-making.
A Queer Hip Hop Future
In conclusion, I’d like to think about the sonic future of queer hip hop and
queer artists making hip hop music. The years 2011 and 2012 introduced
out LGBTQ rappers from all US regions. None of them had significant ties
to earlier homohop or queer hip hop movements. Azealia Banks, an out
bisexual woman, blazed the way for queer commercial success when she
became an Internet star through her dynamic, house-influenced rap, “212.”
Banks helped secure industry success for Zebra Katz, creator of the
infectious and dark song “I’ma Read.” Mykki Blanco (“Waavy”), Angel
Haze (“Coming Out My Closet”), Le1f (“Wut”), and Frank Ocean have
garnered significant Internet followings. The controversial “212” has gotten
over 155 million views on YouTube as of June 2018.
Times have changed. Straight-identified rappers like Murs and
Macklemore have made gay-positive songs. For instance, Murs made
“Animal Love” to combat homophobia both inside and outside hip hop. His
decision to play the role of the boyfriend in the video and kiss his paramour
onscreen promoted calls for him to “explain” his decision.65 Macklemore &
Ryan Lewis made “Same Love” (which featured the haunting voice of Mary
Lambert) in part to honor his gay uncles and their love story; the song had
just shy of 203 million views on YouTube as of June 2018.66
Hip hop has a future partly because the artists, fan base, music
programmers, and others are able to more freely produce their music (and
gain success) without initially being bound by the profit-hungry record
companies. The shift from the total power of major record labels to a more
experimental and quirky Internet interface has made it possible for “weird”
to become “cool” and profitable for the artist.
Many queer hip hop artists, especially emerging mainstream ones, are
refreshingly odd and countercultural, making songs about club drug culture
(Blanco’s “Waavy”), paying homage to Chicago and New York house
music (Banks’ “1991”), and making gloriously dark songs (Haze’s “New
York”). The emergence of AfroLatinx The Brooklyn rapper Young M.A has
absolutely shattered the notion that a masculine woman could not be a
successful mainstream hip hop star. Young M.A’s signature, thick-throated
style manages to combine traditional New York City boom-bap-style hip
hop with the more millennial, regionally diverse (though thoroughly
Southern) style of trap music when she burst onto the mainstream scene
with the infectious hit “Ooouuu” in the fall of 2016. “Ooouuu” was a top 20
hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 and peaked at number 3 and number 5 on
Billboard’s US Rap and US R&B/Hip Hop charts, respectively.67 This
makes Young M.A, alongside Azealia Banks, the most successful queer
woman hip hop artist to date. Young M.A., like many other contemporary
queer hip hop artists, has chosen to stay independent rather than signing to a
major record label.
Although still not the majority, and certainly still experiencing the
deleterious effects of patriarchy, transphobia, antiqueerness, and the ways
that those elements intersect with antiblackness, the wider access to and
proliferation of queer hip hop, of queer and transgender artists making hip
hop, and of straight and nontrans artists making hip hop celebrating queers
mark a break in hegemonic hip hop authenticity and the insistence that hip
hop has no queer interior. It is a bright, odd future indeed.68
N
1. “Frank Ocean Talks Coming Out, Sex, Labels, and Love,” NewNowNext,
http://www.newnownext.com/frank-ocean-talks-coming-out-sex-labels-and-love/11/2012/. This
is Ocean’s original post: http://frankocean.tumblr.com/post/26473798723.
2. Ralph Bristout, “Odd Future’s Syd the Kyd Criticized for Homophobia,” XXL Magazine,
February 14, 2012, http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2012/02/odd-futures-syd-the-kyd-criticized-
for-homophobia/.
3. Amy Wallace, “Ocean-ography,” GQ Magazine, December 2012,
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/201212/frank-ocean-interview-gq-december-2012?
currentPage=1.
4. There is no unified term to refer to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)
people who make rap music, b-boy/b-girl, make graffiti, or DJ (and their allies). Some of the
more popular terms include “queer hip hop,” “gay hip hop (GHH),” and “homohop.” “Queer hip
hop” is often, although not exclusively, used by artists to denote a critical intervention into
mainstream hip hop culture and mainstream gay culture, as well as the biases of both cultures
regarding each other. “Gay hip hop (GHH)” is often used by artists and media to describe
LGBTQ people making hip hop. “Homohop” originated in the LGBTQ hip hop community, but
is no longer widely used there. It has become a media designation, but is often used
interchangeably with GHH.
5. “PeaceOUT World Homohop Festival,” Myspace, http://www.myspace.com/peaceoutfestival.
6. “Peace Out EastTM,” Myspace, http://www.myspace.com/peaceouteastfestival.
7. In addition, there were three spin-off festivals: Peace Out UK, in London; Peace Out South, in
Atlanta, Georgia; and Peace Out Northwest, in Portland, Oregon. All of these were only held in
2005.
8. See Tricia Rose’s The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk abour Hip Hop—and
Why It Matters (especially 236–240), 2008. New York: Civitas Books, 2008 for a discussion of
homophobia in hip hop; see also Terry Sawyer’s “Queering the Mic,” Alternet.com, March 18,
2004 http://www.alternet.org/story/18168/queering_the_mic/.
9. Touré, “Gay Rappers: Too Real for Hip-Hop?” The New York Times, April 20, 2003, Arts
section: 2.
10. Dutchboy, Paradigm. B.Q.E. Interview. Video shot and edited by Robert Penn. Robert Penn
Productions, United States, May 21, 2005.
11. Matt Miller, Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans (Amherst, MA, and Boston:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down:
Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Jeff
Chang, ed., Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (New York: Basic Civitas, 2006);
S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a
Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).
12. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press,
1996), 98.
13. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer
Politics?” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 22.
14. For more on hip hop as an arts movement, see Jeff Chang, “Introduction: Hip-Hop Arts: Our
Expanding Universe,” in Total Chaos, ix-2.
15. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A
History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); Alan Light, The Vibe
History of Hip Hop (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999); Murray Forman and Mark Anthony
Neal, That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd ed. (New York and London:
Routledge, 2012); Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino
Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
16. Chang, Total Chaos, xiii.
17. Perry locates the following four characteristics as determinants of hip hop music’s status as
Black American music: “(1) its primary languages is African American Vernacular English
(AAVE); (2) it has a political location in society distinctly ascribed to Black people, music, and
cultural forms; (3) it is derived from Black American oral culture; and (4) it is derived from
Black American musical traditions.” Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in
Hip Hop (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 10.
18. Forman and Neal, That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 3.
19. Gust A. Yep and John P. Elia, “Queering/Quaring Blackness in Noah’s Arc,” in Queer Popular
Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television, Thomas Peele, ed. (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 31.
20. E. Patrick Johnson, “‘Quare Studies’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer
Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” in Black Queer Studies, 126. Yep and Elia,
“Queering/Quaring Blackness in Noah’s Arc,” 31.
21. For more on Black representation and television, see: Debra C. Smith, “Critiquing Reality-
Based Televisual Black Fatherhood: A Critical Analysis of Run’s House and Snoop Dogg’s
Father Hood,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 4, Race and Reality TV (2008):
393–412, doi:10.1080/15295030802328020.
22. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters. 9–32.
23. Ibid., “Introduction.”
24. For more on disco’s queerness, see Tim Lawrence, “Disco Queering the Dance Floor,” in
Cultural Studies, 25, no. 2 (2011): 230–243; Brock F. Webb, “This Side of Midnight:
Recovering a Queer Politics of Disco Club Culture,” MA thesis, Bowling Green State
University, May 2013; Ani Maitra, “Hearing Queerly: Musings on the Ethics of
Disco/Sexuality,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 25, no. 3 (2011): 375–
396.
25. Michael Wright, Henry Jackson, and Guy O’Brien, Rapper’s Delight (New York: Sugarhill
Records, 1979).
26. Ibid.
27. For more on gender stereotypes of people in same-sex relations, see Diane Felmlee, David
Orzechowicz, and Carmen Fortes, “Fairy Tales: Attraction and Stereotypes in Same-Gender
Relationships,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 62, nos. 3–4 (2010): 226–240,
doi:10.1007/s11199-009-9701-x.
28. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories Is Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 140.
29. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.”
30. See Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco,” in Microphone Fiends:
Youth Music and Youth Culture. (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 1994, 2014), 147–157.
Also, The Roots’ drummer and musical director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Mo’ Meta
Bluse: The World According to Questlove (New York: Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book
Group, 2013) is perhaps the most sweeping and eclectic contemplation on the deep and
divergent influences on hip hop artists and musicians.
31. Listen to the song here: http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/multimedia.htm.
32. Night of the Night and Master Bate, Fight Back MP3 (Los Angeles),
http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/multimedia/mp3s/age_of_consent-fight_back.mp3.
33. Ibid.
34. Brad Rader, “Rader of the Lost Art,” My Beautiful Installment 10, February 8, 2010,
http://raderofthelostart.com/blog/labels/David%20Hughes.html.
35. Ibid.
36. Following Johnson and Buttny’s foundational study on “sounding Black” and “sounding
White,” Billings concludes, “Although not dealing with BS specifically, the study used 93
college participants and employed Mulac’s (1975) 21-item Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale to
underscore two key findings. First, White participants rendered even more negative assessments
of speakers who sounded Black if the content of the message was abstract and/or hard to
comprehend. Second, the researches found that sounding Black caused White participants to
describe the speaker in stereotypical terms” 70. Andrew C. Billings, “Beyond the Ebonics
Debate: Attitudes About Black and Standard American English,” Journal of Black Studies 36,
no. 1 (September 2005): 68–81, doi:10.1177/0021934704271448.
37. Darcy Diamond, “Consent Raps to a Different Beat,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner (November
13, 1981), Weekend Style, http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/press.htm.
38. For more on whiteness and hip hop realness, see Mike Hess, “Hip-Hop Realness and the White
Performer,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 5 (2005): 372–389,
doi:10.1080/07393180500342878.
39. Diamond, “Consent Raps to a Different Beat, http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/press.htm”
40. Samir Hachem, “L.A. Rappin’ with Age of Consent,” The Advocate (April 14, 1983), Music
Ticket section.
41. Bakari Kitwana, Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New
Reality of Race in America (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005), 27.
42. Ibid.
43. Fred Everett Maus, “Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,” Perspectives of New Music 31, no.
2 (1993): 264–293.
44. John Hughes, David Callahan, and Thea Other, “History Rap” (Los Angeles, CA, USA
performed live June 1982 on KPFK-FM radio)
http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/multimedia/mp3s/age_of_consent-history_rap.mp3.
45. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 12.
46. Kurtis Blow, managed by a young Russell Simmons, was the first major-label rapper. He was
signed to Mercury Records in 1979 and released his first album, Kurtis Blow, in 1980.
47. Jamal X, “Confessions of a Gay Rapper,” 1997,
http://www.prismnet.com/~larrybob/gayrap.html.
48. Paula T. Renfroe, “She Got a Big Mouth: Hip-Hop Shock Jock Wendy Willams Tells All,” The
Source, 1997.
49. James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” in James Baldwin: Collected
Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 824.
50. Davey D, “Gays, Lesbians, and Hip Hop Culture” Hip Hop Daily News, July 27, 1997,
http://www.daveyd.com/gaynews.html.
51. Laura Jamison, “A Feisty Female Rapper Breaks a Hip-Hop Taboo,” The New York Times,
January 18, 1998, http://www.prismnet.com/~larrybob/queenpen.html.
52. R. K. Byers, “A B-Boy Adventure into Hip-Hop’s Gay Underground,” The Source, December
1997.
53. Ibid., 107.
54. James Earl Hardy, “Boys Will B-Boys: An Open Letter to All My Homie-Sexuals in Hip Hop,”
The Source, December 1997.
55. Cyryus, Y Us CD, The Lyricist (San Francisco: Queercorps Records, 1998).
56. Jason Victor Serinus, “All the ‘Flavas’ of the Rainbow,” Bay Windows (Boston, May 3, 2001),
News section.
57. Sandra P. Angulo, “GLAAD Handed,” EW.com, September 7, 2000,
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,85521,00.html.
58. Although I don’t discuss it here, the film Pick up the Mic (dir. Alex Hinton, 2005) did a
tremendous job of building on queer hip hop’s subcultural following. I discuss the topic at
length in my book, Hip Hop Heresies: New York City’s Queer Aesthetics (forthcoming). See also
Pick up the Mic, http://www.pickupthemic.com/Pick_Up_The_Mic/Home.html.
59. You can look at Phat Family’s discocraphy in the Way Back Machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20160401024125/http://www.phat-family.org/discography.html.
60. For another read on bling, see Krista Thompson’s “Introduction: Of Shine, Bling, and Bixels,”
in Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015).
61. Tim’m West, Blingizm, live performance, Songs from Red Dirt (New York: Celluar Records,
2002).
62. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 220.
63. Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 156.
64. Ibid., 157.
65. Jerry Portwood, “Murs Explains His Reasons for the Gay Kiss in ‘Animal Style’,” Out
Magazine, July 16, 2012, http://www.out.com/entertainment/interviews/2012/07/16/murs-gay-
 kiss-animal-style-video.
66. I first began writing this chapter in late December 2012. At that time, “212” had 39 million
views and “Same Love” had 9 million. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s song has soared in
popularity, but it also has been criticized for his white cis-hetreo privilege and his collapsing of
homophobia with Black/hip hop culture. See Karen Tongson (and the vitriolic comments
section), “‘Same Love,” Same Old Shit?” From the Square, June 10, 2013,
http://www.fromthesquare.org/?p=5005; and Thaddeus Russell, “The Progressive Lineage of
Macklemore’s and Lorde’s Attacks on the Pleasures of the Poor,” Reason.com, February 1,
2014, http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/01/that-kind-of-luxe-just-aint-for-us-the-p. Murs’s
“Animal Style” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwTSPcNSi40) is provocative and au
courant, as it takes on the issue of gay male suicide, homicide, closetedness, interracial desire,
and masculinity/masculine performance. Although the topics may seem somewhat conservative,
in the realm of hip hop performance, this song and video are cutting edge. See this interview
with DJ Vlad for Murs’s views on the video, his playing a queer male character, and some of the
reaction from other artists and fans, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBJyiW4XLrM.
Incidentally, Murs’s video has not even broken 700,000 views as of mid-June 2018.
67. Young M.A Chart History: Billboard Top 100, Billboard,
http://www.billboard.com/artist/7462235/young-ma/chart; Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs,
http://www.billboard.com/artist/7462235/young-ma/chart?f=367; Hot Rap Songs,
http://www.billboard.com/artist/7462235/young-ma/chart?f=1222.
68. There has been a small but visible surge in queer hip hop scholarship, including the Queerness
of Hip Hop/Hip Hop of Queerness conference (http://qohh.tumblr.com/), organized by C. Riley
Snorton and Scott Poulson-Bryant at Harvard University on September 21, 2012; there have
been at least three special issues of scholarly journals on queerness and hip hop: for instance, the
special issue “The Queerness of Hip Hop/The Hip Hop of Queerness,” ed. C. Riley Snorton,
Palimpsest, 2, no. 2 (2013); and the special issue “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist
Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship,” eds. Jessica N. Pabón and Shanté Paradigm Smalls,
Women and Performance, 24, no. 1 (2014).
R
Brown, Ruth Nicole, and Chamara Jewel Kwakye (Eds.). Wish to Live: The Hip-Hop Feminism
Pedagogy Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.
Chang, Jeff (Ed.). Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: BasicCivitas Books,
2006.
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”
In Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, edited by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson, 21–52. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New
York & London: Routledge, 2004.
Ellis, Nadia. Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in Black Diaspora. Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Hobson, Janell, and Dianne Bartlow (Eds.). “Representin’: Women, Hip-Hop, and Popular Music.”
Meridians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2008): 1–14.
Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson (Eds.). Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology,
Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Means Coleman, Robin R., and Jasmine Cobb. “No Way of Seeing: Mainstreaming and Selling the
Gaze of Homo-Thug Hip-Hop.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and
Culture 52, no. 2 (2007): 89–108. DOI: 10.1080/15405700701294053.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Pabón, Jessica N., and Shanté Paradigm Smalls (Eds.). “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist
Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24,
no. 1 (2014): 1–7.
Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop—and Why It
Matters. New York: Civitas Books, 2008.
Royster, Francesca T. Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul
Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Neal, Mark Anthony. Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities. New York: New York
University Press, 2013.
Snorton, C. Riley, Ed. “The Queerness of Hip Hop/The Hip Hop of Queerness.” Palimpsest: A
Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 2, no. 2 (2013): 238.
PA RT I I

VERSIONS
 CHAPTER 8

F R O M Q U E E R M U S I C O L O G Y TO
INDECENT THEOLOGY
Liberal and Liberationist Protestant Theology
and Musical Queerings of the Bible
 DI R K VO N DE R HO RS T

M queerings of biblical texts are an element of the ongoing

interpretation of the Bible that is constitutive of Protestant spirituality and
identity. To unpack this theological thesis, I will examine two queer musical
interpretations of passages from the Hebrew Bible:1 Ned Rorem’s setting of
David’s Lament over Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1 and Diamanda Galas’s
incorporation of material from Leviticus in her Plague Mass. The
juxtaposition of these examples shows that musical queerings can either
affirm or negate biblical perspectives as normative for ethical reflection;
affirmations and negations alike are significant for theological reflection.
After examining how these musical examples queer biblical texts, I will
place them in dialogue with three Protestant theologians—Georgia
Harkness, Carter Heyward, and Marcella Althaus-Reid—who show a
historical trajectory from early twentieth-century Social Gospel liberalism
to a contemporary radical stance of Indecent Theology. Neither Rorem nor
Galas created their interpretations in connection with Protestant theology,
so there is no intrinsic connection between musical and theological
interpretations of the Bible. Indeed, the relative autonomy of musical
interpretations means that they can just as well challenge as reinforce
Protestant habits of interpretation. To draw these perspectives together
clarifies what specific reading strategies each of the musical and theological
interpreters brings to the openness of the biblical texts. Furthermore, liberal
Protestant theology sees such perspectivalism as intrinsic to biblical faith.2
It is this perspectivalism that has allowed Protestant theology to lend
significant support to the quest for social norms that genuinely foster the
sort of pluralistic society in which queer people can flourish.
A major contribution of queer musicology is the investigation of how
music can subvert patriarchal or heteronormative texts. One formative
example can be seen in the interplay between Catherine Clément’s feminist
critique of opera and subsequent queer reflection on the genre. In Opera, or
the Undoing of Women, Clément turned our attention from opera’s
seductive music to its dangerous and misogynist narratives.3 According to
Clément, music’s beauty invites acquiescence to said misogyny. Shortly
after the English translation of Clément’s book, queer musicologists did not
contest Clément’s feminist critique but looked at the relation of plot, music,
and sexual politics from other angles. Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s
Throat and the volume En Travesti recounted ways in which musical
experience does not simply lull one into complicity with opera’s misogyny,
but provides ways of resisting the plots.4 Susan McClary’s analysis of Lucia
di Lammamoor examined how the music participated in a misogynistic
musical tradition of exhibiting madwomen, but also noted how Lucia’s
coloratura virtuosity signaled something very much other than defeat.5
Suzanne Cusick examined the opera singer Jessye Norman’s performance
of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und—leben as a way of showing how
performers can resist a composer’s uncritical setting of misogynist texts
without ceding musical beauty to patriarchal and heterosexist norms.6 The
variety of queer musicological approaches demonstrates that every musical
agent—performer, composer, or listener—has the potential to queer the
most recalcitrant of heteronormative texts.
Patriarchal and heteronormative assumptions often find their strongest
ideological justification in religious discourses, so the musical task of
subverting or resisting religious texts is especially urgent. At the outset of
the twenty-first century, to point out that heterosexism often finds religious
justification may seem like an understatement. There is no denying that the
main voices to object to the equal participation of LGBT people in society
at this historical moment are religiously motivated. “Fundamentalist”
movements in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism all share a pattern
of combining strict scriptural authority with an attempt to control women
and eradicate homoeroticism.7 However, a mapping of religion/homophobia
vs. secularism/tolerance is much too simple. As the sociologists of religion
Robert Putnam and David Campbell have shown in their recent survey of
the American religious landscape, attitudes to the sexual revolution provide
the surest sign of the divide between religious conservatives and religious,
as well as secular, liberals, not simply of the divide between conservative
religious and liberal secular perspectives.8 This situation points to two
necessary strategies. First, because heterosexism generally finds its
strongest buttress in religious discourses, resisting and subverting biblical
ideologies is a necessary move for queer liberation. Second, because a
broader coalition can achieve more than a narrower one, the often difficult
task of building connections across religious/secular divides is a crucial task
that necessitates looking to where biblical resources can be helpful and not
simply harmful to queer lives and politics. In adopting this double strategy,
I refuse to pit against each other queer voices that either affirm or reject
biblical authority, but rather seek a more expansive view that can learn from
both.
Moreover, I pursue this double strategy from a decidedly theological
perspective. This stance may seem odd given the inclusion of queer voices
critical of biblical perspectives. However, subverting or resisting a biblical
text is not necessarily a secular undertaking because having a biblical faith
is not the same as “believing the Bible.” The latter takes the Bible as an
inviolable and prescriptive book. The former participates in a diverse and
rancorous textual, political, and spiritual history, including ancient
antecedents and subsequent reception. The very opening of the Bible invites
the reader to engage multiple perspectives with two contradictory creation
stories: Genesis 1, which reworks the Babylonian creation myth Enuma
Elish and recounts each step of creation as “good,” and Genesis 2, in which
God creates by solving a series of issues that are “not good.” Broadly seen,
the Protestant tradition transmits biblical faith both as engagement with
textual diversity and as assent to the Bible as a unitary testimony to God’s
infallible truth, with Protestant Fundamentalism representing the furthest
case of “believing the Bible.” On the other end of the spectrum, liberal
Protestant theology since the nineteenth century has taken both the
historical contingency of and ideological division within the Bible as
starting points for theological reflection.9 The biblical scholar most
associated with this development is Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918),
although he developed work by earlier scholars.10 This diversity, even
incommensurability, of perspectives provides one starting point for a
biblical faith that is open to queer counterviews in the development of
theological reflection. In this approach, the multiplicity of biblical
perspectives mandates recognition of perspectives unavailable to authors
from millennia ago. Theology ceases to be a simple exposition of deposited
truths and becomes an open conversation in which biblical insights are
neither given final authority nor dismissed as passé or intrinsically
oppressive. This method bypasses the apologetic question of “what the
Bible really says about homosexuality” and strengthens the liberal case that
the inevitable fact of historical change authorizes ongoing change,
including the expansion of the moral vision of biblically-derived religions
to include affirmation and celebration of same-sex love and desire. To
engage the internal diversity of the biblical text, I discuss musical examples
that set the most commonly cited biblical passages of the Hebrew Bible at
the furthest ranges of affirmative and condemnatory positions vis-à-vis
homoeroticism.
 N R : M S

The locus classicus for gay-affirmative engagement with the Hebrew Bible
is 2 Samuel 1:26–27, in which King David proclaims the love Jonathan, son
of King Saul, had for him. This proclamation is part of a lament over the
deaths of Saul and Jonathan, but earlier episodes in the narrative also stress
Jonathan’s love for David. Debate over what kind of love these verses
represent continues unabated; erotic and non-erotic understandings have
been put forth.11 Given the historical distance between the texts and our
times, agnosticism on this matter is probably the wisest approach.12
Nevertheless, a musical composition and/or performance must make an
interpretive choice one way or the other. Several musical interpretations of
David’s lament exist, including Abelard’s planctus; Jacobean anthems by
Thomas Tomkins, Thomas Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons; George Frideric
Handel’s oratorio Saul; and Lou Harrison’s version for the Portland Gay
Men’s Chorus.13 In 1947, Ned Rorem composed a setting of this text for
baritone and string quartet, titled “Mourning Scene.”
Rorem set the entirety of the lament to music, in contrast to his
contemporary Lou Harrison, who selected primarily the verses that dealt
with Jonathan to bring out the potential homoeroticism of the text. Rather
than excise verses irrelevant to depicting love between two men, Rorem
used musical-rhetorical strategies to cast Jonathan’s love for David in relief.
In four separate registers—tonality, tempo, texture, and the manner of
interaction between voice and instruments—Rorem sets the expression of
Jonathan’s love off from the remainder of the song. The composition overall
treats D as a tonic within a non-triadic neo-tonal idiom but tonicizes various
pitches over the course of the song. The string quartet generally moves in a
conspicuously polyphonic texture and gives the singer melodic cues before
his entrances. Before the moment the singer exclaims Jonathan’s love, the
viola outlines an octave on E, which the singer takes up to begin the section
on Jonathan’s love with an octave leap on E, hearkening back to an earlier
octave leap on E on the words “mountains of Gilboa.” The tempo slows
(the score indicates a change from ♩ = 90 to ♩ = 72), the texture of the
quartet becomes much sparer, and rather than providing specific gestural
cues to the singer, the quartet provides a slightly more “atmospheric”
background over which the singer describes Jonathan’s love and slowly
unravels emotional control as the close of the statement drifts from E to E
flat. The song subsequently returns to D and a notable martial melodic
gesture from early in the song and ends in the home tonality.
Rorem’s setting of Jonathan’s love as distinct from the remainder of the
lament divides Saul and Jonathan into representatives of militarism and
love respectively. In the lament, the love of Jonathan for David is one
element in a larger military elegy. The biblical text suggests a public
performance in which tropes of military commemoration are paramount and
the assertion of love is a side note. By setting the lament as a chamber
music vocal piece, he facilitated a shift toward highlighting the intimate
dynamics between David and Jonathan over against the larger context of
military defeat.14 The division of Saul and Jonathan into representatives of
militarism and love furthermore contrasts with some contemporary
interpretations of the David story that understand David as sexually active
with both Saul and Jonathan.15 Without excluding Saul from David’s erotic
experience, treating the contrast love/militarism as a binary opposition
would be impossible to sustain. Finally, “Mourning Scene’s” differentiation
of homoeroticism from militarism is salient in light of Rorem’s Quaker
identity. In this respect, Rorem joined Benjamin Britten in linking Christian
narratives, homoeroticism, and pacifism. Rorem, however, would have
resisted the interpretive move to connect music, religion, and politics in his
music because he was committed to a view of musical autonomy that queer
musicologists generally find inimical to our work.16
In line with this commitment to musical autonomy, Rorem posited an
almost impermeable boundary between art and religion. His “Notes on
Sacred Music” outline his understanding of music vis-á-vis religion. Like
the reformer Ulrich Zwingli before him, Rorem’s thoughts on sacred music
value both religion and the arts, but keep them strictly separated.17 While he
recognizes the interaction between religion and music, it is an interaction
that remains like that between oil and water. They can occupy roughly the
same space, but never on each other’s terms. Thus, he did not understand
his turning to a biblical text as a theological act. Rorem’s resistance to
theology can furthermore be seen in the fact that he writes as an atheist
Quaker, opening his notes with the unequivocal “I do not believe in God.”
Two pages later, he writes “God gave me a gift for music.”18 This
discrepancy is less of a contradiction than a movement between different
discursive uses of the term “God.” He was perfectly willing to use “God” as
a figure of speech, but not as a metaphysical reality. Finally, he notes that
“as a composer I am apolitical. As a Quaker I am superpolitical. There is no
halfway point.”19
Although Rorem makes a firm distinction between apolitical music and
political religion, his discussion of the performance of “Mourning Scene”
weakens this distinction. He described the context of the first performance
as an explicit clash between an avowed homoerotic identity and a
homophobic institutional context. In 1948, Rorem participated in a
composers’ consortium at the Eastman School of Music. In his memoir,
Knowing When to Stop, he describes how, a year before the performance, he
formed a friendship with a group of Eastman students who “spoke…
disparagingly of director, Howard Hanson, who had fostered homosexual
purges.”20 Despite the students’ warning that the text “Thy love to me was
wonderful, passing the love of women” would “outrage the faculty,” the
baritone performed it “glowingly.”21 The Eastman students recognized not
only the homoeroticism of Rorem’s setting, but the general recognizability
of homoeroticism in the piece. In this case, even the cultural pedigree of the
Bible could not neutralize the scandal of homoeroticism amidst Cold War
gay panic. The cultural, if not religious, authority of the Bible could,
however, provide enough counterweight to cultural homophobia for
homoerotic desires to be explicitly represented, making “Mourning Scene”
a clear example of the positive and effective use of the Bible to disrupt
heterosexist norms.
 D G : P M

The locus classicus for homophobic readings of the Hebrew Bible is

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, in which the “lying with a male as with a
woman” is prohibited as an abomination and penalized with death. These
verses are sometimes called upon to disprove the notion that ancient
Israelites could have conceived of same-sex eroticism in the David and
Jonathan narratives.22 However, we can trace two broad, competing
trajectories in the Hebrew Bible with different notions of holiness, religious
authority, and sexuality: The Deuteronomic and the Priestly.23
Deuteronomy and Leviticus are the respective legal texts of each strand.
The Deuteronomic History (Joshua–2 Kings) tells the history of Israel
differently than does the Priestly version in 1 and 2 Chronicles. In contrast
to the clarity of Leviticus’s prohibitions on male-male erotic behavior,
Deuteronomy may or may not condemn male cultic prostitution, but that is
a matter of dispute.24 These conflicting ideological agendas mean we must
use considerable caution in extrapolating a coherent Israelite sexual
ideology from Leviticus to be applied to Deuteronomic texts; make what
you will of the fact that Chronicles does not connect Jonathan and David in
any way whatsoever.
While the exact meaning of the Levitical phrase “lying with a male as
with a woman” is not perfectly clear—it may refer to any male-male
homoerotic activity, it may refer strictly to anal sex, or, given the verb form
and narrative parallels, it may refer to male-male incest25—it represents the
most straightforward example of biblical homophobia. The more
circumscribed understandings of the phrase derive from recent scholarship
and are sensitive to the fact that criticism of Levitical law plays into
centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.26 Earlier gay scholarship tended to
take the prohibitions as fairly comprehensive and use them as a basis for
total resistance to the Bible. For example, an early essay in gay liberation
drew a direct line from Leviticus to Hitler as examples of gay genocide in
history.27 Likewise, Gary David Comstock’s Gay Theology without Apology
similarly approached Leviticus in a spirit of resistance, turning to it as an
example of “compensatory micromanagement,” in which the loss of
political power provokes an increase in sexual regulation that queer people
must resist.28 Diamanda Galas uncompromisingly participates in this earlier
approach of total queer rejection of Levitical ideology.
Galas’s 1990 Plague Mass is one of the most significant musical
responses to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. A multi-sectioned solo
performance piece lasting over an hour, Plague Mass finds just about every
way possible to parody and subvert the sense of a liturgical celebration. Her
performance exemplifies the “in your face!” ethos of much queer activism
of the early 1990s. Throughout, Plague Mass oscillates between critique
and appropriation of biblical images of judgment and condemnation. As an
expression of rage, this double movement is less self-contradictory than a
strategy to give her opponent, ecclesial homophobia, no out in the face of
her attack.
In Plague Mass, Galas did not quote the precise verses about “lying with
a male as with a woman,” although one can hear a skewing of Leviticus
20:13 in the statement “Give me sodomy or give me death” printed on the
CD and spoken during the performance. Instead, Galas turned to Leviticus
15 to confront the larger ideology of purity underlying Leviticus’
prohibition of homoeroticism and connected it to the AIDS crisis.29 Her
performance in various ways stresses the word “unclean” and punctuates
her recitation with shrieks and virtuosic simulations of chaos. While the
notion of “uncleanness” in Leviticus is not primarily an ethical category, it
easily becomes a criterion for discerning “good” and “bad,” and Galas
skillfully exposes the extent to which ritual, ethical, and medical criteria
became conflated in responses to the AIDS crisis. Where liberal Christians
highlight Jesus’s and Paul’s flouting of purity laws in order to drive a wedge
between Levitical prohibitions of homoerotic acts and normative Christian
positions, Galas fuses Leviticus with the history of Christian heterosexism
and turns her rage on both.
First performed in the Episcopal cathedral of St. John the Divine in New
York City in 1990, Plague Mass followed Galas’s participation in an ACT-
UP action in the Roman Catholic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989. Galas was
arrested for disrupting the service at St. Patrick’s, yet she saw her action in
the latter case as a form of participation in a sacred event, not a disruption
of it.30 In both instances, Galas brought a queer presence into a Christian
cathedral. In one case, her presence was unauthorized, in the other case it
was authorized. Galas’s different embodied relations to Christian
institutions point to the difficulty of naming “Christianity’s position” on
homoeroticism.31 In both cases, however, Galas performed against a
recognizable Christian mythic structure.
Where Rorem drew careful delineations between sacred and profane
functions in art, Galas merges art, madness, and the sacred to engage in a
“liturgy” explicitly against Christianity. While Galas probed a much more
ambiguous area of the boundary between secular and sacred than did
Rorem, the applause at the end of the live recording of Plague Mass makes
clear that she is engaged in a performance and not a ritual. Her facilitation
of an experience that bleeds into the sacred does not create a specific
community. Nor does her leadership in creating a specific experience imply
that she has a pastoral role: no one would expect her help with a personal
problem because of attending the performance. The ambiguities around the
divide between secular and sacred that Galas probes are profound and they
make it hard to say whether a theological engagement with her work is a
kind of interfaith dialogue or a mutual interrogation of sacred and non-
religious discourses. In either case, Galas skillfully undercuts biblical
claims to moral authority by giving a raw emotional expression to the
damage queer people have experienced at the hands of Christian authorities.
How might these two very different musical queerings of biblical texts
interact with Protestant theology? Establishing this interaction is necessary
to demonstrate that these non-theological biblical interpretations can be part
of Protestant theology’s ongoing interpretation of the Bible. I will highlight
different approaches in a chronological sequence from the mid-twentieth
century to the present. The examples move from a position in which
Protestant theology was firmly embedded in a culture of decency to
positions of increasingly queer transgressiveness. This movement within
theological discourse should make clear that the tension between religion as
a source of social cohesiveness and queerness as socially transgressive is
not one of absolute opposition. The chronological sequence roughly
parallels the span of time in which Rorem and Galas were active.
Furthermore, the examples roughly correspond both in chronology and
ideology. Rorem’s interpretation would largely appeal to Harkness, but not
to Althaus-Reid; Galas’s performance resonates well with Althaus-Reid’s
agenda, but not Harkness’s. Heyward offers a mediating position that can
easily affirm both Rorem’s and Galas’s interpretations. But liberal
Protestantism’s emphasis on historical change as the locus of divine activity
puts the fact that Harkness and Galas would likely have difficulty hearing
each other in a different light. That Protestantism itself went through a
change marked by a movement from a situation in which Galas’
denunciation of a biblical trajectory would mark a line of “this far and no
further” to one in which such a denunciation of a biblical expression of
patriarchy, purity, and heterosexism is integral to theological reflection is
simply a manifestation of a theological commitment to perpetual
reformation.
The fact that both Rorem and Galas move toward secularizing the Bible
means that this dialogue is one that crosses secular/religious divides. While
liberal Protestantism does not give secularism the last word, a search for
dialogue and accommodation with the secular values of pluralism and
scientific inquiry is what makes liberal Protestantism liberal. Furthermore,
Heyward and Althaus-Reid engage in liberation theology, which mounts a
stronger ideological critique of both secular and religious ideas and
practices than does liberal theology. Liberal theology’s main interlocutor is
the Enlightenment and the secular and scientific perspectives that proceed
from it. Liberation theology, in contrast, grew out of engagement with
colonized and exploited people in the Third World. Where liberal theology
has a double task of defending God-talk in a world where it is no longer
self-evident and changing God-talk to accommodate modern philosophical
and scientific insights, liberation theology begins with the experience of
oppression and interrogates the sacralization of unjust social structures.
Theologians sometimes pit the two perspectives against each other or
synthesize them.32 In all cases, the theologians will see the ways musicians
make meaning from the Bible as secondary to a larger movement toward a
just world that they construe as the central biblical mandate. In this respect,
although Galas is unequivocally opposed to Christianity, her politically
engaged musicking will have an edge over Rorem’s apolitical stance.
However, Protestant theology will not force an absolute choice between the
two approaches because each theologian will see a dynamic relationship
between the quest for a just world and the more intimate psychological and
interpersonal relationships that the musical examples explore. What queer
musicology offers Protestant theology, then, are some clear tools to deepen
the links between the personal and the political, both of which Protestant
theology posits as areas of sin and redemption.
 G H : M
P L

Queer theologians sometimes—and very cautiously—claim the Methodist

theologian Georgia Harkness as a precursor to our own work.33 Harkness
(1891–1974) was raised in the Methodist Episcopal Church during the
heyday of the Social Gospel, a religious movement that understood the
metaphor of “the Kingdom of God” as a mandate for building a just
society.34 Although Harkness never identified as either a feminist or a
lesbian, she was an advocate for women’s equality and the recognition of
same-sex relationships. Her one heterosexual romantic relationship was
brief; she “later expressed thanks to God for being delivered from her
‘abortive love affair.’”35 During the last 15 years of her life, she lived with
her companion Verna Miller, with whom she had formed a close friendship
in the 1940s. Harkness also dedicated two books to Miller. For a year,
Harkness and Miller supported a young man dismissed from school under
suspicion of homosexuality.36 Because no letters between the women
survive and Harkness never identified as a lesbian, church historians have
been wary of stating that Harkness and Miller were lovers or that Harkness
was a lesbian. If we use Adrienne Rich’s notion of a lesbian continuum,
however, we can bypass the question of proving “was she/wasn’t she?” and
ask how her enduring partnership with a woman, her passionate advocacy
for women’s equality, and her support of same-sex relationships play into
narratives of queer history.37
When considering Harkness’s position vis-á-vis Rorem’s setting of
David’s lament, an important factor to keep in mind is that Harkness
remained more closely aligned with the liberal Protestant tradition during
the 1920s and 1930s than many of her generation. World War I, as well as
the political crises of the 1930s, led many theologians to question the
optimism of liberal theology. During the National Socialist era in Germany,
many theologians turned away from liberal theologians’ affirmation of
modern culture, seeking instead a way in which Christianity could be an
effective witness against the political and cultural situation in Nazi
Germany. Harkness absorbed some of these critiques of liberal theology, but
her experiences in rural American churches led her to assert that theology
was abandoning taken-for-granted liberal insights that had not percolated to
large swaths of American Christianity. This significance of Harkness’s
loyalty to the liberal tradition is that at no point would she accept a strong
dualism between church and culture. Rorem’s setting, though not meant for
church, would be an interpretation worth reflecting on.
For Harkness, the most positive point of dialogue with Rorem would be
the way in which he subtly undermines the militarism of the lament.
Harkness’s liberalism included a commitment to pacifism. Rorem, then,
offers a way of interpreting the most militaristic aspects of the biblical text
in a way that aligns with a pacifist norm derived from the command to love
enemies. This move allows for a positive reclamation of the entire biblical
canon in which “good” and “bad” parts are not set in opposition, but allows
for a way of reading problematic passages in light of normative passages.
This in turn would help Harkness explicate the early twentieth-century
liberal understanding of “progressive revelation” to which she was
committed.
Rorem clearly differentiates Saul from Jonathan, aligning his
interpretation of the lament with a romantic understanding of David and
Jonathan’s relationship. This sense of David and Jonathan as a couple
would fit well with the parameters in which Harkness advocated for gay
and lesbian people. She declared the sexual experimentation of socialist
societies a failure and held a high view of marriage as a source of social
stability. Rorem’s casting of David and Jonathan as a couple, rather than as
a part of a love triangle, would allow Harkness to hold up the passage as
warrant for the extension of monogamous sexual relations to same-sex
couples. Where contemporary queer musicologists might use Rorem’s
descriptions of his sexual experiences in his diaries to relativize the move
from polyamory in the biblical text to monogamy in “Mourning Scene,”
Harkness would take the composition at face value. While this
“normalization” of same-sex desire through monogamy is problematic from
the perspective of queer theory and culture, it represents a cutting edge of
sexual ethics in its historical context.
 Diamanda Galas would most likely pose an insurmountable barrier for
dialogue with Harkness. Early in life, Harkness absorbed the Methodist
holiness tradition, which aims for a piety of the sort that Galas attacks.
What Harkness would hear in Galas is an abandonment of trust in God’s
presence. Harkness was steeped in the idealist philosophy of Boston
Personalism, which provided her with a sense that the pursuit of spiritual
goals is an obligatory human endeavor.38 In the 1940s, Harkness went
through a period of depression and spiritual dryness, on which she reflected
in The Dark Night of the Soul.39 The political crises of the 1930s had
already made a dent in Harkness’s commitment to the optimism of the
Social Gospel; her personal spiritual crisis further mitigated her sense of
optimism. Yet, Harkness never abandoned the fundamental tenets of Social
Gospel liberalism; she simply allowed various crises to modify her position.
Galas, however, pushes past any imagined resolution. Rather, her
performance insists on staying with negativity to allow for catharsis.
Furthermore, the retrieval of Leviticus as a source of protest would strike
Harkness as odd, as liberal Protestantism’s understanding of progressive
revelation reinforced a strong distinction between grace and law. For
Harkness, Levitical law would have been so superseded by the law of Christ
that it would be fairly irrelevant as a point of dispute, so a full-frontal attack
on Leviticus would not challenge Christianity in the way Galas intends.
Both on philosophical and scriptural grounds, there is little room for finding
common ground between Harkness and Galas. The way in which Galas
poses a “this far and no further” point for Harkness will not be the case for
the later theologians I discuss.
C H : M R
E

Carter Heyward was one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in the
Episcopal Church. Although the Episcopal Church was still debating the
issue, two retired bishops and a resigned bishop proceeded with the
ordination of eleven women in 1974.40 She describes her studies in
seminary as a period of spiritual and sexual awakening and Heyward came
out publicly as a lesbian in 1978. She developed an interest in the “death-
of-God” theology of Thomas Altizer while in seminary. This combination
of sexual and spiritual radicalization culminated in a theological position in
which everything flows to and from the radical redefinition of God as “our
power in mutual relation.”41 This non-theistic understanding of God marks
a significant break with Harkness’s idealist personalist view of God as
universal mind.
Unlike Martin Buber, another relational theologian on whom Heyward
draws heavily, Heyward does not consider cultural artifacts in her
discussions of relationality.42 But her emphasis on God as relational power
mirrors a similar emphasis in much queer and feminist musicology.43
Although Heyward does not use many musical metaphors or engage music
directly, Women’s Music is a strong presence in her The Redemption of
God, which has lyrics from the Holly Near and Meg Christian song “The
Rock Will Wear Away” as its epigraph and at one point defines God with
Cris Williamson’s phrase, “the changer and the changed.”44 Women’s
Music embodied a lesbian-feminist, sometimes separatist, vision of
egalitarian politics that contrasted to some later Queer explorations of the
erotics of dominance and submission.45 If we take Women’s Music as a
normative musical stance in Heyward’s thought, Rorem and Galas are both
distant from the sonic world Heyward inhabits. One major contrast between
Heyward and Rorem and Galas is simply in the difference between the
juxtaposition of Women’s Music and biblical faith culminating in a
synthesis of relational theology and direct musical queerings of biblical
texts. A simple setting of biblical texts in the musical styles of Women’s
Music would be uncomfortably close to some forms of conservative
Christian rock music. It is precisely Women’s Music avoidance of
patriarchal religious texts that allows Heyward to use Women’s Music as a
vantage point from which to articulate her criteria for selecting scriptural
norms.
Furthermore, Heyward takes her relational understanding of God to the
center of her understanding the Bible. Because all biblical narratives are
imagined reconstructions of prior events, not direct reports, reading the
Bible is a participation in an ongoing process of reinterpretation in which
new agents find ways to relate to past stories.46 What is central is the prism
of relation—including relations to the text and the people who wrote the
text—not the text itself. For Heyward, then, the central theological question
is not “how do Rorem and Galas interpret the Bible?” but instead “what
relational dynamics do their respective musickings reveal and foster?” The
question of how these interpretations relate to biblical traditions must serve
the question of clarifying the human relations opened by the specific
musical practices, not simply rest as examples of biblical exegesis. In either
case, musical practices as part of a web of social practices would trump the
musical rhetorical or narrative compositional strategies at stake. In Rorem’s
case, the performance of “Mourning Scene” opened room for a naming of a
social oppression among an intimate group of friends; the discussion among
Eastman students preceding the performance would be of more importance
for Heyward’s theology than the performance itself. In this light, unlike
Harkness, Heyward would embrace an interpretation of “Mourning Scene”
that downplayed its move from a polyamorous text and that would stress its
disruptive presentation of homoeroticism in a heterosexist context.
Galas would provide Heyward with an excellent example of how
biblical interpretation is never a matter of accepting the text as binding in a
coercive sense, but rather of adjudicating ideological tensions and effects of
the Bible. Building on Hannah Arendt’s understanding of authority,
Heyward develops the idea of trustworthiness as the key to determining in
what ways a given biblical passage can have authority. Galas’s Plague Mass
serves as an object lesson in demonstrating that the Levitical ideology is not
trustworthy for queer people grappling with the AIDS crisis. For both
Heyward and Galas, Leviticus can be fairly rejected as misogynistic and
homophobic. In the course of adjudicating the Christian tradition, Heyward
draws a direct line from Leviticus to Pope John Paul II as representatives of
a misogynistic God who must be plainly rejected.47
Another link between Heyward and Galas is that Galas performed
Plague Mass in an Episcopal cathedral; both critique classical Christian
thought while negotiating—on admittedly very different terms—the
boundaries of the authority of the Episcopal Church. Heyward also invokes
the 1960s as a time in which the spirit of radical collective action for
change modeled the kind of hope she sought to capture. The fact that
Galas’s musicking is part of a larger activist practice shows a basic
congruence between Heyward’s and Galas’s use of the sacred to articulate
meanings of social struggle. Finally, Galas’s unflinching representation of
descents into suffering and madness illuminate the tragic quality of
relational theology. If God is our power in mutual relation, God is as fragile
as our mortal bodies and not a guarantee that everything will be made well.
The voice of protest against unjust relations and the madness induced by
non-relation is a crucial aspect of the process of developing strong, mutual
relations.
 M A -R : I
T

Latin American liberation theology allowed Heyward to do a number of

things.48 First, it provided a method of doing theology in which the praxis
of resisting oppression was the central task; here, Third World resistance to
multinational capitalism provided a model for Heyward’s queer resistance
to heterosexist patriarchy. Second, it provided her tools with which to divest
liberal theology of any remaining body/spirit dualism. The insistence on
sexual sublimation as cultural refinement in the most liberal of mid-century
Protestant theology was a vestige of an early Christian ascetic ethos that it
had by and large abandoned. Finally, it allowed her to proceed with a
strongly intersectional analysis of oppression, in which critiques of
heterosexism could not be divorced from critiques of racism and classism.
Where Heyward took liberation theology as a point from which to launch
critiques of capitalist heterosexuality, the Argentinian theologian Marcella
Althaus-Reid takes the critique of heterosexism into the heart of liberation
theology.49 For example, she wondered why, in Latin American Christian
practice, a procession of poor people fighting for a union with an image of
Mary at the forefront was accepted as a concrete image of God in the flesh,
whereas a transvestite Jesus at a Brazilian carnival was not.50
Althaus-Reid treats the Bible and biblical narratives simply as she does
the rest of the Christian tradition: as a source of symbols waiting to be
queered. In a more thoroughly materialist mode than either Harkness or
Heyward, Althaus-Reid fuses religious and sexual desires in a complete
synthesis of queer practices of public sex, bisexuality, transvestism, and
transsexuality with Christian symbols. Where Heyward both adjudicates
and reimagines biblical passages, Althaus-Reid imagines with more daring
and less apology.
Althaus-Reid spends most of her energy critiquing liberation
theologians, to the point that it is sometimes easy to forget that she writes
from within its assumptions and goals. From this perspective, the problem
with Rorem is not that he is insufficiently queer, but that his queerness
remains excessively bound to Western imperialism. For example, Rorem
uses a kind of aesthetic distance to make his homoerotic desires speakable
in his diaries. In an entry from 1951, however, he similarly describes the
wreck of a bus accident in Morocco in a way that reduces it to an aesthetic
object.51 The tone of his description of the corpses of North Africans seems
more appropriate for a flower arrangement. It was precisely in this period,
however, that Frantz Fanon and Sayyid Qutb were formulating their
critiques of Western violence against North Africans, articulating
postcolonial and Islamist forms of resistance respectively. Althaus-Reid
does not inhabit a mediating position between Rorem’s white queerness and
the anti-colonial proposals of Fanon and Qutb.52 Rather, she theologizes in
a way that is disruptive to all three. Althaus-Reid’s response to Rorem’s
“Mourning Scene” would most likely be an equally appreciative and
dismissive “that’s nice.” While acknowledging the courage of his being out
in his historical context, she would have little interest in the whiteness and
bourgeois aesthetic of Rorem’s queerness or its musical expression.
On the other hand, Althaus-Reid would find a deep kinship with the
radical honesty and uncompromising grittiness of Galas’s musicking. The
question raised here is what is the relation between an invocation of the
antichrist and the proclamation of a queer Christ? Galas’s invocation of the
antichrist protects her protest from co-optation by a liberal Christian voice
that would too soon neutralize the critical perspective her music offers. On
the other hand, Althaus-Reid’s queer Christ destabilizes the category of
Christ in a way forces all Christians to share in a queer identity, as the
church’s task of coming to unity in Christ is a precondition of theological
arguments about who Christ is. While Galas refuses to be co-opted, she can
also be relegated to an outsider status in a way Althaus-Reid cannot.
Keeping in mind the pluralism at the heart of the liberal theological
endeavor enables us to hear and see these two routes as complementary
transgressions rather than as canceling each other out.
 C

Outside of theological discussion, the diversity of biblical texts is

sometimes reduced to “Old Testament vs. New Testament,” all too often
with a simplistic notion of progress bolstering the anti-Semitic trope of law
versus grace. In the liberal Protestant tradition, the internal diversity of both
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are foundational for an ethic of
multiple standpoints, an ethic that did much to foster our current
multicultural ethical norms.53 While Protestant churches have met with
varying degrees of success and failure of being open to queer perspectives,
Protestant theology has the tools to deepen a culturally relativist ethic that
can foster transgressive queerness as a distinctive voice in an open
conversation. Musical queerings of biblical texts—both those that bring out
homoerotic possibilities and those that name homophobic violence—offer
one way in which this transgression can gain enough of a cultural presence
to offset stale assumptions of biblical religions as necessarily representative
of conservative ideologies. Embodied performances, the meanings inherent
in genres and conventions, as well as sonic procedures enable music to step
outside established theological niceties and force harder questions about the
relation between an affirmation of the biblical testimony to God and the
often irreparable damage that testimony has inflicted on queer people. A
simple appropriation of these musical resistances will not do. Rather, they
offer theologians a chance to hear a critique on terms that will not be
neutralized by a too-easy reclamation of dissident strands already
normalized within the Christian tradition. Both as affirmation and
resistance, music is a means by which queer people can use the Bible and
its derivative religions more than they use us.
N
1. “Hebrew Bible” is a more inclusive term for “Old Testament.” The latter term privileges a
Christian framing of ancient Israelite writings. Some recent writers feel the term obscures the
difference between how the Tanakh (the Jewish canon of ancient Israelite writings) and the Old
Testament (largely the same texts, ordered differently and combined with the New Testament to
form the Christian Bible) work. See Roger Brooks and John J. Collins (eds.) Hebrew Bible or
Old Testament: Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1990) and Jon D. Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and
Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1993).
2. See particularly H. Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (New York: Macmillan, 1941),
on the integration of relativism and standpoint epistemology in theology.
3. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988).
4. Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993) and Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith (eds.),
En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
5. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), 99.
6. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender and the Cultural Work of a Classical Music Performance,”
repercussions 3:1 (Spring, 1994), 77–110.
7. I place “Fundamentalist” in quotes to highlight that the term, which has a specific origin in
Protestant Christianity, cannot be easily applied across different religious traditions. For
example, the Islamist anti-secularism of Sayyid Qutb does not share the antagonistic
relationship to science that was the impetus for Protestant Fundamentalism. Nevertheless,
enough family resemblances across religious traditions make it possible to use the term with
caveats. For an overview of the common issues of gender and religious fundamentalism, see
Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young (eds.), Fundamentalism and Women in World Religions
(New York: T&T Clark, 2007). Furthermore, these dynamics have significant overlap with those
at work in religious violence. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global
Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
8. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides
Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
9. The best overview of American Christian liberal theology is Gary Dorrien’s three-volume
exposition: The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–
1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001); The Making of American Liberal
Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John
Knox Press, 2003); The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and
Postmodernity, 1950–2005 (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006). For similar
dynamics in Judaism and Islam see Eugene Borowitz, Liberal Judaism (New York, NY: Union
of American Hebrew Congregations, 1984); Charles Kurtzman (ed.), Liberal Islam: A
 Sourcebook (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Omid Safi (ed.),
Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003).
10. For assessments of Wellhausen see the issue of Semeia devoted to him: Julius Wellhausen and
His Prolegomena to the History of Israel: Semeia 25 (1982) and Ernest W. Nicholson, The
Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002). For his impact on Judaism, see Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew
Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books: A History of Biblical Culture and the
Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism, trans. Chaya Naor (Berlin and New York: De
Gruyter, 2007). For background, see John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth
Century (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) and Thomas A. Howard, Religion and the Rise of
Historicism: W.M.L. DeWette, Jacob Burkhardt and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-
Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
11. An overview of the state of scholarship can be found in Anthony Heacock, Jonathan Loved
David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix
Press, 2011). Heacock’s own position waffles between historical agnosticism and a confident
assertion that the dynamics are those of a gay (Jonathan)/straight (David) friendship. In contrast,
Susan Ackerman posits that the question is left deliberately ambiguous, as in the Gilgamesh
epic, as a way of highlighting a state of liminality at this point in the narrative: When Heroes
Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005). See also James Harding, “David and Jonathan between Athens and
Jerusalem,” Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 1:1 (2011), 37–92, for a discussion of
the historical emergence of the very possibility of the question of a homoerotic relationship. The
title of Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between
Women from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981) plays on the
crucial verse from 2 Samuel 1 for lesbian historiography.
12. I extend this agnosticism to the question of whether we are dealing with historical or fictional
characters. Ackerman provides a brief overview of the debate in When Heroes Love, 153–161.
13. For a theological reflection on these works, see Dirk von der Horst, Jonathan’s Loves, David’s
Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference (Eugene, OR: Wipf and
Stock, 2017).
14. For a setting of the lament in which genre choices and setting retain the prevalence of the
military mood of the lament, see William Boyce’s 1736 composition “David’s Lamentation over
Saul and Jonathan.”
15. Eg., Silvia Schroer and Thomas Staubli, “Saul, David, und Jonathan—the Story of a Triangle? A
Contribution to the Issue of Homosexuality in the First Testament” in Samuel and Kings: A
Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield
Academic Press, 1996), 22–36. For the discrepancy between the relationship of Saul and
Jonathan as depicted in David’s lament and the narrative in in 1 Samuel, see Robert B. Lawton,
“Saul, Jonathan, and the ‘Son of Jesse,’” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 58 (1993),
35–46. The lament holds the characters together where the narrative holds them apart. Rorem,
perhaps unwittingly, sided with the narrative.
16. See Lawrence D. Mass, “A Conversation with Ned Rorem,” in Queering the Pitch: The New
Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86–110, for an excellent example
of the disjuncture between Rorem’s self-understanding and queer musicology in action.
17. See Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
 Ned Rorem, Pure Contraption: A Composer’s Essays (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
18. 1974), 116–117.
19. Rorem, Pure Contraption, 129.
20. Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 335–
336. See Vincent A. Lenti, Serving a Great and Noble Art: Howard Hanson and the Eastman
School of Music (Rochester, NY: Meliora Press, 2009), 72–92, for the institutional context. Lenti
does not mention the expulsion of gay students in his account.
21. Rorem, Knowing When to Stop, 336.
22. For example, Markus Zehnder, “Exegetische Beobachtungen zu den David-Jonathan-
Geschichten,” Biblica 79 (1998), 153–179.
23. Eyal Regev, “Priestly Dynamic Holiness and Deuteronomic Static Holiness,” Vetus
Testamentum 51, fasc. 2 (April 2001), 243–261; Norbert Lohfink, Theology of the Pentateuch:
Themes of the Priestly Narrative and Deuteronomy, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1994); Deborah L. Ellens, Women in the Sex Texts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy:
A Comparative Conceptual Analysis (New York: T&T Clark, 2008). Also pertinent in this
context is Walter Brueggeman’s “Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of
Ancient Israel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 98:2 (June 1979), 161–185.
24. Phyllis Bird, “The End of the Male Cult Prostitute: A Literary-Historical and Sociological
Analysis of QĀDĒŠ-QĚDĒŠÎM,” in Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995, VT Sup 66 (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 37–80 and Stephanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
25. Saul Olyan, “‘And With a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the
Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5:2
(October 1994), 179–206 and David Tabb, “Leviticus,” in Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona
West, and Thomas Bohache (eds.) The Queer Bible Commentary (London: SCM, 2006).
26. See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
(New York: Seabury Press, 1979) and Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church
and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). For an in-
depth discussion of musical repercussions of this history, see Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel
against the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
27. Louis Crompton, “Gay Genocide: From Leviticus to Hitler,” in The Gay Academic, ed. Louie
Crew (Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 1978).
28. Gary David Comstock, Gay Theology without Apology (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1992).
29. For an analysis of AIDS and purity, see Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS
(Boston: South End Press, 1985).
30. Interview with Diamanda Galas in A. Juno and V. Vale, Angry Women (New York: Juno, 1999),
18–19.
31. See the simplistic understanding of Christianity in the otherwise fine discussion of Galas by
Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 238.
32. Liberation theologians generally dismiss liberal theology as “bourgeois” theology. A
condescending dismissal of liberation theology by a liberal theologian is Schubert Ogden’s
Faith and Freedom: Towards a Theology of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979);
theologians who bring the two perspectives together include Robert McAfee Brown, Theology
 in a New Key: Responding to Liberation Themes (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978) and
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1989). For an overview of the reception of Latin American liberation theology in North
America, see Craig L. Nessan, Orthopraxis or Heresy: The North American Theological
Response to Latin American Theology (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989).
33. For example, Mary Hunt, “Lesbian Feminist Pioneers in Religion,” in Queer Religion: LGBT
Movements and Queering Religion, Volume 2, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 49–62, discussion of Harkness on 50–51.
34. The classic text of this movement is Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), originally published in 1918.
35. Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity,
1900-1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 407.
36. Rosemary Skinner Keller, “Women’s Spiritual Biography and Autobiography,” in Encyclopedia
of Women and Religion in North America, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford
Ruether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78.
37. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs Vol. 5, No. 4
(Summer, 1980), 631–660. Her presence in contemporary queer religious activism is apparent in
the Georgia Harkness lecture series of the Pacific School of Religion’s Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry. http://clgs.org/lecture-series/the-georgia-harkness-lecture/
Another example of Harkness being mobilized for queer history can be found in the assertion
that when the United Methodist Church adopted the clause, “we do not condone the practice of
homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching,” Harkness “held
her head in her hands and lamented…They know not what they do. It will take years to undo the
damage they have done today.”
http://welcomingministries.blogspot.com/2007/05/homosexuality-and-united-methodist.html I
have been unable to find independent corroboration; regardless of whether or not the statement
is apocryphal, it points to the authority Harkness continues to wield in liberal Methodist circles.
38. Dorrien, The Making of Liberal Theology, 393–394, 398, 400–404.
39. Georgia Harkness, The Dark Night of the Soul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1945).
40. Carter Heyward, A Priest Forever (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
41. Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San
Francisco: Harper and Row), 188.
42. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970),
91.
43. Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relation with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think
Straight,” in Queering the Pitch (see note 14); Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” in Queering the
Pitch; Fred Maus, “Love Stories,” repercussions 4:2 (1995), 86–96; Marion Guck, “Music-
loving, or the Relationship with the Piece,” Journal of Musicology 15:3 (1997), 343–352;
Elizabeth LeGuin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
44. Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1982), xiii, 10. The bibliography of this book includes three
recordings, all Women’s Music: Meg Christian, Face the Music; Holly Near, Imagine My
Surprise; and Cris Williamson, The Changer and the Changed.
 Judith Peraino, “‘Rip Her to Shreds’: Women’s Music According to a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,”
45. repercussions 1:1 (Spring, 1992), 19–47. Heyward did move toward a greater acceptance of
lesbian sadomasochism than Peraino might expect from someone rooted in Women’s Music: See
Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1989), 108–109.
46. Heyward, Redemption of God, 25–31; Touching Our Strength, 72–86.
47. Heyward, Redemption of God, 10–11.
48. For Heyward’s use of Latin American liberation theology, see Redemption of God, 205–208;
Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation (New York: The Pilgrim
Press, 1984) 103–115, 230–233; Speaking of Christ: A Lesbian Feminist Voice (New York: The
Pilgrim Press, 1989), as well as Amanecida Collective, Revolutionary Forgiveness: Feminist
Reflections on Nicaragua (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987).
49. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and
Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and The Queer God (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003).
50. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 25.
51. Rorem, The Paris and New York Diaries of Ned Rorem, 1951-1961 (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1983), 43.
52. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008);
Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, trans. John. B. Hardie (Washington, DC: American
Council of Learned Societies, 1953).
53. David Hollinger, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the American
Encounter with Diversity,” Journal of American History 98:1 (June 2011), 21–48.
R
Ackerman, Susan. When Heroes Love: The Ambiguity of Eros in the Stories of Gilgamesh and David.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Althaus-Reid, Marcella. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Althaus-Reid, Marcella. The Queer God. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Amanecida Collective. Revolutionary Forgiveness: Feminist Reflections on Nicaragua. Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis Books, 1987.
Bird, Phyllis. “The End of the Male Cult Prostitute: A Literary-Historical and Sociological Analysis
of QĀDĒŠ-QĚDĒŠÎM.” In Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995, VT Sup. 66, 37–80. Leiden: Brill,
1997.
Blackmer, Corinne E., and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion,
Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Borowitz, Eugene. Liberal Judaism. New York, NY: Union of American Hebrew Congregations,
1984.
Brooks, Roger, and John J. Collins, eds. Hebrew Bible or Old Testament: Studying the Bible in
Judaism and Christianity. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Brown, Robert McAfee. Theology in a New Key: Responding to Liberation Themes. Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1978.
Brueggeman, Walter. “Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of Ancient Israel.”
Journal of Biblical Literature 98, no. 2 (June 1979), 161–185.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou, Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1970.
Budin, Stephanie Lynn. The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2008.
Clément, Catherine. Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Translated by Betsy Wing. Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Comstock, Gary David. Gay Theology without Apology. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1992.
Crompton, Louis. “Gay Genocide: From Leviticus to Hitler.” In The Gay Academic, Edited by Louie
Crew. Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 1978.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “Gender and the Cultural Work of a Classical Music Performance.”
repercussions 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1994), 77–110.
Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–
1900. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001.
Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–
1950. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003.
Dorrien, Gary. The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–
2005. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2006.
Ellens, Deborah L. Women in the Sex Texts of Leviticus and Deuteronomy: A Comparative
Conceptual Analysis. New York: T&T Clark, 2008.
Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from
the Sixteenth Century to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin/White Masks, Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press,
2008.
Garside, Charles. Zwingli and the Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
Guck, Marion. “Music-loving, or the Relationship with the Piece.” Journal of Musicology 15, no. 3
(1997), 343–352.
HaCohen, Ruth. The Music Libel against the Jews. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Harding, James. “David and Jonathan between Athens and Jerusalem,” Relegere: Studies in Religion
and Reception 1, no. 1 (2011), 37–92.
Harkness, Georgia. The Dark Night of the Soul. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1945.
Heacock, Anthony. Jonathan Loved David: Manly Love in the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Sex.
Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011.
Heyward, Carter. A Priest Forever. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Heyward, Carter. The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation. Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1982.
Heyward, Carter. Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God. San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1989.
Hollinger, David. “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the American
Encounter with Diversity.” Journal of American History 98, no. 1 (June 2011), 21–48.
Howard, Thomas A. Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. DeWette, Jacob Burkhardt and
the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Hunt, Mary. “Lesbian Feminist Pioneers in Religion.” In Queer Religion: LGBT Movements and
Queering Religion, Vol. 2, Edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson. Santa Barbara,
CA: Praeger, 2012.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
Juno, A., and V. Vale. Angry Women. New York: Juno, 1999.
Keller, Rosemary Skinner. “Women’s Spiritual Biography and Autobiography.” In Encyclopedia of
Women and Religion in North America, Edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary
Radford Ruether, 78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New
York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Kurtzman, Charles, ed. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook. New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Lawton, Robert B. “Saul, Jonathan, and the ‘Son of Jesse.’” Journal for the Study of the Old
Testament 58 (1993), 35–46.
LeGuin, Elizabeth. Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006.
Lenti, Vincent A. Serving a Great and Noble Art: Howard Hanson and the Eastman School of Music.
Rochester, NY: Meliora Press, 2009.
Leonardi, Susan J., and Rebecca A. Pope. The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Levenson, Jon D. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and
Christians in Biblical Studies. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993.
Levine, Amy-Jill. The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
Lohfink, Norbert. Theology of the Pentateuch: Themes of the Priestly Narrative and Deuteronomy,
Translated by Linda M. Maloney. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
Mass, Lawrence D. “A Conversation with Ned Rorem.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and
Lesbian Musicology, 86–110. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Maus, Fred. “Love Stories.” repercussions 4, no. 2 (1995), 86–96.
Nessan, Craig L. Orthopraxis or Heresy: The North American Theological Response to Latin
American Theology. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989.
Nicholson, Ernest W. The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Meaning of Revelation. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
Ogden, Schubert. Faith and Freedom: Towards a Theology of Liberation. Nashville: Abingdon, 1979.
Olyan, Saul. “‘And With a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the Meaning
and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 2
(October 1994), 179–206.
Patton, Cindy. Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS. Boston: South End Press, 1985.
Peraino, Judith. “‘Rip Her to Shreds:’ Women’s Music According to a Butch-Femme Aesthetic.”
repercussions 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1992), 19–47.
Putnam, Robert D., and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Qutb, Sayyid. Social Justice in Islam, Translated by John. B. Hardie. Washington, DC: American
Council of Learned Societies, 1953.
Rauschenbusch, Walter. A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918). Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1997.
Regev, Eyal. “Priestly Dynamic Holiness and Deuteronomic Static Holiness.” Vetus Testamentum 51,
no. 2 (April 2001), 243–261.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer
1980), 631–660.
Rogerson, John. Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1985.
Rorem, Ned. Pure Contraption: A Composer’s Essays. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974.
Rorem, Ned. The Paris and New York Diaries of Ned Rorem, 1951–1961. San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1983.
Rorem, Ned. Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. New
York: Seabury Press, 1979.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 1989.
Safi, Omid, ed. Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism. Oxford: Oneworld, 2003.
Schroer, Silvia, and Thomas Staubli. “Saul, David, und Jonathan—the Story of a Triangle? A
Contribution to the Issue of Homosexuality in the First Testament.” In Samuel and Kings: A
 Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), Edited by Athalya Brenner, 22–36. Sheffield:
Sheffield Academic Press, 1996.
Sharma, Arvind, and Katherine K. Young, eds. Fundamentalism and Women in World Religions. New
York: T&T Clark, 2007.
Shavit, Yaacov, and Mordechai Eran. The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of
Books: A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism, Translated
by Chaya Naor. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2007.
Tabb, David. “Leviticus.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, Edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss,
Mona West, and Thomas Bohache. London: SCM, 2006.
von der Horst, Dirk. Jonathan’s Loves, David’s Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and
Historical Difference. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017.
Zehnder, Markus. “Exegetische Beobachtungen zu den David-Jonathan-Geschichten.” Biblica 79
(1998), 153–179.
 CHAPTER 9

O P E R AT I C A D A P TAT I O N S A N D
T H E R E P R E S E N TAT I O N O F N O N -
N O R M AT I V E S E X U A L I T I E S
 F RE YA JARMAN

F the early turns to Classical mythology to the numerous examples

based on plays, novels, epic poems, the life of a scientist, or the hijacking of
a liner, it is far harder to find an opera that is not an adaptation of sorts than
to find one that is. Likewise, it is a rare opera indeed that does not have at
its core a story of love, desire, some other related emotional force, or a
combination thereof. The central questions in this chapter are therefore
about how music contributes to the framing of those desires in and across
operatic adaptations. Using adaptational clusters based on Carmen
(Mérimée’s novella, Bizet’s opera, and Hammerstein’s musical) and Death
in Venice (Mann’s novella, Visconti’s film, and Britten’s opera), I ask
specifically how music helps frame operatic desire with regard to ideas of
normativity; ultimately, I argue that the normativity or queerness of a desire
in an audiovisual text is significantly connected to the use of music, not
least because of music’s capacity both to embody characters and to narrate
in opera.
Two central concepts require some thought before proceeding too far:
adaptation and queer/non-normative. Of adaptation, it seems simple enough
to imagine some source material (play, novel, biography, poem) and a
cultural object that seeks to render it, usually in a different media form from
the original source. Novels into films, plays into operas, films into video
games: these are the bread and butter of adaptation. Yet even a light scratch
yields a far more complex world beneath the surface, and narrative theorists
quickly find themselves in the murky waters of citation, quotation,
bricolage,1 transposition, transferal, and intertextual engagement.2 A
thesaurus might suggest a number of alternatives to the word “adaptation”
itself, and we would be quickly reminded also of the biological sense of the
word, pertaining to the adaptation of species to new environments. From
this latter starting point—the slippage between “adaptation” as a form of
cultural text and “adaptation” as a means for the survival of species—Linda
Hutcheon (literary theorist) and Gary Bortolotti (biologist) argue for the
unhelpfulness of what they call “fidelity discourse,” a notion that assesses
articulations of single adaptations in terms of faithfulness (or not) to its
source material. They suggest instead that, just as phenotypical changes are
the consequences of adaptive solutions to environmental challenges, “core
narrative ideas”3 act as replicators, mutating over time in order to survive
new cultural contexts, a process they call “cultural selection.”4 The thesis is
a provocative one, but it raises an important question for the purposes of
this chapter, namely how ideas operate in relation to cultural context.
In the particular instances with which this chapter is concerned, the
“idea” would be that of non-normativity, and of course cultural context is
crucial to its definition. Having written elsewhere on the rich etymology of
“queer”5 and given a flexible working definition in this volume as a whole,
I do not wish to divert into a lengthy discussion of the available definitions
of that word here. Suffice it to say, however, that the choice of “non-
normative” in the present chapter was a deliberate one designed to
emphasize the culturally contingent aspect of sexuality, and to underline the
extent to which “queer” is defined precisely in opposition to normativity
rather than as a stable or fixed identity such as “gay” or “lesbian.”6
Importantly, non-normative sexualities in adaptations operate primarily on
the level of the context of reception and signification. Thus, “non-
normative” as a term invites scrutiny of those texts where the
contemporaneous cultural politics frame specific relationships within the
narrative as non-hegemonic and consequently inappropriate, without being
“queer” in the sense of gay or lesbian. (This is what I shall argue is the case
in relation to Carmen.) As such, any temporal or other cultural gap between
the ancestor and the adaptation must be considered. So, in an abstractly
simple case, what is queer in the novel on its first publication may be less
so in the context in which the film is released (or vice versa), and so
however “faithful” the adaptation may be of the narrative, the cultural
impact of the text is likely to shift with the new cultural environment.
We might consider a text, then, as made up of various interlocking
levels. Some elements of a text act as crucial parts of the narrative structure
without which the narrative as such mutates so significantly as to challenge
its integrity. Other elements act on the level of signification, either within
the narrative world or beyond it. Roland Barthes7 uses the terms “functions”
and “indices” to identify certain levels of operation with regards to narrative
structure, and he too seeks to distinguish between those elements that are
central to the narrative structure (cardinal functions), those that help fill in
the structure but which are not consequential (catalytic functions, or
catalyses), and those that signify meaning either within or beyond the
narrative world (indices). Adapting Barthes’s system for the purposes of the
issues at stake here, I propose there are three interlocking levels: (1)
descriptive details; (2) narrative checkpoints; and (3) the field of symbolic
meaning opened up by the text as a whole and its constituent parts.

1. Descriptive details are probably the most clearly available of these in

respect of mutation. We might consider here the color of a
protagonist’s shoes,8 where the color has no symbolic value internal
to the narrative.9 Such a change has limited adaptive significance
since it little affects the meaning to be taken from the text, and does
not have a bearing on the resulting text’s fitness to thrive in its
environment. The name of a protagonist or even the location of the
story and the description attendant to that location might be included
here, depending on the specific case.
2. Narrative checkpoints are available for mutation through changes in
descriptive detail, and are open to a quite significant amount of
change, providing enough checkpoints are inherited by the
adaptation in a recognizable enough form; these are arguably what
constitute the fundamental material of the text under adaptation. We
could identify in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet a sequence of
narrative checkpoints (unexpected meeting, profession of love,
violent conflict resulting in murder, exile, deception, misplaced
information, and double suicide); these are sufficient to transcend the
various changes of descriptive details (location, time, and so on)
manifest in its adaptation so that the narrative ancestry is still
palpable, as in West Side Story, for example.
3. Each of the former elements brings with it a field of signifying
possibilities—a field sensitive to cultural contexts of production and
reception—such that the signifying potential of any element (and in
turn the whole narrative, and indeed the entire text) may mutate
 along with the elements, even if the adaptation is still recognizable
as an adaptation. To continue with West Side Story, the change from
families to gangs, the introduction of a racial element, and the
strategic consequence of the latter in raising questions about the
“American-ness” of the Jets each raise cultural-political themes in
the signifying field of the musical that are less obvious in that of the
play. The change of medium also plays a role here, since the
introduction of song and dance, especially in such a heterosexual-
male-dominated narrative world, opens up a field of meaning in
itself, as well as new possibilities for a queer-inflected reading.10 But
just as an adaptation might yield a new field of signification as a
consequence of changes to descriptive details, narrative checkpoints,
or medium, any one of those levels might be used in the service of
retaining or adapting the signifying field as its own layer in the
source material. That is, we ought not to think of the signifying field
simply as the accidental by-product of other strategies of adaptation,
but as a level of the text which might itself be being adapted.

Given the importance of the context of reception to the definition of non-

normative sexuality, then whether such sexuality exists also on the level of
descriptive detail, and even though it may not form part of a key narrative
checkpoint, it is likely to work at the level of signifying possibility, forming
part of the cultural work that the text invites. It is my contention that, in
audiovisual media forms, music plays an important role in framing
(enhancing or closing down) non-normativity of sexuality.
 C

The first adaptational cluster to be considered consists of a number of

Carmen narratives, one of the most famously adapted texts in and around
the world of opera,11 and certainly one that has generated an enormous
amount of scholarship.12 The narrative’s history begins with Prosper
Mérimée’s novella, Carmen, written in 1845 and republished with
additional annotations in 1847. Mérimée’s work is a quasi-anthropological
piece of writing, a first-person tale of a Spanish encounter with a nobleman
—Don José—who tells the narrator his own tale of downfall at the hands of
the gypsy Carmen. There have been countless adaptations of the work into
ballets, musicals, and films, but the most famous adaptation to date is surely
George Bizet’s 1875 opera, Carmen, which sets only Don José’s tale,
extracted from the center of Mérimée’s novella. An adaptation in turn of
Bizet’s work, Otto Preminger’s film version (1954) of Oscar Hammerstein’s
musical Carmen Jones (1943) provides the next focal point in this cluster;
famous for its all-Black cast in mid-1950s America, the musical directly
lifts Bizet’s tunes and relocates the narrative to the American South in
World War II.
Between Bizet and Mérimée, Carmen is established early in the
narrative’s history as a cultural threat on three levels: she represents the
racial other, she embodies an excessively sexual femininity, and she
signifies popular, vernacular culture. Each of these in its own way helps
constitute not only Carmen’s non-normativity, and by extension that of
José’s desire for her, since he represents in many ways a norm against
which Carmen is defined. That is to say, the non-normativity of sexuality in
this narrative core is to be found not only in Carmen’s own insistent
transgression of expected female behavior, but also in José’s desire for her
in return. But this is significantly more the case in Bizet’s opera than it is in
Mérimée’s novella, and far less true in the musical adaptation of Bizet’s
work, Carmen Jones, largely because of the musical layer in the
adaptations.
 In Mérimée’s novella, the threats that Carmen poses are established
partly through the narrative incidents relayed by the narrator and by Don
José within the story, but also partly through the first-person mode of
narration, and the role of the narrator in the story. Early on in Mérimée’s
story, the narrator himself meets Carmen, and describes her to the reader in
such a carefully descriptive manner that his own desires are barely veiled in
what is otherwise a quite objective report of the narrative events. He writes
of her “perfectly smooth” skin, a set of teeth “whiter than blanched
almonds,” and her black hair “with a blue sheen like a raven’s wing.” He
goes on to describe a “strange, wild” beauty, an inhuman expression “at
once voluptuous and fierce” in Carmen’s eyes, and a face that was
“disconcerting at first sight, but unforgettable.”13 The first-person address
of the narrator, combined with the otherwise quite detached narration,
allows the reader first to identify with the narrator, then to trust him, and
ultimately to perceive both Carmen’s desirability and the threat posed by
the gypsy to the narrator and José. The threat of the racial other, which
intersects with the problem of sexuality in later adaptations, is introduced
by Mérimée first and foremost through the descriptions of Carmen’s gypsy
features. Specifically, Carmen is the threat from within, as “the Gypsies
have no country of their own,” and this paradox of having no home, of
always being the outsider but with no place to return (or be returned to),
earns them a sinister mercurial nature, especially in language14 which
constitutes the terms of reference for Mérimée’s medium. So, although
Carmen’s sexual identity is immediately defined by her transgression of the
expected norms of female behavior in the nineteenth century, it is also
intertwined with her racial otherness and importantly framed by the
narrative strategies deployed by Mérimée.
Although the opera makes radical cuts to Mérimée’s work, and while
narrative checkpoints are thus affected quite significantly, an “essence” of
Carmen translates well from the page to the operatic stage. Not only does
the opera remove the first-person narrative before and after José’s tale, but
it also makes some significant interventions in respect of secondary
characters: Carmen’s husband is removed, and superseded by Escamillo the
toreador (Lucas the picador in Mérimée); and Micaëla, José’s betrothed
from his hometown, is fabricated anew.15 These two characters, the one
increased in importance and the other newly created, act as counterparts to
Carmen and José in various ways. In one sense, Escamillo is merely the
vehicle through which José comes to perceive the extent of Carmen’s
fickleness. But his signature song contrasts in style and emotional content
to José’s music just as much and in many of the same ways as Carmen’s
music generally does, for the gypsy and the toreador are equally
characterized by verse-chorus forms with catchy tunes,16 while the soldier
expresses himself in through-composed lyricism. José is barely afforded
any solo airtime in the opera, with one self-contained aria alone to his
name, against Carmen’s four. But what monologuing he does enjoy is
nevertheless firmly grounded in a very different soundworld from those of
Carmen and Escamillo. His Act II plea for Carmen’s understanding (“La
fleur que tu m’avais jetée”) features long, swooning lines whose subtle
chromaticism serves to add sophistication rather signifying the racial
difference it does in Carmen’s world. The aria builds organically, without
the vulgarity of Carmen’s typical verse-chorus form, to an impassioned
climax of vulnerability whose style is altogether in keeping with that of
tenor arias throughout the century.17 José is thereby characterized by the
sound of the unscrutinized hegemony, in which his social, gendered, and
racial statuses are the “norm” against which Carmen’s “other” is measured.
Micaëla, meanwhile, essentially offers a moral standard against which
Carmen’s behavior could be judged, and serves to remind both José and the
audience of what his safer, more sensible, and socially more desirable
course of action should be. Her music, like José’s, contrasts with that of
Carmen. Micaëla brings the comfort of unison singing (Figure 9.1) and
sympathetic counter-melody (Figure 9.2) to José in their Act I duet. Later,
her appeal to José’s sense at the end of Act III is grounded with safe
diatonicism and supported by a smooth texture of strings, woodwind, and
arpeggiated harp (Figure 9.3).
FIGURE 9.1 Unison singing between Micaëla and José in the Letter Duet, suggesting emotional
proximity.

FIGURE 9.2 Micaëla’s sympathetic counter-melody in the Letter Duet, suggesting emotional
proximity of her and José.
FIGURE 9.3 Safe harmonies and smooth texture in Micaëla’s Act III aria.

Carmen, by stark contrast, is characterized primarily by percussion,

chromaticism, and dance music in the majority of her solo arias. Two
notable exceptions to this musical rule are to be found, but neither disrupts
the overall argument here. In Carmen’s “Cards” aria in Act III, “En vain
pour éviter,” her musical language is markedly different from her usual
style, with long flowing lines in a through-composed structure. I would
argue that this constitutes Carmen stepping back to reflect on her own fate
as if from outside and that the musical shift reflects that; in a musical
system where external standards are upheld by the kind of musical language
found in José’s aria, this moment of Carmen operating in that language is a
moment of voicing those external standards.18 Later, in Act IV, she and
Escamillo express their mutual affection. Here, their harmonies are as
closely intertwined as José’s and Micaëla’s are in their Act I duet, arguably
lessening Carmen’s autonomy at this moment. I read this rather as
indicative of their similarity as types, implicitly underlining the problem she
poses to José and what he represents. Overall, though, Carmen’s musical
numbers are modal, strophic, and rhythmically oriented.
 The piece that arguably exemplifies Carmen’s threat—as a sexual,
embodied creature; as racial other; and as harbinger of the vernacular—is
her Act II opener, the Chanson bohème (“Les tringles des sistres tintaient”).
Rhythmically, “Les tringles” is characterized by a gradual accelerando to a
wild conclusion, played out by an increasingly dominant battery of
percussion. The lyrics alternate between verses describing the gypsy life
and the semiotically vague “La la la la” chorus that designates it as a song
even within the sung form of an opera. Thus, “Les tringles” identifies
Carmen more clearly here than at any other point as a sexual creature, a
racial other, and situated in popular culture. The scene does not advance the
plot at all, but furthers Carmen’s characterization primarily through musical
means. The audience is thereby left to gaze on this narratively superfluous
moment as a moment at which the sheer physicality of their own enjoyment
of the music comes into radical conflict with the overall ideological project
of the opera, namely the condemnation of Carmen. Susan McClary likewise
suggests that the change from novella to opera enhances the present-ness of
the narrative, writing that José’s story is “not relayed second-hand as in
Mérimée, but enacted before the audience’s very eyes.”19 She goes on to
explain how the “chromatic excesses” and “pseudo-gypsy dance” that
pervade so much of Carmen’s music not only serve to describe and embody
her qualities, but also work on the audience:
Her rhythms indicate that she is very much aware of her body. […] Moreover, these rhythms
are so contagious that they make José—and the listener—aware of both her body and also
(worse yet) of their own bodies. […] Her melodic lines tease and taunt, forcing the attention
to dwell on the moment—on the erogenous zones of her inflected melodies. […] She knows
how to hook and manipulate desire. In her musical discourse she is slippery, unpredictable,
maddening: hers is the music we remember from the opera. She becomes José’s obsession—
and likewise the listener’s.20

In this particular adaptive shift, the narrative core is altered in order to bring
one part of the signifying field into greater focus, as Bizet’s opera zooms in
on the signification of José’s tale, thereby losing the authority of Mérimée’s
anthropological narrator. But the opera enhances the various
characterizations by way of certain narrative changes and amplifies them
significantly with the new level of meaning brought to the text by the
music, which not only comments from outside on the characters and their
actions, but also fundamentally embodies them; Carmen is her strophic,
rhythmic, percussive, modal sound, just as José is his through-sung
bourgeois lyricism.
Thus, while the narrative close-up on José’s tale serves to amplify the
signifying power of its constituent elements, the musical frame performs the
work of the now-lost narrator more intensely, by persistently voicing in
musical terms the narrator’s and José’s desires and bringing them to bear
instead on the audience; where it was the narrator’s and José’s first-person
desires that Mérimée’s reader perceived, it is now the audience’s own desire
at stake. Music thereby serves both to embody Carmen’s sexuality and to
pass judgment on it.
A self-identified adaptation of Bizet’s opera, Carmen Jones (dir.
Preminger, 1954) is famous for its all-Black cast and relocation of the
narrative to mid-1950s America. The relationship between Joe and Carmen
proceeds narratively in much the same way as that between José and his
gypsy temptress, but the effect is rather different. The tension between the
two lead characters—his emotional dependence on her, and her decreasing
interest in him—is a part of the narrative core of any manifestation of
Carmen, and evidently requires some kind of sexual element and some
differential of power. Yet the relationship in Carmen Jones ultimately seems
in all ways founded on a far more conservative sexuality than that in its
narrative ancestor. If Bizet’s text essentially renders Carmen a threat on the
three levels of racial, sexual, and social status, then the Preminger film
effectively dilutes all three levels. And just as Bizet’s music consolidated
those elements in the opera, the musical decisions made by Hammerstein
and Preminger contribute to an almost entirely opposite effect.
The very rendering of this opera into a piece of musical theater is the
first issue at stake. Bizet’s Carmen sounds conspicuously vernacular when
set against the bourgeois strainings of José in his Act II aria, but Joe’s “Dis
Flower” does not have quite the same effect in terms of relief from
Carmen’s soundworld. Rather, the mise-en-scène of the film is such that a
vernacular tinge colors the entire event, and, as such, Joe’s song—here sung
as a brief soliloquy rather than, as in the opera, an impassioned declaration
—appears more like a change of dramatic tempo than it does a contrast of
ideological realm; in the musical, this is “a slow number,” where in the
opera it is from a different sonic world, and therefore characterizes José as
from a different social order. It is true that LeVern Hutcherson, who
provides the voice of Joe (for Harry Belafonte’s on-screen performance),
has an operatic, cultured quality to his voice, exceeding that of Marilyn
Horne in her singing for the title role (played on screen by Dorothy
Dandridge), and a comparison between “Dis Flower” and “Dere’s a Café on
the Corner” (the Seguidilla in the opera) shows a palpable difference
between the two voices. At the same time, however, both songs call for the
stylized African American pronunciation common at the time (“dis,”
“dere,” “dat”), which renders them in similar aesthetic worlds. On screen,
Belafonte is seen topless and undertaking physical labor in the prison,
situating the actor and the character both in a long history of objectifying
the Black body on screen. The overall effect, then, is more one of unrefined
authenticity (albeit with aspirations to something greater) than it is one of
innate bourgeois privilege such as José represents.
Further to this comparative lack of musical contrast is the lack also of
racial contrast, which frames the (non-)normativity of sexuality in Mérimée
and Bizet. The cast of Carmen Jones is by no means homogenously Black,
as Dandridge in the lead role is light enough in her skin tone (and
sufficiently made up, no doubt) that she almost imbues the role with a hint
of its Hispanic origins; she contrasts strikingly with Broc Peters21 in the
role of Joe’s superior officer or Roy Glenn as Rum Daniels (the manager of
Husky Miller, the boxer who substitutes for Escamillo). Nonetheless, there
is no hint in the narrative or the casting that Carmen and her allies Frankie
(Frasquita) and Myrt (Mercedes) are intended to be racially other to Joe or
any other character. The artistic decision here was, of course, made in an
America still laboring under lingering Jim Crow laws, some years before
the 1964 Civil Rights Act, much less the 1967 Federal repeal of anti-
miscegenation laws; once Hammerstein had taken the decision to set the
story with an African American element, a direct equivalent to Bizet and
Mérimée in terms of racial contrast was arguably too politically sensitive to
consider.22 In addition to denying the contrast between the leading
characters along lines of race, the couple is rendered safer still in several
incidents where Carmen displays domestic and domesticating instincts—
taking Joe to meet her grandmother, cleaning his clothes, and so on—
thereby inviting a sympathetic audience response to the possibility of this
relationship. So, while most fundamental narrative checkpoints are rendered
equivalent, descriptive details being changed to suit the new context and
without great adaptive significance, the sexual significations (in some cases
by way of racial difference) are lost at the expense of the already culturally-
significant attempt to provide a cultural space for an African American
musical text.
One musico-narrative checkpoint that is noticeably adjusted is the
decision to deny Carmen her Chanson bohème, and to give the tune instead
to Frankie (“Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum”). If the operatic text
exemplifies Carmen’s status as a gypsy as well as the variety of threats she
poses, in Carmen Jones, the song is transformed into a musical discourse on
Africanism, notably by way of an opening drum solo played on toms with
soft beaters. Also underpinning the “Blackness” of the event is the
directorial decision to keep the iconic singing voice of Pearl Bailey, who
plays Frankie, with all its connotations of Black vocality; notably, this is in
contrast to the characters of Carmen and Joe, whose songs were voiced by
white singers despite both of the actors having enjoyed singing careers of
their own. Thus, all the burden of difference brought about in the Chanson
bohème is laid instead at the door of a secondary character who barely even
casts a shadow of guilt on Carmen by association. Carmen herself is free to
brood about Joe’s absence, and the audience is altogether left less
threatened by her as a figure.
Taken as a whole, Carmen Jones maintains the principle of sexual
tension between its two leading characters, but is much less challenging
overall on the levels of threat established by Bizet’s music. Despite a
surface attempt to translate Bizet’s opera for a contemporary audience, the
musical changes combine with other decisions to transform considerably
the signifying potential of the text, fundamentally adapting the field of
meaning while ostensibly not mutating far from its narrative predecessor.
Ultimately, in Carmen Jones, music helps redirect the source toward
comparative normativity in the sexuality on display, where Bizet had more
fully immersed his audience in transgressive desire.
 D V

One cluster of texts where the non-normativity of a character’s sexuality

remains important across adaptations is Death in Venice. Starting with
Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912), through Luchino
Visconti’s film Morte a Venezia (1971), to Benjamin Britten’s opera Death
in Venice (1973),23 the core of this text relies on the queer desire of the
mature Gustav von Aschenbach for the adolescent Tadzio. (For the sake of
clarity, where I mean to refer specifically to one of the individual texts, I
will use Tod, Morte, and Death respectively; if I mean the narrative core
that holds the texts together, I will use Death in Venice.) The subtleties of
non-normativity—the precise shape of the queerness of the sexuality
represented— are variable according to artistic decision and medium, but
essentially the narrative requires that relationship to be queer. Music, in
both the film and the opera, positions the audience in particular relation to
the idea of that queerness, contributing to the texts’ adaptation not only of
the narrative core but also of the signifying field in relation to sexuality.
Mann’s Tod presents an intriguing set of challenges to anyone seeking to
adapt the text into another medium, since its form relies heavily on the role
of the narrator. It is a determinedly third-person voice that tells the story of
renowned author Gustav von Aschenbach and his gradual decline to death,
brought about by his refusal to leave Venice despite a cholera epidemic, in
order that he can continue to enjoy the presence of the young Tadzio.
Aschenbach’s initial response to the boy is that he embodies a classically
perfect beauty, and the protagonist understands his feelings to be those of
aesthetic appreciation. As the novella progresses, Aschenbach’s feelings
become more palpably tinged with physical desire, and the narrative voice
becomes more detached and judgmental. But all the way through Tod, there
is a clear sense that this is a tale being told; the narrative voice is insistently
third-person, keeping the reader at a critical distance from the events.24 The
voice also becomes ever more distant from its object, such that while the
beginning of Tod reveals Aschenbach’s inner thoughts, the end of the work
tends more toward a recounting of events. Judgment also emerges more
significantly, so that descriptions of Aschenbach change from objective
descriptions of “the traveler” or “the waiting one” to more critical terms
like “the crazed one” and “the besotted.”25 The distance achieved by the
narrative voice is an effect that may be hard to translate across media, or
one that certainly requires a thoughtful solution. Also problematic from an
adapter’s perspective is that there is comparatively little action, save for
Aschenbach’s visits to the barber and his half-hearted attempt to leave
Venice due to the persistent annoyance of the Sirocco wind. Perhaps the
greatest challenge for adaptation, however, is the extraordinary lack of
dialogue. A few short exchanges take place between Aschenbach and
various minor characters, and there are references to the sounds of language
around the hotel—Aschenbach takes note of a decreasing amount of
German being spoken around the Lido as the epidemic bears down on
Venice, for instance; but the mise-en-scène of the novel is, for the most part,
tensely still and quietly anxious. At the same time, the narrative core
established by Mann is relatively sparse, so that what little does “happen,”
and what few minor characters do intervene, are therefore overburdened
semiotically. Adaptation into either a film or an opera is consequently a
significant challenge, and the artistic decisions made by Visconti and
Britten (the latter with his librettist Myfanwy Piper) speak to the media in
which they work and, in turn, enable subtle shades of signification through
their musical choices.
Visconti’s Morte is famous for its musical choices, and no doubt many a
listener knows the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony because of its
use in the film and the popularity thereby afforded it. Visconti balances
dialogue and music carefully, and long stretches of the film proceed with
the Adagietto as the only or primary sound. Mahler’s music is all that
accompanies a ninety-second sequence of Aschenbach leaving the Lido to
depart Venice, a sequence that focuses the viewer visually on the subtle
facial movements of Dirk Bogarde. Similarly, a 4-minute stretch covers
Aschenbach’s departure from the train station, through his return to the
Lido and a few stolen glances at Tadzio’s family, to a flashback with
minimal and barely audible dialogue between him and his wife and
daughter, before a jump cut to a shot of Tadzio running out of the sea. In
such sequences, between Bogarde’s acting and the choice of soundtrack, the
filmic medium succeeds in conveying much of Aschenbach’s internal
conflict surrounding the failed attempt to leave Venice.
Only in the final scene, where Aschenbach’s body is discovered on the
beach, does the interiority of perspective start to yield. After a long
sequence of Aschenbach watching the boy as he wanders out to sea, in
which Aschenbach’s desires and their failures are again narrated by Mahler,
the precise moment of his death occasions no interruption to the music. It is
the discovery of his body that is drawn attention to musically, heralded by a
new theme in the Adagietto, an off-beat forte interjection of the counter-
subject that provides a contrast with the preceding musical material quite
appropriate for the visual sequence (Figure 9.4).26
FIGURE 9.4 The second theme in the Adagietto, heralding Aschenbach’s death in Morte a
Venezia.

The music continues to dominate the soundtrack while the attendants

remove Aschenbach’s body, and apart from the fleeting shot of one
bystander’s shock at the discovery, the remaining images are all shot at long
distance, fading seamlessly into the credits. In these final moments, the
viewer might perceive a shift from the internal world of Aschenbach’s
thoughts to an external perspective of narration about Aschenbach in the
manner of the novella, which becomes radically and unsentimentally distant
after a period of intense interiority. But ultimately, the focus in the film
remains squarely on Aschenbach, in that the viewer sees Tadzio primarily
through the filter of Aschenbach’s internal conflict in a way that is not quite
true of Tod because of the novella’s insistence on narrative distance and the
presentist isolation of the older man. Several flashback scenes in Morte,
added by Visconti to Mann’s narrative checkpoints, give the viewer a sense
of Aschenbach’s former life, and provide opportunities for voicing debates
around beauty, spirituality, sensuality, and perfection. In Tod, Aschenbach
ponders these thoughts internally and alone, and so in Morte, he becomes
more social, more informed by the world around him. Moreover, Mann’s
Tadzio and Aschenbach are both filtered through the voice of the narrator.
The boy is always held at a distance, as the narrator only voices
Aschenbach’s thoughts and never allows Tadzio the same agency he
acquires under Visconti. But with the increasing distance in Mann’s
narrative voice, the reader does not exactly see the boy through the eyes of
the man; rather, we read first of Aschenbach’s problems and then of the
problem of Aschenbach himself. In Morte, by contrast, the viewer is asked
to understand Aschenbach’s problems from the perspective of Aschenbach,
to see Tadzio through his eyes, and it is primarily in the final scene that a
world beyond his thoughts is possible. It is Mahler’s music that underpins
this subtle shift. The affective power of the Adagietto at crucial narrative
moments (the attempt to leave, the discovery of Aschenbach’s body)
enhances a more sympathetic version of Aschenbach that is offered also by
an increased level of interaction between him and other characters (however
subtle those interactions may be).
More so than in film, where periods without dialogue may challenge the
director, the actors, and the viewer, but do not fundamentally challenge the
genre, opera requires some text to be voiced in order to be opera. Britten
and Piper’s first solution was to give Aschenbach extended monologues in
which he expresses his inner thoughts to the audience; the author’s
notebook is frequently the device used to make these appear more rational.
Further, they manifest the role of Dionysus—a recurring character in
Aschenbach’s philosophical ponderings in the novella—in a series of
characters drawn from Mann. The Traveller, the Fop, the Hotel Manager,
and various other anonymous characters, in addition to Dionysus himself
are not only sung by the same baritone, but feature a recurring sonic motif
of a jump to the falsetto voice. Apollo, meanwhile, is a separate figure with
a contrasting countertenor voice. In Tod, Aschenbach’s internal
psychological machinations over the Apollonian or Dionysian nature of his
desires are described at an increasing distance by a narrator. In Morte, these
same machinations were either silently-acted sequences with Mahler’s
music, affectively powerful but nonetheless somewhat impenetrable, or
manifested as flashbacks of conversation with another character concocted
for the film, set as sequences to be watched at an implicit distance. In
Death, they are either voiced by Aschenbach to himself or played out
between Dionysus and Apollo themselves. By voicing Aschenbach’s
thoughts in the first person, Britten and Piper manage to draw the listener
more intensely in to his internal psychological wranglings, and in this sense
Death in Venice has the most intimate effect of the three versions of the
narrative. By vocally manfesting Apollo and Dionysus, the forces are
rendered more pervasive, and we might hear them in fact as part of
Aschenbach’s internal thoughts in a way that was always somewhat out of
reach in the other two manifestations of Death in Venice.
But by far the most striking device in Death is the decision to render
Tadzio and his family entirely silent. The same lack of voice is apparent in
Morte, but there is speech and action around Tadzio, and he enjoys an
agency not so readily found by his counterpart in Death by means of several
returning gazes he bestows on Aschenbach. Under Britten, the silence of the
Polish family is not simply a byproduct of adapting Mann’s narrative core
for a new medium (such that the family happen to be silent while
Aschenbach enjoys his new-found voice). Rather, it becomes a strategic
device of representation, and therefore signification, as Britten writes the
family’s roles as those of ballet dancers; Tadzio does not play in the
background while Aschenbach sings, but dances as the primary action on
stage, while Aschenbach is rendered speechless, or absent altogether. James
Larner argues that this “is a good example of Britten taking a very different
approach but achieving the same ends as Mann. Both men wanted to stress
the lack of communication between Aschenbach and Tadzio and his
family.”27 Certainly, Britten’s method goes at least as far as Mann’s in
“stressing” this lack of communication. Indeed, the opera may even be
more forceful in its emphasis by virtue of the juxtaposition between the
sung text, a defining feature of the genre, and the ballet sequences, which
stand out starkly from the sung backdrop.28 By situating Tadzio within the
wordless frame of ballet, Britten’s opera renders Tadzio more the object of
the gaze than either Tod or Morte manage. And this is specifically not only
Aschenbach’s gaze, but the audience’s too. During Tadzio’s formal solo
dance in Act I, for instance, the stage is dominated solely by the physical
form of the young male dancer. And although he returns for the Games of
Apollo sequence, the older man is but part of an onstage audience, all
watching Tadzio and the other boys. Similarly, at the end of the opera,
Aschenbach’s final plea, “Tadzio!,” is followed by a minute and a half of
music in which the boy walks out to sea. Throughout the opera, the
audience therefore not only sees Tadzio through Aschenbach’s gaze, but
gazes at the boy with him, becoming complicit in the gaze, and even gazes
at the boy in Aschenbach’s absence.
Mann’s narrative core is left more intact in Death than it is in Morte, in
which Aschenbach makes contact with the Polish family in order to urge
them to leave Venice, and supplementary flashbacks account for
Aschenbach’s philosophical struggle. But, contrary to Larner, I would
suggest that the “ends achieved” by Britten are not quite the same as those
achieved by either Mann or Visconti, because the field of signification is
affected by the mediality of the text. Music in Death takes up the work not
(or not simply) of the third-person narrator in Tod (as is the case in Morte)
but of Aschenbach’s perspective on Tadzio. From the start, the boy’s
soundworld is radically contrasted with all that has preceded it; the closest
comparison before his entrance in Scene 4 might be the sound of the
Traveller (the first of the Dionysian harbingers), framed as it is by a
selection of small drums. But at the first sight of Tadzio, a shimmering
otherworldliness emerges with the introduction of a vibraphone theme that
sounds peculiarly exotic on account of its pentatonic inflection to the A
major region and its major seventh span (Figure 9.5).
FIGURE 9.5 The entry of Tadzio, heralded by a pentatonic motif and otherworldly instrumentation.

The theme and its attendant timbres are so particular in their contextual
use that it is not long before the simple sound of the vibraphone conjures an
association with Tadzio. Once Aschenbach has pondered, “Surely the soul
of Greece lies in that bright perfection […],” the vibraphone yields to the
more grounded percussion of drums (a different flavor of percussive sound
that will continue to characterize the boy as physically energetic), although
cymbals continue to lend a metallic, unreal edge to the sound. Everything
gives way to the cold, harsh sound of a solo piano which brings the
audience back into Aschenbach’s mind—into his determinedly Apollonian
analysis of the question, “How does such beauty come about?” Later, in the
Games sequence and elsewhere, a chorus sings from off stage of Tadzio’s
beauty and physical superiority; the sound, libretto content and function of
the chorus summon associations with Greek melodrama, associations
cemented by the off-stage countertenor voice of Apollo. At such instances,
music does not describe Tadzio, but embodies Aschenbach’s view of him.
The gamelan-style percussion sound that frames the boy is not a device to
characterize his foreignness—it is hardly a sound one would associate with
a Polish character. Rather, music is part of the vision by which Aschenbach
is so captivated; the exotic music is Tadzio through Aschenbach’s eyes,
which is the only Tadzio the audience is ever able to perceive.29
 There is an argument to be made that Tadzio-as-object is common to all
three texts, and that the balletic device in Death is but a medium-
appropriate means of achieving that symbolic end. But by reducing the boy
to a musical and visual spectacle with no voice, by navigating
Aschenbach’s feelings through monologues, and by weaving his internal
tension throughout the musical fabric via Apollo and the shape-shifting
Dionysus, the operatic result is also to resituate the audience in relation to
Tadzio, and to invite the audience further into Aschenbach’s mental world.
Where Mann distances the reader from Aschenbach through the narrator’s
voice, and Visconti introduces some more substantial role for the boy
through the numerous return gazes, Britten’s musical frame serves to align
the viewer with and within Aschenbach, rendering them complicit in this
transgressive desire. Consequently, the change of medium serves to shift the
overall effect of the narrative—not completely and absolutely, but
nonetheless palpably and profoundly.
It seems obvious that the treatment of sexuality in adaptations is likely to
be as varied and diverse as the world of adaptations, which is indeed
complex. All that this chapter has considered are examples of adaptations
that take a single point of reference as their narrative ancestors; I have not
ventured anywhere as intricate in terms of narrative genetics as, for
example, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (which might be summed up as
the hero of La bohème and the heroine of La traviata, filtered through a
recycled soundtrack of Bollywood, Hollywood, and 1980s pop). What I
have intended to demonstrate, though, is the role that music plays in
changes to and from operatic forms of texts under adaptation, in terms of
the place and meaning of sexual desire. And while there is clearly much
more that could be said about that role in any one of the texts mentioned, it
should also be clear by now that it is a significant one. Specifically, music
can succeed in taking up the work of a narrator when a novel is adapted to
an opera; this works either by acting as a third-person commentary in lieu
of a first-person narrator, as in Bizet’s Carmen, or by bringing the audience
into first-person alignment with the events previously described by a third-
person voice of judgment, as in Britten’s Death in Venice. Moreover, as
music serves to characterize various protagonists—not only in the sense of
enhancing a character who is already sufficiently defined by dialogue and
narrative checkpoints, but also in the sense of being part of the definition of
the character at all—then it becomes a part of the character; it is not simply
that music inflects a pre-existing character that would exist without it, but
that characters are to some extent their music. (This is particularly true in
the case of the mute Tadzio.) In any given case, the narrative content may
be left quite intact or it may not, but the signification opened up by the
adaptations is notably enhanced by the intervention of music in the new
medium. From the perspective of non-normative sexuality, a trace of their
various source texts remains in the adaptations I have discussed here
(Mérimée in Bizet, Bizet in Hammerstein/Preminger, and Mann in both
Visconti and Britten). Consequently, any non-normativity in the source text
casts a long shadow in the adaptation, even if, as in Carmen Jones in
particular, a musical frame may also confine the limits of any sexual threat,
and transgression is more a ghostly reminiscence of the source than it is
present in the new text. But certainly, sexuality operates in narratives at the
level of the signifying field, wherever else it might also operate, and music
plays a significant role in positioning it.
N
1. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York/London: Routledge, 2006), 3.
2. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York/London: Routledge, 2006), 8–10.
3. Linda Hutcheon and Gary Bortolotti, On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity
Discourse and “Success”—Biologically, New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 447.
4. Ibid., 449.
5. Freya Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13–17.
6. See Halperin (1995) and Jagose (1996) in addition to Jarman-Ivens (2011).
7. See Roland Barthes (1975).
8. The famous instance to which I refer is of course that of Dorothy’s slippers in The Wizard of Oz,
which were silver in L. Frank Baum’s book (1900) and ruby red in the glorious Technicolor film
(dir. Fleming, 1939). It is interesting to consider whether the cultural significance of the film
has, over time, afforded the ruby slippers signifying potential that has come to transcend what
was a pragmatic change of a descriptive detail.
9. Hutcheon and Bortolotti (2007, 449).
10. Such a reading is not beyond the possibilities invited by Shakespeare’s text, of course, and there
is some agreement that the play contains distinctly homoerotic undertones, particularly in the
relationship between Romeo and Mercutio (see Dalmaso 2016), which is perhaps most clearly
queered in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film. My point here is simply one about the importance of the
medium of musical theater in 1950s America to any reading of the adaptive result. One might
also consider the Anita/Maria dyad in Bernstein’s musical as another example of the
significance of homosociality to West Side Story, as Stacy Wolf does (2006).
11. Davies notes that there have been at least eighty film adaptations alone (2005, 3).
12. See for instance: McClary (1991); McClary (2005); Davies and Perriam (2005); Powrie et al.
(2007).
13. Prosper Mérimée, Carmen and Other Stories, Trans. Nicholas Jotcham (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 4.
14. Ibid., 23.
15. Carmen’s companions, Frasquita and Mercedes, are also creations for the operatic narrative.
16. Indeed, it is the music of the bullfight that bookends the opera itself, opening both the first and
final acts, and inviting the audience to remember this as a crucial musical feature.
17. See Jarman (2013) for an exploration of the emergence of this style and the gender politics
thereof.
18. We might also read it as part of Carmen’s social slipperiness, with reference to Mérimée’s
description of the gypsies’ linguistic slipperiness (1989, 23).
19. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), 56.
20. Ibid., 57–58.
21. Elsewhere, Brock Peters.
22. See also McClary (2005, 210).
23. Although Britten’s opera was debuted after Visconti’s film, he worked independently from
Mann’s novella (Strode 1987, 26); this is not an adaptation of an adaptation, but a coincidental
text directly descended from the same ancestor.
24. Ritchie Robertson, Classicism and Its Pitfalls: Death in Venice. In the Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Mann, ed. Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97.
25. See James Larner’s PhD dissertation: Benjamin Britten and Luchino Visconti: Iterations of
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (2006, 43).
26. Thanks to my colleague Dr Giles Hooper for his insights on this audiovisual moment.
27. James Larner (2006, 42).
28. In terms of operatic history, balletic content is not at all unusual; quite the contrary, it was a
convention of grand opera. However, in Britten’s Death, that generic frame which would make
ballet an expected feature is not present. Moreover, the sequences in Death differ from grand
opera’s ballets in form, as they are generally solos or pas de deux and woven into the narrative
rather than a stand-alone divertissement involving a corps de ballet. My point here, therefore, is
that the sequences in Death stand out from the general context of the opera as a sung narrative.
29. A number of scholars have explored the relevance of the gamelan to Britten, both personally and
in terms of the characterization of Tadzio. See Brett (2006, ch.7–8), Brett (2009), and Cooke
(1998, ch. 8).
R
Barthes, Roland. An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative. New Literary History 6, no.
2 (1975): 237–272.
Brett, Philip. Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, Edited by George E. Haggerty.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Brett, Philip. Queer Musical Orientalism. Echo 9, no. 1 (2009). www.echo.ucla.edu.
Carmen Jones. Directed by Otto Preminger, written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Harry Kleiner.
20th Century Fox, 1954.
Cooke, Mervyn. Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of Benjamin Britten.
Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1998.
Dalmaso, Renata Lucena. Queering the Performance: Mercutio as an Emblem of Non-Normativity in
Romeo and Juliet. Scripta Uniandrade 14, no. 2 (2016): 72–85.
Davies, Anne. Introduction. In Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV, Edited by Anne Davies and Chris
Perriam, 1–8. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Davies, Ann and Chris Perriam, eds. Carmen: From Silent Film to MTV. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York/London: Routledge, 2006.
Hutcheon, Linda and Bortolotti, Gary. On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse
and “Success”—Biologically. New Literary History 38, no. 3 (2007): 443–458.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996.
Jarman, Freya. Pitch Fever: The Castrato, the Tenor, and the Question of Masculinity in Nineteenth
Century Opera. In Masculinity in Opera: Gender, History, and New Musicology, Edited by Philip
Purvis, 51–66. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Jarman-Ivens, Freya. Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Larner, James. Benjamin Britten and Luchino Visconti: Iterations of Thomas Mann’s Death in
Venice. PhD Diss., Florida State University, 2006.
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991.
McClary, Susan. Carmen as Perennial Fusion: from Habanera to Hip-Hop. In Carmen: From Silent
Film to MTV, Edited by Anne Davies and Chris Perriam, 205–216. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Mérimée, Prosper. Carmen and Other Stories, Translated by Nicholas Jotcham. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989.
Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice]. Directed by Luchino Visconti, written by Thomas Mann, Luchino
Visconti and Nicola Badalucco. Warner Bros, 1971.
Powrie, Phil, Bruce Babington, and Ann Davies, eds. Carmen on Film: A Cultural History.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Robertson, Ritchie. Classicism and Its Pitfalls: Death in Venice. In The Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Mann, Edited by Ritchie Robertson, 95–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
 2002.
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York/London: Routledge, 2006.
Strode, Rosamund. A Death in Venice Chronicle. In Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, Edited by
Donald Mitchell, 26–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Wolf, Stacy. “We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies”: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway
Musical Theater. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 351–376.
 CHAPTER 10

QUEER AUDIOVISUAL
C R E AT I V I T Y
Fan-Created Music Videos from Star Trek to
Bad Girls
NI NA T RE ADWE L L
 I

D 2005, the year of YouTube’s founding, fans gathered at VividCon,

the annual US convention devoted to the practice of creating fan-made
music videos (vids) to celebrate the tradition’s 30-year history.1 By mid-
2006, YouTube had become one of the fastest growing sites on the internet,
and vids were one of many forms of subcultural creativity now beginning to
proliferate through YouTube and other online forums. Ironically, despite the
fact that music is integral to a vernacular practice that dates back to the
mid-1970s, academic writing on vids—both before and after the advent of
YouTube—lacks detailed attention to the music that is key to understanding
the meanings that vidders convey through their works.2
This chapter introduces and brings to the fore the importance of a
vernacular tradition that has been overlooked by music specialists,3 yet is
becoming increasingly visible to a wider audience due to the availability of
sophisticated digital production tools and ease of distribution by sites such
as YouTube. Theater and media scholar, Francesca Coppa, defines vidding
as “a form of grassroots filmmaking in which clips from television shows
and movies are set to music.” Unlike MTV music videos, she continues,
“vidders use music in order to comment on or analyze a set of preexisting
visuals, to stage a reading.”4 Yet how such readings are “staged” through
the complex relationship between visual and aural media has yet to be
demonstrated. As Coppa notes, to “trace the history of fannish vidding is to
trace the emergence of a distinctively female visual aesthetic and critical
approach;”5 at the same time, I will argue that at the center of vidding
activity is a queer aesthetic, one that can be understood through the very
practice of vid-making itself, and through queer-oriented subject matter that
has pervaded vid-making since its beginnings.
I will start by outlining the nature of vidding practice and its herstory
from the mid-1970s to the present, drawing on the relevant literature in the
field. I give particular attention to one of the earliest extant vids: a vid by
Kandy Fong based on Star Trek slides (stills). I briefly trace the transition to
vidding practices using VCRs before turning to digital vidding. Regarding
the latter, I provide close readings of two vids drawn from the community
of vidders dedicated to the British television drama series Bad Girls,
originally broadcast on ITV from 1999 to 2006. Through these case studies
I demonstrate how the relationship between visual and aural components is
key to the creation of queer meanings.
 P I: T H V

The earliest academic work on vidding practices is found in the chapters of

two 1992 monographs: Henry Jenkins’ now-classic Textual Poachers:
Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Camille Bacon-Smith’s
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular
Myth.6 Jenkins’ text was reissued in 2013 as an “updated twentieth
anniversary edition,” although for good reason the original text remains
largely unchanged.7 While both Jenkins and Bacon-Smith classify their
work as ethnographic, Jenkins rarely uses the traditional terminology of the
ethnographer, preferring to draw on theories from cultural studies. Most
notably, he productively uses Michel de Certeau’s conception of poaching8
to describe a range of media fan activities, including the creation of vids,
proposing “an alternative conception of fans as readers who appropriate
popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests,
[or] as spectators who transform the experience of watching television into
a rich and complex participatory culture.…Fans construct their cultural and
social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images,
articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant
media.”9 Jenkins mounts a fierce defense of fannish activities, in response
to both mass media representations of fans as fanatics of various
persuasions and earlier academic work that had pathologized fans; indeed,
he identifies himself as a fan from the outset of his monograph and defends
his position as both fan and academic by coining the term “aca-fan.” The
term has gained much traction over the years with scholars who work on
media fandom, suggesting a more embedded ethnographic practice,10 and
invoking fan studies’ debt to feminist and queer theory, in part through the
acknowledgement of personal investment in the work one undertakes.11
When Jenkins’s and Bacon-Smith’s monographs were published in
1992, fan-made cultural artifacts were not easily accessible, instead
circulating within close-knit communities of like-minded fans. Although the
practice of vidding appears to date from the mid-1970s, fans met at
conventions dating back to the 1930s; not surprisingly it was science fiction
(SF) enthusiasts who organized the first conventions. As Bacon-Smith
notes, participants in these international, multi-city SF conventions
maintained a variety of interests, with more “serious minded” participants
sometimes objecting to what may have been perceived as frivolous fannish
activity. For example, at the inaugural SF convention in 1936 “a fan wore
the first SF costume based on a visual media source—the [Orson] Welles
film Things to Come.”12 Both formal and informal media fan clubs have
also been important loci of fan activities.
The early- to mid-1970s witnessed the beginning of media fan
conventions, most notably those devoted to Star Trek. Francesca Coppa has
identified this period as formative in the early history of fannish vidding.
Coppa’s work is motivated, among other things, by a desire to document
and preserve media herstory—“invisible, underground, [and] female-
dominated”—that could be ignored or lost in the plethora of YouTube-era
remix vids easily accessed today.13 Indeed, she has taken pains to counter a
common misconception that the practice of vidding began with YouTube.
Although the distribution technologies have changed over time, Coppa
demonstrates that overarching continuities in vidding practices—grounded
in female fans’ creative responses to Star Trek—have not:
Star Trek fandom was the crucible within which vidding developed because Star Trek’s
narrative impelled female fans to take on two positions often framed as contradictory in
mainstream culture: the desiring body, and the controlling voice of technology.…[T]he
conflict between desire and control was particularly thematized in Star Trek, most famously
through the character of Spock.

Later she continues:

Although vidding has now moved beyond Star Trek, the representational tensions at the
show’s heart have not gone away. Consequently, many vids still make overt or subtextual
arguments about gender, and vids in a broad variety of fandoms engage with issues of
female representation, displacement, and marginalization in visual culture.14

I would add that Star Trek, as an ovular text for vidders, also embodied the
necessary relational tensions between characters that allowed vidders to
creatively explore relationships in their vids, most notably homoerotic
desire between Spock and Captain Kirk.15 While these queer expressions
were, more often than not, created by straight women in the early days of
vidding, the impetus for queer exploration also resonates with Star Trek’s
foundational mission for exploring alternative universes, and thus
alternative characters (Spock as half human, half Vulcan), alterative view
points, and alternative relationships.16 The term “slash” was coined in
response to the coupling of two male characters by juxtaposing their paired
initials; thus, in the case of Star Trek, the subtextual, homoerotic pairing of
Kirk and Spock was referred to as K/S. I will return to the topic of slash,
and more specifically femslash, later in this chapter.
While slash found expression in Star Trek fan fiction and fan art—
arguably easier mediums to negotiate than vidding from a technical
standpoint—it comes as no surprise that, likewise, the earliest work by
vidders contains elements of slash. Claiming precedence for any work of
art, be it subcultural or mainstream, is always a fraught endeavor, however,
Coppa has carefully contextualized her herstory of fannish vidding within
the VividCon community. According to Coppa, this community of vidders
traces its lineage back to Kandy Fong’s slide show, “What Do You Do with
a Drunken Vulcan?” (1975), first “performed” at The United Federation of
Phoenix, according to Fong herself “the longest running Star Trek fan club
in the world.”17 Using discarded Star Trek footage that Fong’s husband
acquired from Lincoln Enterprises, Fong was able to bring new visual
sources to an audience eager for new Star Trek material;18 film footage was
converted into carefully chosen stills (slides) that were set to the popular
filk (fan-created song) “What Do You Do with a Drunken Vulcan?”19
At that time, vidding involved carefully cueing slides to either filk—a
distinctive genre in its own right—or popular songs, with the latter
predominating. The vid was performed live, in the sense that Fong activated
the slides in situ at a club or conference (con) as the pre-recorded song was
played.20 While the results (and the available technology) might seem
rudimentary from an outsider’s perspective today, the way in which stills
were synced to songs and particularly to a song’s lyrics was highly
suggestive to those familiar with a given television series or movie. For
fans, particular stills generated a complex web of meanings that related to
the original dramatic context of a still, its repositioning within the vid itself,
and previous “citations” in other vids that circulated in the fan
community.21 The juxtaposition of music and lyrics further complicated
interpretive possibilities. The combination of visual and aural materials (at
any given moment) worked to produce a multiplicity of “readings” or, as
Jenkins describes it “a complex grid of associations;”22 the greater the
knowledge of the visual sources, the richer the meanings, which could also
work self-referentially as the vid proceeded through time. It is worth noting
that during this early period a song’s lyrics (rather than specific musical
elements) appear to have been given a privileged position in the
construction of vids in terms of the meaning-making process; from the most
obvious standpoint, selected slides were frequently synced with words that
had a specific visual correspondence, a trend that continues in digital
vidding practices today. That said, in 2008, long-time vidders (as well as
more recent exponents) identified song choice as the crucial component of a
video,23 which presumably referred to both the significance of a song’s
lyrics and the music’s general affect, at the very least. Discussion of the
relationship between visuality and musical details is all but non-existent in
the scholarship on vids, although this should not reflect the explicit (or
implicit) way in which vidders work with music, a topic which is explored
most fully in the second part of this chapter.
To return to Star Trek specifically: Kandy Fong’s vid to “Both Sides
Now” (c. 1980, videotaped 1986) is another early vid consisting of Star
Trek stills that holds special significance, not least because we have a record
of it, thanks to Fong who videoed her endeavors. The piece can now be
readily viewed via the Critical Commons website.24 It has already been
given quite extensive analysis by Coppa,25 so I will only discuss certain
aspects of the vid here. In so doing, I will concentrate my attention on
queerness and music, aspects that Coppa only touches upon. I say “music”
not song, because Coppa uses the song’s lyrics, in part, to structure her
analysis of the (visual) stills.
The vid might be loosely described as a thought-provoking meditation
on the dual nature or otherness of the character of Spock; the version of
“Both Sides Now” chosen by Fong for the vid is not sung by Joni Mitchell
who wrote the song, nor Judy Collins who first popularized it; rather, Fong
uses the 1968 cover by Leonard Nimoy (who plays the character of Spock)
from the actor’s third album The Way I Feel.26 In her commentary to the
vid, Coppa suggests the following:
By creating an intertext between Leonard Nimoy the actor and Leonard Nimoy the singer,
Fong gives the unemotional Mr. Spock an unexpected poignant inner voice that’s hard to
dismiss, since it’s Nimoy’s own.…By staging the contrast between Nimoy’s external
appearance and inner voice, Fong foregrounds various kinds of “bothness:” human and
alien, public and private, male and female, mainstream and resistant reader.27

A perceptive response to Coppa comes from an earlier post by Claudia Pine

who suggests adding visual and aural to the vid’s articulation of
“bothness.”28 Unlike Coppa, Pine interprets the song as “a sardonic
comment on…Spock’s unexpressed emotions.” Thus, while Coppa
understands Nimoy’s rendition of “Both Sides Now” as an expression of an
inner (emotional) voice, Pine seems to be suggesting that Nimoy’s
“sardonic” vocal expression serves to critique the visual presentation.
Although seemingly different in their perceptions, both Coppa’s and
Pine’s interpretations have some affinity if we consider the element of
bothness playing out through the contrast of Nimoy’s vocal rendition with
the orchestration that “supports” him. In other words, I am suggesting that
Spock’s dual nature is also dramatized in the distinction between the song’s
vocal line and its accompaniment, orchestrated by George Tipton, a
composer whose music and arrangements were well known for their
commercial appeal.29 In this respect, Judy Collins’s cover of the song—the
rendition that first made the song a hit and would have been in the cultural
and aural memory of those who experienced Fong’s vid—needs some
consideration, as it clearly influenced Tipton’s arrangement. A far cry from
what Lloyd Whitesell has described as Mitchell’s (purposefully) “dejected”
(yet brilliantly rendered) performance, Collins’s recording is characterized
by “a sugary barrage of primary colors.”30 The accompaniment to Collins’s
version begins with a basic four-note motive (E-flat D-flat C D-flat) with
each note of the motive fleshed out by a descending triad. A rather strident-
sounding harpsichord articulates this relentlessly “busy,” propulsive
accompaniment that underpins Collins’s entire rendition.31 Dominating the
song’s opening, the motive is also prominent during the singer’s held notes
at the end of choruses, between verses, and dominates the conclusion of the
song, which ends with a fade. At times, when the motive is almost masked
by the addition of strings to heighten the emotion, the drum kit takes over
the predictable, propulsive function of the harpsichord.32
There seems no question that what could be described as a heavy dose of
decorative tinsel became a central part of the song’s appeal, and is utilized
to invigorate the almost monotonal quality of Mitchell’s original harmonic
palette.33 The version that Tipton arranged for Nimoy is indebted to the
orchestration in Collins’s rendition; all the above-mentioned elements are
there in some form or another, but the orchestration overall is more muted,
perhaps not to overpower Nimoy’s more limited vocal abilities. The
introduction to Nimoy’s version begins with the upper strings articulating
an oscillating semitonal shift.34 The strings continue this idea through a
second iteration with the addition of what will become a ubiquitous
keyboard arpeggio figure supported by the drum kit. The arpeggio
figuration serves a similar function to that in Collins’s cover. What
distinguishes Nimoy’s rendition is the initial use of the strings, and their
reintroduction just prior to the second verse where the focus of the lyrics
departs from clouds that “block the sun” and “rain and snow on everyone”
to an alternative, more positive view that begins: “Moons and Junes and
Ferris wheels/The dizzy dancing way you feel.” As the strings surge to the
fore to set up these lyrics, they also raise the tonality by a half-step
(beginning at 0:58).35 A modulation of this type, so early in the song, is
unusual; while it clearly indexes the emotional tone that Tipton wished to
convey at this moment, the arranger may also have employed the gesture to
compensate for Nimoy’s limited expressive arsenal. The swirling string
parts that accompany the second verse, “jacked up” by the surprising
modulation are clearly intended to create a tone of “dancing” elation, but it
is a tone that Nimoy’s declamatory style cannot match.36 Collins, on the
other hand, effortlessly renders the song’s undulating lyrical possibilities
with full-bodied mezzo soprano voice, and frequent use of vibrato. In other
words, Collins’s vocality brings an emotional intensity to “Both Sides
Now” that is absent from Nimoy’s more speech-like rendition, a style that
he adopts, no doubt, because it is what he does best.37 In the chorus
(beginning at 0:39) the “up and down” leaps in the vocal line required for
the first emotional high point inspired by the lyrics—beginning “I’ve
looked clouds from both sides now”/From up and down”—are beyond the
Nimoy’s grasp. Weak tone and intonation—the inability to hit the note “spot
on”—and basic lack of vocal dexterity and conviction fail Nimoy, although
ironically this failure corresponds with Spock’s inability to “really…know
clouds [love or life] at all.” Thus, the duality between Nimoy’s wry delivery
of the lyrics and the upbeat tone of Tipton’s accompaniment provide yet
another index of Spock’s bothness or otherness. The basic tools required for
efficacious lyrical song elude the singer, and thus in the context of Fong’s
vid, elude Spock himself. The lyrical prowess that is lacking contrasts with
Spock’s “spot on” (verbal) analytical skills—the speech that exemplifies his
rational thought. This character trait is brought to mind by his physical
(visual) appearance in the vid from the outset: at the end of verse one, Fong
cuts to the first recognizably solo shot of Spock, holding his viewfinder
while looking askance—to explain his observations—as we hear the verse’s
concluding lyrics: “I’ve looked at clouds that way” (0:20–0:23).
I have spent considerable time discussing the tension between the vocal
delivery of the lyrics and the accompaniment in Fong’s vid, with little
reference to the visuals she chose. It seemed important to show how music,
in this groundbreaking vid, worked, in this case, in tandem with other
dualities present or implied by the vid.38 For the purpose of this chapter, I
will restrict myself to commenting on elements of slash within the context
of the vid as a whole. Elements of slash (K/S) are present in the vid, as are
possible heterosexual pairings. Coppa has spoken to an example where
Spock is repositioned by Fong as a desiring subject, in a shot where he
contemplates Kirk and Christine Chapel who both return his gaze (1:32–
1:34).39 Fong sets this still to the second chorus, where the emotional stakes
have already been raised (at least by the orchestra) and Mitchell has
substituted the word “love” for “clouds:” “I’ve looked at love from both
sides now.” Coppa suggests that Fong’s edit here might challenge us to
consider Spock’s possible bisexuality. I would suggest that the term
bisexual suggests too definitive a reading; it is exactly in the choruses that
Spock betrays his lack of emotional lyricism, his failure to “really know
love at all.” While the possibility of dual or either/or attraction might be
proposed at this moment in the vid, I suggest that the still with its attendant
music and lyrics marks Spock’s queerness, and in this respect his ambiguity,
his inability to “fit” into any clearly defined category. Other slides chosen
by Fong draw attention to K/S; yet at the same time the possibility seems to
be disavowed. In the third (seemingly more hopeful) verse with the words
“I’ve looked at love that way,” Fong selects a K/S still in which both
characters are seen in profile with their backs up against the wall, both
weary in posture, with Spock directing a sidelong glance towards Kirk
(1:13–1:15). Just as quickly, the “fairy tale” fades with a cynical follow-up
declaration suggesting that love is superficial: “it’s just another show.”
Whether we understand Spock’s difference in terms of bothness or
otherness, a lack of resolution pervades Fong’s vid on numerous levels,
including the audio realm. The vid’s slashiness is evident, but like the
affective incongruence in the Nimoy/Tipton version of “Both Sides Now,”
there is no simple resolution. What is most important in the context of this
chapter, however, is to observe that slash is present at one of the formative
moments of this budding genre, and continues to dominate Star Trek and
other vids to the present, most notably with the hotly debated K/S vid by T.
Jonesy and Killa to Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer.”40
 I I: V Q

If the term “queer” is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a
set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is,
in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered
from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political
purposes….41

I have chosen to use the word “queer” quite casually throughout the course
of this chapter often with little explanation, notably by eliding the notion of
slash with queerness. What I want to do now is demonstrate how the
activity of vidding itself—the act of appropriating and repurposing elements
of mainstream material culture—can itself be understood as decidedly
queer. If one reconceives the above citation and imagines vidding as “a site
of collective contestation” [italics mine] in which vids are “never fully
owned,” “but always and only redeployed [and] twisted…from a prior
usage”42 one comes fairly close to describing what it is, using the infinitive
of the verb, “to vid.” In essence, vidders use repurposed footage and
repurposed music to create a myriad of musico-kaleidoscopic
recombinations that yield results as yet not seen or heard, “futural
imaginings” that, as we have seen, also have a herstory. Most productively,
one can refuse to understand queer as oppositional to seemingly stable
identities—gay, lesbian, straight, bi—and use it instead to continually
critique preconceived notions of identity that depend, for their efficacy, on
the stakes of inclusion and exclusion, including the seemingly more
inclusive term queer. In sum, central to both queering and vidding is the art
of critique.
I opened this section with a citation drawn from Judith Butler’s article
“Critically Queer,” written some 25 years ago now. While the selected
citation articulates, in part, a Butlerian notion of queer, it is also radically
decontextualized for the purpose of recontextualization in the present
chapter. I omitted the broader context of Butler’s argument even within this
small section of her essay; in other words, I chose to use the parts of her
text that best served the interests of my own argument—as a vidder would
do—at the same time as excluding other parts of the source material. As a
productive intervention, Butler would no doubt approve of this
(mis)appropriation of her work; in essence what I chose to exclude was her
broader discussion of identity politics, which I now cite:
As much as it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity
categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the conditions
under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that kind of mastery over the
trajectory of those categories within discourse. This is not an argument against using
identity categories, but it is a reminder of the risk that attends every such use.43

Butler wishes to keep two concerns in play in her discussion of identity:

while she recognizes the necessity of identity categories, she also warns of
the possible risks—intentional or not—of creating exclusive domains. As
such she states that the term queer itself may need to yield “in favor of
terms that do…political work more effectively.” Some 25 years later, the
term queer—which is yoked to an implicit assumption of critique—is still
up to the task, I believe. It does not deny the importance of community and
identity, both of which are central concerns within vid cultures. Vidding
communities coalesce around shared “objects” of interest, but the meanings
of canon (original source material) and fanon (fan-created works) are more
labile, as they are constantly being negotiated. I will reengage with a
number of these issues in Part II of this chapter.
 I II: F F : VCR ,
D V , F

During the 1980s and 1990s, women began making vids by using patch
cords and two VCRs. Chosen clips were edited by transferring material
from one VCR to another. As Jenkins notes: “The biggest [technical]
challenges artists faced were rollback and rainbow lines.”44 Rollback
occurred because pushing the pause button to make an exact cut resulted in
the tape rolling back by a few seconds, or a delay in starting the next
recording point. In addition, as Coppa notes, rollback had a crucial impact
on the relationship between the audio and visual components:
[R]ollback wasn’t standard from machine to machine, so vidders had to learn the
idiosyncrasies of their particular equipment. Worst of all, in the early days of vidding, the
audio track [which required the use of a stopwatch for accuracy] could only be imported
once all the clips had been laid down on tape, so a vidder who wanted to edit to the beat or
who wanted internal motion synchronized with the music had to be extremely meticulous.45

Nevertheless, thousands of vids were made using this technology, and

women often worked in collectives, in part, due to the time consuming
nature of the activity. Coppa also cites technical challenges and the expense
of equipment as reasons for the collaborative nature of vidding in the 1980s.
In terms of continuity in women’s vidding practices, these collectives
“served as sites of technical and aesthetic mentoring.”
Further: “The VCR vids made in the 1980s and 1990s…[are] important
artifacts of female community: technologically minded and media-savvy
women coming together to make themselves, and their perspectives, visible
on screen.”46 Coppa has parsed out distinctive aesthetic trends that have
distinguished different groups of VCR-era vidders. For example, vids
created by the collective California Crew are considered to be “accessible,”
insofar as they were geared toward convention showings, which assumed
one-time viewing “legibility” and no need for extensive insider knowledge
of the source material.47
 VCR-vidding continued into the early 2000s, and many examples can
now be found on the internet mixed amongst digitally-created vids. Some of
the first examples of female slash or femslash were prompted by the
television series Cagney and Lacey (1982–1988),48 a show that revolved
around the work of two New York City police detectives with complex, yet
differing, personal situations.49 The focus on two female leads and their
complex characterizations was unprecedented in American television at that
time. In the mid-1990s, a series of a completely different ilk—Xena:
Warrior Princess, a supernatural fantasy featuring Xena and Gabrielle as
lead characters—become fodder for femslash, both fan fiction and vids.
Julie Levin Russo has demonstrated Xena’s relevance as crucial for
understanding media convergence—“where old and new media collide”50—
by documenting an exchange between Xena’s producers and the show’s
fandom, an exchange that could only have taken place when media fandoms
migrated to web-based platforms. As Russo stresses: “Xena was the first
large fandom to emerge with a lesbian relationship as its principal focus,
and this happened in the 1990s—after the advent of the web.”51 With regard
to vidding, specifically, artists posted their work on websites and some
vidders today continue to maintain their own sites. However, the advent of
YouTube eliminated or reduced the cost of maintaining a personal site,
which was appealing to some vidders, as was the prospect of reaching a
wider audience; by the same token, the latter was not appealing to many
long-time vidders whose work could be appropriated or misunderstood by
the casual YouTube surfer.52 While personal sites are less likely to be
“stumbled upon” and can be password protected, anything on YouTube is
fair game.
Nevertheless, gone was the challenging and time-consuming era of VCR
vidding; digital production tools offered vidders a plethora of sophisticated
effects—shorter clips, speed adjustment, fade-ins, use of multiple “screens,”
layering of images, color adjustments, and so on—that were relatively easy
to execute with Web 2.0 technologies. The ability to sync visual and aural
components has advanced to the point where infinitesimal nuances of
meaning—that are reliant on the confluence of image, music, and
sometimes speech (drawn at will from source material)—can be readily
articulated through precise cuts. The precision with which particular
musical elements can be synced with visuals encourages a greater attention
to musical details and the meanings thereof, a tendency that is consistent
with vidders’ and fans’ micro-level knowledge of visual sources.
Interestingly, digital media has made the actual practice of vidding less
dependent on collectives, and many vidders who are new to vidding remain
unaware of the herstory of the genre. Yet support and encouragement by
other vidders—from sharing technical expertise to posting comments to a
vidder’s YouTube “channel”—is a mainstay of the genre. A community
emphasis is still central, including by those whose fannish activities are
exclusively confined to the internet, as fans and vidders negotiate the
possible meanings of both canon and fanon through blogs, websites, and
other forums devoted to particular shows.
 P II: F M D
V : “W N
H ?”

“I feel cheated! What is Bad Girls? And where can I find it?”

“Have you found it out yet, Will? Bad Girls was a British TV show begun in the late 1990’s.
It ran 8 seasons/series. The show is about a womens prison in South London. When the
show started, Helen was a Wing Governor (Warden) and Nikki was a prisoner. Helen’s job
changed during the three years she worked there. Helen and Nikki’s relationship during
those three years is the focus of hundreds of videos and fan fiction.”
Responses by willtynellyworth and blazerliz, respectively, to Bad Girls vid by nikkhele set
to Melissa Etheridge’s “I Take You with Me” posted on YouTube on September 10, 2006.53
“jesus sweet christ where the hell have i been? who th ehell are nicki and helen ?”54
Response by torndenim1 to fanvid by Masque101 set to LeAnn Rimes’s “The Right Kind Of
Wrong,” posted on YouTube on July 16, 2006.55

The visceral urgency of torndenim1’s questions leap off the computer

screen, shouting: “WHO THE HELL ARE NIKKI AND HELEN?” with the
implicit corollary “AND WHERE CAN I FIND THEM?” Fingers grasp for
computer keys, fast, blurting outrage on to the screen.
Suzanne Scott states: “Most fans can recount with perfect clarity the first
time they watched Star Wars, or picked up their first comic book, or wrote
their first piece of fan fiction.”56 I can remember with a kind of exacting
visual memory the moment I first saw clips of Nikki and Helen from Bad
Girls in 2007, craning over a friend’s computer (reimagined now in my
mind’s eye from an aerial perspective) and the specific footage I was
shown. It happened, of all places, at one of the annual conferences of the
American Musicological Society (AMS). I couldn’t tell you in which city
we gathered that year, because it occurred in one of those non-descript
conference hotel rooms with their predictable room layouts. My long time
“roomie,” Kelley Harness, casually mentioned a TV series I might be
interested in. Far more internet-savvy than I, Kelley whipped out her laptop,
laid it out on the countertop, and swiftly logged on to a site, showing me
two excerpts from BG featuring the central protagonists. In retrospect, what
I experienced—not unlike the experience of fans cited above, unexpectedly
stumbling upon a BG vid for the first time—was a typical example of
convergence culture. In fact, many American fans of BG—which began
airing on British television in 1999—did not discover the show for another
8 or 9 years, and their discovery was largely due to the prevalence of clips
floating around the internet after YouTube hit its stride in 2006.57 At that
time, I had never seen a fan vid, or if I had I wouldn’t have known what it
was.
By 2008, I was an avid BG fan, having purchased a multi-regional DVD
player and the first of several region 2 box sets of the series. It wasn’t easy
to become a BG fan, which is why the series was and is so little known in
North America compared, for example, to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire
Slayer or Ilene Chaiken’s The L Word. I also began to fumble around on the
internet to see what I could find out about the show. If I was lucky, I
thought, perhaps there was even some academic discourse on the series
(indeed, there was, although, comparatively speaking, very little). In the
midst of my fumbling I stumbled on what I now know was a Bad Girls
fanvid. I won’t give a full description of my reaction at that time but it was
something along the lines of vid watcher torndenim1’s response: “Where
the hell have I been?”
Expressing similar sentiments in a 2007 article in Curve magazine,
LeeAnn Kreigh posed the question in more general terms:
British actor Mandana Jones is an international lesbian icon who portrayed one of the most
beloved lesbian characters in television history. So why is it so few people in America—gay
or straight—know about her, the character she played [Nikki Wade], or Britain’s hit show
Bad Girls, which lasted eight seasons and featured one of television’s most captivating
lesbian storylines for three of those [years]?…The network television portrayal of two
women falling slowly and madly in love over three seasons was indeed groundbreaking in
Britain in 1999—and, sadly, it remains almost unfathomable for network television stations
in the US almost a decade later [italics mine].58

Unlike its airing in the US on LOGO (the “gay” cable channel) 8 years
later, Bad Girls originally aired on Britain’s main commercial network, ITV,
on primetime television. To quote Mandana Jones: “We broke down
barriers, portraying things the public didn’t normally have in their front
room at 9 o’clock on a Tuesday evening.”59 A women’s prison drama,
though hardly stereotypical, the relationship of inmate Nikki Wade and
prison worker Helen Stewart (N/H) was fleshed out over the course of 3
years.60 Thus, British viewers witnessed a long and subtly-evolving
relationship with the typical vicissitudes that such long-term relationships
entail, and by necessity waited each week for the next installment. And
although it is probably true to say that the N/H relationship constituted the
central dramatic thread during series one to three (although the couple’s
airtime was comparatively minimal), BG was a commercial hit for
numerous reasons, and the viewership was by no means limited to a lesbian
one.61 It was the lesbian fan community, however, that picked up on the
N/H relationship in particular, spawning discussion lists, websites, fan
fiction, vids, and so on.
 H L F

I participated in the BG fandom between 2007 and 2011, at a time when

YouTube was well established, and many fandoms were using the site to
disseminate vids.62 (At the same time, YouTube was being used as a forum
to disseminate scenes from BG, especially to audiences in the United States
who were unaware of the series’ existence.) While digital media allowed
vidders to transform clips in a variety of ways, the basic concept of a vid
remained true to the origins of the genre: the vidder chooses a song that is
coupled with a series of clips (more frequently than stills) that function
together as a reading or form of criticism of the source material.
I have chosen two vids from the BG oeuvre that exemplify this general
practice.63 My first example relies on a single, short scene rather than a
series of juxtaposed clips, in order to demonstrate how a vid functions as a
reading, a useful starting point for those unfamiliar with the BG series. As
such, the original scene and the vid can be productively compared to
demonstrate how the vid’s music is used to accentuate, or make explicit, the
sexual tension that is only implicit in the original scene.64 I will first
describe the context of this 45-second scene drawn from series one, episode
six.
Inmate Nikki Wade is stretched out on the lawn of the prison garden;
one assumes she is taking a break from her gardening duties (only later in
the scene do we become aware that she is also smoking a cigarette). An
aerial view emphasizes her strikingly long legs as she suns herself. Wing
Governor Helen Stewart has just returned from a 3-week vacation, and
walks toward Nikki to greet her. Helen gets Nikki’s full attention.65
helen: Hiya, Nikki.
Nikki: Miss Stewart.

A power differential is in place (as anyone familiar with BG already

knows): the casual versus formal address; Helen in her business suit (her
name tag bearing her official status) while Nikki sports her gardening
clothes (her form fitting white tank top emphasizing her shapely breasts).
Words are exchanged…some inane, some with certain innuendo. While I
can not deconstruct the scene in full here, for the purposes of this chapter I
will focus almost exclusively on aspects of the scene that play into the
meanings generated by the vid.66
First, it is significant that the scene is set in the prison grounds outside
the dank, dark prison building. Although the prison walls are still present in
the background (a reminder of the literal and figurative barriers that
separate N/H) they gain little of the viewer’s attention. At the opening of
the scene, Helen walks away from the prison building toward the glaring
sunlight, toward Nikki. It is hot enough that Nikki’s arms are bare, all of
which contribute to the scene’s unusual sultry appeal. As is typical of vids
in general, the characters’ words in the scene are generally replaced with
music,67 so in a sense the characters become mute, although the original
scene (and the words associated with it) are well known to the fan
community, thereby creating an intertextual “dialogue” between canon and
fanon. In the case of BG, I suggest that the extraordinary strength of the
non-verbal dimension of the N/H relationship—eye contact, facial
expressions, body language, etc.—accounts for the nuanced ways in which
the N/H relationship has been explored and reconfigured in vids. In the case
of the vid in question, the extinguished voices (particularly Helen’s) holds
special significance: much (though not all) of what Helen talks about has
been aptly described by vidder Jeansneakers as “Helen ‘yakkityyak[ing]’
away”68 which allows Nikki the opportunity to contemplate Helen at her
leisure, queering her with her mind’s eye.
As such, the original scene relies heavily on non-verbal communication
for its efficacy; in other words, it relies on forms of communication that at
once acknowledge yet mask desire, in part because of Helen’s inability to
acknowledge her growing attraction for Nikki. (While Nikki is an out
lesbian, Helen’s sexuality is less certain.) Part of the enjoyment of viewing
the vid, then, comes from the revelation of subtext—a key element of
femslash—that is articulated through the confluence of music and visual
imagery. The original scene itself ends with a symbolic offering that is the
most overt verbal indication of Helen’s attraction to Nikki. She offers to
bring in a book from home for Nikki to read: “Isn’t that against
regulations?” (Nikki queries) and, leaning in toward Nikki with a slight tilt
of the head and a meaningful glance, Helen responds: “I won’t tell if you
won’t.” Helen mimics the kind of words one would hear from a naughty
child, who implicates herself by keeping a secret, thus referencing her own
evolving desire.
Jeansneakers (JS) sets the scene in question to a portion of the American
girl group The Pussycat Dolls’s song “Buttons.”69 Her musical choice and
reworking of visual components push the N/H relationship into the realm of
the flesh. JS retains the opening elements of this scene as they appear in BG
—the verbal greeting between the two (perhaps to reference the vid’s
original context) but recaps and reconstitutes Helen’s approach toward
Nikki in undulating, pulsating slow motion.70 Never mind that Helen is
wearing her business suit: the musical choice undercuts her demeanor as
Wing Governor, essentially undressing her through the music’s connection
to belly dance, the burlesque, and the admittedly problematic connotations
of the exotic and erotic evinced by the clichéd musical tropes associated
with “Orientalism.”71 The song’s lyrics (which I will only discuss
selectively, for sake of brevity) support this reading, expressing a woman’s
desire to be undressed. The vid is clearly from Nikki’s point of view, in the
sense that it articulates her overt desire, with the visual focus on Helen
filtered through Nikki’s imagination. In the song, the Pussycat Dolls (as a
unified group) are the desiring subjects who wish to be undressed, yet in the
vid, JS “mixes up” the desiring subjects through strategic visual cuts
juxtaposed with selected lyrics, suggesting that Helen is not only being
metaphorically undressed by Nikki, but that she, too, is a desiring subject.
A reverberating gong announces Helen’s entry into a newly constituted
exoticized world (0:08), by way of contrast to the constrained prison
environment (and her own personal sense of imprisonment).72 A slow
closing of the eyes corresponds with both the gong’s resonance and the
glaring sun she encounters as she sensuously moves forward.73 At 0:09 the
song starts in earnest with a syncopated low-pitched frame drum and finger
cymbals supporting the vocalized (female-voiced) melody that mimics a
quintessential orientalist musical gesture: the Arabic Hijaz tetrachord, with
its characteristic augmented second.74 The conclusion of the first vocal
phrase, which resolves the augmented second, coincides with Helen’s
arrival in front of Nikki. JS then cuts to a shot of a smiling Nikki coinciding
with an “Egyptian” string tremolo (0:18); thus, both Nikki and Helen are
musically projected into the realm of the exotic.75 With the return of the
opening theme, the vid cuts back to Helen, but this time Nikki is included in
the frame, shot from a side angle that emphasizes her bare neck and
shoulders. With the entrance of the Pussycat Dolls’s speech-like singing
—“I’m tellin’ you to loosen up my buttons babe”—JS suddenly
reconstitutes the camera lens by moving in to give a close-up of Helen, a
gesture that invokes a sense of intimacy, and intensifies the viewer’s
subjective identification. In so doing, she cuts to the beat so that the close-
up occurs on the stress of the word “loosen” (0:28). Here JS divides up the
remainder of the musical phrase and repositions the camera’s lens,
privileging Nikki: the lyrics express Nikki’s willingness to unbutton Helen
(“uh, huh”), followed by her frustration (“but you keep front-in’, uh”).
Accompanying the lyrics are the curvaceous flourishes of an “Egyptian
string orchestra.” The orchestra begins in the lower ranges but gradually
rises to prominence as the upper range is reached, thereby increasing the
tension that comes with the insistent repetition of the lyrics (0:28–0:45).
While it would be instructive to continue this analysis at the micro-level,
I will restrict my remaining observations to several points of interest
regarding the music’s function and the vidder’s craft. A moment of irony
occurs with a close-up of Helen (0:32) with the lyrics “Sayin’ what you
gon’ do to me” which correspond, in the original scene, with the line “Call
yourself a feminist?” Helen queries Nikki here (following her remark “No
man around to help you?”) while simultaneously looking down toward
Nikki’s breasts. The latter is made explicit in the vid. JS’s slow motion pan
reveals Helen’s queer secret. This is also a moment in the vid where Helen’s
gesture is distinctive enough that an informed viewer will recall Helen’s
original phrase (and the comments that prompt it). I mention them here
because most vids, which draw on a range of original footage, are rife with
this kind of intertextual play.
JS pairs one more “orientalist” musical gesture with the most overtly
flirtatious moment in the original, when Helen leans in toward Nikki at the
end of the scene (“I won’t tell if you won’t”). In the vid, with the camera
(and by extension, Nikki’s eyes) firmly glued to Helen the lyrics declaim:
“Baby can’t you see, see, these clothes are fittin’ on me, me, the heat
comin’ on from this beat, beat? [italics mine].” On each of the word
repetitions the singer articulates pronounced, provocative, glissandi that in
the context of the vid, position Helen as the desiring subject who is calling
upon Nikki to undress her. Both the original scene and vid conclude with
Nikki watching Helen disappear into the distance, but JS follows Helen’s
disappearance with a shot of Nikki taking a final (post-sex?) drag of her
cigarette. Overall, the vid may appear strikingly simple in execution, but
that is what makes it so efficacious—it seems exactly “right.” The few
moments I have highlighted are demonstrative of a multitude of choices that
the vidder must make, from song choice to the most nuanced of details.76
I turn now to my second example, which is entirely different in
conception. “Bossy” is a long and complex vid that requires extensive
knowledge of BG in order to make its point; my analysis here will be
limited to a few aspects of the audio material that contribute to the vid’s
queer meanings.77 The vidder Tres Chaud (TC) chose a club remix of
Bjork’s song “Army of Me” as the basis for the vid,78 but elements of the
remix are radically manipulated by TC (compared to most digital vids) for
dramatic purposes. Another unusual feature of the vid is the ubiquitous use
of dialogue from BG that is woven across Bjork’s audio and intersects with
it in provocative ways.79 (Most vids eliminate the verbal content of the
source material, or at least do not incorporate characters’ words with such
consistency.) In this vid, TC incorporates several textual/visual motives that
interject during the course of the vid at strategic moments. In my analysis, I
will first attend to the motivic material and then discuss how the use of the
bass drum as well as the song’s bass line are strategically used by TC to
articulate the vid’s queer drama.
The first textual/visual motive initially occurs near the vid’s opening:
Bjork’s audio is momentarily halted and we see Nikki sit on the couch, after
a tense exchange with Helen. She turns her head toward Helen who has
disappeared into another room, and calls after her “Love it when you’re
bossy!” (0:14–0:16). The function of the “Bossy” and other motives is to
build tension throughout the vid through their increasing frequency leading
up to the climax. (Two other significant textual motives are: Nikki to Helen:
“So what do you want?” and Helen to Nikki: “This is difficult for me, as I
think you know”). From 3:57–4:12 these three motives are compressed and
recycled within a 14-second time span (with some additional short
exchanges interjected). For the final 4 or 5 seconds of the build, TC
reintroduces the “whooshing” crescendo effect used at the beginning of the
vid but excludes the “crash” (the sound effect is found at the beginning and
end of Bjork’s track). At the anticipated climax, however, TC unexpectedly
drops Bjork’s audio entirely. Nikki’s final question prior to this moment
—“What do you want?”—is answered by a short segment of BG footage:
Helen utters “I want you” while taking the initiative with Nikki who is lying
beneath her on the couch.80 Helen has finally given in (in the context of the
vid), acknowledging her feelings for Nikki after nearly 4 minutes of
fraught, and at times, ironic exchanges between the two.81 After a final nod
to the “Bossy” motive (4:15–4:17), TC introduces the “crash” that was
purposefully delayed at the end of the “whooshing” crescendo, as Helen
and Nikki finally lock lips, with Helen taking the lead. (In other words, any
hesitancy on Helen’s part has now dissolved.) From this moment on, the
visual/textual motives that dominated the first two-thirds of the vid are
abandoned, having served their tension-building function.
During the opening of the kissing scene, the drumbeat—which
dominates a good portion of the vid—is strategically absent (4:18–4:26).
This is an ideal moment to discuss the function of the drumbeat in general
and how its removal and reintroduction at various points is crucial to the
vid’s queer efficacy. The drumbeat is felt in 2/4, with an eighth-note shuffle
(swing) pattern. The kick (bass) drum on every beat gives the track its
distinctively “club” or “dance” feel.82 The snare drum falls solidly on the
second beat, but the hi-hat cymbal swings, giving the beat a loping,
expansive quality that simultaneously propels the rhythm towards the beat
(there is a 6/8 over 2/4 feel). The tempo of the remix is a little slower than a
standard club track, which is usually 120–135 beats per minute (bpm); the
“Army of Me” mix is about 115 bpm. The more relaxed tempo gives the
beat a darker, less frenetic effect than a typical club mix, and this “darker”
element is perfectly matched with the conflicted, angst-ridden quality of
TC’s vid (I will return to this point momentarily).
The driving quality of the beat, dominated by the bass drum, is such a
crucial element of electronic dance music, that its removal or “breakdown”
can be one of the most ear-attention focusing moments of a dance track.83
Cutting the bass drum builds anticipation, especially in live performance
where it can lead to a sense of both physical stasis (the crowd’s dancing
shifts dramatically, with some ceasing to dance altogether) and expectation:
when will the DJ’s next “drop” occur? In TC’s vid, the strategic positioning
of the beat’s absence, at the exact moment when N/H finally enact their
physical attraction for one another makes the listener wonder: “When, and
what will happen next?”84 As one might suspect, the reintroduction of the
beat at 4:27 only heightens the sense of N/H’s driving physical passion; this
time TC “backs up” from the short portion of footage where Helen says “I
want you” (where the musical audio had been previously silenced) to
include the entire scene from BG—prolonging the scene through slow
motion, repetition, and other devices—and now incorporating Bjork’s
remix, with its forceful and insistent bass drum.
TC uses only a small portion of Bjork’s original lyrics, and they occur in
their entirety during this “scene” in the vid. In this context, they reference
the sense of individual risk that both Nikki and Helen are taking through
their actions: “You’re on your own now, we won’t save you, your rescue-
squad is too exhausted.”85 The sense of risk-taking and danger is also
articulated through the quality of the electronic bass line that articulates
triplets over a three-octave span on the same note. There is a destabilizing
quality to the bass line that can be partly attributed to the generous onset
time allowed for the sound’s attack: the bass line is slightly behind the beat.
Further, and more importantly, the cutoff frequency of the synthesizer is
constantly and seemingly unpredictably manipulated. This technical feature
creates a wide variety of timbral qualities in the bass line ranging from
muted to noisy. The apparently random manipulation of the cutoff, which
accounts for the unpredictable timbral effects, gives the impression that the
bass line is on the verge of unhinging at any moment.
Indeed, the N/H relationship in BG itself is fraught with conflict and
danger, an aspect that TC brings to the fore. While dissension dominates the
first two-thirds of the vid—with Helen battling conflicting emotions while
Nikki remains stubborn and plagued by jealousy—the final section of the
vid creates its own sense of drama and risk. As any BG fan knows, the
footage that dominates the final third of TC’s vid, is preceded by Nikki’s
risky escape from Larkhall prison, an act of desperation through which she
hopes to convince Helen of the worthiness of their relationship. We are
uncertain how Helen will respond to Nikki, as she is again placed in a
position of conflict, this time between her (acknowledged) desire and
professional duty: “I am an employee of the Home Office. Do you have any
idea?” (3:45–3:47). Not only has Nikki just executed a dangerous escape
from prison, she is now, for the first time, in Helen’s (private) home. Thus,
the stakes are high as Nikki, as escaped inmate, tries to reconnect with
Helen. While Helen finally “gives in,” the act of making love is itself an
enormous risk, given the unusual circumstances and the uncertainty of what
will follow. Thus, the element of danger implicit in the bass line, as well as
the darker quality inherent in the beat during this “scene” serves TC’s
dramatic purpose, at the same time that the beat’s propulsive, driving
quality embodies the protagonists’ desires.
I chose these two vids as exemplars because they efficiently illustrate the
way music’s meanings are so central to queer audio-visual experience. They
also embody the values of fanvids in general by deploying original source
material and pairing it with specific musical components to make new and
critical observations regarding BG. By critical, I refer to the art of queer
critical engagement: in “Buttons” the unspeakable is fully explored
especially through the choice of music, and in “Bossy” the element of
conflict and danger in the N/H relationship is compressed, and reworked
into a narrative with its own dramatic arc.
A vid, as Francesca Coppa has defined it, is “a visual essay that stages
an argument.”86 Tisha Turk has rightly called attention to the fact that
“unlike academic essays or written reviews, vids allow their creators…to
present arguments in the same medium as the original.”87 However, the
medium, to date, has been almost exclusively understood as a visual one.
Once music is fully integrated into the meaning-making process, ways of
knowing and understanding vids will surely be greatly enriched.88 The way
forward, it would seem, points not only to cognitive, text-based
understandings of vids (that have thus far dominated the field) but also to
serious consideration of music’s place in vidding activity, and thus the
embodied knowledges that such a consideration will bring to light.
A
This chapter could not have been completed without the participation of the numerous Bad Girls fans
with whom I communicated online and, in some cases, in person. My research assistant Tyler
Burton’s knowledge of popular music was an invaluable asset for the project. Parts of this chapter—
particularly the material related to the early history of fan-created music videos—are indebted to the
relatively recent, groundbreaking work of Francesca Coppa. The project was supported in part by
faculty research funds and grants from the Arts Research Institute at the University of California,
Santa Cruz.
N
1. Francesca Coppa, “Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding,”
Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008): 1.4. Fan-created music videos are also sometimes
referred to as fanvids or songvids. VividCon, a fan-organized conference, began in 2002.
2. The situation is a common one, and previously characterized work in the area of film studies
and popular music, for example, when non-music specialists were taking the lead in these
research areas.
3. At the same time, this chapter should be accessible to non-music specialists. In this regard, I
have avoided extensive use of technical terminology or, when incorporated, attempted to make
my observations as self-evident as possible.
4. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 1.1.
5. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 2.1.
6. See Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, rev. ed. (New
York and London: Routledge, 2013), Chapter 7, “‘Layers of Meaning’: Fan Music Video and the
Poetics of Poaching” and Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and
the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), Chapter 7,
“Visual Meaning.”
7. The anniversary edition includes a conversation between Jenkins and Suzanne Scott and a
teaching guide and discussion questions by Louisa Stein.
8. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
9. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 23.
10. Henry Jenkins and others have criticized what they perceive as the more distanced approach of
Camille Bacon-Smith in Enterprising Women; for example, in the opening interview section of
the 2013 edition of Textual Poachers Jenkins states that Bacon-Smith “presented herself as ‘The
Ethnographer’ who observes but participates only through formal experiments to see how the
community practices work” (viii–ix). Jenkins’s criticism seems harsh, given the many insights
she brought to the field. Jenkins himself has come under criticism from various scholars for both
the limited pool of vidders (from which he extrapolated to vidders in general), and his
conception of poaching that implies a unidirectional relationship that disempowers fans. On the
latter see Christy Carlson, “Is This because I’m Intertextual?” Law and Order, Special Victims
Unit, and “Queer Internet Fan Production,” in Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality,
ed. Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 177–178 and Julie
Levin Russo, “Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Lesbian
Online Fan Communities,” PhD diss., Brown University, 2010, 4–5; on the former, see Angelina
I. Karpovich, “Reframing Fan Videos,” in Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the
Virtual, ed. Jamie Sexton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 25.
11. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, viii–x.
12. Bacon-Smith in Enterprising Women, 9.
13. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 1.5.
14. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 0.1 and 2.20.
15. In his September 18, 2006 blog entry “How to Watch a Fan-Vid,” Henry Jenkins deconstructs
the nature of the friendship between Spock and Kirk in Star Trek, pointing to why these two
characters are ripe for exploration through slash. See
http://henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html.
16. Straight women’s penchant for creating gay male erotica was been discussed and theorized by a
number of scholars. Russo’s “Indiscrete Media,” (pp. 3–4) provides an excellent summary of the
scholarship on this topic, beginning with an assessment of science fiction writer Joanna Russ’s
1985 essay on K/S slash: “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love.”
17. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 1.4, 3.2. Not coincidently, the earliest Star Trek slash fan fiction
dates from approximately the same time. Diane Marchant’s “A Fragment Out of Time” appeared
in the fan magazine (fanzine) Grup #3 in 1974. On early Star Trek fandom see Joan Marie
Verba, Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967–1987, 2nd ed. (Minnetonka, MN:
FLT Publications, 2003).
18. Kandy’s husband, John Fong, was responsible for converting the Star Trek footage into slides.
19. Filking is another form of creative fan activity; preexisting songs are reconstituted as a means of
commenting upon or critiquing mainstream media within fan communities. For an overview of
the broad spectrum of styles and approaches that filking constitutes, and the fan community
functions that it serves, see Jenkins, Textual Poachers, Chapter 8 (“‘Strangers No More, We
Sing’: Filk Music, Folk Culture, and the Fan Community.” See also Jenkins “‘If I Could Speak
with Your Sound’: Fan Music, Textual Proximity, and Liminal Identification,” Camera Obscura
8, no. 2 (1990): 148–175.
20. Later, Fong went on to use two slide projectors at once, in order to cut more quickly between
shots.
21. Not many had the opportunity, like John Fong, to acquire discarded or unused footage from a
media franchise. Most of the time visual material was drawn from previously aired sources, well
known to fans.
22. Jenkins speaks more generally here about the process of writing, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s
notion of hetroglossia (1981). Textual Poachers, 224.
23. “Good Vids, Bad Vids,” http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding.
24. http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/fcoppa/clips/both-sides-now.
25. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 3.4–3.12.
26. Dot Records DLP 25883.
27. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2007/11/19/celebrating-kandy-fong-founder-of-
fannish-music-video.
28. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2007/11/19/celebrating-kandy-fong-founder-of-
fannish-music-video.
29. Tipton is best known for his work in television creating show themes and incidental music for
serials such as The Golden Girls and The Love Boat, as well as for his collaborations with
singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson. Tipton arranged several of the songs on Nimoy’s The Way I
Feel, but it was Nimoy’s fourth album that followed—The Touch of Leonard Nimoy (1969)—in
which Tipton’s role was central, as arranger and conductor for the entire album.
30. Lloyd Whitesell, The Music of Joni Mitchell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), 143–146. Whitesell refers specifically to the contrast between the final two measures of
 the chorus in Collins’s rendition (“the barrage of primary colors”) and the same moment in
Mitchell’s original when the dissonance between voice and guitar denies the listener the
possibility of a satisfying resolution, a deliberate move by Mitchell to produce an anticlimactic
conclusion for expressive purposes. Collins’s recording is on the album Wildflowers (Elektra
74012-2, 1967).
31. The opening note of each triadic figure is rearticulated as a short upbeat before the change to
each new pitch level, thus creating a sense of momentum.
32. I thank Joshua Rifkin, who arranged Judy Collins’s rendition, for clarifying the instrumentation.
Personal communication, May 21, 2013.
33. See Whitesell’s analysis in Music of Joni Mitchell, 143–146.
34. The xylophone provides momentum by articulating an upbeat before each downbeat when the
harmony changes in the string parts, not unlike the momentum produced by the harpsichord
articulation in Collins’ version.
35. All counter indications reference the online version of Fong’s vid at
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/fcoppa/clips/both-sides-now and are approximate.
36. Typically, modulatory gestures of this kind are reserved for the end of a song, to literally raise
the emotional stakes even higher. See David Metzer, “The Power Ballad,” Popular Music 31,
no. 3 (2012), esp. 439–440.
37. Nimoy’s earliest albums include spoken word songs, in which the commanding voice of
Nimoy/Spock declaims over an instrumental backing, often with Space Age effects. “Alien” is a
classic example on Nimoy’s first album Leonard Nimoy presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer
Space (Dot Records DLP 25794, 1967), while “Spock Thoughts”—on his more eclectic Two
Sides of Leonard Nimoy—is another standout number (Dot Records DLP 25835, 1968). An
excellent resource that includes excerpts from Nimoy’s albums can be found at
http://www.maidenwine.com/lps.html.
38. Make no mistake, however, Fong’s stills are carefully chosen, and any Trek fan will immediately
recognize the way the vid functions as an intertext. For example, two consecutive stills (0:40–
0:43 and 0:44–0:46) are drawn from scenes in series one, episode nine: “This Side of Paradise.”
When the Enterprise arrives at a Federation colony Spock and other members of the crew are
sprayed with spores by a flower that induces love and contentment. After exposure to the spores
Spock is able to express his emotions for Leila Kalomi, a colonist who had previously been in
love with him when they were on earth. In the first still used by Fong, Spock is lying beneath a
tree with his head on Leila’s lap as he contemplates the clouds, singling out one for its similarity
to the shape of a dragon (a sign that his imagination has superseded rationality). Tellingly, he
states: “I’ve never stopped to look at clouds before, or rainbows. Do you know I can tell you
exactly why one appears in the sky, but considering its beauty has always been out of the
question.” Thus, at this moment in the vid, Fong is referencing the “side” of Spock that has
experienced love and emotion.
39. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 3.9.
40. Regarding the controversy surrounding this vid see Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 1.3 and
Jenkins, “How to Watch a Fan-Vid.” The vid is widely available for viewing on YouTube, and
elsewhere online.
41. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993),
17–32, at 19.
42. Text in quotes is drawn from Butler, “Critically Queer,” 19.
43. Butler, “Critically Queer,” 19.
44. Jenkins, “How to Watch a Fan-Vid.”
45. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 4.2. A stopwatch was required because “a VCR’s numerical
counter rarely corresponded to actual time, or even any particular position of the footage on the
tape.”
46. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 4.3.
47. For more information on the various collectives and aesthetic trends see Coppa, “Women, Star
Trek,” 4.1–4.15 and “Genealogy of Vidding with Francesca Coppa” at 24/7: A DIY Video
Summit (February 8–10, 2008; School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=SN&v=aYdllH7jZxg&threaded=1&hl=fr See also
Jenkins’s references to the vids of MVD (Mary Van Deusen) in Textual Poachers, esp. 238–246.
48. For the purpose of this chapter, I will use the term femslash, although other terms such as
femmeslash, girlslash, and saffic are used in specific communities. See Russo, “Indiscrete
Media,” 2.
49. Coppa refers to Cagney and Lacey as having “the first lesbian slash fandom,” but her assertion
is raised in the context of a discussion of fan fiction, not vids. See Coppa, “A Brief History of
Media Fandom,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen
Hellekson and Kristina Busse (North Carolina: McFarland, 2006), 51–52.
50. I cite the subtitle of Henry Jenkins’s book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006).
51. Russo, “Indiscrete Media,” 1–3. Despite the fact that the existence of a lesbian relationship in
Xena was much debated, Russo’s point is to document the existence of a large fan base invested
in lesbian readings.
52. For examples of vidders who have shunned the spotlight and those who have embraced it see
Jesse Walker’s interview “Remixing Television: Francesca Coppa on the Vidding
Underground”: http://reason.com/archives/2008/07/18/remixing-television.
53. Nikkhele’s vid can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oeq3XblvufE. Her video
summary is as follows: “This Melissa Etheridge song is really a ‘road song’ but since there are
no highways in prison, it’s a different kind of journey. Nonetheless, Helen & Nikki sure did a lot
of walking around in Larkhall [prison] *g*.”
54. All responses to the videos discussed in this chapter are cited exactly as posted on YouTube. I
have not made adjustments of any kind (e.g., typographical errors) in order to maintain the tenor
of the original postings.
55. The vid can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJLjK_c_6_w (Masque101’s initial
post included the accompanying video summary: “Two very intelligent and compassionate
women met and fell in love with each other; unfortunately, one is the Wing Governor at HMP
Larkhall and the other is serving life at HMP Larkhall for murder. It’s so many kinds of wrong,
but what’s a few rules, regulations and cell doors on the path to true love? It was almost as if
‘Right Kind Of Wrong’ was written with these two in mind so I just had to put some clips to the
track.”).
56. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, vii.
57. In addition, series one through eight began airing on Logo beginning in early 2007. (Series one
and part of series two had previously aired on BBC America.) Unlike BG’s television debut in
 Britain, BG was confined to “the gay channel,” thereby restricting viewership to those with
cable or satellite.
58. Curve, February 2007. At the time of Kreigh’s writing, BG had already been aired worldwide on
television in more than 40 countries.
59. Curve, February 2007.
60. For reasons that will become obvious through the remainder of this chapter, I treat the
relationship between Nikki and Helen depicted in vids as femslash, hence the reference to N/H.
61. At the 2000 and 2001 National Television Awards, Bad Girls won for Best Drama. It also
picked up a number of TV Quick Awards and Inside Soap Awards in the early 2000s.
62. The subtitle of this section is a play on Jenkins’s blog entry entitled “How to Watch a Fan-Vid.”
I engaged in online ethnography. As a participant-observer in the BG fan community I observed
the community in action and communicated with fans online. I conducted formal surveys with
follow-up questions, some of which resulted in in-person interviews.
63. I am grateful to vidders Jeansneakers and Tres Chaud for their willingness to share their
knowledge and love of vidding (and Bad Girls!) with me.
64. The original scene should be watched first, followed by the vid. The original scene is posted at
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/nktreadwell/clips/bad-girls-excerpt-from-series-1-
episode-6/view. The vid is at
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/nktreadwell/clips/helen-and-nikki-pmb. Jeansneakers
deleted her entire account (which included some 77 BG vids) when YouTube had one of its
periodic copyright-inspired purges. I am grateful to her for re-uploading this vid which can also
be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=WOW8p6AR7qk.
The video quality is improved in the YouTube version.
65. This sentence is a derived from the description accompanying Jeansneakers’s original YouTube
posting of the vid (January 24, 2008).
66. Even then, I will need to be judicious in terms of what I choose to highlight, for sake of brevity.
67. There are notable exceptions to this practice, however, including a number of BG vids that
incorporate the portions of the original dialogue in creative ways.
68. Personal communication, May 2, 2008.
69. The song is from their album PCD (A&M, 2005).
70. This is an element of JS’s craft in general that is finely tuned, synchronized precisely with the
music, and oozes sensuality, particularly when she reworks Helen’s physical movements.
71. By “Orientalism” I refer to the formulation of Edward Said, in terms of a dominant Western
fantasy that (historically) has been attached to various non-Western peoples including those of
the Middle East. For a trenchant yet nuanced critique of musical orientalism in the work of gay
male composers see Philip Brett, “Queer Musical Orientalism,” Echo 9, no. 1 (2009).
72. It is striking how many times Helen is represented behind bars in BG itself, despite the fact that
she is not an inmate. A number of vids emphasize the symbolic nature of Helen’s imprisonment.
73. Although I reference the sounds of specific “oriental” musical instruments throughout the
analysis, the sounds are likely generated electronically.
74. The augmented seconds signal the intended Oriental character of the music, although strictly
speaking the Hijaz tetrachord would contain three (not two) half steps between the second and
third pitches.
 Interestingly, both actresses have an Eastern parent, giving a certain veracity to the vid in terms
75.
of the characters’ slightly swarthy visual appearances. Actor Simone Lahbib’s father is Algerian
and Mandana Jones’ mother is Iranian.
76. Indeed, JS states that “Buttons” was not the first choice of music for the scene she envisioned.
She went through at least five different songs, beginning with Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic.”
She abandoned that choice while creating the vid. When she “reached the part where they [N/H]
stand face-to-face” she realized that she couldn’t make the scene “more interesting” with
Newton-John’s music. Personal communication. May 2, 2008.
77. The vid can be viewed at http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/nktreadwell/clips/love-it-
when-youre-bossy/view and at TC’s YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=hmQT7BpsJlk.
78. For sake of convenience, I identify the song in question as Bjork’s, although in many instances
it is actually the remix material that is being referenced. The remix is the Bersarinplatz Mix by
Beats Beyond on the album Army of Me—Remixes and Covers (One Little Indian Us, 2005).
79. TC explains: “one element I found to be missing [in the corpus of N/H vids] was dialogue that
was not only folded into music, but created rhythm of its own. Being a musician…I love the
marriage of music to spoken words where the words become part of the music. The delivery of
lines by [actors] Mandana [Jones] and Simone [Lahbib] quite often have unique rhythm and go
quite naturally with music.” Personal communication. May 7, 2008.
80. This footage was not actually aired, but appears on the series two DVD set under “Deleted
Scenes.”
81. The irony (and some humor) stems from TC’s repositioning of incongruous snippets of
dialogue. As TC states: “I also like to combine dialogue that is not initially meant to be paired
with other dialogue, but that combine to give yet another perspective, while staying true to the
characters” (personal communication, May 7, 2008). To be appreciated on this level, the vid
requires the viewer-listener to have an insider’s knowledge of all the N/H scenes.
82. I am indebted to the exemplary work of Tyler Burton, my research assistant from 2009 to 2010.
Without his knowledge of electronic dance music that I draw upon here, I would not have been
able to develop the concomitant interpretive possibilities.
83. On the removal of the bass drum in electronic dance music see Mark J. Butler, Unlocking the
Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 91–92. According to Butler: “Because the beat
commands such stature, removing it and bringing it back [in live performance] is one of the
most powerful things a DJ can do.” Unlocking the Groove, 4.
84. Earlier in the vid (2:46–3:02), another key dramatic moment occurs when the bass drum is cut.
85. TC explains her use of Bjork’s lyrics as such: “The lyrics…speak of defining moments in each
woman’s struggle trying to deal with such raw and passionate and intense emotions for the other.
Helen couldn’t talk to Sean (or anyone), Nikki couldn’t tell anyone, so there was no one to talk
to for either one, no one to ‘save them,’ they had only themselves to work it out; they became
exhausted and gave in to it.” Personal communication, May 7, 2008.
86. Coppa, “Women, Star Trek,” 1.1.
87. Tisha Turk, “‘Your Own Imagination’: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative
Interpretation,” Film and Film Culture 5 (2010): 88–89.
88. Between writing this chapter in 2017–2018 and its publication in 2018, two relevant articles
have been published that speak to the musical dimension of vids. Unfortunately, I was unable to
incorporate their insights, but I cite them here. Tisha Turk, “Transformation in a New Key:
Music in Vids and Vidding,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 2 (2015): 163–176 and
Sebastian F. K. Svegaard, “Critical Vidders: Fandom, Critical Theory and Media,” Akademisk
Kvarter 11 (2015): 1–11.
R
Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Brett, Philip, “Queer Musical Orientalism,” Echo 9, no. 1 (2009).
http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume9-Issue1/brett/brett1.html.
Bury, Rhiannon. Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 1 (1993): 17–
32.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Coppa, Francesca. “Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding.”
Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008).
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/44/64.
Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington. Fandom: Identities and Communities in a
Mediated World. New York and London: New York University Press, 2007.
Hellekson, Karen and Kristina Busse. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet.
North Carolina: McFarland, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. “How to Watch a Fan-Vid.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, September 18, 2006.
http://henryjenkins.org/2006/09/how_to_watch_a_fanvid.html.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Rev. ed. New York and
London: Routledge, 2013.
Kreisinger, Elisa. “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities.” Transformative Works
and Cultures 9 (2012). http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/395/264.
Metzer, David. “The Power Ballad.” Popular Music 31, no. 3 (2012), 439–440.
Russo, Julie Levin. “Indiscrete Media: Television/Digital Convergence and Economies of Lesbian
Online Fan Communities.” PhD diss., Brown University, 2010.
Svegaard, Sebastian F. K. “Critical Vidders: Fandom, Critical Theory and Media.” Akademisk
Kvarter 11 (2015): 1–11.
Turk, Tisha. “‘Your Own Imagination’: Vidding and Vidwatching as Collaborative Interpretation.”
Film and Film Culture 5 (2010): 88–89.
Turk, Tisha. “Transformation in a New Key: Music in Vids and Vidding.” Music, Sound, and the
Moving Image 9, no. 2 (2015): 163–176.
Turk, Tisha and Joshua Johnson. “Toward an Ecology of Vidding.” Transformative Works and
Cultures 9 (2012). http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/326/294.
Wanzo, Rebecca. “African American Acafandom and Other Strangers: New Genealogies of Fan
Studies.” Transformative Works and Cultures 20 (2015).
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/699/538.
Whitesell, Lloyd. The Music of Joni Mitchell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008,
143–146.
 C H A P T E R 11

K A R A O K E , Q U E E R T H E O RY,
QUEER PERFORMANCE
Dedicated to José Esteban Muñoz
 K ARE N TONGS ON

“It’s been said and done

Every beautiful thought’s been already sung
And I guess right now here’s another one
So your melody can play on and on
With the best of them…”
Selena Gomez and the Scene, “Love You Like a Love Song” (2011).

A performance genre and recreational pastime at once public and semi-

private, karaoke is replete with love songs. Indeed, karaoke, wherever it
happens, however it happens, is an activity founded fundamentally on
repetition: on reproducing all the thoughts—be they beautiful, crass,
lascivious, rageful, or joyful—that have “been already sung” about love,
intimacy, filiality, and alienation. The 2011 music video for Disney teen
sensation, Selena Gomez’s pop hit, “Love You Like a Love Song,”
hammers this point home not only by nesting a karaoke video within the
music video itself, but also by staging a conceit in which the “original”
singer is singing her own song at a karaoke bar as one of its many (future)
imitators in front of an audience of disaffected Asian businessmen. I open
this essay with Selena Gomez’s re-enactment of what is already a re-
enactment— karaoke—because it very concisely establishes the extent to
which the activity might be understood within some of queer aesthetics’
most common tropes: its play with surfaces, its obfuscation of originals
through copies of copies, its tendency to echo the well-worn forms of love
and desire, even as it makes apparent—indeed, amplifies—the clichéd,
normative fantasies that underlie the repetition of these conventions.1
In her collection of non-fiction essays, titled Karaoke Culture, the
Croatian novelist, Dubravka Ugresic, uses karaoke in a mostly pejorative
manner, as an extended metaphor for the rampant “amateurism” that has
arisen in various modes of creative production in the media age, from
music, art and film, to literature and criticism. While I tend to disagree with
Ugresic’s general attitude toward karaoke—she rarely makes an effort to
discuss the form itself and laments that “we wanted individual freedom” but
merely “achieved the freedom of imitation.”2—I actually find one of the
earliest claims in her essay compelling for my own approach to the subject.
As she writes of its practitioners, both literal and figurative: “Their creation
can’t be called plagiarism, nor can their activity be called imitation, because
both terms belong to a different time and different cultural system.”3
Ugresic instead focuses on debased iterations of post-digital forms of
“copying,” from fanfic and cosplay, to cell phone novels, as well as certain
remaindered forms of Balkan kitsch imitation (e.g., prepatterned crochet
sets) in her Eastern Bloc region of origin, the former Yugoslavia. While
some of her analogies between karaoke and earlier, analog imitative
recreations in the age of Tito’s dictatorship are rather moving and haunting,
I was struck by Ugresic’s remark that karaoke exists outside a cultural
system in which “imitation” itself might yet resound as an ambivalent term,
or at its most reparative, a philosophically dignified one. (Think the long
history of aesthetics and mimesis since Plato’s Republic). Instead, the idea
of the “copy” reigns conceptually in the contemporary moment as the
debased, post-post-modern cousin of “imitation,” of mimesis as the soul of
art. While I welcome creative metaphorizations of karaoke such as
Ugresic’s, and plan to engage later with the conceptual entanglements that
allow karaoke to stand in for a post-digital world of “copies” and
“copycats,” I want to also focus on some of karaoke’s material
manifestations. My efforts will bring together, in a preliminary manner, an
engagement with karaoke as a queer theoretical and aesthetic mode, as well
as a material set of participatory practices that vary wildly in different
regional sites. What might we be able to learn, for example, about queer,
post-colonial logics of mimesis and imitation, as they cut between and
across material histories of karaoke as a leisure pastime in the overlapping
contexts of LGBTQ recreation and tourism?4
Karaoke is a compound Japanese word: “kara” means “empty,” and
“oke” is the contraction and truncation of “o-kesutora,” or “orchestra.”5
Although the conceptual origins of karaoke are largely apocryphal, and
have been linked by journalists, enthusiasts, and scholars to folk forms of
group singing and sing-along entertainments across a wide historical span
from medieval Europe, to Anglo-American vaudeville, to post-World War II
Japan (from which the name of the activity is derived), the precise origins
of the first karaoke machine came to be known in 1996, when a
Singaporean television station tracked down its inventor, Daisuke Inoue.6 In
the late 1960s and early 1970s, Inoue was an unassuming, and (by his own
accounts) terrible drummer for various cover bands who played in Japanese
dancehalls abandoned by American GIs in the wake of World War II.
British writer and journalist, Pico Iyer, wrote the definitive Western media
profile on Inoue for a 1999 issue of Time magazine, in which Inoue is
anointed as one of the “most influential Asians of the century.”7 Around
1970, as the story goes, Inoue established himself in Kobe as the drummer
for a band who performed nightly at a cocktail club called “Baron,”
accompanying patrons who wanted to sing along to hits old and new, from
Japanese folk classics and military songs, to contemporary hits of the day.8
To have a house band staffed with musicians skilled enough at sight-reading
to accompany regulars who wished to sit-in with the band, especially in
remote Asian outposts after World War II, was not, in and of itself, the
innovation that lead to the global dissemination of karaoke as a machinic
practice.
Inoue himself was a terrible sight-reader of sheet music, so his method
as a drummer (according to his interview with Iyer), was to follow along to
the movement of the guest singer’s lips, thus creating the effect of a halting
accompaniment amenable to singing businessmen whose faculties were,
shall we say, already compromised for the evening. One fan of Inoue’s
ensemble was the president of a small steel company who asked Inoue and
his crew to serve as his backing band for a number he wanted to perform at
a hot springs retreat.9 Because the band was obliged to play at the club
instead, Inoue couldn’t make the trip and recorded their accompaniment for
the steel mini-magnate’s favorite tune on a cassette tape. Thus, karaoke was
conceived. However, karaoke as we know it wasn’t truly born until Inoue
fashioned special jukeboxes with popular tracks recorded by his band, sans
vocal accompaniment, and leased them to other bars. As Iyer writes, “If
company presidents could sing along to taped accompaniment, Inoue
thought, why not regular guys at more modest drinking places equipped
only with a jukebox? He and his pals had 11 home-made boxes constructed,
fitted them out with specially made tapes and amplifiers, and began leasing
the machines to bars in Kobe in 1971. Soon customers were wailing ‘My
Way’ in Osaka and Tokyo as well.”10
Karaoke’s origins, and how it came to be disseminated machinically in
leisure sites around the world, are significant to me because they contain
within them all of the elements that initially fueled my interest in
subordinate, or “remote” forms of queer aesthetics and queer sociability.11
Karaoke’s genesis required a collision of entertainment cultures in the wake
of both failed and emergent imperialist efforts (by Japan and the US,
respectively); it began in a “second city,” a location distinct from the
national capital of governance and nightlife (Tokyo), while becoming a
popular pastime that continues to haunt or “drag” urban taste cultures
today.12 Furthermore, the first karaoke apparatus was jerry-built by
dilettantes who weren’t even all that good at playing music: in effect, these
musicians were service workers in Kobe’s tourism and nightlife industry.
Karaoke’s origin story also suggests that the “copy” or “copier” is not
necessarily guided by a master rhythm produced by an expert (or top-down
approach), but that the rhythm itself is forced to accompany or copy the one
who is copying (think of Inoue’s drumming technique, and this subsequent
dynamic as akin to “topping from the bottom”13). Finally, karaoke as a
performance practice is fueled by the desire for a repeat performance, for
the constant repetition of popular numbers at once saturated with meaning
(sometimes nostalgic and sentimental, often associational, and always, I
would argue, deeply personal14), and yet, by the very nature of that
repetition, consigned to being regarded as a shallow, or meaningless form of
expression.
While some scholars, particularly in Asian and Asian American studies,
have richly documented the complex cultural, aesthetic and social functions
of karaoke as a pastime and performance practice amongst Asian and Asian
diasporic communities, the activity has received far less attention in the
often Westernized frameworks in which queer sociability and aesthetic
practices are often discussed.15 Furthermore, karaoke remains largely
debased and denigrated, if occasionally recuperated through ironized
performances, in Anglo-American social and cultural contexts: a set of
attitudes conditioned by its very associations with racialized and working
class cultures in the US and other, so-called “first world” sites.16
 We are all familiar with the ways in which karaoke is depicted as the
ruinous end-point of a booze-fueled bender in popular cinema. In the
contemporary moment, karaoke in the US has also emerged as common
homosocial ritual preceding heterosexual unions. I can barely count the
number of times the divey karaoke bars I frequent have been invaded by
drunken brides-to-be and their gal-pals (more often than not, adorned with
wacky headgear and penis-shaped paraphernalia), who disembark from
their party-buses to group-sing a few ’80s tunes as a way of rounding out
their bridal shower bacchanals. In short, karaoke in and of itself, given the
range of its contexts, practitioners and venues, cannot easily be designated
as a “queer” activity in the manner that, say, D. A. Miller depicted the piano
bar and its Broadway repertoire as a “place for us”—or at least for
metropolitan gay men of a certain age.17
And yet, karaoke nights have become a staple of many queer bars
throughout the US and other countries, especially in nightlife venues that
service a mixed clientele of gay men and lesbians both within and beyond
queer global capitals such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles,
London, Sydney, and Berlin. Often scheduled during “slower” weeknights
for an infusion of niche customers to offset losses in revenue, karaoke has
been added to the rotation of other entertainments, sometimes participatory
(e.g., trivia, bingo, lip-synching contests, drag king and queen open mics),
to draw out customers who are looking for something more to do at the
queer local than sip Bud Lights and well drink specials with regulars.
Although the participatory nature of most of these supplementary
entertainments certainly create other vectors of queer sociability and
communion in bar spaces, the rationale behind this programming is largely
financial: in most instances, bar owners are spared the cost of cabaret
licenses when they hold amateur competitions and game nights. Perhaps
more significantly, queer bar owners—like other nightlife proprietors who
came increasingly to rely on video technologies and playback music instead
of professional musicians from the 1980s onward18—can also skimp on
money for live entertainers, some of whom are unionized and require union
wages. In fact, most KJs, or “karaoke jockeys” are hobbyists who subsist
entirely on tips, and simply choose to host karaoke because of their own
enthusiasm for the activity.19
 Arguably, installing a basic karaoke system—a mic or two, a screen, and
an amplified receiver with a videodisc player—takes up far less space than
say, a piano or an entire stage for other varieties of live performance,
although the apparatuses used for karaoke are sometimes more elaborate,
depending on what each venue is willing to accommodate. The cost of an
entry-level karaoke apparatus for a bar or mixed-use space can be as little as
a couple of hundred dollars, especially if the venue already has video
screens or an LCD projector installed for other purposes. An especially
popular entry-level karaoke delivery system used in Filipino restaurants and
bars in the US, both queer and straight, is the Magic Sing home-system
(available for as little as US$170). The Magic Sing, sometimes also referred
to colloquially as the “Magic Mic,” consists of a microphone or set of two
microphones with built in microchips filled with hundreds of songs,
accompanied by lyrics and video graphics usually comprised of scenic
images from paradisiacal tropical resorts in the Philippines. The Magic
Sing, primarily intended for home use, requires standard video and audio
inputs—the type used for DVD players and cable boxes—available on
nearly every television or monitor built since 2000. Many venues, large and
small, are also relying increasingly on laptops, iPads, or other portable
delivery systems like the Magic Sing for hosting public karaoke. The
volunteer KJs and karaoke hobbyists, who donate their time to
administering nights of song, will often bring in their portable devices
stocked with thousands of songs downloaded from the internet and simply
plug and play.
On a recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, students and faculty
from the University of British Columbia brought me to a queer-owned
Indonesian restaurant that transforms into a karaoke bar after 9pm. The KJ
at that venue, a Pinay singer/entertainer who immigrated to Canada from
the Philippines, plugged her own iPad into the speakers and TV monitors,
and logged into YouTube to supplement the venue’s extant song book with
newer top-40 hits that had yet to be released on videodisc (karaoke’s bread
and butter). In Manila, where karaoke is ubiquitous, as it tends to be in
many other East and Southeast Asian nations, you can even find various
improvised karaoke apparatuses at neighborhood gathering places like the
Sari-Sari store (a convenience store commonly built into an existing
structure like a house, or in certain instances, built entirely of salvaged
materials and placed adjacent to more “permanent” structures). In spaces
like the Sari-Sari store, which will sometimes double as a hawker stand,
selling freshly made street-food with small outdoor seating areas for
noshing and gathering, you might find rehabilitated, early-model karaoke
systems discarded by tonier bars and clubs who have upgraded their
systems. In an early episode of the sitcom The Mindy Project (helmed by
the Indian American comedienne, Mindy Kaling), an early-model cassette
based karaoke system “that only plays songs in Spanish” makes a cameo
appearance at her Christmas party: it’s been salvaged from the sidewalks of
New York City by Morgan, an enterprising male nurse who works for her
private OB/GYN practice. The nearly infinite variety of karaoke
apparatuses, old and new, rehabilitated and “pirated” I’ve enumerated here,
make apparent just how exponentially Daisuke Inoue’s quaint vision of the
common man singing his heart out to a more affordable, recorded
accompaniment instead of live lounge musicians, has grown.20
While it would be easy to regard karaoke’s infiltration into queer
nightlife venues in particular as a penny-wise business move in keeping
with other participatory trends wrought by new and portable media
platforms—in some instances, capitulating to karaoke is also perceived as a
desperate financial gesture21—it would behoove us to resituate karaoke
within a longer genealogy of participatory, amateur amusements in queer
bars and clubs, including the kindred activities of lip-synching and open-
mic drag performance that are sometimes programmed alongside karaoke
on weeknight bar schedules. I use “amateur” here, not in the derogatory
manner Ugresic employs it in Karaoke Culture to signify the death of the
artist/auteur in a mediated world replete with copies and copycats, but in the
reparative mode queer performers and performance studies scholars, such
as José Esteban Muñoz and Nao Bustamante, have used the designation to
emphasize the refusal of mastery in certain queer performance idioms.22
The amateurism in queer performance modes such as drag, for example,
walks a fine line between homage and critique, not so much of the
“original” performer or musical number, but (as many observers of camp
have noted) of the very forms, aesthetic and otherwise, that legislate the
divide between the “real” and the “copy,” such as style, tone, gesture,
gender, and genre. Amateurism does not necessarily manifest as an overt
thwarting of “tradition,” “decorum,” and “the rules,” as much as it makes
apparent these categories: playing with, if not always against the rules;
making a mess within and of the lines, if not always crossing them. The
genealogy of queer amateur performance in which karaoke belongs, then,
lacks the overtly “political” dignity of something like punk, DIY cultures,
which reinstall the primacy of the creator and producer—the “self” making
or repurposing extant objects and forms, as opposed to surrendering to their
a priori existence, thus becoming their mimics, copyists.
As Christine Yano explains, karaoke belongs to the tradition of kata, or
“patterned form” in Japanese aesthetics. She writes:
Kata structures an artform into named, stereotyped, replicable patterns. These patterns in
turn become the basis for teaching and learning in a hierarchy of knowledge. Within this
hierarchy, what is first taught through kata is the importance of form over content, technique
over understanding, imitation over creativity. Content, understanding, and creativity, then,
become end products of years of training in form, technique and imitation…Karaoke may be
thought of as a technological reification of kata expression, a kind of hardware of patterned
form.23

Although this culturally distinct notion of karaoke cannot be superimposed

directly onto the disparate karaoke practices we might find in small-town or
second-city mixed-use queer bars around the world, it offers another
aesthetic lens through which to view the amateur and participatory queer
performance modes to which karaoke belongs. We are conditioned to think
of imitative queer arts, either pejoratively or affirmatively, as requiring a
predominantly affective identification (or disidentification) with originals
and icons; as an expressive form of fandom, homage, and love sometimes
laced with critique.24 While karaoke can be and often is all of these things,
the activity also derives much of its pleasure and frisson from the repetitive
encounter with prepatterned, predictable forms; from a kata-esque
capitulation to learning a particular pop repertoire as it has already been
performed “in the style of” a certain artist (as the front-titles to many
karaoke videos declare). Indeed, karaoke as a mode of copying, of singing
along to an “empty orchestra” makes apparent how deeply formalized other
imitative, transnational queer performance modes like lip-synching, drag,
and singing at a piano bar (karaoke’s avuncular precursor), truly are.
 But whereas singing at the piano bar retains a certain patina of
authenticity derived from its historicity, its gendering (gay male), and its
own ritual formalisms preconditioning one’s participation—like the
painstaking efforts to memorize a specific repertoire (The Great American
Songbook), sourced from a locus classicus (Broadway, aka “The Great
White Way”), with room for emphatic, improvised phrasing (the suggestive
“vocal italics” Miller refers to in Place for Us25)—karaoke is far more
crass, and textually promiscuous, technically requiring very little of its
participants except for the ability to read words on a screen, which are
already preprogrammed to scroll in time with the music. One needn’t even
have prior knowledge of a song before performing it, although most
karaoke participants tend to choose songs they’ve at least heard a few times
on the radio. More commonly, many would-be singers know the chorus to a
song, and will sign up for it on that basis alone, despite having little
familiarity with the verses. Indeed, a common phenomenon in public
karaoke venues is to see singers looking up the lyrics on their smartphone to
remind themselves how “the rest of it goes,” or—in certain situations—
stepping outside to listen to the song on their phones before venturing a
performance. Even in instances when, on certain self-controlled apparatuses
such as the remote-controlled machines used in “noraebang” or private
karaoke rooms, the singer is given a numerical score after their
performance, the standards of assessment seem to focus exclusively on how
well the singer has followed the scrolling words, and how loudly they have
sung them.
Unlike the elaborate and absorptive rituals of self-education Miller
characterizes as prerequisites of the gay cosmopolitan’s participation in the
piano bar scene, contemporary karaoke requires virtually no preparation or
prior memorization: you simply show up, pick a song out of a book, write
the title of the song and your name (which can be a pseudonym) on a slip,
hand it to the KJ and wait your turn. This is what makes the activity so
amenable to weeknight programming in any bar, queer or not. On its
surface, karaoke would seem to sanction interlopers, invite the
uncommitted, and welcome tourists (see my earlier anecdote about bridal
parties). Plied with enough liquid courage and peer pressure, a karaoke
bystander or voyeur—many first timers claim they’ll “just watch”—can
easily be converted into a participant even if they initially demur. It’s a
slippery slope for the bystander who, although hesitant to step up to the mic
because they fear the exposure of a solo performance, will begin to sing
along with the rest of club when someone warbles a particularly popular
number—either hits of the day, or music that belongs to the “oldies” bin
(i.e., songs at least 20 years old). They may then agree to a duet or a group
number: probably something from Grease or “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Before you know it, halfway into their second or fourth drink, the karaoke
voyeur is seizing the mic and busting their guts to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total
Eclipse of the Heart” as the crowd responds “and I need you!” to their
impassioned, gravel-throated call: “and I need you now tonight!” In short,
karaoke creates the occasion for social promiscuity, ephemeral though it
may be, and thus becomes another iteration of what Samuel Delany, qua
Jane Jacobs calls “contact.”26 I’ve witnessed firsthand how this contact
comes to fruition in a range of karaoke venues, with various apparatuses
throughout the globe, from private rooms in Tokyo, Seoul, and Manila, to
rec rooms in the Philippine provinces, to bars exclusively focused on
karaoke in Los Angeles and New York, to pubs with trivia contests
followed by karaoke in East London, to down home bar-and-grills with
karaoke only one night a week in Lincoln, Nebraska and Watervliet, New
York. We could end here with this scene of utopian queer mingling in
disparate settings, of strangers, lovers, and dreamers coming together in and
through song: a truly euphoric scene of Dionysian splendor.
And yet, despite the verity of karaoke’s surface manifestations—it
foments contact, it is fundamentally participatory, it sanctions promiscuous
musical repertoires, it has achieved global ubiquity—it is also an activity
that models very specialized regimes of knowledge and participation
contingent upon a set of decorums established within the particular venues,
locales and nations in which it transpires. In other words, the kata of
karaoke, the repeated encounter with “patterned forms” (to use Yano’s
words), is not only focused on the music, on learning to sing a song in the
preexisting style of a recorded artist; it is also about becoming ritualized to
the set of performance idioms and social manners that inhere in very
particular, classed, racialized, sexualized, and nationalized settings. Yano
makes apparent some of the intricate social negotiations and observances in
Japan’s mainstream karaoke cultures, noting that at its incipience, karaoke
was a profoundly homosocial practice: “Karaoke has developed not only
from participatory social gatherings and performing arts traditions, but also
within the milieu of male-dominated urban nightlife.”27 The kata of queer
karaoke, or karaoke that carries within it a queer potential (which I would
argue, includes all forms of karaoke due in no small part to its origins as a
type of homosocial bonding), is one that highlights how deeply formalized,
transcultural, and socially layered an ostensibly “superficial” queer
aesthetics founded upon reflections and echoes might actually be. Karaoke
in both its material and metaphoric forms provides something of a gestalt
for a queer aesthetics through which—as Kurt Koffka, one of gestalt
theory’s founders famously remarked—“The whole is other than the sum of
its parts.”28
Earlier in this essay, I made a passing remark about the long history of
aesthetics and mimesis since Plato’s Republic and the more ambivalent
resonances the term “imitation” might yet retain in a mediatized world of
copies and copycats. As I approach my conclusion, which only temporarily
registers the end of this work on karaoke’s conceptual and material
manifestations in the present time, I’d like to reconsider a couple of specific
critical frameworks for imitation in which karaoke participates, and by
doing so, enhances.
From a cultural materialist standpoint, the spread of karaoke in queer
bars and clubs catering to tourists in Europe, Asia, and Latin America could
easily be read as but another instance of gay globalization in which the
popular, economically-driven amusements of Anglo-American queer
nightlife are simply transposed, “mimicked,” or “aped” in peripheral sites
as part of an effort to approximate mainstream gay recreational
environments in the US and UK. Although there is bound to be some truth
in interpretations of this sort, this logic neglects altogether the material
history of karaoke’s dissemination from Asia, and its already extant
protocols of nightlife and sociability cultivated over centuries, as Yano
demonstrates in her article on “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan.”
Furthermore, the spread of karaoke is not only owed to Japan where the
first machine was invented, but to other nations, mostly in Asia, who
embraced the machinic practice as but another iteration of convivial,
amateur singing rituals already in place, as ethnomusicologist Deborah
Wong has argued.29 The emergence of karaoke as a recreational pastime in
the US is owed in no small part to diasporic Filipino, Korean, Japanese,
Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai communities who began to feature karaoke
in restaurants and other public spaces frequented by multigenerational
mixed crowds.30
Tourists from the US who visited Asia in the decades since the
machine’s invention, also came across karaoke during their travels to leisure
sites that arose, not coincidentally, from the ashes of military
“interventions” and incursions into the region since World War II.
Eventually, karaoke itself came to be a common representational trope in
US film and media, the audiovisual shorthand for touristic
defamiliarization, perhaps most notoriously exemplified by Sofia Coppola’s
Lost in Translation (2003). In these instances, the colonial underpinnings of
queer logics of mimesis and appropriation based on top-down, first-
to-“developing”-nation models of neoliberal globalization simply cannot
account for the crosscurrents of karaoke through queer nightlife practices.
Furthermore, global karaoke repertoires, which vary wildly, but seem to
cohere across the board around synthesized British, American, and even
German pop music from the 1980s and 1990s, pose yet another problem of
“influence” that cannot simply be resolved through frameworks of
appropriation or media imperialism.31
I would like to end here with where I began: with several speculative
and theoretical claims about repetition, the copy, and the echo in a karaoke-
oriented queer aesthetics. What if the copy, only implicitly sonic, but
mostly visual in Dubravka Ugresic’s contemplation on contemporary
karaoke culture, assumed a classical form? What if we reconsidered the
copy not only through the technologies and apparatuses that enable its mass
proliferation, but through the fabulous (in the ancient sense of the word)
queer fantasies of Ovidian metamorphosis? I’d like to explore these options
with a snippet from a text which is once, or more accurately, several times
removed from Ovid’s myth of “Echo and Narcissus”; a passage that has
lodged itself in my mind and won’t go away, like a pesky earworm. It is a
pithy, yet profound remark about influence cribbed from another time,
another queer world of empty reflections:
 All influence is immoral…because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He
does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real
to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of
someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.32

These lines belong to Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray (1890). Wotton waxes about influence as echo while an artist,
Basil Halward, paints Dorian’s infamous picture. The more Wotton says,
the more Dorian Gray squirms and breaks his pose, interrupting the scene of
aesthetic production, of imitation. This irks Basil whose aesthetic labor, in
this instance portraiture, requires his subject’s stillness. Basil Halward in
turn interrupts Wotton’s diatribe by commanding Dorian’s physical
restraint: “Just turn your head to the right, Dorian, like a good boy.”33
Indeed, it seems the content of Wotton’s speech is enough to incite Basil to
prohibit Dorian’s movements to ensure he remains a “good boy,” and in this
instance a good subject of art, for Wotton’s words are literally moving
Dorian Gray.
Yet, it is not Lord Henry Wotton’s endorsement of self-development
through self-indulgence that provokes Basil’s regulations and excites
Dorian’s imagination. It is how Lord Henry says what he says that threatens
to inform, infect, and shape Dorian Gray. Lord Henry’s musicality—his
“low musical voice,” his graceful hands that “moved as he spoke, like
music and seemed to have a language of their own”—resonates and
reverberates in Dorian’s body, “touch[ing] some secret chord in him that
had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and
throbbing to curious pulses.”34 In short, Wotton speaks and gesticulates
“musically,” according to Wilde’s narrator, and musicality interrupts the
scene of visual discipline.
Long ago, and oh so far away, I endeavored to make a case for studying
musicality in Victorian literature with Wilde’s/Wotton’s lines about
becoming “an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not
been written for him” as the project’s keynote. Fast forward a few years
later, and I invoked these lines again in my first book, Relocations, as a
means for understanding our stubborn attachments to improper objects, to
the cultural detritus of imperialism in the so-called suburban “wastelands”
of the Inland Empire. And here I am once more, repurposing the same old
song, only its music is no longer incidental, but has crescendoed into my
main theme. To become an “echo of someone else’s music” is at the heart of
my reflections on criticism and aesthetics, on queer theory, and on karaoke
itself as a mode of criticism. To become an echo of someone else’s music is
to surrender to a mild form of madness activated by something outside of
one’s self that has burrowed its way, parasitically, within (in your head, in
your gut, in your ear). It requires capitulating to the compulsion to repeat
the same lines over and over again from the chorus, verse, refrain. And yet
this form of psychological disturbance has also been upheld as the
penultimate form of training the cultural critic before and after
psychoanalysis. We could turn, for example, to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s
essay on “The Echo of the Subject,” which declares that the tune lodged in
one’s head primes (in his words) “the autobiographical gesture: that is, the
theoretical gesture.”35 I already wrote about this at some length in the
conclusion to my chapter on the Inland Empire in Relocations, when I used
Lacoue-Labarthe’s remarks to aggregate disparate scenes of queer, suburban
media encounters, as well as queer suburban theoretical confession by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and some of her pupils.
Instead of languishing in this echo chamber, I want to revisit briefly
another framework for repetition, or perhaps more appropriate to earworms,
regurgitation. In his classic 1977 retort to New Critics and theorists of
influence and form such as M. H. Abrams and Harold Bloom, J. Hillis
Miller recontextualizes what it would mean to be a “parasitic critic”
threatening the formal and literary historical univocality of the “primary”
text. With “The Critic as Host,” Miller (on behalf of the practices of
deconstructive reading), describes the filial intimacy forged by the prefix
“para”:
A thing in ‘para’ is…not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between
inside and outside. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is at once a permeable
membrane connecting inside and outside, confusing them with one another, allowing the
outside in, making the inside out, dividing them but also forming an ambiguous transition
between one and the other. Though any given word in ‘para’ may seem to choose
unequivocally or univocally one of these possibilities, the other meanings are always there
as a shimmering or wavering in the word which makes it refuse to stay still in a sentence,
like a slightly alien guest within the syntactical closure where all words are family friends
together…. Parasite was originally something positive, a fellow guest, someone sharing the
food with you, there with you beside the grain.36
And so, in this oldie but goodie, in this hoary chestnut I was forced to digest
in the required entry-level critical theory seminar in my first semester of
graduate school, we find a refrain we’ve heard many times since (and many
times before), albeit processed differently through something akin to an
emulator; with a different texture, in a different key and octave, from voices
located elsewhere. Although many of us now, queer critics forged in a post-
post-structuralist world, take for granted the mutual dependency between
text and critic, subject and object, original and copy(ist), we are prone to
forget how many times over we were compelled to repeat the same mistakes
out of fear of derivation itself. Critics—to get a bit Barthesian, Berlantian,
Paterian, and Platonic on you—are like lovers who, despite their full
awareness of the folly inherent in a commitment to the other, who, in many
instances is just a fantasy of the self projected into a gorgeous vessel, are
consigned to surrender to the same forms over and over again, the same
imaginary that sutures wholeness to severance, and severance to an a priori
and divine wholeness, which we already know, but choose to forget, is
fantasy.
Having arrived at this impasse, there is nowhere to turn except to turn on
the song in one’s head in the hope it might drown out the inevitable doubt
that creeps in at junctures of realization when a fissure appears in the
fantasy. The ear worms its way back to where we began our encounter with
the “empty orchestra,” with Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song.”
To “love like a love song,” is to “keep hittin’ repea-pea-pea-pea-peat,”
despite the fact that “it’s been said and done” and “every beautiful word’s
been already sung.” It is to surrender compulsively to a kata: to regimented
patterns of repetition and copying. Gomez’s love song offers a convenient
coda for revisiting the queer critic as artist, as host, as lover, as karaoke
crooner.
Elaborating on the vocality of criticism itself, J. Hillis Miller reminds us
that “Both readings, the ‘univocal’ one and the ‘deconstructive’ one, are
fellow guests ‘beside the grain,’ host and guest, host and host, host and
parasite, parasite and parasite. The relation is a triangle, not a polar
opposition. There is always a third to whom the two are related, something
before them or between them, which they divide, consume, or exchange
across which they meet.”37 J. Hillis Miller (not to be confused with D. A.
amongst the piano bars), transposes this “triangle” into the metonymic
chain that becomes deconstructive criticism’s formal signature. He says,
“The relation between any two contiguous elements in this chain is that
strange opposition which is of intimate kinship and at the same time of
enmity.”38 I ask us to linger instead on the triangulation. It is, at once, the
shape René Girard attributes to narrative in Deceit, Desire and the Novel,
and, thanks to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a foundational form for
understanding queer theories of desire.39 Since Sedgwick’s Between Men
(1985), queer theory in the Sedgwickian vein has “repaired” the idea that
triangulation merely gives shape to unidirectional flows of power between
subjects objectified, and objects subjectified to desire; the desire of the
critic, the lover’s desire. We might think about this in relation to the
transnational crosscurrents of karaoke, of the flows of influence actually
muddied by knowing its origins in Asian nations such as Japan and the
Philippines, and fixating on its subsequent popularity in the US.
To illustrate this subjective objectification further, we might return again
to one of my favorite lyrics in Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song”
(which already transposes the subject “you,” into an object, “a love song”):
“You are beautiful/like a dream come alive incredible/centerfold, miracle,
lyrical.” Centerfold. Miracle. Lyrical. A set of three things, first mundane (a
commodity), then magical, then poetic. As any student of poetry remembers
about “the lyrical,” or the lyric and in particular the Romantic lyric: it is as
much about the fantasy of an “I” speaking, as it is about say, some
mountains (P. B. Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”), a bird (Keats’ Nightingale), or
even a feeling-as-object (Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”). As Lauren
Berlant remarks in Desire/Love, “without fantasy, there would be no
love.”40 Karaoke as a critical mode creates an absorptive, magical, lyrical
fantasy, a repetitive, yet genuinely reparative one that allows us to obfuscate
the very repetition to which we surrender so that we might love again, sing
the same old songs again, with the hope and promise of another outcome.
As Carly Rae Jepsen sang in the smash summer hit of 2012, “Call Me,
Maybe?”: “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.” In this
anticipatory remark, the rest of the narrative has already been scripted and
loss has already announced itself: “I missed you so bad.” And yet all of this
echoes in one’s head prior to the action, and therefore is also saturated with
possibility, with the off-chance of fulfillment—maybe—this time.41 We
copy ourselves, echo ourselves, and in so doing, end up echoing everybody
else. We know where this all goes. We’ve heard it all before. And yet we
keep falling. Falling for karaoke and its abundance of love songs; for love
itself despite—or is it because?—of our queer capacity for repetition, our
predilection for copies, our affection for an empty orchestra awaiting a
voice to fill the void.
N
1. Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012), 13–17.
2. Dubravka Ugresic, Karaoke Culture, Trans. David Williams (Rochester, NY: Open Letter Press,
2011), 104.
3. Ibid., 11.
4. My initial exploration of karaoke’s apparatuses for this volume is part of a larger project-in-
progress, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke in Our Time, which centralizes karaoke in a critique of
prevailing paradigms of originality and imitation in aesthetics, critical theory, and media
economies, while at the same time exploring the form’s cultures, histories, technologies, and
techniques.
5. Christine Yano, “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan,” Popular Music and Society 20, no. 2
(1996): 1–17.
6. Pico Iyer, “Daisuke Inoue,” Time (August 23, 1999). There is some dispute, however, about who
is technically the “inventor of karaoke,” since the first patent global patent holder of what we
refer to more commonly as the karaoke machine, is Roberto Del Rosario, a Filipino piano
manufacturer who created his sing-along machine using “minus-one” technology (literally
subtracting the vocals from extant musical tracks), between 1975 and 1977. See Xun Zhuo and
Frances Tarocco, Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2007). I discuss the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of the Inoue vs. del Rosario
controversy in “Empty Orchestra: The Karaoke Standard and Pop Celebrity” in Public Culture
27, no. 1 (January 2015): 85–109.
7. See Pico Iyer, “Daisuke Inoue,” Time (August 23, 1999).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University
Press, 2011).
12. Rob Drew, “‘Once More with Irony’: Karaoke and Social Class,” Leisure Studies 24, no. 4
(2005): 371–383. Drew’s article takes as its central premise the degree to which karaoke was
first shunned, then ironized by an urban, upper-middle class in the US, because of its
associations with lower-middle class and working class sociability. As Drew writes, “it becomes
clear that there are subtle contrasts in style between middle-class and working-class karaoke
performers, and that these contrasts serve as the basis for social distinction an exclusion. In
particular, middle-class participants are consistently more likely to experience karaoke within a
comic or ironic frame” (381). For more on the concept of temporal drag in queer aesthetic
practices, see Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).
13. For more on the queer aesthetics of bottoming, see Tan Hoang Nguyen, A View From the Bottom
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
 Music writer Rob Sheffield explores karaoke repertoires of mourning in his memoir, Turn
14. Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke (New York: Harper Collins, 2013).
15. See Yano, “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan;” Casey Man Kong Lum’s ethnography, In
Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America (Mahwah, New
Jersey: Lawrence Elrbaum Associates, Publishers, 1996); and Christine Bacareza Balance’s
essay, “On Drugs: The Production of Queer Filipino America through Intimate Acts of
Belonging,” Women and Performance 16, no. 2 (2006): 269–282, as well as Balance’s
forthcoming work on karaoke as an improvised technique of aesthetic training in Filipino
America.
16. Drew, “‘Once More with Irony’: Karaoke and Social Class.” With the notable exception of Rob
Sheffield’s nuanced, and rather sensitive take on karaoke’s relationship to ’80s music in Talking
to Girls About Duran Duran: One Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut (New York:
Dutton, 2010), most mainstream accounts of karaoke, particularly in the US, render the activity
as a sad substitute for broken, musical dreams, or as a drunken pastime for frat guys and
bachelorettes. Indeed, it remains a standard insult in reality vocal competitions to assess a bad
performance as “karaoke-like.”
17. D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
18. Debates about recording technologies replacing the “liveness” of musical performance have
circulated in academic discourse and the popular press since the incipience of the phonograph,
with Theodor Adorno’s extensive writings on the subject providing the most enduring
philosophical critique in pieces such as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of
Listening” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt
(New York: Continuum, 1982), 270–300. See also works that have engaged more explicitly the
legal and technological ramifications of these shifts in ways that are more open to the interplay
between recorded and live music, such as Simon Frith, “Copyright and the Music Business,”
Popular Music 7, no. 1 (1989): 57–75 and Jon Frederickson, “Technology and Music
Performance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” International Review of the Aesthetics
and Sociology of Music 20, no. 2 (1989): 193–220.
19. Both Yano and Drew allude to the hobbyist’s zeal in their ethnographies of karaoke in Japan and
the US, respectively. In the informal conversations I’ve had with KJ’s at various venues, both
queer and mixed, in the US and beyond, most KJ’s are paid entirely through tips, even if they
provide some of the karaoke equipment themselves (including additional song discs, books,
mics, and in certain instances, peripherals like laptop or iPad delivery systems). Some venues,
especially those geared to rotating participants and festive parties instead of regulars, require a
fee or tip per song (usually $1), although most rely on the participants’ preexisting knowledge of
an unspoken karaoke etiquette in which singers tip the KJ a small amount after each song as a
sign of appreciation.
20. Inoue never actually profited from his invention, since he failed to file a patent for the karaoke
machine. See Iyer, “Daisuke Inoue,” Time (August 23, 1999).
21. A Toronto alternative weekly reported, in 1995, how a local rock club strapped for cash had
“succumb[ed] to what many say is a fate worse than disco…the final frontier of live musical
insult—the karaoke machine.” Stoute, L. “Curtains for Clintons: breeding ground for new talent
switches to karaoke format” in Toronto Star, December 7, 1995, H7 (cited in Drew 2005).
22. Prior to his untimely death in early December 2013, José Esteban Muñoz was collaborating with
Nao Bustamante on an anthology and artist catalogue of her work, titled, Amateur: The Work of
 Nao Bustamante. Bustamante plans to continue this work with some of the volume’s other
collaborators. See also Munoz’s “Impossible Spaces: Kevin McCarty’s The Chameleon Club,”
GLQ 11, no. 3 (2005): 427–436, which argues that amateurism in both punk and queer
performance “signal a refusal of mastery.”
23. Yano, “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan,” 2–3.
24. See, for example, Wayne Koestenbaum’s enduring work on The Queen’s Throat: Opera,
Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993).
25. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, (1998), 34. Miller writes, “Like old bits
of rubbish transfigured by the significance they acquire from having been the implements of an
ancient rite, the looks and tones before without rhyme or reason are now necessitated as the
requisite mediations—or simply the inevitable consequences—of a practice as central to the
piano bar as any rite can have been to an antique cult. And though this practice consists of
nothing more than putting the words of songs into certain vocal italics, the metaphoric force of
the latter is so radical that, whether being putatively sung in the Middle Ages or the South
Pacific, by a courting cowboy or a cloistered nun, every lyric now becomes a figure for present-
day metropolitan homosexuality, which no lyric has ever cared, or dared, literally to mention.”
26. Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press,
1999).
27. Yano, “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan,” 3.
28. This signature phrase of Gestalt psychology is often mistranslated as “The whole is greater than
the sum of the parts,” which redirects its emphasis on the totality that produces a more profound
coherence, rather than simply distinguishing between a whole as something other than its
constitutive elements. See Allen R. Barlow, “Gestalt-Antecedent Influence or Historical
Accident,” The Gestalt Journal 4, no. 2 (1981).
29. Deborah Wong, “I Want the Microphone: Mass Mediation and Agency in Asian American
Popular Music,” The Drama Review 38, no. 2 (1994): 152–167.
30. For the Chinese American version of this story, see Lum, In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the
Construction of Identity in Chinese America.
31. In Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, Rob Sheffield offers one compelling answer for why
’80s music would be within karaoke’s wheelhouse: “There’s something inherently karaoke-like
about the ’80s musical style—the overproduced drums, the beer-commercial sax solos, the
keytars, the leather-lung vocal melodrama. Eighties songs do not belong to the singer…They
don’t sound like a person expressing a feeling—they sound like a gigantic sound machine
blowing up this feeling to self-parodic heights” (135).
32. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Peter Ackroyd (London and New York: Penguin
Books, 1985), 23.
33. Ibid., 22.
34. Ibid., 24.
35. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Echo of the Subject,” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 139–207.
36. J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447.
37. Ibid., 444.
38. Ibid., 444.
 Renee Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore:
39. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
40. See Berlant, Desire/Love, (2012).
41. Here I am not only singing along, karaoke-style, with the Canadian pop wunderkind, Carly Rae
Jepsen, but also with the joyful (and adulterous) sentiments of Peter Coviello’s essay, “Call Me
Morbid,” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 4 (2011): 381–393.
R
Adorno, Theodor. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In The
Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 270–300. New
York: Continuum, 1982.
Balance, Christine Bacareza. “On Drugs: The Production of Queer Filipino America through Intimate
Acts of Belonging.” Women and Performance 16, no. 2 (2006): 269–282.
Barlow, Allen R. “Gestalt-Antecedent Influence or Historical Accident.” The Gestalt Journal 4, no. 2
(1981).
Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012.
Coviello, Peter. “Call Me Morbid.” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 4 (2011): 381–393.
Delany, Samuel. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press,
1999.
Drew, Rob. “‘Once More with Irony’: Karaoke and Social Class.” Leisure Studies 24, no. 4 (2005):
371–383.
Frederickson, Jon. “Technology and Music Performance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 20, no. 2 (1989): 193–220.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Historie. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010.
Frith, Simon. “Copyright and the Music Business.” Popular Music 7 no. 1 (1989): 57–75.
Girard, Renee. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Iyer, Pico. “Daisuke Inoue.” Time, August 23, 1999.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054546,00.html.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire. New
York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “The Echo of the Subject.” In Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy,
Politics, Edited by Christopher Fynsk, 139–207. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Lum, Casey Man Kong. In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese
America. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Elrbaum Associates, Publishers, 1996.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977): 439–447.
Miller, D. A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Impossible Spaces: Kevin McCarty’s The Chameleon Club.” GLQ 11, no. 3
(2005): 427–436.
Nguyen, Tan Hoang. A View From the Bottom. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Sheffield, Rob. Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Man’s Quest for True Love and a Cooler
Haircut. New York: Dutton, 2010.
Sheffield, Rob. Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke. New York: Harper
Collins, 2013.
Tongson, Karen. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: New York University Press,
2011.
Tongson, Karen. “Empty Orchestra: The Karaoke Standard and Pop Celebrity.” Public Culture 27,
no. 1 (2015): 85–109.
Ugresic, Dubravka. Karaoke Culture, Translated by David Williams. Rochester, NY: Open Letter
Press, 2011.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Edited by Peter Ackroyd. London and New York:
Penguin Books, 1985.
Wong, Deborah. “I Want the Microphone: Mass Mediation and Agency in Asian American Popular
Music.” The Drama Review 38, no. 2 (1994): 152–167.
Yano, Christine. “The Floating World of Karaoke in Japan.” Popular Music and Society 20, no. 2
(1996): 1–17.
Zhuo, Xun, and Frances Tarocco. Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 2007.
 PA RT I I I

VO I C E S A N D S O U N D S
 CHAPTER 12

FREE AS A BIRD? THINKING

WITH THE GRAIN OF MESHELL
N D E G E O C E L L O ’ S B U T C H VO I C E
 TAVI A NYON G’ O

T influential success of Saidiya Hartman’s critical study Scenes of

Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (1997) has led to two subsequent trajectories in critical thought.1
One pathway, Afro-pessimism, has followed up on Hartman’s rigorous
critique of the liberal humanist rhetoric of abolition, and has emphasized
her claim, at one point in her argument, that emancipation was a “non-
event.” Hartman, Scenes, p. 116 The other path, which I personally have
favored, has tended to emphasize Hartman’s subsequent characterization of
her method as one of “critical fabulation,” a method on display in her
subsequent work Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route (2008) and even more so in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2018).2 Afro-pessimism sees the
social death of slavery as the event horizon of all modern Blackness; where
critical fabulation looks to ways of telling that story differently. Part of this
debate, to which I can only briefly gesture here, concerns the status of
Black performance. Is Black performance proof that the dehumanization of
slavery and its afterlives did not succeed? Or does such a triumphalist
reading of performance fall prey to the ruse of liberal humanism?
If there is a musical soundtrack to this critical debate, it must include the
music of Meshell Ndegeocello (born Michelle Lynn Johnson), whose 1993
debut album title, Plantation Lullabies, anticipates so powerfully the
themes and spirit of Hartman’s study. In particular, it seemed to resonate
with some of the queer consequences of Hartman’s rigorous genealogy of
the “self-made” Black subject, self-making being a popular if paradoxical
American ideal that we inherit from the nineteenth century and from self-
styled “self-made” men like the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass,
whose Autobiography Hartman critiqued in the famous opening pages of
Scenes, where she declined to repeat an oft-retold story in Douglass’
narrative in which he witnesses his aunt Hester’s beating. Although
Douglass tells the story to inculcate in his readers a sense of the horrors of
slavery, Hartman redacts the story, which she points out has been repeated
ad nauseam in subsequent feminist and Black literary studies. She intimates
that this repetition only extracts surplus enjoyment from the abject violence
done to enslaved Black women. She instead asks after the role of gendered
terror and the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing fiction of Douglass’ self-
making manhood.3 Hartman re-directed historical and critical attention
away from the exceptional acts like Aunt Hester’s beating to the quotidian
episodes of terror and subjection under slavery and in its afterlives.
While a musical album rather than a critical study, Meshell
Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies was also a fiery nineties Black feminist
jeremiad, rousing Clinton-era America from any complacency regarding the
unresolved legacy of chattel slavery and white supremacy. Historicizing the
book and the album alongside each other could prove instructive. Both took
a tradition established in the 1960s and 70s—one historiographic (the new
social history), the other musical (funk/soul)—and reassessed its utility for
Black people as we approached the new millennium. Both the book and
album, in their distinctive ways, rejected the prevailing tropes through
which a long-suffering and sentimental image of Blackness was reproduced
in American political culture, and sharply queried the heroic image of
resistant Black masculinity extolled everywhere from nineteenth century
rebel slaves like Douglass and Nat Turner to nineties hip-hop icons like
Tupac and Biggie. Both were deeply infused with a melancholic
relationship to a past that was not really past. And both sought, in their
respective domains, to spell out what the consequence of this past was for
contemporary Black subjects, not only in relation to history, but in direct
and existential relationship to ourselves.
This chapter is in part an attempt to provide retroactive musical
justification for my intuitive leap between Hartman’s nineties Black
feminism and Ndegeocello’s. How did Ndegeocello’s “butch throat,” to use
a resonant phrase, help narrate the gendered dimensions of what Hartman
called “the burdened individuality of freedom”?4 This tentative
juxtaposition of scholarly argument and musical counterpoint opens out into
a broader question that the new popular music studies works so assiduously
to address. That broader question takes a cue from Francesca Royster’s
work on “eccentric acts” in post-soul America: Black musical performers
whose embodiment of gender, race, and sexuality diverged from the most
visible and recognizable frames for representing Black people.5 My interest
in Ndegeocello follows in the wake of Royster’s investigations of post-soul
eccentricity and, in particular, asks what happens when we bring Royster’s
interpretive method forward into the 1990s and the “neo-soul” era. Who
were the outliers and eccentrics of the era of neo-soul and gangsta rap?
What can we learn from their complex and still-evolving musical legacy?
Beginning with her self-given, Afrocentric and ghettocentric name, and
her singularly butch musical persona, Meshell Ndegeocello seems an
excellent subject for such a discussion. And just as Scenes of Subjection
tethered gendered self-making to its violent and traumatic histories, much
of Ndegeocello’s music can be read as a deep interrogation of American
ideals of freedom. Tracking the appearance of the word “free” and its
variants across the lyrics for songs from her twelve studio albums to date
reveals a songwriter obsessed with precisely this paradoxical experience of
burdened, deferred, idealized, and travestied freedom. The female
masculinity she so clearly exhibited on stage and on record indicated less an
identification with than an interrogation of the lures and deceptions of
individualistic masculinity, at a moment when ghettocentric rap was loudly
being extolled as “the CNN of the ghetto.”6 On “I’m Diggin You Like An
Old Soul Record,” off her 1993 debut, the singer recalls the sixties as a
moment when “freedom was at hand and you could just taste it.” By her
second album in 1996, freedom was less historical and collective than it
was otherworldly and personal. “Free my heart so my soul may fly,” the
lyric voice pleas on the song “Ecclessiastes”: “free my mind of my worldly
wants and desires.” On 1999’s Bitter, freedom obtains a precisely vagrant
sense when the song’s ecstatic speaker seeks a spiritual bliss in relation to
which “freedom is this mockery.”
But it is on 2002’s Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape that
Ndegeocello’s American jeremiad is voiced with fullest throat. On the
incendiary opening track “Dead Nigga Blvd, Pt 1” she repeatedly and
rhetorically asks her listener “So tell me are you free?” Although a
commercially released album, naming Cookie a “mixtape” indicated
Ndegeocello’s intention to reach the streets with a direct message
(especially after being unfairly criticized for the insufficient Blackness of
the album, Bitter, that had preceded it). And indeed “Dead Nigga Blvd”
opens with her rapping over a mournful, loping beat. At the very moment
when the term “post-Black” was being circulated, Ndegeocello sarcastically
tore into this post-millennial amnesia of the past, and lyrically indicted both
the pursuit of civic belonging—as represented by streets in Black
neighborhoods named after famous “dead niggas” such as Martin Luther
King, Jr.—and the pursuit of “worldly wants and desires” championed in
ostensibly rebellious gangsta rap. She was amongst the most eloquent
public critics of what Black theorist Cedric Robinson termed “racial
capitalism”: his name for the intertwining of the afterlives of slavery with
the ongoing and rapacious commodification and destructive consumption of
the lifeworld.7 But while she sampled Angela Davis and other Black radical
voices on Cookie, the true paradox of Ndegeocello’s voice lay in how
insistently she tethered these political questions to the intimate sphere and
the ongoing pursuit of “sexual healing.” In this sense, the freedom she
yearns after is to be distinguished from the liberty that ostensibly founds the
American social contract. Rather than the pursuit of life, liberty, and
happiness on normative terms, she urges Black people “to redefine what it
means to be free.”
There is much to be said about Ndegeocello’s voice, which is a
shapeshifting and heterotopic instrument that raps, sings, and speaks across
registers in utter defiance of gender and racial expectation, and in deep
conversation with her bass-playing, song-writing, and arranging. Although
Ndegeocello can and does rap, her vocal technique is often closer to a sped-
up version of spoken word poetry. Like another eccentric vocalist of that
era, Ya Kid K, Ndegeocello moved fluidly between rapping, speaking, and
singing, often on the same song, creating musical duets with her own voice.
She was also that relative rarity of the time, the bassist as bandleader who
also sang lead vocals, so she and her band were not easily photographed or
videotaped according to the visual conventions established for either rock
or hip hop. I don’t think this apparently mundane fact can be overstated:
Meshell Ndegeocello was simply hard to see, even when you were staring
right at her. Her well-known aversion to flash photography in concert may
lead us to personalize this phenomenon. But it wasn’t just some aversion to
the audience or the spotlight so much as the fact that the way she actually
made music was so outside gendered and racialized expectations, especially
in the heyday of MTV, that it evades popular memory to this day.
From Plantation Lullabies on, her voice was in antagonistic cooperation
with the male braggadacio and wordplay that dominated the airwaves in
those years. It did not refuse that voice, but placed it within an emotional
matrix that was at once broader and deeper, refusing the generational divide
in the Black community even as she gave voice to it. She was also one of
the sharpest musical skeptics of the cult of male personality to which music,
literature, and popular culture repeatedly succumbs. Unlike fellow neo-soul
singer D’Angelo, Ndegeocello would never release an album called Black
Messiah, even as she was equally obsessed with rooting around in the muck
of patriarchal religion, and especially in the prophetic form of the jeremiad.
Instead of Black Messiah, she released an album entitled The World Has
Made Me the Man Of My Dreams revealing how deeply manhood was both
a fantasy and a masquerade.
Another way of putting these matters is to highlight how Ndegeocello
inhabited the freewheeling male ethos of the wandering troubadour in a
radically subversive way. To hear this, we need to return to the curious
puzzle of her self-chosen name, with its idiosyncratic and shapeshifting
textual form. What does it mean, in racial and gendered terms, for
Ndegeocello to have claimed that her name meant “free as a bird”? Under
German law, according to one of its nineteenth-century historians, Jacob
Grimm, the term vogelfrei acquired a contradictory but terrifying meaning.
To be declared “free as the birds in the air and the beasts in the forest and
the fish in the water,” according to the sixteenth-century Bamberger penal
code, was to be stripped of all civil rights and protection. In this legal
verdict, freedom and banishment fused into one. The person thus banished
was denied the right to dwell within the community, and was to be deprived
even of civil burial. The body upon death was to be left permissus avibus:
free for the birds. Another nineteenth-century German scholar, Karl Marx,
employed this legal sense of vogelfrei to underscore the violent advent of
racial capitalism, which could bring a mobile and unattached working class
into being only by stripping the peasantry of customary feudal rights and
usages, rendering them a vagrant population that was always already
criminalized before the law. The notorious “freedom to starve” that Marx
enumerated as being among the freedoms that bourgeois revolutions
granted to emancipated workers draws its irony from this particularly bitter
sense of vogelfrei. It is certainly a freedom that emancipated slaves
encountered in the postbellum United States, as Hartman details in Scenes
of Subjection.
One need not know this exact Germanic provenance for the phrase “free
as a bird” to sense how it might shape the Berlin-born Michelle Lynn
Johnson’s musical avatar. In all the early press accompanying the release of
her 1993 debut album, Plantation Lullabies, it was explained to the public
that her self-chosen last name, Ndegeocello, meant “free as a bird” in
Kiswahili. I am not exactly fluent in Kiswahili, but it is the lingua franca of
Kenya, where I spent much of my childhood, and even as a teenager I knew
that Ndegeocello wasn’t Swahili for “free as a bird.” But I also knew that it
meant something for Ndegeocello to be able to claim an unverifiably
African origin for her name. Anyone who is claimed by Africa, which is
everyone, can claim Africa. Born in Germany to Black American jazz-
playing parents, “Meshell Ndegeocello” took a name that serves to negate
the “natal alienation” that is the living legacy of slavery. Even if the fact of
her German birth may only be a convenient coincidence for my present
purposes, the resonance between her African confabulation ndegeocello and
Grimm’s verdict of vogelfrei is too rich not to dwell upon. Meshell
Ndegeocello sounds a distinctively Black diasporic cadence out of the
nondescript “Christian” name, Michelle Lynn Johnson, rejecting
assimilation into a system of values from which Ndegeocello herself had
been structurally occluded. It indicates the felt degree to which she was, in a
sense, born a vagrant, born vogelfrei in a nation to whom her Blackness
would only ever be recognizable as the visible stamp of the stranger. Her
frequent claim, so common among musicians, that she is only truly at home
when playing her music, bespeaks this deep and radically counter-cultural
fugitivity, but articulated from a queer feminist perspective that, as we shall
see, is deeply skeptical of male privilege and male prerogative (even as she
vocally and corporeally invests in that manhood).
The faux African etymology of the name Ndegeocello, we can speculate,
serves less as a misdirection or tall tale and more as what Kara Keeling has
called “the witch’s flight.”8 The witch’s flight is Keeling’s Deleuzean
troping of a Black feminine presence in the colonial modern that makes its
presence known not as signature but as diagram. To sign one’s name
vogelfrei is to stamp one’s civic presence with vagrant designs. It is to point
to, without naming, the real movement that is the revolution in our times.
To be free as a bird, to sing deep as a cello, is to plumb a bassline that
emerged out of Washington DC gogo, to which Ndegeocello belonged in
the late 1980s, and goes on to traverse ever expanding musical territory.
The witch’s flight, as I will try to show, diagrams masculinity in Keeling’s
dark Deleuzeanism: giving us the outline, shape, and force of male
prerogative while divesting it of all phallogocentricity.
Two examples from Ndegeocello’s second album, Peace Beyond
Passion, and one from her 1996 album, which revisits the music of that
earlier era, can help illustrate this argument. In the post-millennial era of
Lady Gaga singing “Born This Way,” Ndegeocello’s 1990s version of a
queer anthem, “Leviticus: Faggot” can come as a bit of a shock. “Leviticus:
Faggot” is not a song about a gay man coming to express his inner truth, but
rather opens with a welter of voices directed at this man, or really child;
voices that are, variously, accusatory, threatening, supplicating and
judgmental. In pop terms, one cannot sing along to “Leviticus: Faggot” in
the manner of Lady Gaga’s anthem “Born This Way” (2011) or, well before
her, Carl Bean’s “I Was Born This Way” (1977). It is a song that echoes,
and disidentifies with, the harsh patriarchal and misogynist voices in hip-
hop that were being heavily promoted in that era. But as a butch throat
singing to, for, and about the Black community, it did not seek to demonize
Black men as exceptionally homophobic. Rather it depicted the violence of
gender norms as they get imposed upon and reproduced within the Black
family by patriarchal religion expressed and endorsed by men and women.
It is a song that identifies gender, rather than the Black family, as the true
“tangle of pathology,” and thus resonates with other Black queer work of
this period such as Marlon Riggs’s important documentary, Tongues Untied.
While exemplifying a certain Afrocentric mode of female masculinity,
Ndegeocello constantly complicated her relationship to this masculinity
through polyvocal songs that highlighted what I call the queer drama of
Black life. By locating queerness in the collective dynamics of Black life,
rather than in individual identities, I seek to address the critique of identity
politics in Goldin-Perschbacher’s analysis of Ndegeocello’s ongoing
metamorphosis.9 Goldin-Perschbacher is persuasive in noting how
reluctantly Ndegeocello has assimilated her voice to any framework, even
those as capacious as “female masculinity” or “the butch throat.” Instead of
assimilating her musical and vocal acumen to a pregiven identity, what we
find here instead is a queerness in relation to the angular sociality of Black
life and Black sound. Rather than a stable and knowable self, she offers up
the ineffable for commercial consumption on her albums and in live
performance.
“Mary Magdalene,” also off Peace Beyond Passion, is an excellent
example, insofar as it initially sounds like a seductive slow jam that would
fit any “quiet storm” format like a glove. She croons lyrics like “tell me I’m
the only one” and talks about “jumping the broom,” but as the song
progresses it becomes increasingly obvious that the lyric voice of the song
is that of a deluded john convinced that his true love is all that will be
required to rescue his “harlot” from her life of sin. Sequenced on the album
to follow the violent patriarch of “Leviticus: Faggot,” the predatory control
freak of “Mary Magdalene” takes us further along the stations of the cross
of toxic masculinity. Rather than championing visible out and proud queer
identities, Peace Beyond Passion dives into the wreck of Black
relationality, at the risk of ruining the easy-listening myth of Black-on-
Black love, certainly. But also in hopes of articulating an aesthetics of
redress, a peace beyond passion that conceptualizes freedom as a constant
inner and outer struggle, freedom as a horizon, rather than as a property,
right, or possession.
Ndegeocello’s conception of freedom even extends to relinquishing her
own voice; such as on 2005’s Meshell Ndegeocello presents The Spirit
Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel, which largely substituted the vocals of
chanteuses like Cassandra Wilson and Lalah Hathaway for her own.
Freedom here arrives not in articulating the butch throat as something
audible and discernible, but in the “ghost note” or extended silence through
which other voices can emerge and resonate. This move is especially
productive for thinking through her most recent and surprising move toward
the cover, as she has now released two albums of cover music. It is here that
we can encounter the mercurial dynamics of the voice as it meets and
brushes up against the conventions of the pop industry.
We also see polyvocality and narrative restraint, or what Christina
Sharpe calls Black “redaction,” in Ndegeocello’s recent cover of TLC’s
smash hit “Waterfalls” from 1994’s CrazySexyCool.10 Co-written by the
late, great Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and widely hailed as the first number one
single to directly address the HIV/AIDS epidemic, “Waterfalls” is halfway
between a pop song and an afterschool special. In her version, Ndegeocello
rearranges this R&B smash with country stylings, and radically redacts
Lopes’s morality tale about a drug-dealing, pistol-packing gangsta and his
god-fearing mother. In part, Ndegeocello can count on her audience
knowing the original lyrics by heart, so they run like a series of ghost notes
over her own restrained lyric. Exhibiting her songwriting penchant for first-
person voices, Ndegeocello turns the opening verse into a dialogue between
mother and son, excising the third person repertorial lines of the original
like “another body laying cold in the gutter” as unnecessarily sensational.
After the second verse, she actually withholds the expected singalong
chorus for a long cosmic wail of the guitar, underscoring both the deep
lament and spiritual ecstasy that were always latent in the song.
If the small dust-up over Ndegeocello’s dig at Bruno Mars’ performance
at the 2018 Grammies tells us anything, it is that her conception of musical
freedom is above all freedom from the constraints of the music industry and
in particular freedom from its taste hierarchies that so often operate
according to standards of musical virtuosity that constrain eccentric
outsiders like herself. After Mars won six Grammies in both pop and R&B
categories, Ndegeocello told Billboard magazine that, in her estimation:
What he’s doing is karaoke, basically. With “Finesse,” in particular, I think he was simply
copying Bell Biv DeVoe. I think he was copying Babyface. And definitely there were some
elements of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis back when they worked with Human League. I feel
like there’s just all these threads running through there but not in a genuine way.11

Pursuing the point, Ndegeocello argued that:

It’s really a matter of musicality and being able to manipulate the tropes in a way that makes
it feel personal. It can’t just be a pastiche, where you’re copying or mimicking an old sound
or just doing karaoke. There has to be a form of sincerity.
Although Ndegeocello later apologized to both Mars and karaoke on her
Instagram— “long live karaoke” she wrote—her point had been made. It is
certainly ironic that she should be underscoring this point through releasing
an album of covers of her own. But, as I’ve shown, her aesthetic strategies
of redaction and polyvocality reveal that her approach to songs like
“Waterfall” are anything but singalong. Musical “sincerity” for Ndegeocello
is to be sharply distinguished from “pastiche” insofar as she continues to
adhere, even in our postmodernist times, to the modernist injunction to
“make it new.” In a way, Scenes of Subjection also took quiet exception
from much of the postmodernism that preceded it, even as it respectfully
engaged with many postmodern thinkers. Amidst exuberant celebrations of
post-racialism and the “browning” of America, marked in that era above all
by the embrace among white teenage fan boys of gangsta rap—a
quintessentially postmodern phenomenon—both Ndegeocello and Hartman
kept insisting on the drag of history.
N
1. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
2. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:
Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York and London: Norton, 2019). On Afro-
pessimism, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.
Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
3. I am indebted here to the argument of Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, “The World Has Made Me
the Man of My Dreams: MeShell Ndegeocello and the ‘problem’ of Black female masculinity.”
Popular Music 32, no 3 (2013): 471–496. Also see Nghana Lewis, “‘You Sell Your Soul like
You Sell a Piece of Ass’: Rhythms of Black Female Sexuality and Subjectivity in MeShell
Ndegeocello’s ‘Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape,’” Black Music Research Journal 26, no.
1 (2006): 111–130; and Matt Richardson, “Make Me Wanna Holler: Meshell Ndegeocello,
Black Queer Aesthetics, and Feminist Critiques,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 18, no. 3 (2014):
237–251.
4. Roundtable on “The Butch Throat” held at EMP MoPop Conference April 27, 2018, participants
Taylor Black, E Glasberg, Sarah Kessler, and Mairead Sullivan.
5. Francesca T. Royster, Sounding like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul
Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).
6. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 20th Anniversary (Durham: Duke University Press,
2019).
7. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill,
N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
8. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common
Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
9. Goldin-Perschbacher, “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams.”
10. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 117.
11. Ron Hart, “Meshell Ndegeocello Talks Revisiting R&B Gems for Covers Album & Why Bruno
Mars Is ‘Karaoke’,” Billboard (March 6, 2018),
https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8232751/meshell-ndegeocello-ventriloquism.
B
Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana. “The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams: MeShell
Ndegeocello and the ‘Problem’ of Black Female Masculinity.” Popular Music 32, no 3 (2013):
471–496.
Hart, Ron. “Meshell Ndegeocello Talks Revisiting R&B Gems for Covers Album & Why Bruno
Mars Is ‘Karaoke’.” Billboard (March 6, 2018).
https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8232751/meshell-ndegeocello-ventriloquism.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2007.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
New York and London: Norton, 2019.
Lewis, Nghana. “‘You Sell Your Soul like You Sell a Piece of Ass’: Rhythms of Black Female
Sexuality and Subjectivity in MeShell Ndegeocello’s ‘Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape’.”
Black Music Research Journal 26, no. 1 (2006): 111–130.
Richardson, Matt. “Make Me Wanna Holler: Meshell Ndegeocello, Black Queer Aesthetics, and
Feminist Critiques.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 18, no. 3 (2014): 237–251.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Royster, Francesca T. Sounding like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
 CHAPTER 13

T R A N S G E N D E R PA S S I N G
G U I D E S A N D T H E VO C A L
PERFORMANCE OF GENDER
AND SEXUALITY
S T E P HAN P E NN I NGTON
 I

T scene has been repeated over and over in film and television. A man
approaches a beautiful woman. He makes a pass, and she responds with an
impossibly deep voice, revealing the “truth” that she is “really” a man.
Hilarity ensues. At a time when the relationship between bodies and
identities is ever more complex, the voice is clung to as the locus of
essential, non-alterable gender “truth.” The eyes may deceive, but the voice
never lies.
Despite this fantasy being reinforced by scenes repeated in so many
variations from Mrs. Doubtfire to American Dad, transgender people can,
and do, change their voices. Transgender people and voice therapists and
linguists working with transgender vocality have spent considerable time
and effort studying and codifying exactly how gender is performed vocally
in order to help achieve congruency between gender identity and vocal
presentation. The collected wisdom passed down through tips and passing
guides from trans person to trans person, or the scientific data and vocal
coaching published in speech pathologist and voice training literature, can
help the trans person pass aurally as well as visually.1 Vocal passing can
help alleviate gender dysphoria and lessen a transgender person’s chances
of encountering transphobic violence, but it also puts the lie to the
convenient fiction that while gender might be a social construct, sex,
especially as represented by the voice, is biological and unalterable. Vocal
passing guides illuminate the way in which all people, transgender or
cisgender, perform gender through the voice.2
What use are transgender passing guides, which focus on speech and
gesture, for those who study music? It would be easy to argue that speech
and singing have no connection and one should not use discussion of
gendered speech when looking at gendered singing. But Andrea James and
Calpernia Addams, co-creators of a popular line of passing guides for trans
women, including Finding Your Female Voice, make explicit connections
between speech and music. The DVD Finding Your Female Voice works to
ensure that trans women wishing to pass have strategies they can use to find
a voice that society will read as female. James and Addams link the
strategies they use to train an effectively gendered speaking voice to the
lessons used to train singing voices. James notes in the introduction to the
vocal feminization program, “I have noticed that musical ability seems to
make a positive difference in the ability to achieve a passable voice.…If
you can’t read music or play an instrument, or if you couldn’t carry a tune
with a handle on it, your job is going to be a bit tougher.”3 The booklet has
an entire section called “Pitch: Musical and scientific expressions”
complete with staff notation and instructions on the importance of knowing
where one’s passagio is and how to find it.4 If this connection between
singing and speaking when articulated by transgender people is not
convincing, connections between the two have also been noted by cisgender
scholars. Linguistics and Literature Professor Yukiko S. Jolley points out
that “songs and normal speech are on the same continuum of vocally-
produced human sounds. Both have rhythmic and melodic content, and
represent forms of communication in a linguistic sense” and “indeed it may
be an impossible task to describe the point at which the ‘speech’ of a given
language ends and the ‘song’ categorization begins.”5 Additionally, musical
traditions such as the melodic speech singing of the diseuse Yvette Guilbert,
Vaudevillian Sophie Tucker, or caberettist Claire Waldoff on one hand or
the melodic speaking of actors such as Ernst von Possart, Julia Marlowe,
and Sarah Bernhardt on the other, illustrate the fluid nature of any
distinctions between the two vocal practices.6 As so many trans people use
music to gain insight into crafting a gendered voice, and considering that
speech and voice form a continuum rather than a binary, it makes sense to
reverse the process and ask what passing guides can tell scholars about
musical performances, especially as these passing guides give insight into
not only speech, but also vocabulary and gesture, which can be used when
looking at lyrics as well as the singer’s performing body.
It is logical that Andrea James would refer to classical singing technique
when trying to help people find their female voice as the connection
between vocal gender essentialism and classical singing is very strong.
Singing itself has long been feminized, as evidenced by the 1895 Musical
Times article, “The Strong Man in Music,” which tries to counter “the
commonest of all Philistine objections to the musical profession [which] is
that it tends to effeminacy” by cataloging how athletic and manly various
male singers are.7 The strong association between singing and femininity
carries over into the spoken voice. As Melinda Green notes in her passing
guide for trans women, “Men tend to speak at a single pitch while women
tend to make frequent pitch changes to their speech to the point that they
almost seem to be singing.”8 Indeed, Melanie Anne’s passing guide goes
even further, stating “that in every group of several words a woman will
string together in a sentence, usually no two are spoken at the same pitch.
This is what makes women’s voices sound so ‘sing song.’ In fact, they ARE
singing!”9 However, it is not just that women are expected to speak more
musically than men that connects passing guides and musicology, but also
the way singers themselves are often trained.
Classical singing training often varies by gender, and this differential
training reinforces the societal imagination that men and women have
completely different voices and are profoundly different from each other.
Alfred Blatter explains this difference in classical vocal training, writing
“One of the characteristics that separates the singing approaches of the
trained female singer from the trained male singer is in the use of the chest
voice. The male singer will produce most or all of his vocal sound by using
this chest voice, while the trained female singer uses her chest voice for
only about the lower third to fifth of her range.”10 In contrast to male
singers, Blatter adds that “in trained female singers, this ‘head register’ or
‘light mechanism’ is used for most of the range of the singer,” whereas
men’s head register is often referred to as “falsetto,” reinforcing the idea
that it is an unnatural place for men to place their voices.11 That men and
women would operate in completely different registers is naturalized and
even makes its way into everyday speech habits. The history of singing is
complicit in the maintenance of gender vocal essentialism as evidenced by
the regular evocation of singing as a means to learn how to produce a
“proper” female voice in passing guides for trans women and the regular
warning to trans men that transition will mean never being able to sing
again. However, as the same transgender passing guides show us, such
seemingly essential things as the gendered sound of one’s voice are learned
and in reality are performed by everyone. Linguists Pierrehumbert, Bent,
Munson, and Bailey note, “Young children adopt sex-specific speech traits
even before sex-related anatomical differences begin to appear, and the sex
of children as young as four years old can be accurately identified from
speech. Such differences are clearly learned through imitation of adult
models.”12 Which is to say that while cisgender, heterosexual vocal gender
performance is taught and naturalized early, it is no less a performance.
Although everyone learns how to perform gender for their specific
cultural location (though they certainly can choose not to), it tends to be
literature created by, for, and about transsexuals that theorizes exactly how
those performances work in a practical way. Cataloging the practical
theoretical workings of gendered performance offers an invaluable set of
basic tools for the analyst and interpreter of performance.13 Hegemony
maintains its domination by making its workings invisible, and transgender
passing guides, an important source of experiential knowledge, expose the
hegemony’s naturalized gender presentations as the fiction that they are.
This knowledge is important, but unknown or overlooked by scholars, and
when known, the insight into the performance of gender articulated by
transgender people is rarely turned back onto cisgender people. This chapter
rectifies this lack by turning transgender experiential knowledge back onto
cisgender performance. Therefore, while this chapter is rooted in
transgender-based insight into gendered vocalisms, I purposefully avoid
using transgender-identified people as examples. This is because people on
the transgender spectrum are often used as the representation of the
performed nature or constructedness of gender, which only serves to
delegitimize their gendered identities while simultaneously rendering
invisible and naturalizing the gender construction of cisgender people. To
counter this pattern, this chapter places the gender performances of
cissexuals (both homo and hetero) under the microscope using the
parameters illuminated by transsexuals, rather than the other way around.14
The chapter is in two halves. In the first theoretical section I catalog the
specific parameters that construct the Western gendered voice, drawing
from transgender passing guides and speech research in order to provide
tools for the analysis of gendered voices and gestures in musical
performances. In the second section I use these tools by drawing on musical
examples spanning various times and genres. There, I start by exploring
how cisgender people use vocal gender performance to pass as their
“opposite” gender through Ella Shields’s “Burlington Bertie from Bow”
(1934) and The Honeytraps’ “Wishing” (2006), continue by exploring how
cisgender queer people use vocal gender performance to signal
homosexuality through Byrd E. Bath’s “I’m So Wet” (ca. 1965) and Joan
Jett’s “Bad Reputation” (1981), and finally, explore how cisgender
heterosexual people use vocal gender performance to pass as cisgender
heterosexual people through Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty’s duet, “I
Still Believe in Waltzes” (1981).
 P 1: E V G
P

Transgender passing guides, sociolinguistics, theater and voice instructors,

and speech language pathologists focus on numerous elements of vocal
gender performance. In this section I address ten commonly recognized
categories of the gendered ways in which we speak or in which our speech
is contextualized: Pitch, Resonance and Formants, Intonation, Timbre,
Articulation, Emphasis, Volume/Intensity, Flow, Language Usage, and Non-
Verbal Communication. Table 13.1 summarizes these gendered elements.
This section and the accompanying table distill a large and diverse body of
literature as well as my personal experience in music, theater, and being
transgendered, and are organized in the way I found most useful for projects
focusing on musical vocal performance. Throughout the subsequent
analysis I often bring up gendered musical elements such as speaking
versus singing or distortion versus ornamentation. I want to note that while
I have reproduced the division of these elements into male- and female-
coded binary categories, I do not subscribe to the notion that sex or gender
is binary. I recognize the flexibility and messiness of the reality of vocal
gender production, and gender in general, and how “people acquire (and
sometimes reject) the vocal habits and characteristics of the family, culture,
peer group, region and environment from which they emerge.”15 However,
I also recognize how society itself tends to be rigid, binaristic, and
simplistic regarding gender and the punishments it doles out for deviation.
The result, as Leigh Wilson Smiley writes, is that “the voice reflects
socially accepted, gender-based stereotypes and mirrors cultural
expectations of what men and women ‘should’ sound like.”16 This section
demonstrates how men and women are “supposed” to sound in order to
facilitate the interpretation of the many permutations of those sounds in
practice. It is descriptive of norms, not prescriptive or supportive of them.
This disclaimer is important to keep in mind as I describe hegemonic
norms, such as cursing being male-coded or upward inflections being
female-coded.
Table 13.1 Ten Elements of Vocal Gender Performance

Vocal Element Male-Coded Female-Coded

Pitch -Singing: 49Hz -Singing: 174Hz (F3)-1244+Hz (Eb6).
Gender Neutral: (G1)-740+Hz (F#5).
155Hz -Spoken: 65Hz -Spoken: 128Hz (C3)-523Hz (C5).
(D#3)-180Hz(F#3) (C2)-262Hz (C4).
-Average: 120Hz -Average: 220Hz (A3)+/-20Hz.
(B2)+/-20Hz.
Resonance & -Emphasizes chest -Emphasizes head resonance.
Formats resonance.
-Vowels trend -Vowels trend forwards and up on the IPA
rearwards and lower triangle (anterior and superior). Smiling
on the IPA triangle. more, forward and higher tongue
(posterior & inferior) placement, and more open mouth
increases formants.
Intonation -Flat, monotone, with -Expressive, melodic, upward inflections.
downward inflections.
-Narrow dynamic -Wide dynamic range used.
range used.
Timbre -Raspy (hard glottal -Breathy (partially open glottis).
fry).
Articulation -Poor articulation. -Standard and precise articulation.
-Harsh or dull -Soft or light articulatory attacks.
articulatory attacks
Emphasis -Uses increased -Uses pitch variance for emphasis.
volume for emphasis.
-Stresses the whole -Stresses vowels.
word.
Volume -Speaks more loudly. -Speaks more softly.
Flow -Speaks quickly, but -Takes a longer time to finish sentences
with little room for and includes more pauses in the middle of
other people to sentences.
interrupt. Pauses at
end of sentences.
-Staccato, with short -Legato, with elongated vowels (to
vowels. accommodate pitch inflection).
Language Usage -State. -Request.
-Does not use many -Uses a richer vocabulary and a wide
words or an extensive range of expressive words.
vocabulary.
-Lack of expressive -Uses modals, tag questions, qualifiers,
words. compound polite requests.
Vocal Element Male-Coded Female-Coded
-Increased use of
slang and swear
words.
-Poor grammar. -Proper grammar.
-Interrupts and -Does things to encourage group
dominates participation in conversations.
conversations.
-Detail and fact -Feeling and consensus oriented.
oriented.
-Aggressive and direct -Passive and indirect in speech.
in speech.
Non-Verbal -Takes up space. -Takes up a smaller amount of space.
-Slouchy and spread -Upright and compact posture.
out posture.
-Gesture from -Gesture from elbow, emphasizing wrist
shoulder. and fingers.
-Often gestures with -Often gestures with only one side of the
both hands body and laterally.
simultaneously and In
front of the body.
-Smiles less often. -Smiles regularly.
-Lack of self- -Self-referential touching.
referential touching.
Musical -Speaking and -Singing and melodicism.
monotonicity.
-Distortion. -Ornamentation.
Pitch and Resonance
Of all the elements of vocal gender performance, pitch and resonance (as
manifested through formants) are the elements most essentialized as
exemplifying the fundamental biological difference between men and
women not only in popular culture in general (as represented by the deep
voice revealing the truth of gender in film and television as discussed in the
first paragraph of this chapter), but also by vocal coaches and scientists who
are influenced by society’s views of pitch as biologically essentialized.
Speech language pathologist Kathe Perez illustrates this way of biologizing
vocal pitch difference, focusing on seeming objective measurements to
naturalize the gender binary, writing:
The average length of the vocal folds in an adult female is 14 mm, which gives an average
pitch of 200–220 Hz (that’s about A3 or the “A” below middle “C” on the piano).…The
average length of the vocal folds in an adult male is 22 mm; nearly 30% longer than the
female vocal folds. This length results in a pitch at about A2 (the “A” an octave below the
A3 on the piano) or 100–110 Hz. Not only is the length an issue, the thickness (or mass) of
the vocal folds also determines pitch. In brief, male vocal folds are longer and thicker and
female vocal folds are shorter and thinner.17

However, biological attribution ignores how heavily socialization

impacts our speech, including our fundamental speaking frequency, or F0.18
Theater Professor Pamela Hendrick counters the perceived exclusive
biological cause for the gulf between men and women’s speaking
frequencies: “That men’s voices are deeper than women’s is often construed
as a purely biological distinction. Indeed, men’s larynxes and vocal chords
are proportionally larger than women’s. Nevertheless, results from
sociolinguistic research support the observations of the theatre voice
trainers cited earlier: the average differences in pitch between male and
female speakers is greater than the physiological difference between vocal
cords and larynx.…Clearly, the difference in pitch between English-
speaking males and females cannot be attributed to biology alone.”19
 As sociolinguists Nancy Henley and Barry Thorne observe, biologically
humans are weakly sexually dimorphic, and to compensate for this we
“organize learned characteristics, such as posture, gesture, facial expression
—and, we would add, speech, to enhance sexual dimorphism.”20 According
to theatrical speech trainer Leigh Wilson Smiley, the ways in which sexual
dimorphism is enhanced vocally include, for American men, “pushing the
voice down into a chest resonance that may not be a natural vocal
placement for their individual instrument. For American women it can
mean tightening the vocal apparatus to acquire a higher, lighter resonance
and tone.”21
It is telling that as women achieve more social equality, their F0 drops,
as shown by researchers noting that young women’s F0 were higher in the
1920s than in the 1990s.22 It is similarly telling that as women age out of
society’s model of youth-associated sexualized femininity, their F0 also
drops. Gelfer and Mordaunt note that while women aged 20–29 have an
average F0 of 224Hz, “women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are reported to be
below 200Hz…some of the female subjects have SFFs [Speaking
Fundamental Frequency] as low as 143 Hz (for a female in the 60-69 year
group…), or 147 Hz (for a female in the 40 to 50 year group…).”23
Focusing on average F0 also obscures that men and women’s voices exist
on a continuum, one with significant overlap. Gold notes that men and
women tend to have two octave speaking ranges with a one octave overlap
(C2–C3).24 Alfred Blatter, when diagramming men’s and women’s classical
singing ranges for orchestrators gives at least a two octave overlap (F3–F5),
though that is a minimum as he notes that women can often sing much
lower than the alto ranges he lists. Within this overlap is a pitch zone
perceived as gender neutral most generously defined as between 155Hz
(D ♯ 3) and 180Hz (F ♯ 3).25 In this zone, absent other gender markers,
listeners have a difficult time gendering the voices they hear, something
exploited by those trying to purposefully achieve an androgynous or
genderqueer vocal representation.26 Although pitch is the element most
focused on as proof of the unbridgeable gap between men and women, in
fact men and women’s vocal ranges overlap considerably, especially
singing ranges. Transgender passing guides have recognized this, regularly
referencing deep voiced women like Bea Arthur and Kathleen Turner as
evidence of the diversity of women’s vocal pitch. Both they and linguistic
studies agree that despite popular focus on pitch, other vocal elements,
especially resonance, are just as important, if not more so, in the successful
performance of gender in the voice.
Alfred Blatter writes that female classical singers are trained to sing with
head resonance while male singers are trained to sing with chest resonance.
Theatrical voice trainers write that this also occurs in speech as female
actors tend to use primarily head resonance and male actors tend to use
primarily chest resonance due to pressure to embody gender presentational
norms on stage and in the casting process.27 Passing guides for both
Females-to-Males (FtMs) and Males-to-Females (MtFs) echo this,
explaining that FtMs should, in order “to make your voice sound
deeper/more resonant, put your hand on your chest and try to get the sound
to reverberate there”28 while MtFs should “develop head resonance rather
than chest resonance.”29 Yet resonance of tone is not just a function of head
or chest, it is also a matter of “color,” often described in terms of feminine
lightness or masculine darkness. Tone color is achieved through a
combination of superior versus inferior placement, anterior versus posterior
placement, and formant spread that, while imagined as purely the result of
the biological differences, is heavily affected by mouth and tongue
placement.
Harrington describes formants as “resonances created within the vocal
tract that are modulations of the initial F0 created at the level of the larynx.
The three formants are referred to as F1, F2, and F3. F1 modulates
frequency based on the relative opening of the oral cavity. F2 modulates
frequency based on the relative anterior-posterior placement of the tongue.
F3 modulates frequency based on the relative length of the oral cavity.”30
She notes that there are gender differences in formants with women having
up to 20 percent higher formant frequencies “because of the smaller vocal
tract size of females.”31 However, formant frequencies are altered by how
one shapes one’s mouth and vocal tract. As Hirsch and Gelfer explain,
“increased tongue height might raise the hyoid bone somewhat, and thus
reduce the length of the pharyngeal cavity, a factor in increasing the first
formant. A more fronted position can reduce the size of the oral cavity,
increasing the second formant. A more open mouth or greater lip opening
reduces acoustic impedance, increasing the frequency of all formants.”32
Formants, seen as yet another biological marker of difference between men
and women, are affected by how one holds one’s mouth, and how one holds
one’s mouth is gendered. As Heuer writes, “Using a relaxed jaw and gentle
smile is very effective in reducing the strength of the lower partials in the
voice. More feminine individuals are found to smile more frequently during
speech in any case.”33 Smiling not only increases formants, it also results in
a lighter more forward focus of tone placement, reinforcing the perception
of the speaker/singer as female. The societal pressure for women to smile is
documented in the street harassment women often face when strangers
accost them, insisting they smile.34
Vowel placement is another important part of gendered resonance. As
Hirsch and Gelfer write, “The ‘color’ of the vowels moves from light to
dark as they move from front to back (/i/ /e/ /æ/ /ɑ/ /o/ /u/). This shift in
resonant color is often termed chiaroscuro (light and dark; literally, clear
and obscured) in the singing world.…This chiaroscuro is also a perfect way
to describe the sound of the feminine to masculine resonance tone shift.”35
Both Hirsch and Gelfer counsel MtFs on vowels: “Vowels in general
produce a dark or low resonance, except for the ee, or /i/ (as in Peter)
sound. Produce all vowels using an /i/ configuration as much as possible to
lighten their tone. Think /i/ when producing all vowels to bring the sound
up and forward. There is a reason why telephone sales people are told to
smile when answering the phone. A smile is an /i/ posture.”36 Heuer
describes this in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet’s vowel
triangle chart, writing, “The patient should practice reducing the vowel
triangle both posteriorly/anteriorly and inferiorly/superiorly; moving the
posteriorly articulated consonants /k/ and /g/ and /ŋ/ forward may create a
more feminine articulatory production.”37 To perform socially recognized
female coding in resonance, women are encouraged to speak higher in their
tessitura, focus on head resonance, produce a lighter sound with forward
focus achieved by trending upward and forward on the IPA vowel triangle,
and raise formants by smiling and lifting and bringing forward their tongue.
Male coding comes with using a lower part of their tessitura, focusing on
chest resonance, making a darker sound achieved by trending rearward and
downward on the IPA vowel triangle, and keeping formants lower by
producing sound without smiling and with a smaller and more clenched
mouth.
Intonation, Timbre, Articulation
Regarding intonation, men are expected to use a very narrow dynamic pitch
range and women are expected to use a much wider range of pitches while
speaking. Female-coded speech is perceived to be more expressive and
melodic, using tone changes within vowels and upwards inflections at the
end of sentences while male-coded speech is characterized by a lack of
expressiveness, monotonicity, short blunt vowels, and downward
inflections.38 Female-coded intonation also involves elongating vowels in
order to include more melody, or as Heuer writes, “The more feminine
individual tends to utilize increased intrasyllabic melody on vowels within
the syllable. The more masculine individual tends to utilize a flatter, less
melodic pattern.”39 Passing guide after passing guide notes that to pass as
male is to be flat and non-expressive, which reads as dominant and rational,
while to pass as female is to sing one’s speech and use upward inflections,
which reads as hesitant and conciliatory.
The view of men as dominant and women as submissive is further
enhanced by timbre. Sodersten and Lindestad wrote that, unlike men,
women in the 20–35-year age range tend not to completely close their
glottis while speaking, resulting in audible breathiness.40 The use of
breathiness to achieve a female sound is brought up regularly in both
passing guides and speech language pathology literature. The male-coded
equivalent to breathiness is a hard glottal fry resulting in a gravelly, gruff
quality. Feminine Voice Techniques recommends MtFs “partially open the
glottis when speaking,” explaining that, “with the glottis firmly closed, all
the air is forced over the vocal cords, producing a fully-voiced and typically
male voiced sound. You need to try to find a ‘semi-whispering’ position that
eliminates the fully-voiced sound with heavy resonance in the chest, and
imparts a breathy quality to the voice.”41 Churcher describes the effect of
the female-coded breathy timbre as vulnerable and childlike while positing
the male-coded gravelly rasp “adds a danger, which excites the listener even
as it disturbs the conscientious voice coach.”42 As explored by Churcher,
these timbre ideals are about sexualization. Traditional gendered timbre
ideals sexualize vulnerability and childlikeness in women and danger and
aggressiveness in men. Interestingly, researchers have recently noted an
increase in the use of vocal fry among young women.43 A Science Now
summary of the findings by researchers Wolk, Abdelli-Beruh, and Slavin
used Britney Spears as an example of women’s use of vocal fry.44 I should
point out, however, that while Spears does use vocal fry (see “Oops! I Did
It Again”), it is a light fry paired with the breathiness of a partially open
glottis. What Spears signals is both childlike non-threatening vulnerability
and the willingness to be sexually aggressive, which shifts expectations for
women without necessarily improving them.
Articulation is also heavily gender coded. Numerous studies have noted
that women tend to have a lighter, softer articulation than men. As Heuer
summarizes, “More feminine articulation is characterized by lighter
contacts and shorter articulatory gesture distances that result in less impact
on contact.”45 Both passing guides and speech language pathologists
recommend a certain delicacy of speech and easy onset of initial vowels
when performing female-coded speech.46 All of this is contrasted with
male-coded articulation that Heuer describes as “more dull and strong.”47
The difference between male and female coding goes beyond how hard or
soft a person articulates, but also to how well a person articulates. Oaks and
Dacakis noted that women tend to enunciate more clearly and use correct
pronunciation while men are more likely to use improper and muddy
pronunciation, for example, dropping the “g” in the -ing verb ending,
pronouncing it “dancin’” rather than “dancing.”48 Melinda Green, in the
section titled “Ee-NUN-Cee-Ate!” simply recommends trans women to:
“Fully pronounce each word and make sure there is a clear break between
words. Don’t leave out the little words, and avoid using contractions.…It is
obvious (once you really pay attention) that even little boys and girls speak
very differently in these ways with girls speaking much more clearly and
correctly than boys.”49
Emphasis, Volume, Flow
It is female-coded to emphasize words through increased pitch variation,
while it is male-coded to use increased volume for emphasis. As Melanie
Anne notes in her MtF passing guide, “Place emphasis with pitch, not
volume: Upward intonation places emphasis. Men place emphasis in their
speech by varying the loudness, but keep their pitch within a very narrow
range; on the other hand women tend to keep their loudness much more
constant but vary their pitch a great deal to express emphasis.”50 Men, who
tend not to elongate their words in the first place, tend to stress whole
words, giving them a volume punch for emphasis, while women tend to
stress the vowels, which allows for pitch variation emphasis. This use of
volume for emphasis is part of a larger male-coded habit of speaking more
loudly. Joan Boonin summarizes, “Research investigating differences in
male and female vocal intensity have in most cases concluded that adult
male vocal intensity exceeds that of female speakers.”51 In other words, it is
male-coded to speak loudly, usually 2 to 3 decibels louder than women, and
to use even greater volume for emphasis while, in keeping with the
connection of breathiness and melodiousness to femininity, speaking softer
with more pitch variation for emphasis is female-coded.
Another related element is what I call flow, which encompasses both the
rate and the rhythm of speech.52 Wilder writes, “Research examining rate,
including general speech rate as well as durational characteristics, shows
that men use a more rapid overall speech rate while women tend to have a
longer duration of voicing at the phrase and word-level.”53 Feminine Voice
Techniques recommends that those wanting to pass as women “start and end
sentences slowly and gently,” avoiding the hard attack of male-coded
speech.54 Joan Boonin frames her recommendation of managing gendered
flow for trans women using the language of music, writing, “the clinician
might discuss with the client how sustaining vowels leads to a more ‘legato’
(reference to how musical tones can be produced in a connected, smoothly
gliding manner) versus ‘staccato’ (marked by short, disconnected,
separated, or distinct production) prosody, while also having the effect of
slightly lengthening the overall speaking rate (which is a feminizing
feature).”55 While it is female-coded to speak legato, that does not mean
that women take up all the space in a conversation. Michelle Mordaunt
notes that women include more pauses in their speech to allow others to
talk, whereas it is male-coded to leave little room in their speech flow to
prevent others from getting in a word edgewise.56 Those following male-
coded speech codes also tend to interrupt people more.57
Language Usage
The habit of women using more inclusive speech and men using more
competitive speech has been heavily studied by feminist sociolinguists,
most often through how words themselves are used. The body of study is so
large that I can only touch on it briefly here, generally about as briefly as
passing guides tend to do. Female-coded language is marked by the use of
expressive vocabulary, modals, tag questions, and compound polite
requests. Pamela Hendrick summarizes the most salient differences in male
and female-coded language, noting, “Women are also more apt to use
hyperbolic or emphatic vocabulary, such as ‘fabulous’ or ‘fantastic.’”58 She
continues that, “men tend to favor the imperative construction of direct
commands, while women are more likely to use a number of strategies to
alter, and usually soften, a directive.…For example, women more often tend
to use the modal ‘would,’ ‘should,’ ‘could,’ ‘can,’ ‘may,’ ‘might,’ thereby
turning a command into a more polite request.”59 Regarding women’s use
of tag questions, she writes, “the addition of a phrase in the form of a
question added to a declarative sentence, softens the force of the speaker’s
opinion by seeking outside corroboration,” and she brings up sociolinguist
Mary Ritchie Key’s hypothesis that “the tag question exists to reinforce the
feminine image of dependency and the desire not to appear aggressive or
forward.”60
Hendrick’s overview of men and women’s differences in vocabulary also
touches on grammar, and she writes that “women are more inclined than
men to use formal, refined, or ‘correct’ grammar, and perhaps a
semantically richer vocabulary. Likewise, men tend to use slang and
obscenities more than women. In American English, variation in
correctness also appears phonologically, such as in the use of -ing vs. -in, or
‘you’ vs. ‘ya.’”61 Just as it is a male-coded social norm to articulate poorly,
it is also a male-coded social norm to use grammar improperly and to use
more slang and curse words. It is also a male-coded social norm to have an
impoverished vocabulary and a terseness of speech.62 Hooper, Crutchley,
and McCready translate those findings into clinical advice to trans clients,
writing that this “for the MtF TG/TS client may mean a reduction of
contractions, more elaboration in conversation, and greater use of pronouns
in subordinate clauses for more classic ‘proper speech’ in women. The FtM
client may choose to adopt a more frequent use of contractions and a
reduction in the amount of elaboration during conversation.”63 This sort of
advice is reflected in passing guides as well. One of the first things these
guides bring up is vocabulary, encouraging the use of “appropriate” word
choice. Melinda Green counsels, “There are large collections of words that
are used almost exclusively by one sex or the other. Avoid the masculine
words and sprinkle your talk with several of the feminine words and you’ll
be making good progress.”64 She also says those wanting to pass as women
should be polite, writing, “Being polite is not just a good policy in general
but it will help you to pass. That’s because women really are at a
disadvantage compared with men in modern society. Women are therefore
expected to be conciliatory towards men and supportive towards other
women.”65 Though women seem to use traditionally female-coded
language and qualifiers less now than they did in the past, linguist Holly
Wilder shows that the continuing perception of those qualifiers as female-
coded has not changed. She finds “there is likely a discrepancy between
what is actually present in an individual’s language and what stereotypes
contribute to gender and femininity perception.”66 Despite much of the
progress women have made towards gender parity, resulting in some
women dropping some of the language based markers of submission, the
specifics of male and female-coded language still dominate our perception
of maleness and femaleness.
Non-verbal
Though not aural, non-verbal gendered gesture can be a useful addition to
the analysis of musical performances that include a visual element, such as
concerts and music videos. Andy, in his passing guide for FtMs, counsels
that “women tend to be less obtrusive, while men tend to take up more
space. If you watch commuters on a bus, women tend to sit with their legs
crossed and their arms drawn in, and men tend to sit with their legs apart
and their arms out.”67 This particular habit, recently dubbed
“manspreading,” has become part of a political critique of male privilege
and female marginalization in public spaces.68 Hirsch and Boonin sum up
the general differences between female and male-coded posture, in both
sitting and standing, noting men tend to form an “A” shape and women tend
to form an “S” shape with their bodies. They also categorize a host of other
differences between male and female-coded body carriage, including how
women’s “Arms move from the elbow versus the shoulder,” their “Fingers
are expressive, with movements focused distally,” their “Gait is shorter and
narrower than men,” “Women tend to smile more than men,” and “Women
use more self-referential touching during conversation than men.”69 Hirsch
and Van Borsel expand on the above observations noting that “Women are
expressive and painterly with their hands, with open, fluid fingers and
curved motions. Men use linear, horizontal, or vertical gestures with fingers
closed. Women break at the wrists during arm movements; men find this
very difficult.”70 Speech language pathologist Michelle Mordaunt further
notes that women tend to use one hand or gesture with one side of their
body, while men tend to gesture with both hands simultaneously.71 There is
the expected observation on the subject of the lower body that “women use
swinging, undulation motions. Men move on a more linear plane.”72
All of these gender coded sounds, gestures, and words are habits
inculcated by society from the time we are children. As Erica Tobolski
notes while discussing gendered vocal patterns, “these patterns, at one point
consciously chosen by the individual, become ingrained to the point of non-
awareness; habit replaces choice.”73 They also bleed into and inflect other
identity presentations. We overlay gender not only onto people, but also
onto race, class, age, sexuality, region, and any other number of social
constructions, including musical genre. Transgender passing guides make
the unconscious habits conscious again, so that a new set of gender
vocalisms can be learned and internalized. Attention to these elements of
vocal gender performance systematized through transgeder passing guides
gives a valuable set of tools that expand the analytics of vocal musical
performance.
 P 2: G V
P

There are many ways in which gendered vocalisms are used in musical
performance, and in life, to convey information to a listener. Gendered
vocalisms can be used sincerely or ironically, they can be used consciously
or unconsciously, they can be used to defuse or inflame a situation. How
they are used can illuminate ideologies of gender in different times, places,
and musical practices. Because I believe theoretical tools should always be
applicable in practice, this second part of the chapter will present a few
brief musical analytic sketches to show the possibilities of these tools in use
for musical and cultural analysis.
Passing as a Different Gender: Narratives of
Deception
Crossgender presentation often carries accusatory narratives of deception
and fraud. The crossgender presenter is framed as “fooling” the viewer in
some way. This connection between crossgender performance and
deception too often carries over into attacks, both intellectual and physical,
against trans people as deceivers and fraudulent. But stage impersonation
framed as a performance dissipates the anxiety about being fooled by,
metaphorically and sometimes literally, pulling off the wig at some point,
exposing “true” gender and reassuring the audience of the immutability of
gender. Because of the transgender community’s struggle to separate their
gender identity from notions of deception, this section looks not at
transgender people, but at two cisgender performers doing crossgender
performance. Both performances raise narratives of deception, but in ways
that have implications beyond gender. “Burlington Bertie” by Ella Shields,
of 1934, adds class fraud, and 2006’s “Wishing” by The Honeytraps plays
with the concept of deception in the manufactured pop group.
For my example of FtM crossgender vocal performance, I examine Ella
Shield’s 1934 recording, “Burlington Bertie from Bow.”74 Shields was one
of the last generation of male impersonators in the vaudeville/music hall
tradition that spanned the mid-1800s to about 1930. Gillian Rodger traces
the male impersonator tradition from its earliest stars like Annie Hindle and
Ella Wesner, who were renowned for their verisimilitude, to later stars like
Vesta Tilley and Hettie King, who generally made sure not to pass
completely. Rodger points to soprano Tilley, who, unlike earlier
impersonators, made little effort to pass, as a catalyst of these changes in
new performers, writing, “Because Vesta Tilley had come to be seen as the
ideal for male impersonation, these women were now more likely to be
soprano or mezzo-soprano than alto or lower.…The pitch of the singer’s
voice ensured that any illusion of masculinity was broken as soon as she
began to sing. Where the singing had once served to prolong the illusion,
particularly in the case of Annie Hindle with her tenor or low alto range, it
was now instrumental in reassuring the audience that they were indeed
watching a woman perform.”75
While documenting this newer, less passable generation of
impersonators, Rodger regularly singles out Ella Shields, who patterned
herself after earlier performers like Wesner rather than the newer more
feminine style of Tilley, as the exception. Rodger is not the only one to
single out Shields. Contemporary commenters regularly praised Shields’s
verisimilitude with comments like, “it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say
that in her admirable Burlington Bertie from Bow she brought to perfection,
on individual lines, the art of male impersonation.”76

EXAMPLE 13.1 Ella Shields, “Burlington Bertie from Bow.” Song opening.

EXAMPLE 13.2 Ella Shields, “Burlington Bertie from Bow.” Sung beginning of verse.

EXAMPLE 13.3 Ella Shields, “Burlington Bertie from Bow.” End of song.

Shield’s signature tune was “Burlington Bertie from Bow,” a song about
a homeless Cockney man who affects the manner of an upper class dandy.
Clad in a tattered suit, top hat, monocle, and cane, Shields recounted the
way jobless Bertie would wander along the fashionable parts of London in
the same way aristocratic men of leisure would. The song had great impact
on her audiences, with an obituary for Shields noting, “‘Burlington Bertie
from Bow’ was a real person to her and her audience.”77 In all versions of
the song, it is significant that Shields, known for being “strongest in what
the actors call ‘attack,’” does not sing much at all.78 In the 1934 version I
look at specifically, she performs almost the entire song using heightened
musical speech, singing only on the word “Bert” tentatively in the first line
of the song (Ex. 1), the words, “My pose, though ironical, shows” at the
beginning of the second verse (Ex. 2), and the final line of the chorus
“Burlington Bertie from Bow” (Ex. 3). Recall the association of singing
with effeminacy from The Musical Times; by avoiding traditional notions of
singing, Shields enhances the male-codedness of her performance and
distances herself from femininity. The entirety of the song’s tessitura fits
within a baritone range, spanning A2 (spoken) to G4 (sung), and the
majority of Shields’s heightened speech takes place between the pitches A2
and D3, which is squarely in the male-coded speech zone and below the
155Hz–180Hz gender neutral area. When Shields starts the song, she begins
with some percussive, harsh, guttural chuckle sounds and an improvised
spoken line before beginning the song proper (Example 13.1). Her first line,
“I’m Bert,” drifts down to the A2 (110Hz) that she tries to emphasize
throughout the song, a pitch identified as the average male speaking F0.
The guttural chuckle sound she tosses in throughout the song emphasizes
how she keeps her performance in her chest with posterior and ulterior
intonational emphasis. She foregrounds downward inflections, harsh
attacks, especially on /h/’s, a staccato flow, and a consistently present light
glottal fry throughout the heightened speech sections.
When Shields sings, she does so in two different ways. She sings the
“My pose…” line (Example 13.2) below her break, while continuing to use
many of her preferred male-coded elements. She emphasizes the darkness
of the posteriorly placed /oʊ/ vowel in “pose” and “shows,” belting the line
with increased volume. She further emphasizes downward inflections on
the high notes and harsh attacks, showing a successful integration of male-
coded singing into her male vocal persona. The final line of the chorus
(Example 13.3), with its emphasis on the /i/ vowels in “-ling” and “-tie,”
and its placement above her break, contrasts with the rest of her
successfully male-coded performance. The line, legato with lowered
intensity, is performed with an audible “smile.” The tone is anteriorly and
superiorly placed and creeps into a more modal voice sound. It is here, at
the very end, that Shields’s “deception” is broken, though she brings back
the male-coded vocalisms for the last two words, “from Bow,” which fall
back in her more comfortable belted chest range. Momentarily, Shields’s
metaphorical wig is removed, and trying to put it back on at the very end
does not completely work.
Breaking the illusion serves to comfort an audience that they are seeing
a woman, thus naturalizing gender difference. However, Shields’s move to a
more female-coded vocalism can serve another function in the context of
this song. In her performance of “Burlington Bertie” Shields keeps one
element that is female-coded present throughout: expressive, melodic, pitch
intonational variety. While this form of speech is coded feminine, so is
upper classness, especially upper class Britishness, which is marked as
much by precise speech as it is by money. Cicely Berry notes that “there is
a deep-rooted feeling that a standard [British] accent is to some degree
effeminate, and therefore to remove that [regional or working-class] accent
takes away a certain virility in the speech.”79 The higher one goes on the
class line, the more effeminacy lurks, and working class culture is often
stereotyped as more authentically masculine. Shields can allow hints of
female-coded pitch variation to pepper her performances without
undermining her maleness because the upper class swells she performs are
already feminized. Leaks of female coding don’t mark her failure to
perform masculinity properly, but mark a wink to the working class music
hall crowds that upper class swells do not perform masculinity properly. Yet
perhaps the most important deception in the song is that Burlington Bertie
is not actually a well-off toff, but a Cockney homeless man just
impersonating one. The consistency of Shields’s male vocalisms and the
way she would perform a physicality that included “prowling about the
stage” threateningly enough that “the audience seemed to get uneasy”
allowed for a powerful simmering of class anger to be camouflaged by what
masqueraded as a good-natured ribbing.80
 For my example of MtF crossgender vocal performance, I look at a
contemporary reality show. In 2006, British television channel E4
premiered a six-episode reality show, Boys Will Be Girls, in which ex-
members of boy bands participated in a “stunt” that consisted of trying to
pass themselves off as a girl band. The members of the group, dubbed The
Honeytraps—Austin Drage of 5Boyz, Russ Spencer of Scooch, and Martin
Rycroft of the Fast Food Rockers—were given a four-week crash course in
dressing, performing, and singing like women. Their challenge was to
produce a song—a cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ 1982 New Wave song
“Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)”—film a music video, and
perform a live show female-coded well enough to fool industry insiders and
audience members alike.81 Explaining why he chose “Wishing,” the
project’s producer Olivier Behzadi, said, “Melodically, it’s very, very linear.
There’re no bends, there’s no vibrato parts, it’s a linear song that a guy from
a boy band pretending to be a girl would very possibly get away with.”82
The single Behzadi produced, however, contains quite a few bends and
some vibrato, all of which function as the musical version of the increased
intrasyllabic melody that characterizes female-coded speech, increasing the
perception of the vocalists as “singerly” and therefore more feminine.
Behzadi’s way of making over the boys into girls relied heavily on
gendered vocalisms as well as the feminized nature of the pop genre itself.
Among the experts brought in to transform the Honeytraps was vocal
coach Larion Van Der Stolk. Van Der Stolk said of his task, “It’s gonna be
very difficult, because no matter what ranges they are at the moment, I’m
gonna have to…get ’em to sing in completely alien fashion to them.”83 This
alien fashion in singing is everything emphasized by transgender passing
guides. Although we see all three men doing vocaleses to expand their
range upward into head resonance, the vocal training segment in Episode 2
focusing on Russ Spencer shows how much more there is to a “woman”
than pitch. The audience is shown Spencer doing a vocalese on “Mah.” In
the first attempt, his mouth is small, barely opened, the lips neutral,
emphasizing a deep posterior chest resonance. Van Der Stolk says in a voice
over, “You know he has got a lot of bass in his voice, which I’m going to
try and iron out.”84 When we next hear Spencer doing the vocalese, he
sounds much more female-coded, accomplished through Spencer having a
visible smile, adding a great deal of breathiness to his voice, pulling back
on the intensity, and pushing his resonance up towards his head.
The Honeytraps’ performance of “Wishing,” especially compared to the
original Flock of Seagulls’ version, exemplifies female-coded vocal
performance in music. A Flock of Seagulls’ melody barely spans more than
a fifth, and the affectless delivery of lead singer Mike Score conveys male-
coded monotonicity. Austin Drage, lead singer for the Honeytraps, spans an
octave and a fourth (G3 to C5) thanks to some orgasmic head voice moans
encouraged by producer Behzadi during the recording session, presenting
both the expressiveness and sexualization that so strongly marks female-
codedness for women (and especially pop girl bands). Additionally, in
contrast to the fairly straight delivery of Score (see Example 13.4), Drage
adds a lot of scoops and bends, especially upwards bends (see Example
13.5), enacting female-coded intonation and intrasyllabic expressiveness.
While the melodies for the line “there must be something more” in both
versions are the same, ending in a male-coded downward half-step motion,
Score highlights the drop by singing that note a bit flat, with a hard attack
using volume for emphasis, while Drage de-emphasizes the drop by adding
vibrato that ends on a slight upglide and pulling away from the note. The
Honeytraps version even includes, as a musical climax, a long, extended
upward glide leading to the word “wishing,” ending in an upward leap of a
fourth modeling female-coded sexualized vocality (see Example 13.6).

EXAMPLE 13.4 Flock of Seagulls, “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph).” Beginning of verse 1.
EXAMPLE 13.5 The Honeytraps, “Wishing.” Beginning of verse 1.

EXAMPLE 13.6 The Honeytraps, “Wishing.” End of chorus before break.

Drage maintains an anterior and superior tone placement throughout the

song, using a lot of head mixture to make his voice sound feminine without
sliding into a “falsetto” sound that might give him away and that is
discouraged by the passing guides. He relies heavily on breathiness,
especially on extended notes that sometimes dissipate into sighs (see for
example the word “do” in Example 13.5). In contrast, A Flock of Seagulls,
while keeping a superior resonance, also keep their resonance more
posterior and full, which can be heard in the difference between how both
singers approach the /ŋ/ in “wishing.” Recall that in counseling MtF trans
women Heuer recommends “moving the posteriorly articulated consonants
/k/ and /g/ and /ŋ/ forward” to “create a more feminine articulatory
production.”85 Score fully pronounces the /ŋ/, but lets its resonance linger
in the back of his throat, while Drage keeps the /ŋ/ as forward as possible
and lets it decay quickly while keeping the articulation light. Drage is also
very closely mic’d, giving a sense of intimacy to the breathy voice, also
resulting in volume without intensity or power. The long notes, vibrato,
bends, breathiness, and upward glides not only contribute to a female-coded
legato flow, but also give Drage more of a “singerly” quality, all of which
contribute to the social definition of female vocalism.
In the music video and culminating live performance, The Honeytraps
go beyond vocalism and extended their production of female-codedness
into body language, emphasizing the importance of even playing
instruments in a female-coded way. Spencer was praised for how he “really
got into character” by stroking the keyboards suggestively when not
actively playing, while Rycroft, who was miming the bass parts, spent most
of the performance dancing around suggestively, serving as “the band’s
onstage decoy.”86 Drage, on guitar, was constantly admonished by coaches
Lucie Pankhurst and Larion Van Der Stolk for playing “from the shoulder,”
which broke the illusion immediately. Van Der Stolk told him, “Don’t put
your shoulder into the chord at all. No shoulder. Just that. Just the wrist. All
through the wrist. Flick of the wrist.”87 Rather than the straight wrist and
tight grip on the pick, Van Der Stolk mimed a bent wrist with a delicate grip
on the pick, pinky finger in the air. In the video, the Honeytraps emphasized
female-coded visual cues, having Drage engage in self-referential touching
constantly or, as director Carolyn Corbin insisted, “Keep your hands, one
hand, in contact with your face at all times.”88 The whole trio was shot
mostly lying down rather than standing, taking up smaller amounts of
space, and emphasizing feminine S-shapes with their bodies rather than
masculine A-shapes.89 The project was considered a success and they
“fooled” two out of three “industry insiders” with their video and the
majority of the live audience at their end of show concert. However, it
wasn’t just their adoptions of female vocalisms and body language that
helped them pass. In The Honeytraps’s single “Wishing,” there is an audible
autotune manipulation giving a light mechanical wash to their voices that
make them seem artificial and manufactured. And their adoption of an
already highly feminized genre, pop, and more specifically the modern girl
group subgenre, which is generally assumed to be manufactured, aided their
passing just as much.90 Because it is assumed that girl groups are always-
already artificial and constructed, seeing a group that is an obvious artificial
construct of femininity did not raise questions in the eyes of the audiences
and industry insiders as to the authenticity of their gender; it confirmed The
Honeytraps as an authentically inauthentic Britpop girl band.
Passing as Queer—Sexual Intermediaries
Homosexuality has long been associated with gender variance, at least as
far back as when sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld articulated a theory of gay
men and lesbians as a third sex, or sexual intermediaries, on a continuum
between male and female. Gender variance is often seen as the external
marker of sexual variance. Because of this, looking, acting, or sounding
“gay” can be accomplished by selectively adopting crossgender behavior,
especially vocally. As noted by linguists Ron Smyth and Henry Rogers,
who write of gay-perceived speech, “Our overall conclusion is that the gay-
sounding speakers show similar characteristics to female speakers.”91
However, gay men adopting female-coded vocal characteristics do not want
to pass as women as The Honeytraps did; they want to pass as gay men.
Sounding gay or lesbian hinges on adopting enough crossgender vocalisms
to signal gender variance without adopting so many that the speaker passes
for the other gender and erases their visibility as queer. How singers like
“Byrd E. Bath” and Joan Jett negotiate the selective use of crossgender
vocalisms in order to invite queer recognition illuminates much about
genre, the closet, and visibility within queer culture.
In the early 1960s, Camp Records, a small gay Southern California
record label, produced two LPs and a score of 45s before evaporating. The
tracks ranged from the raunchy to the romantic and offer musical insight
into a pre-Stonewall gay culture. “I’m So Wet,” a contrafactum on the
French-Canadian children’s song “Alouette” sung by “Byrd E. Bath,” is one
such song.92 It concerns itself with a lyrical-I who spends all day under the
YMCA showers cruising for men. In each verse, Bath interacts with a
different man, performing a wide variety of the crossgender vocalisms that
read as “gay sounding.” Melanie Anne, noting the male-coded trait of using
volume for emphasis versus the female-coded trait of using pitch for
emphasis, tells her reader to “Keep in mind that masculine women will
adopt the loudness approach in monotone, and the feminine man will rise
and fall in tonality with even amplitude.”93 Smyth and Rogers identified the
elongated vowels and precise articulation associated with female-coded
speech, the elongation of the /s/, /z/, and the forward placement of /l/, as
other elements of what is heard as gay male speech.94 William Leap notes
the association of the female-coded richer vocabulary with gay speech as
well.95 “I’m So Wet,” along with many other 1960s camp recordings, serves
as a primer for all that is understood as the gay male voice, demonstrating
the way in which the performance of “feminine” vocalisms opens the way
to gay male identification, though it does more than that as well.

EXAMPLE 13.7 Byrd E. Bath, “I’m So Wet.” Verse 2.

Byrd E. Bath emphasizes his /s/’s, /z/’s, /l/’s consistently throughout the
song—for example note his pronunciation of the word “silly” in the phrase
“silly dope” (Example 13.7). Both the /s/ and /l/ are elongated and
emphasized (indicated by bolding and italicization). Note how often Bath
elongates his /s/ consonants in the scant eighteen seconds of Example 7.
The final “silly dope” in that example also exemplifies the way in which
Bath uses pitch variety for emphasis, signaling gender variance as a
synecdoche for homosexuality. Bath elongates his vowels to increase
melodicism in phrases like “Let us fly,” and his overall articulation is the
female-coded precise, correct, and soft, rather than the male-coded harsh,
casual, or dull. Bath sings with forward emphasis, especially on /i/ vowels,
allowing him to move out of male-coded posterior and inferior voice
placement, yet he also uses a vocal quality that Addams defines as “The
Drag Queen”: nasal, up in palette, but with a voice too low to pass as a
woman.96 This voice, along with his use of a tenor register with good chest
resonance, keeps his formants low as he sings above and below the gender
neutral zone, allowing him to remaining legible as male. This vocal strategy
allows Bath to aurally signify that he isn’t a normative man without
sounding exactly like a woman. Which crossgender elements Bath or other
speakers of gay speech adopt has larger implications. Pierrehumbert and
colleagues write of their research that, “the gay men in these studies have at
most adopted aspects of female speech that convey social engagement and
emotional expressiveness, such as vowel-space dispersion, and not those
that would convey diminutivity or subservience, such as a higher f0
[fundamental speaking frequency] or overall higher-scaled formants,”
adding that gay men therefore avoid “the adoption of a breathy, feminine,
voice quality [which] would affect this measure.”97 In other words, the men
using this gay voice do so to signal non-normative manhood, but without
ceding male privilege.
Listening to Bath, it becomes clear, however, that he does selectively
adopt some “subservient” female-coded vocalisms like breathiness and
upward inflections. “I’m So Wet” is not directed at society in general, but is
rather an insider conversation meant for gay men set in the relative safety
and privacy of the pre-Stonewall YMCA showers. It deals with sex and
seduction, a context in which signaling “subservience” can be part of sexual
power play. Bath’s breathiness and upward inflections coincide with the
cruising interactions he is most interested in. The more Bath wishes to
seduce the man in question, the more he plays with performing submission.
His strongest vocal response is to the third man he encounters, who sings
“Would you like to make a date?” When responding to that man, whom I
will call “Perfect Boyfriend,” Bath includes more upward inflections and
more breathiness than he does with anyone else (Example 13.8). There are
two potential drawbacks with using so many female-coded vocalisms, the
first that Bath might inadvertently pass as a woman rather than gay and
second that the performance of subservience might be taken as actual
subservience. Bath’s male-coded resonances, lyrical references to himself
as male, and nakedness in the shower reduce the chance he would pass as
female for either listeners or his fellow showerers. As for the issue of
subservience, there is a consensual symmetry and equality in the exchange
with Perfect Boyfriend. When singing with Perfect Boyfriend, both of their
voices come together towards the gender neutral pitch zone, as opposed to
many of the other cruisers who are sonically placed in opposition to Bath.
In Example 13.8 contrast the closeness and convergence of Bath and Perfect
Boyfriends’s voices with the wide gap and divergence between Bath and
“Piece of Soap” or “Wash Your Back.” Bath’s ability to use the more
vulnerably-coded vocalisms without that usage implying a less-than status
evidences a sense of comfort, safety, and attraction with Perfect Boyfriend
as well as expands models of gayness and gay relationships for pre-
Stonewall listeners.

EXAMPLE 13.8 Byrd E. Bath, “I’m So Wet.” End of verse 3.

The expansion of gay musical identity happens not just through Bath,
but also through the voices of the other men in the showers. Despite Bath’s
embodiment of a very large number of female-coded vocalisms, flirting
with a stereotype of gay speech, and by extension gay men, as womanly,
Bath is not doing gay things by himself. He is successfully cruising
strangers in the YMCA, and many of those enthusiastic strangers (“I would
like to wash your back” and “Do you have a place nearby?”) have low-
pitched voices, with almost no female-coded vocalisms, implying that men
of all sorts of gender presentations may be queer. Yet I think the most
interesting additional gay voice belongs to the Perfect Boyfriend, the voice
attached to the man who best matches Bath’s desire. Perfect Boyfriend has a
chesty and resonant tenor voice. There is little breathiness and it is not
imbued with the sorts of female-codedness that Bath performs. While this
could reinforce a heteronormative masculine-feminine binary, the song
works to subvert that. Not only do Perfect Boyfriend and Bath engage each
other in the same vocal range avoiding male/female binary sonic spaces,
Perfect Boyfriend is the suitor who is the most “singerly” (a female-coded
quality), and he is the only person to ornament his vocal line. His quasi-turn
on the word “date,” set within an upward melodic phrase using female-
coded grammatical politeness, is ornamental enough to signal an outness
and confidence in his sexual variance that marks Perfect Boyfriend an equal
match to Bath, who waits in the shower “with two towels marked clearly
his and his.” In “I’m So Wet” Bath demonstrates one gay voice with a high
level of female-codedness as an exemplar of an out (enough) gay man of
the 1960s, but the song does not essentialize that voice as the only means of
sounding gay. “I’m So Wet” also offers other ways of incorporating
crossgender vocalisms in order to express a visible gay identity (Perfect
Boyfriend), as well as a wide range of other male voices (some using little
to no female-coded vocalisms) gladly seeking out homo sex. Recorded
pseudonymously, in a time when the closet still dominated gay landscapes,
the song allows those consuming it a pride in aural visibility by using
crossgender vocalisms to construct recognizable gay voices without
naturalizing stereotypes of all gay men as effeminate.
Twenty years later, rocker Joan Jett would also play with the relationship
between queerness and vocal gender deviation. Jett first came to
prominence as part of the all-female rock band The Runaways in the 1970s
before going solo in 1979. Jett has long been a lesbian icon, despite
avoiding definitive declarations of her sexuality. Even though she was
billed as an “Out Lesbian Rocker” when she performed at the 2006 Dinah
Shore Weekend, when she is asked directly about her sexuality, she
typically demurs. Referring to a sex scene between Jett and Cherie Currie in
the 2010 biopic The Runaways, interviewer Evelyn McDonnell asked Jett:
“Are you comfortable if people say, ‘Oh, she was a lesbian,’ or ‘Oh, she’s
bisexual,’ or whatever? When they see this movie, people are probably
going to say that.” Jett responded:
I guess they’ve always said those kinds of things to a degree anyway. Anyone who wants to
know who I am can just read my lyrics—I’ve always written about who I am. Look, in The
 Runaways I learned at a very young age, because I could see the looks in the writers’ eyes
when they would ask me questions about the band and our offstage antics, and I could see
from the way they asked the questions that if I answered this stuff, that was all they were
ever going to write about.…But that’s not what I want people to focus on—I want people to
focus on the music. And if they want to know who I am, I write about who I am in the
lyrics, so don’t be lazy—read the lyrics and figure it out for yourself.98

Jett challenges the listener to read her lyrics to find out who she is, yet her
vocal performances do just as much to encourage a queer reading—while
still giving Jett the plausible deniability of the glass closet in a queer-
unfriendly and misogynistic industry. However, it is precisely her position
as a woman in the male-coded genre of rock that complicates and obscures
performances of male-coded vocalisms as queer.
Linguist Janet Pierrehumbert and her team note in their study of queer
speech that lesbian and bisexual women had much lower formant
frequencies than their heterosexual sisters, writing, “LB (Lesbian and
Bisexual) women produced average F1 and F2 values that were
significantly lower than heterosexual females’ values…this effect is
primarily due to the back vowels /ɑ/ and /u/.”99 In other words, the queer
women they studied moved their voices away from the female-coded
forward and upward placement and toward the male-coded anterior and
inferior placement. Pierrehumbert and her colleagues hesitate to identify
this male-coded vocal placement with masculinity. Referring to the work of
Timothy Habick on the rural community of Farmer City, Illinois, they write,
“A back variant of /u/ was associated with membership in a group known
for its ‘tough’ stance. The notion that the LB women were using backness
to convey social identity rather than overall masculinity is supported by our
finding that they did not mimic the articulatory reduction that is typical of
male speech.”100 However, Pierrehumbert and her co-authors minimize the
ways that toughness is itself a masculine-coded trait in our society and that
queer women are not ultimately trying to pass as men. As with Byrd E.
Bath, how far you can go depends on context and, in the context of being a
tough, rebellious rocker, Jett goes pretty far. In one of her first solo hits,
“Bad Reputation” from 1980, Jett uses far more male vocalisms than just
back vowels, including the “articulatory reduction” typical of male
speech.101
 “Bad Reputation” is a fast rock song with a punk aesthetic in which
Jett’s lyrical-I proclaims she does not care about her bad reputation, does
not care if people think she is “strange,” and will do whatever she wants
regardless of what others think. Jett does not sing so much as she shouts.
Her range falls squarely in the alto range, and unlike Ella Shields, who was
trying to pass as male, Jett remains above the gender-neutral pitch zone,
even modulating upward higher into her tessitura. Lyrical references to
herself as a “girl” help cement Jett as female in the listener’s mind, though
she adopts few female vocalisms. Jett keeps her voice loud, strained, and
raspy with hard glottal fry and vocal distortion, avoiding all breathiness
(Example 13.9). Although she sings high in her range, she never uses her
head voice, belting throughout and placing her pitches strongly rearward
and downward. Jett’s resonance is chest heavy and gets very deep with her
placement of the “O” in “Oh no.” Additionally, she avoids the forwardly
placed vowel /i/, consistently distorting it from /i/ to /eI/, pronouncing “me”
more like “may.” This is, of course, a regularly used rock pronunciation of
the /i/ vowel, but that pronunciation is meant to convey masculine hardness
and accords with linguistic research showing men use less standard vowel
pronunciation than women.102 Jett avoids upward inflections and
consistently ends phrases with male-coded downward drops. While the
song avoids a sense of monotonicity due to large leaps and drops due to its
staccato shouted and syllabic delivery, it does not sound particularly
melodic either. Jett uses volume rather than pitch for emphasis and
generally stays high intensity for the whole song. Finally, Jett also peppers
the song with the emphasized articulatory reduction and cursing so strongly
related to male-coded vocal performance.
EXAMPLE 13.9 Joan Jett, “Bad Reputation.” End of verse into Chorus.

In the song’s music video, Jett supplements her strong male-coded

vocalisms with male-coded body language. She stands in an A-shape, her
legs planted in a wide stance, taking up a lot of space. In sharp contrast with
The Honeytraps, Jett plays her low-slung guitar aggressively from her
shoulder and not from her wrist. The video, which is a fictionalized account
of Jett’s rejection by society and record labels for being “different,” features
scenes of her being physically ejected from bars and venues with cheeky
intertitles like “We don’t want your kind here,” “Come back when you’re
dressed like a lady,” and “You can’t sing.” These intertitles highlight both
Jett’s unfeminine femaleness as well as her membership in a non-normative
“kind.” Yet despite all of her performance of gender variance, many people
did not read her as queer. How could this be? While heterosexism is
certainly part of the culprit, another answer is genre. Rock is an
aggressively male-coded genre. Jett, performing tough male-coded
vocalisms, could be seen as presenting butch queer identity, or her gender
presentation could be understood as “merely” the performance of rock
authenticity. The rock genre becomes the walls of the glass closet for the
queer female rocker, the plausible deniability that allowed Jett to broadcast
two meanings with one tone of her voice, one for those who chose not to
“be lazy” and “figure it out themselves,” and one for those who would
rather not see Jett as anything but heterosexual. However, reading her
straight demands inattentiveness to her voice. Unlike heterosexual-
presenting female rockers such as Anne Wilson, Lita Ford, and Pat Benatar
who regularly integrate female-coded vocalisms into their performances of
rock vocality, Jett does not rework rock tropes to make femininity legible.
Jett’s voice claims membership in the boys club of rock without challenging
the masculine coding of the genre, but in so doing challenges the
assumption that masculinity only belongs to men and makes audible for
those who would hear it a female queer rock star within a homophobic and
sexist environment.
Passing as Cisgendered Heteronormative—
Nostalgic Imaginings
I end this chapter with a brief discussion of Loretta Lynn and Conway
Twitty’s gendered performances in their 1981 duet “I Still Believe in
Waltzes.”103 By including them here, I do not claim that the singers are
queer or transgender. Rather, I want to posit that the insight gained from the
study of gendered vocalisms outlined in transgender passing guides also
applies to cisgender heterosexual people. Reading “I Still Believe in
Waltzes” through the lens of the gender vocalisms systematized by
transgender people illuminates much about the performance of
heteronormativity and the ways it is effected by operating within a genre,
country, marked by associations with a working class and rural identity that
is itself not hegemonic within American society.
Loretta Lynn, the “First Lady of Country,” emerged into the Nashville
music scene as a singer and songwriter in the 1960s. She started her career
as a hard honky-tonk singer with songs like “I’m a Honky-Tonk Girl” and
“Wine Women and Song.” She was known to sing brash and challenging
songs about women’s issues such as “Rated X” and “The Pill,” bringing her
into conflict with the country music industry’s power structure. In 1977 she
paired up with Conway Twitty to form one of the most successful country
duos of all time. Before switching over to country in 1968, Twitty started
his musical career in rock ‘n’ roll, first recording at Sun Records, the same
studio where Elvis got his start. Twitty initially encountered resistance from
country DJs distrustful of his rock ‘n’ roll pedigree, but was eventually
welcomed in and went on to rack up fifty-five number one hits on the
country charts over the course of his career. Though Lynn and Twitty were
at first a bit too wild or controversial for country, by the end of the 1970s
they were both institutions. Yet as the 1970s became the 1980s, when they
released their single “I Still Believe in Waltzes” (1981), the country music
industry was in the process of pushing out many of the stars of the 1960s
and 1970s in favor of a newer crop of singers. “I Still Believe in Waltzes,” a
form of pushback against that change, sees Twitty and Lynn presenting a
nostalgic return to a normative, mythic musical country past that they were
never unproblematically a part of in the first place. Supporting this
nostalgic return to traditional notions of country is the performance of
compulsory normative gender vocalisms by both of them.
Set in 3/4 time, “I Still Believe in Waltzes,” features Lynn singing the
verses and Twitty singing the chorus. The song begins with Lynn’s lyrical-I
putting the brakes on an escalating intimate moment with Twitty’s lyrical-I,
explaining that she is old-fashioned and “not that kind of girl.” Expecting to
be rejected, Twitty instead reassures Lynn in the chorus where he declares
that he “still believes in waltzes,” “old-fashioned girls,” and “the good old
days.” By the second verse, Lynn and Twitty are married with children, but
all is not well. Lynn is anxious because Twitty has been working late and
expresses her fears that Twitty might be cheating on her. Twitty reassures
her of his fidelity with a return to the chorus and the past. This song is a far
cry from Lynn’s 1967 “Don’t Come Home from Drinking With Loving on
Your Mind” or Twitty’s 1974 “There’s a Honky Tonk Angel (Who Will
Take Me Back In),” which are a part of a long country tradition challenging
traditional domestic narratives, especially as they are perceived to be
removed from rural working class experiences. Twitty and Lynn sing with
audible southern accents, which effects both vocal production and its
perception. The Southern US accent tends to have a wider variety of
inflectional patterns than American standard, and these broader inflection
patterns can be heard in Lynn and Twitty’s use of swoops on words with
twang like her pronunciation of “square” (Example 13.10) or his
pronunciation of “you” (Example 13.11). Although such inflectional variety
tends to be read as female-coded in Standard English, here it is
counterbalanced by the South’s, and especially country music’s, association
with working class and rural culture, both of which are masculinized. As
Hendrick notes, “in America, ‘plain talk’ has always held a claim to greater
masculinity than what some social conservatives have characterized as the
‘effete’ utterances of the educated.”104 The working class masculine
association of country with plain talk counteracts the greater inflectional
variety of the Southern dialect and paradoxically gives “Waltzes” the ability
to function as valorization of the sort of privileged middle class domesticity
that neither Lynn nor Twitty grew up with.

EXAMPLE 13.10 Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty, “I Still Believe in Waltzes.” Lynn’s verse 1.

EXAMPLE 13.11 Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty, “I Still Believe in Waltzes.” Twitty’s chorus 2.

“Waltzes” draws a strong division between men and women. So much

so, in fact, that Lynn and Twitty’s respective sections are in different keys,
Lynn’s verses in E♭, Twitty’s chorus in F. Differences between the sexes is
amplified by the obvious and deliberate switching of keys for each singer,
emphasizing their places in different sonic worlds. Lynn has a grounded
chest sound, which is fitting for the working class toughness associated
with the genre but also the less sexualized maturity Lynn-as-mother
projects. Yet Lynn avoids the belting power she demonstrates in songs like
her Twitty duet “Mississippi Woman, Louisiana Man.” Instead, she places
her voice higher in her chest and adds female-coded vulnerable breathiness,
especially at the ends of melodic lines (Example 13.10). Twitty, on the other
hand, revels vocally in his rich baritone, emphasizing a warm, stable, and
reassuring chest resonance. Twitty mostly avoids the gritty or excessive
vocal fry that, while male-coded, would connote a sexual aggressiveness
and dangerous excitement that would undercut Twitty’s presentation of a
faithful and virtuous patriarch.
Even the smaller details of the duo’s performance mirror the gendered
vocalisms outlined by the transgender passing guides and feminist
sociolinguists. Twitty’s articulations are harder and duller, mitigated by a
relaxed rubato that helps him avoid coming off as too aggressive. Lynn’s
articulations are precise and careful. She sings with more extended vowels,
often using swoops for emphasis, while Twitty avoids elongation for
emphasis, uses less pitch variation, and tends to hold longer notes steady
without vibrato. Twitty’s straightforward delivery makes him seem more
masculine and less “singerly,” while Lynn, whose vocals are marked by the
presence of both vibrato and some multi-note runs, conforms to traditional
notions of vocal womanhood. Even the singers’ volume reinforces
traditional gender coding. While the overall amplitude between them was
normalized in the mixing, the perception of their volume is different due to
microphone placement. Lynn sings softly with her volume coming from
being closely mic’d. Twitty sings much louder, compensated by being
mic’d farther away. All the ways Lynn and Twitty choose to perform gender
in their voices for “Waltzes” serve not only to reinforce traditional notions
of gender but also to naturalize and emphasize wide differences between
men and women. Such a large gulf could raise the specter of relationship
incompatibility, threatening the desirability and stability of compulsory
heterosexuality, but “Waltzes” soothes any doubts raised in Lynn’s sparse
verses through Twitty’s lushly orchestrated and overwhelming chorus,
replete with a supportive choir of feminine “oohs” in the background.
Twitty’s reassuring authority and domestic normality prevail in the end as
Lynn joins Twitty for the last line, harmonizing his melodic line and
adopting his key. “Waltzes” capitalizes on an association of Country music,
most specifically the Country waltz, with nostalgia for a past social gender
and sexual order and reinforces it by having both performers pass as male
and female as traditionally and seamlessly as possible.
 C

This chapter has cataloged a number of gender vocalisms and then applied
them as analytical lenses to a number of songs while touching on some
intersectional lenses, such as class, genre, and sexuality. This represents
only a few of the ways that the vocal elements cataloged by transgender
passing guides can be used in music scholarship. More intersectional lenses
can be added to the way gender vocal expectations create meaning. For
example, the ways in which dominant white society genders race, from the
masculinization of African Americans to the feminization of Asian
Americans, can be taken into account when analyzing the vocal
performance strategies of performers like Grace Jones or PSY. These vocal
elements can also be used to examine how performers like Boy George or
Kelly Moe craft androgyny within a binarily conceived vocal system.
Comparisons of the different gendered vocal strategies of heterosexual and
queer female rockers as they create spaces for themselves within the rock
industry would add much to scholarship about women in music. The
possibilities opened up by transgendered passing guides and related
linguistic research are numerous for music and voice scholars. Transgender
experiential knowledge offers a rich and valuable set of tools for those
scholars dealing with gender and sexuality performance of both trans and
cisgendered artists.
N
1. It must be noted that not all transgender people care about passing. While this chapter concerns
itself with those texts created by or about transgender people who do wish to pass, my use of
those texts should by no means be taken as an endorsement of passability as necessary.
2. Cis comes from the Latin for “on this side of” and is the antonym for trans. Thus, a cisgendered
person is someone whose gender identity matches their sex. It should be noted that the passing
guides I am using are all Anglophone guides and aim to help the transgender person pass as a
normative subject, which means that they particularly highlight the social constructs that
emphasize the dominant white, middle-class, Western ideas of gender norms. These guides,
many of them available on the internet, do, however, travel globally, and people in many
different parts of the world often learn passing tips from these Anglophone guides. If one wants
to understand hegemonic constructions of gender (which gain their power by obscuring their
constructed nature) either to reproduce them or to subvert them, transgender passing guides that
expose the constructed nature of hegemonic gender performance are an invaluable resource.
3. Andrea James, “Vocal Feminization: Introduction,”
http://www.tsroadmap.com/physical/voice/voice2.html.
4. Calpernia Addams and Andrea James, “Finding Your Female Voice” (Deep Stealth Productions,
2005), 21–23. The main passagio, or break, people usually speak of is where one’s voice
switches from the chest voice to the head voice.
5. Yukiki S. Jolly, “The Use of Songs in Teaching Foreign Languages,” The Modern Language
Journal 59: 1–2 (1975), 11–14. For other scholarly work on the link between singing and
speaking, see, for example: Thomas F. Cleveland, Johan Sundberg, and R. E. (Ed) Stone,
“Long-Term-Average Spectrum Characteristics of Country Singers During Speaking and
Singing” Journal of Voice 15:1 (2001), 54–60; Markus Christiner and Susanne M. Reiterer,
“Song and Speech: Examining the Link between Singing Talent and Speech Imitation Ability,”
Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00874.
6. Mitchell Morris has done some excellent unpublished work on the melodicism of actors of the
nineteenth century, including noting how Julia Marlowe trained speaking on specific pitches
over an octave and a half range. See Mitchell Morris, “Wozzeck, Sprechstimme, and the
Melodramatic Tradition of Acting Style” (master’s essay, Columbia University, Spring 1986).
7. “The Strong Man in Music,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 36 (1895), 373.
8. Melinda Green, “Passing Glances: A Primer on Passing and Successful Transition for the Early-
Stage Transwoman,” http://superliminal.com/melinda/passingglances.htm.
9. Melanie Anne, “Female Voice Lessons for Transsexuals,”
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112042052/http://heartcorps.com/journeys/voice.htm.
10. Alfred Blatter, Instrumentation and Orchestration, 2nd ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997),
306.
11. Ibid., 305. Note: “Head Voice” or “Head Register” is when the singer feels as if the voice is
resonating in their head, as opposed to “Chest Voice” or “Chest Register,” when the singer feels
as if the voice is resonating in their upper chest or throat. To hear what this sounds like and for a
 further explanation, including for the term passagio see Melody M., “Chest Voice vs. Head
Voice,” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnX9DlAQbnc
12. Janet B. Pierrehumbert et al., “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production (L),”
Journal of the Accoustical Society of America 116 (2004), 1906.
13. For important music studies works that look at gendered vocal performance from a critical
theoretical lens rather than the more practical theoretical lens I’m using see, for example, Sue-
Ellen Case, “The Butch White Trash Throat,” GLSG Newsletter 8, no. 1 (1998), 7–13; Suzanne
Cusick, “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex,” Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and
Music, ed. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999), 25–48;
John Shepherd, “Music and Male Hegemony,” Music and Society, ed. Richard Leppert and
Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 151–172.
14. For important music studies works that look at transgender musicians see, for example, Shana
Goldin-Perschbacher, “TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” New Literary History 46,
no. 4 (2015), 775–803; Elias Krell, “Singing Strange: Transvocality in North American Music
Performance” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2014); Viviane K. Namaste, C’était du
spectacle! L’histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955–1985 (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2005).
15. Leigh Wilson Smiley, “Cowboy Resonance in America,” Voice and Gender and Other
Contemporary Issues in Professional Voice and Speech Training, ed. Mandy Rees (Cincnnati,
OH, 2007), 18.
16. Ibid.
17. Kathe Perez, “Ask a Voice Therapist” Transgender Tapestry (2008), 10–11.
18. F0 (F-zero) is the shorthand for the phrase “fundamental frequency.” F0 is a standard usage in a
number of fields from linguistics to acoustics to physics. While one can figure out their
fundamental speaking frequency by using linguistics software like PRAAT, one could also find
an approximation of their fundamental speaking frequency by recording themselves speaking,
isolating an average vocal pitch and finding that note on the piano.
19. Pamela R. Hendrick, “Two Opposite Animals? Voice, Text, and Gender on Stage” Theatre
Topics 8 (1998), 116.
20. Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Rowley, MA,
1975), 14.
21. Smiley, “Cowboy Resonance in America,” 18.
22. Cecilia Pemberton, Paul McCormack, and Alison Russell, “Have Women’s Voices Lowered
across Time? A Cross Sectional Study of Australian Women’s Voices” Journal of Voice 12
(1998), 208–213.
23. Marylou Pausewang Gelfer and Michelle Mordaunt, “Pitch and Intonation,” Voice and
Communication Therapy for the Transgender/Transsexual Client: A Comprehensive Clinical
Guide, ed. Richard Kenneth Adler, Sandy Hirsch, and Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego, 2012),
192.
24. Lynn Gold, “Voice Training for the Transsexual,” VASTA Newsletter 13 (1999), 105–109.
25. Extrapolated from the two following sources: Jack Pickering and Lauren Baker, “A Historical
Perspective and Review of the Literature,” Voice and Communication Therapy for the
Transgender/Transsexual Client: A Comprehensive Clinical Guide, ed. Richard Kenneth Adler,
Sandy Hirsch, and Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego, 2012), 3, 11; and Rachael Harrington,
 “Voice Characteristics of Transgender Speakers” (master’s thesis, George Washington
University, 2011), 5.
26. See, for example, Nat Titman, “Practical Androgyny: Vocal Androgyny in Speech and Singing,”
http://practicalandrogyny.com/tag/gender-cues/.
27. See Cicely Berry, Voice and the Actor, 1st American edn (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Kristin
Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1976); Michael
McCallion, The Voice Book: For Everyone Who Wants to Make the Most of Their Voice, rev. ed.
(New York: Theater Arts Books/Routledge, 1999).
28. NHS Department of Health, “A Guide for Young Trans People in the UK” (2007), 12.
29. Anon., “Feminine Voice Techniques,” http://www.looking-glass.greenend.org.uk/voice.htm.
30. Harrington, “Voice Characteristics of Transgender Speakers,” 5–6.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. Sandy Hirsch and Marylou Pausewang Gelfer, “Resonance,” Voice and Communication
Therapy for the Transgender/Transsexual Client: A Comprehensive Clinical Guide, ed. Richard
Kenneth Adler, Sandy Hirsch, and Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego, 2012), 231.
33. Reinhardt J. Heuer, Margaret Baroody, and Robert Thayer Sataloff, “Management of Gender
Reassignment (Sex Change Patients),” Voice and Gender and Other Contemporary Issues in
Professional Voice and Speech Training, ed. Mandy Rees (Cincinnati, OH, 2007), 227.
34. There are a number of YouTube videos with examples of formant adjustment for those who
want to hear examples. See, for example, those by singing instructor Karyn O’Connor “Vocal
Formants and Harmonics Explained!” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=D3dFSJ4Hzbs; linguist Moti Lieberman “How Do We Change Our Mouths to Shape Waves?
Formants,” YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl4zGRSYqkE; musician and
YouTube personality Justin Omoi, “The Difference Between Pitch and Formant,” YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok0PL_QS2BM.
35. Hirsch and Gelfer, “Resonance,” 232.
36. Ibid., 238.
37. Heuer, Baroody, and Sataloff, “Management of Gender Reassignment,” 227.
38. Hendrick, “Two Opposite Animals?,” 117.
39. Heuer, Baroody, and Sataloff, “Management of Gender Reassignment,” 226–227.
40. Maria Södersten and Per-Åke Lindestad, “Glottal Closure and Perceived Breathiness During
Phonation in Normally Speaking Subjects,” Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research
33 (1990), 601.
41. Anon., “Feminine Voice Techniques.”
42. Mel Churcher, “What Is a Sexy Voice?,” Voice and Gender and Other Contemporary Issues in
Professional Voice and Speech Training, ed. Mandy Rees (Cincinnati, OH, 2007), 262.
43. Lesley Wolk, Nassima B. Abdelli-Beruh, and Dianne Slavin, “Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in
Young Adult Female Speakers” Journal of Voice 26 (2012), e111–e116.
44. Marissa Fessenden, “‘Vocal Fry’ Creeping into U.S. Speech,” Science Now, December 9, 2011,
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/vocal-fry-creeping-into-us-speec.html.
45. Heuer, Baroody, and Sataloff, “Management of Gender Reassignment,” 227.
46. See for example, Joan Boonin, “Articulation,” Voice and Communication Therapy for the
Transgender/Transsexual Client: A Comprehensive Clinical Guide, ed. Richard Kenneth Adler,
Sandy Hirsch, and Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego, 2012), 253.
47. Heuer, Baroody, and Sataloff, “Management of Gender Reassignment,” 227.
48. Jennifer Oates and Georgia Dacakis, “Voice Change in Transsexuals” Venereology 10 (1997),
178–187.
49. Green, “Passing Glances.”
50. Anon., “Feminine Voice Techniques.”
51. Boonin, “Articulation,” 264–265.
52. My choice of the term flow is informed by hip-hop music’s concept of flow, used to describe the
rhythm and speed of an emcee while rapping.
53. Holly Wilder, “Investigating Language Differences between Men and Women” (master’s thesis,
George Washington University, 2010), 4.
54. Anon., “Feminine Voice Techniques.”
55. Boonin, “Articulation,” 254.
56. Cecelia Goodnow, “Speech Therapy Helps Transgender Women Develop a Feminine Sound,”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 12, 2001,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070527214159/http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/transgende
r.shtml.
57. Anthony Mulac et al., “Male/Female Language Differences and Effects in Same-Sex and
Mixed-Sex Dyads: The Gender-Linked Language Effect” Communications Monographs 55
(1988), 315–335.
58. Hendrick, “Two Opposite Animals?,” 118.
59. Ibid., 118–119.
60. Ibid., 119.
61. Ibid., 120.
62. I would like to remind the reader of the disclaimer I made at the beginning of this section. I am
describing hegemonic gendered speech and voice norms, I am not endorsing them.
63. Celia R. Hooper, Sena Crutchley, and Vicki McCready, “Syntax and Semantics: A Menu of
Communicative Choices,” Voice and Communication Therapy for the Transgender/Transsexual
Client: A Comprehensive Clinical Guide, ed. Richard Kenneth Adler, Sandy Hirsch, and
Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego, 2012), 307.
64. Green, “Passing Glances.”
65. Ibid.
66. Wilder, “Investigating Language Differences between Men and Women,” 52.
67. Andy, “Ftm Passing Tips,” http://www.ftmpassingtips.com/passing.html.
68. For some popular discourse on manspreading see: Emma G. Fitzsimmons, “A Scourge Is
Spreading. M.T.A.’s Cure? Dude, Close Your Legs.” New York Times, December 20, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/MTA-targets-manspreading-on-new-york-city-
subways.html; Eric M. Johnson, “One body, one seat: Seattle’s campaign against the
“manspreading” scourge’, Reuters, January 15, 2015, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-
transportation-manspreading-idUSKBN0KQ01120150117; Gabrielle Moss, “Why Do Guys
 Spread Their Legs When Sitting on The Subway? My Weekend of Sitting Like a Man” Bustle,
August 7, 2014, http://www.bustle.com/articles/34279-why-do-guys-spread-their-legs-when-
sitting-on-the-subway-my-weekend-of-sitting-like.
69. Sandy Hirsch and Joan Boonin, “Nonverbal Communication: Assessment and Training,” Voice
and Communication Therapy for the Transgender/Transsexual Client: A Comprehensive
Clinical Guide, ed. Richard Kenneth Adler, Sandy Hirsch, and Michelle Mordaunt (San Diego,
2012), 359.
70. Hirsch and Van Borsel, “Nonverbal Communication: A Multicultural View,” 326.
71. Goodnow, “Speech Therapy Helps Transgender Women Develop a Feminine Sound.”
72. Hirsch and Van Borsel, “Nonverbal Communication: A Multicultural View,” 326.
73. Erica Tobolski, “Opposite Gender Monologue: Expanding Vocal Range,” Voice and Gender and
Other Contemporary Issues in Professional Voice and Speech Training, ed. Mandy Rees
(Cincinnati, OH, 2007), 35.
74. This recording can be found on the CD Tipping The Velvet CD41 (2002).
75. Gillian M. Rodger, “Male Impersonation on the North American Variety and Vaudeville Stage,
1868–1930” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1998), 306. For more of Rodger’s work on
male impersonation see: Rodger, Gillian M. “‘He Isn’t a Marrying Man’: Gender and Sexuality
in the Repertoire of Male Impersonators, 1870–1930.” In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern
Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002),
105–133; Rodger, Gillian M. Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the
American Variety Stage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018); and her chapter, “Queering
Middle-Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Theater,” in this collection.
76. Harold Scott, The Early Doors, Origins of the Music Hall (London, 1946), 211.
77. “Ella Shields,” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 14, 1952.
78. Ibid.
79. Berry, Voice and the Actor, 69.
80. Colin MacInnes, Sweet Saturday Night (London, 1967), 60.
81. Both the Flock of Seagulls and Honeytraps versions of “Wishing” can be found on YouTube.
82. “Episode 3,” in Boys Will Be Girls (UK, 2006), 3:55–4:10.
83. “Episode 2,” in Boys Will Be Girls (UK, 2006), 14:00–14:10.
84. Ibid., 15:52–15:56.
85. Heuer, Baroody, and Sataloff, “Management of Gender Reassignment,” 227.
86. “Episode 6,” in Boys Will Be Girls (UK, 2006), 11:30–11:36.
87. Ibid., 9:00–9:09.
88. “Episode 5,” in Boys Will Be Girls (UK, 2006), 13:24–13:29.
89. For more discussion of the regular depiction of women sitting, lying down, or standing off
balance rather than standing grounded see Jean Kilbourne’s documentary series, Killing Us
Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.
90. The discourse of girl pop groups being manufactured and therefore inauthentic, as opposed to
male rock groups, goes back quite far, and was regularly used against Motown girl groups. The
discourse was renewed again and leveled, most relevantly, against Brit Pop girl group The Spice
Girls. For some information on this see, Catherine Driscoll, “Girl Culture, Revenge and Global
 Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrls, Spice Girls” Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29 (1999),
173–193.
91. Ron Smyth and Henry Rogers, “Phonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation,” Actes De L’acl
2002/2002 Cla Proceedings, ed. Sophie Burelle and Stanca Somesfalean (Montreal, 2002), 303.
92. The song “I’m So Wet” may be heard on the Queer Music Heritage website:
http://queermusicheritage.com/camp.html.
93. Anne, “Female Voice Lessons for Transsexuals.”
94. Smyth and Rogers, “Phonetics, Gender, and Sexual Orientation,” 309.
95. William Leap, Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (Minneapolis, 1996), 38.
96. Addams and James, “Finding Your Female Voice,” 10.
97. Pierrehumbert et al., “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production (L),” 1908.
98. Evelyn McDonnell, “Joan Jett,” Interview, March 23, 2010,
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/joan-jett-the-runaways/.
99. Pierrehumbert et al., “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production (L),” 1907.
100. Ibid., 1908.
101. “Bad Reputation” may be found on YouTube.
102. Lesley Milroy, Language and Social Networks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
103. “I Still Believe in Waltzes” may be found on YouTube.
104. Hendrick, “Two Opposite Animals?,” 114–115.
R
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Bath, Byrd E. “I’m So Wet,” The Queen is In the Closet. Various artists. Accessed from: Queer
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Case, Sue-Ellen, “The Butch White Trash Throat.” GLSG Newsletter 8, no. 1 (March 1998): 7–13.
Christiner, Markus, and Susanne M. Reiterer, “Song and Speech: Examining the Link between
Singing Talent and Speech Imitation Ability.” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013).
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and Speech Trainers Association, 2007.
Cleveland, Thomas F., Johan Sundberg, and R. E. Stone, (Ed), “Long-Term-Average Spectrum
Characteristics of Country Singers During Speaking and Singing” Journal of Voice 15, no. 1
(2001): 54–60.
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Driscoll, Catherine. “Girl Culture, Revenge and Global Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrls, Spice
Girls.” Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29 (1999): 173–193.
“Ella Shields.” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, August 14, 1952.
“Episode 2.” In Boys Will Be Girls. UK, 2006.
“Episode 3.” In Boys Will Be Girls. UK, 2006.
“Episode 5.” In Boys Will Be Girls. UK, 2006.
“Episode 6.” In Boys Will Be Girls. UK, 2006.
Fessenden, Marissa. “‘Vocal Fry’ Creeping into U.S. Speech.” Science Now (December 9, 2011).
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/vocal-fry-creeping-into-us-speec.html.
Fitzsimmons, Emma G. “A Scourge Is Spreading. M.T.A.’s Cure? Dude, Close Your Legs.” New
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 CHAPTER 14

SOUND DESIRES
Auralism, the Sexual Fetishization of Music
JOD I E TAYL OR
 A

I contemporary society, new technologies facilitate new forms of “aural

sex.”1 Long after the emergence of erotic literature and the predominantly
visual spectacles of pin ups, strip tease, and pornographic film came phone
sex services and commercial sex recordings: audio porn. First available in
the US in the early 1980s,2 phone sex is a specific service that offers callers
telephonically mediated sexual arousal and gratification. Audio erotic
performers at the other end of the line offer a variety of aural services at the
request of their paying clients, who more than likely masturbate to the real-
time vocalizations of an unseen body. The phone sex worker may offer
sexual anecdotes, narrate requested sexual scenarios, and/or make orgasmic
noises depending on what the client needs to “get off.”3
Pornography and erotic cinema serve as salient examples of how certain
genres of music have established cultural affinities with particular forms of
sexual gratification.4 Since the mid-1990s, audio porn has also become
widely available in a variety of media and distribution formats such as
compact discs, podcasts, and online radio. Employing binaural recording
techniques that attempt to create a three dimensional and thus more
immersive listening experience, CDs such as Cyborgasm (1997) offer
listeners a range of spoken word erotic fantasies, while others such as
Sounds of Sex (2006), are merely a collection of sampled ecstatic moans,
panting, and other sex-related bodily sounds like sucking, licking, or the
sounds of lubricated flesh pounding flesh. Descriptive text on an iTunes
podcast feed provided by Sonic Erotica promises to provide “immersive
audio erotica” for the “visually impaired (and anyone else with ears).” It
boasts a large selection of what it calls “aural voyeurism” as well as stories
“illustrated” with “sounds recorded from actual sex scenarios,” promising
that “all orgasms are authentic.”5
Enmeshed in both the signification of sexual desire and the potential for
sound and music to sexually arouse, this chapter identifies the ear as a
sexual orifice, a penetrable erogenous zone. When we are penetrated by
sounds so rapturous that we find ourselves erotically stimulated, even
orgasmic, is this aural sex? What might it mean if we become so “turned
on” by particular auditory stimuli that they become a crucial agent for our
sexual enjoyment? Is it conceivable that music or sound may actually
become one’s primary object of sexual devotion: a fetish?
As with other “unconventional” sexual practices such as BDSM,6
medical fraternities have historically stigmatized fetishism as a
psychosexual disorder or a deviation from a “normal,” “healthy” sexuality.
In the current edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-V), fetishism remains classified as a paraphilia, where
such diagnoses are tenuously founded on fetishists’ feelings of extreme
guilt or shame leading to sexual and social dysfunction, particularly among
men.7 The notion of a “normal” sexuality is problematic for so many
reasons, not least due to its didactic relationality to the person, community,
or institution defining “normal”.8 Accordingly, many fetishists strongly
object to this classification, preferring instead to situate their
unconventional practices and/or lifestyles within the broader sexual rubric
of “kink.”9 Kink is a somewhat catchall term and broadly signals an array
of alternative sex scenes and practices that transgress “mainstream”10
sexual conventions; kink includes, among other things, BDSM, polyamory,
and fetishism.
Since pathological accounts of perverse sexual pleasure remain a
powerful means of institutionalizing sexual norms and morality, I engage
“queer” as a discursive mechanism in order to critically examine the
fetishization of music and the sexual pleasures/perversions of auralism. To
begin, I give a brief overview of some general theories on music and
sexuality, leading into a more detailed review of theoretical formulations of
the fetish object and sexual fetishism. The value of (re)examining the
sexual potential of the auditory sphere becomes apparent in my review of
what little we know about aural arousal and kinky musico-sexual11
practices. Attempt to bring empirical clarity to the discussion, I proceed to
draw on my own ethnographic observations and participation in online
music and aural fetish forums. Finally, I propose that aural and music
fetishism forms part of the contemporary repertoire of kinky erotic action,
where audio-eroticism queers the conventional repertoire of sexual arousal,
stimuli, and gratification, and affords a new, and perhaps more radical queer
approach to music listening.
 S , S , S

Sexual arousal exceeds mundane associations with tactile and visual

stimuli, and as the introductory paragraphs in this chapter illustrate,
auditory stimulation has established sexual potency. Of course, this is not a
radical proclamation, as the links between music, sexuality, and sexual
affect are well rehearsed.
Since music is known to exist in every human culture past and present,12
we can say with relative certainly that most, if not all humans have found
pleasure in music.13 In his thesis on the descent of man and sexual
selection, the great naturalist Charles Darwin posits music as serving a
primordial sexual function in humans and our half-human ancestors: “the
progenitors of man, before they acquired language, endeavoured to charm
each other with musical notes and rhythm.”14 Referring to Darwin,
Elizabeth Grosz explores music as a pleasure-inducing, seductive,
intensifying and affective means of arousing passion: “it is the erotic,
indeed perhaps vibratory, force…that sexualizes the body” and generates “a
kind of immediate bodily satisfaction.”15 While any positivist assertions
that music constitutes a quasi-universal means of communicating human
desire or emotions are antithetical to contemporary postmodern critique, it
may be argued that certain soft “truths” persist: music, sonic, and vibratory
forces constitute a sexualized body and thus maintain an always
contextualized capacity to rouse intense pleasure, signifying and, perhaps,
fulfilling sexual urges.
Music is culturally contextualized technology of sexual representation
par excellence. It is now a ubiquitous argument within the fields of critical
musicology that gendered power relations and sexual politics are encoded
in musical forms and texts. Thus, deconstructionist textual analysis has
served as the dominant method for critically reconfiguring gender and
sexual agency in music.16 A declaration of one’s musical tastes can
constitute an intimate expression of one’s sexual identity and/or desires:
“music is at its most politically potent when it encourages the transgressive
unleashing of desire, especially sexual desire”.17
Music can also function as a technology of sexual self-making, assisting
us to construct and (re)configure our identities and bodies. In other words,
more than merely signifying one’s sexual identity politics, music propels
our bodies to act in ways that may inform or enhance a sexual response and
even affect sexual arousal and the accomplishment of sexual gratification.18
Exploring the possibility of a “musically composed” form of erotic agency,
Tia DeNora argues that music is a useful structuring device for sexual
action, enabling the establishment of scenic specificity, configuring the
desired parameters for erotic activity, and signifying levels of emotional
intensity and dynamism.19 Drawing on empirical accounts of sexual
activity, DeNora demonstrates how various types of music “provide
materials with which actors may allude to styles and genres of activity…
[and] a means of contextualizing actors and of creating a ‘background’ to
which actors may relate in order to discipline, meaningful feeling and
bodily form”.20
 T S F

The concept of fetishism has been prominent in anthropology, sexology,

psychoanalysis, and Marxist economics, as well as some vernacular
discourses. Introduced as a term referring to exotic peoples or sexual
deviants, it has also been claimed as a term of self-identification. In
anthropological terms, a fetish is an object of obsessive devotion, bestowed
with symbolic power to a degree that exceeds rational explanation and
conflicts with the object’s logical value or use.21 Fetishists—the persons or
cultures who worship the fetish—have historically been looked upon as
anachronistic, abnormal, irrational, perverse, or deviant since their
“unnatural” reverence for the object transgresses normative social codes.
Following this rationale, sexual fetishism is the attribution of specifically
erotic power to a seemingly ordinary object.
The sexual fetishist is a construct of late nineteenth-century Western
medicine: a time when morality and morbid fascination with sexual
aberrations, degenerates, and perversions manifested an evasive sexual
science. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault distinguishes two procedures
for producing what societies have regarded as the truth of sex: an ars
erotica (erotic art) and a scientia sexualis (science of sexuality). In the
masterful art of sex, truth is “experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms
of…its specific quality…its reverberations in the body and the soul,” while
in science, truth “became something fundamental, useful or dangerous,
precious or formidable.”22 Sexologists and psychoanalysts set about
establishing a medical model of normal sexuality through the explicit study
of what was regarded to be sexually odd or queer, and among the most
influential writers on the topic was Sigmund Freud.
With its basis in Oedipal logic, Freud’s thesis suggests that a sexual
fetish is the result of castration disavowal, where a surrogate penis is
created in the mind of a male child when he comes to discover his mother’s
supposed castration. Unlike the boy, the mother does not have a penis and
realizing this induces trauma in the boy who fears the possibility of his own
castration—a fear reinforced through paternal discipline. In the boy’s
original moment of horror and disbelief, he displaces his attachment to the
maternal phallus onto an object that was present when he first saw his
mother’s “mutilated” genitals—a shoe, breasts, a hand, pubic hair, female
garments, or accessories—that is, the object that the boy’s eyes haphazardly
focused upon in his recoiling horror. In summary, the fetish becomes “a
token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It
also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women
with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects.”23
The real or fantasized presence of the fetish then becomes psychologically
necessary for the male to achieve sexual gratification. Following Freud,
Jacques Lacan similarly maintains a phallocentric logic that systematically
disavows female sexual agency. Taking the fetish as symbolic of their
always-already lacking phallus, Lacan insists that “fetishism must be absent
in women” since “the imaginary motive for most male perversions is the
desire to preserve the phallus which involved the subject in the mother.”24
Contrary to Freudian and Lacanian perspectives, female fetishism and
women’s participation in fetish scenes are empirically evidenced by
contemporary kink sub/cultures, which take form in sexual fetish clubs
(such as the iconic Hellfire club), magazines and online communities, and
through women’s self-stylization, consumption, and production of fetish
fashion, pornography, art, and literature.25 Accordingly, a host of feminist
scholars have vigorously contested this exclusive model of male perversion
offering various theoretical alternatives.26 Concomitant with theories of
“the gaze” prevalent among feminist literary and film criticism and the
scopophilic bias in theory and in culture, both feminist and psychoanalytic
criticism have substantively documented the fetishization of material
objects such as the female body (feet, breasts, pubic hair, and other thereof),
garments (for example, high-heel shoes, corsets, dildos) textiles (for
example, rubber, leather, and lace), and food. Comparatively, the sexual
fetishization of music and sound—of the immaterial—has received little
consideration.
 F S M

Most commonly, fetish-related discussions of music and/or sound are

located under the rubric of what Karl Marx called “commodity fetishism.”27
Critiquing the political economy of capitalism, Marx coined the phrase to
describe human relations as they are transformed by and become alien to
the products of their labour. By affording consumer objects unnatural
power, which is detached from labour, social relationships become
inauthentically mediated through commodity production and exchange. In
his critique of the commodification of artistic expression, Theodor Adorno
suggests the commercial power of mass popular music intoxicates the
fetishistic listener, who falls victim to an irrational and recurring search for
pleasure in hit songs.28 The fetishization of modern music technologies and
sound reproduction, commonly called audiophilia, is also most often
discussed in Marxist terms. Although, like the Freudian subject, audiophiles
are usually male, their fetishist devotion is not classified as psychosexual.
Rather, the audiophile becomes emotionally invested in technology as a
commodity. Collecting certain media formats such as pristine vinyl
recordings, and acquiring desired high-end music technologies, audiophiles
ritualistically spend extreme amounts of time and money on “tweaking”
their high-fidelity recording and listening devices.29
With few exceptions—most notably postmodern musicology’s critical
obsession with mastery, discipline, and submission, which I draw upon in
my concluding discussion—sound and music as they relate specifically to
sexual fetishism have received scant attention. Moreover, as the following
literatures indicate, psychoanalytic, sociological, and cultural critiques lack
perspectival relativity. Within the field of psychoanalysis, Alexander Stein
is a rare writer who addresses aural fetishism. Stein proposes that music and
the auditory sphere can serve the same fetishistic function as physical
(visual/tactile) objects. Stein makes an innovative and salient point in his
psychoanalytic critique of Hilary and Jackie (1998), a biographical film
directed by Anand Tucker depicting the anguished life of cellist Jacqueline
du Pré. Apart from his problematic psychosexual rationale for du Pré’s
neuroses, Stein usefully proposes:
The daily practice so essential to the musician’s art and craft is in this instance not merely a
necessary means to an end, but is also consistent with the kind of ritualized, worshipful
activity of the fetishist. Furthermore, and most importantly, for the musician, the
fundamental component, indeed, the true object of desire, is not an object per se, but is the
music itself; the instrument is but a conduit, engaged through technical mastery and
requiring repetitive, intimate tactile interactions.30

In a later publication, Stein extends his hypothesis, this time arguing that for
the listener, recorded music can similarly serve as a symbolic means of
repairing and consoling one’s psychosexual neuroses. Recounting a case
example from his clinical work, Stein returns to the topic of aural pleasure
in a later publication in which he describes a practice he names as a “private
listening orgy.” Although Stein offers scant detail regarding the mechanics
of this practice, it is said to “generate an affect-rich sound environment” for
the listener, allowing “the external and voluminously audible expression of
an internal world otherwise banned.”31
The book Smut, by sociologist Murray Davis, also addresses aural sexual
pleasure. Davis provides an intriguing phenomenological analysis of
perverted sex, where he schematizes acts condemned as sexually deviant
according to Jehovanist32 sexual ideology. Featured among the list of
outlawed sexual behaviours charted in what he calls “The Periodic Table of
Sexual Perversions” is auralism, defined as sensory sexual stimulation
taken in through the ears.33 Davis explains that “sex through distant and
contact sense receptors” such as the eyes (voyeurism) and the ears
(auralism) is condemned as a moral abomination and a form of
psychological dysmorphia.34 Where genital stimulation requires partners to
be close to one another, stimulation through these means does not require
physical proximity. This “unnatural” distance results in the subject being
“stripped of all human qualities and reduced to a ‘thing’—a sexual
organ.”35 However, beyond auralism being anathema to Jehovanists, Davis
does not discuss the pleasure that one may gain from the practice itself.
In studies of cinematic representations of sex, Linda Williams’ work
stands as an authoritative example of the representation and affective power
of sound, music, and voice in pornography. Williams argues that a hierarchy
exists between the visual evidence of male pleasure as it is witnessed via
ejaculation—what she terms “the frenzy of the visible”—and the aurality of
female pleasure since female orgasms are most commonly verified by
crescendoing vocalizations. In porn, Williams notes, disembodied
overdubbed ooohs and aaahs commonly stand in as the most prominent sign
of female pleasure, which “seem almost to flout the realist function of
anchoring body to image, halfway becoming aural fetishes of the female
pleasures we cannot see.”36 Following Williams, Corbett, and Kapsalis
discuss the prevalent use of female orgasmic sounds in pop music. They
propose that where male pleasure is accomplished in a moment of visual
frenzy, “female sexual pleasure is better thought of in terms of a ‘frenzy of
the audible’.”37 Furthermore, note Corbett and Kapsalis, as many men
fetishize women’s orgasmic vocalizations, hi-fidelity audio porn, such as
the aforementioned immersive recording Cyborgasm, lends itself to “a
double sex/tech fetishization.”38
A decade after Corbett and Kapsalis made this claim, a new musically-
powered vibrating sex toy called OhMiBod (created by former Apple
employee Suki Vatter in 2006),39 could be read as a further extension of this
double fetishization, but one that was created by a woman and for the
primary purpose of clitoral stimulation. Designed to vibrate to the beat and
rhythm of any musical style, the toy responds to the volume and intensity of
the music by escalating and pulsating accordingly and is optimized for use
with portable MP3 players, but can also be controlled by other audio output
source such as hi-fi stereos, microphones, or electric guitars. The female-
centric nature of this product further indicates that auralistic and
particularly audiophilic tendencies are not exclusive to men.
While the aforementioned literatures implore us to consider the
construction of aural codes of sexuality and fetishism, expanding the notion
of the sexual fetish to include the auditory sphere, scholarly accounts are
primarily situated in psychosexual, gender normative, heterosexist terms
and representations. Moreover, though textual analysis makes explicit
certain fetishized qualities of sound beyond pathologization, in the absence
of empirical data, the ways sound or music function as a
queer/deviant/fetishistic technology of erotic action in quotidian sexual
practices remains ambiguous.
 P A S

In an attempt to understand auralism, I turn now to cyberspace, which given

the social stigma of perversion, has proven to date the only way I have been
able to gain further insight into this sexual phenomenon and the kink
communities who practice it. In the last two decades in particular, the
internet has afforded “sexual minority groups, and/or those groups deemed
sexually deviant, limited by their constraints of space,” the ability to
“interact through virtual media.”40 In the remainder of this chapter, I draw
upon two years of online participant observation (undertaken between 2010
and 2012) in an attempt to understand the ways sound and music are
imbued with fetishistic qualities and the practical erotic functions this
serves. The following account is pieced together from personal
correspondence, practitioners’ textual accounts, and virtually mediated
forum discussions with members of online kink communities. For ethical
reasons, which I will later explain, I situate my empirical understanding of
auralism and music fetishists by modulating to an autoethnographic voice.
Although I was completely unaware at the time that my personal
s/explorations would lead to this research, it was through private dalliances
with a virtual friend whom I met via a BDSM, kink, and fetish social
network that I first became consciously aware that such a fetish existed and
that it had a name. One evening in mid-2010, my friend and I were
privately chatting in cyberspace as we had been doing for a few months
prior. As with any new friendship, the more we communicated, the more we
revealed about ourselves. In formative conversations, my risqué personal
disclosures were often dressed up as quasi-theoretical discussions of human
sexuality and the constructions of perversity. However, a few months later, I
no longer felt the need to masquerade my revelations: after all, I had joined
this virtual community seeking new experiences and understandings. From
the beginning, my friend was much more open and experienced than I and
would often ask about my “kinks,” which I frequently struggled to put into
words. Among other details we shared about our everyday selves, I knew
she had worked as a professional dominatrix for a number of years, and she
knew that I was a researcher with a keen interest in music and sexuality.
Crucially, in one particular conversation she asked me: “do you have a
music fetish or have you ever played around with auralism?” Since I had
never heard the term before, I thought she was asking if I was an
audiophile. Clarifying her question, she said: “no, I mean do you use music
for sex, like, actually getting off to a particular song or style or sound?”
This piqued my curiosity, but I was still confused and asked her to explain
further. Paraphrasing our much longer conversation, she said: “auralism is
like voyeurism but it’s just not acknowledged as much.” She told me many
people she had come across both in sex work and in personal sex play
scenarios had “aural fetish tendencies, even if they didn’t name it,” and for
some people it was “certainly a major thing, like leather or corsets.”
Following our exchange, I immediately did an online search for more
information. The first thing I found was a definition submitted to Urban
Dictionary, a popular archival website providing users with an online
lexicon neologisms, slang terminologies and hip jargon.
Auralism is a sexual fetish defined as sexual arousal or excitement caused by sound, to be
compared with voyeurism. This sound might be music, a voice, the actual sounds of sex
itself, or other sounds, and may include enjoyment from listening to others having sex. As
with most fetishes, in some cases it is simply a small additional turn-on, and in others it is a
requirement to sexual gratification.41

As I continued to trawl the web, I found similar definitions on other adult

websites, personal blogs and kink forums. Keen to explore further, I began
reading open-access kink and fetish blogs and bulletin boards, and
eventually began participating in online conversations with members of
virtual fetish communities via forums that welcomed discussions of
auralism. The most active of these had more than 500 contributing members
and more than 10,000 members who listed auralism as a “fetish.”
Sites like FetLife, CollarMe, Devientside, and Informed Consent42 are
just a few examples of the virtual sex environments that provide a point of
coalescence for kinky individuals, access to information, an opportunity to
interact with like-minded others, and the chance to commune around share
desires and sexual practices. Operating similarly to well-known Web 2.0
platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, they are password-protected
social networks. However, to gain access, or become a member, participants
are required to be eighteen years or older and agree to various terms and
conditions of safe, consenting, and respectful engagement with other
members. To maintain a degree of anonymity, users often create a virtual
profile under a pseudonym, with some sites actively discouraging members
from using their “real” names. Depending on site-specific features,
members can “friend” other site members, post status updates, post and
comment on photos and videos, send private messages to other community
members, create special interest groups, and join discussion forums. They
can also disclose as much or as little about their real or virtual sexualities as
they wish, list and explore the various fetishes and sexual kinks they are
“into” or “curious about,” advertise local events, and facilitate “real life”
hook-ups.
By early 2011, my interest was fast becoming ethnography, thus raising
a host of complicated ethical issues around privacy, consent, sensitivity, and
covert intrusion given my subjective shift from participant to researcher in
what had inadvertently become a “virtual field.”43 For example, when I
consulted the terms of service of some of the sites I regularly visited, I
found that they explicitly prohibited participation for academic or
journalistic purposes. Such restrictions put me in a liminal space as a
participant-researcher who originally began and still continues to participate
in certain online sex environments for personal pleasure, while also reading
and cataloguing accounts in ways that replicate the treatment of qualitative
field data. After deliberating the unresolved and competing views regarding
researching online sex communities,44 I assumed the following ethical
position: textual accounts observed within password-protected networks are
not quoted verbatim and personal participant observations are referred to in
general terms only. Thus, any online discussions I engaged in on password-
protected sites are paraphrased and decontextualized, making it impossible
to trace and attribute them to a specific site, site user, or online forum.
Where I quote verbatim, I have either obtained informed consent, or else
the content is open-access, and thus not restricted to a select audience.
The personal accounts and general content of the hundreds of forum
posts I read varied widely. While many people evoked the term auralism to
describe their sexual relationship to both music and other aural stimuli,
clear divisions can be made between the fetishistic qualities of music as
distinct from discussions regarding other aural stimuli (that is, non-
musical). Thus, I have organized my commentary on auralism around the
discursive trends as they appear in their virtual habitat.
Online discussion of music fetishism broadly indicated that music most
commonly functions as either a catalyst for sexual arousal, a supplementary
device in achieving sexual climax, or as a preferred and highly regulated
accompaniment to sexual activity with others. Discussants regularly went
into great detail about the songs they like to masturbate or have sex to, often
sharing their personal playlists with other members in the forum and getting
into critical discussions of the role that music plays in facilitating “play
scenarios” in designated fetish clubs such as “what kind of music is best to
flog to.” Only a small number of discussants specifically claimed the ability
to physically orgasm to music without any form of genital contact. All the
discussants who claimed this ability were female and among discussants
generally, there seemed to be a consensus that a physical orgasm to music
was “more of a lady thing,” although “us guys can still get a raging hard-
on.” Where “female fetishism is, in the rhetoric of psychoanalysis, an
oxymoron,”45 this observation provides a provocative counter-discourse to
the presumed absence of fetishism in women, indicating that women may in
fact be more attuned to the orgasmic potential of music. Numerous people
also evoked terms including “eargasm,” “aurgasm,” and “musical orgasm,”
and described particular musical encounters as “orgasmic” or capable of
soliciting “that pre-orgasmic feeling” causing vaginal wetness and clitoral
or penile erections.
Many people listed specific songs or instrumental works, often
describing their effect in terms that memorialized past sexual encounters
and caused significant arousal when heard again. Others spoke of music-
induced arousal in relation to stylistic and structural qualities: “industrial
music at 118 beats per minute”; the grain of a singing voice such as
“Marilyn Manson’s growl” or “an operatic soprano”; specific frequencies
and instrumental sonorities like “fat deep bass” or “the timbre of a cello”;
and tonal qualities such as “the resolution of an augmented fourth.” The
following open access online statements made by self-declared auralists are
indicative of many of the discussions on this theme.
 For most of my life I…was nonlibidoist, had no sexual desires…totally devoid of anything
sexual – thoughts, fantasies, whatever. But there were a few things that just made me feel so
alive…Mostly, noises – a rumbling engine, a good bass riff, whispering, the sound of rain,
that sound of something sticky (like a suction cup) popping off of something it’s stuck to.
And music, of course. Deep voices, good bass riffs, violins, amazing piano solos. They
would cause me all sorts of awesome feelings. Eyes close and head tilts back. Tingly
feelings all over my body. Being totally lost in the moment, a sense of euphoria. It sounds
like something a lot of people experience but it was different for me…it became a sexual
fetish. It’s called auralism.46
I. Love. Sound. Voices get me. (Avery Brooks. k.d. lang. Patrick Stewart. Annie Lennox.
Gary Oldman. Melissa Etheridge. Alan Rickman. Chrissy Hynde. Need I go on?) Certain
tones of voice or vocal qualities get me. Sounds of people fucking or otherwise enjoying
themselves turn me on. Certain kinds of music and certain songs get me hot. I am an
auralist.47

As illustrated in the preceding accounts, specific bands or artists named in

discussions of auralism reflected a general breadth of musical taste. Since
discussants often spoke of music in terms of rhythmic, timbral qualities and
vocal tonalities, my observations haven’t allowed me to categorically
determine any dominant trends in musical tastes or obvious preferences for
a single artist.
Where sexual arousal was discussed in terms of other (non-musical)
aural stimuli, discussants mostly referred to the pleasures they took in
verbally narrated sexual fantasies or “dirty talk,” and hearing sex in action.
Frequently cited corporeal sex sounds included orgasmic vocalizations, the
squelching and slapping sounds of penetration, and sounds such as crying,
whimpering and other sounds associated with the infliction of physical pain
or emotional distress. As one might expect, audio porn was a frequent topic,
and appeared to be the most common means of satiating desire outside the
context of fetish clubs. Given the significant overlap between fetishism and
BDSM practices within the broader context of kink sub/cultures, a range of
BDSM practitioners also cited various ways that words or sounds can act as
a disciplinary mechanism during sex play. On her blog, a dominatrix gives
the following account of auralism. Likening it to training a puppy, she says
“a certain word or sound added in at a point of play” can be useful in
training a submissive play partner: “I could say POPCORN every time
someone orgasmed and then that word after a while would make your mind
automatically jump into a sexual state,” she says. Going on, she claims that
a “submissive mind” can also be “trained to not allow itself to obtain climax
without that certain aural response happening first” or to force them to
“relax out of an excited state.”48
 T Q E

Given the ethical constraints and limitation to gaining “real-life” access to

music and aural fetishists, this account is both partial and heuristic: thus
further investigations into auralism and kinky aural sex practices are
necessary in order to make substantive claims about the specificities of
practice and the corporealities of practitioners. However, this account has
import, particularly in terms of its queer provocations in discourses of
sexual deviance and musical listening practices.
As Nikki Sullivan points out, “fetishism, insofar as it is—or has been
constructed as—perverse, has the capacity to challenge or to queer sexual
and social norms.”49 By all accounts, aural and music fetishism represents a
departure from normative sexuality. Acknowledging this is, at the very
least, opening up various possibilities for music and aural stimuli to act as
queer operatives in the troubling of sexual normativity. As a queer feminist
music scholar, I had long ago given myself over to the idea that music
constitutes a symbolic manifestation of sexuality, and following Suzanne
Cusick’s inspiring hypothesis, that if we step outside the confines of
heteronormativity, music may indeed be sex. In a variation on this theme,
auralism functions similarly to Cusick’s figuring of the musician as a
distinctly queer subject position: “assuming [through music] more varied
[sexual] positions than we think we’re allowed in regular life.”50
Evoking both Sullivan and Cusick then, to consider music or any other
arousing form of auditory stimulation as a sexual fetish—that is, as
something unequivocally queer—leads to new possibilities for theorizing
queer moments of desire where sound may constitute a queer erotic reality
beyond the boundaries of gender, sexed bodies, and specific bodily and
sensorial orientations. Furthermore, thinking of sound or music as a fetish
object forces a departure from essentializing theories of fetishism as an
atypical pathology and takes us further away from the Oedipal thesis of
castration disavowal. Where Freud placed an emphasis on the averted gaze,
opening up discussion of music and aural fetishism shifts this sensory
preference and signals a queer intervention in the dominant genealogies of
fetishism.
Beyond discursive intervention, there is a final and perhaps more salient
point to be made about my particular account of music and aural fetishism
as a radically queer listening practice. At musicology’s critical turn, queer
and feminist critiques of classical forms, modernist expositions and
structural analysis scrutinized musical listening in terms that are almost
impossible to divorce from the BDSM imaginary: that is music as allegory
of sexual violence, erotic submission and debasement,51 pleasure, mastery,
and control.52 More recently, however, queer listening and perhaps “musical
listening in general,” suggests Maus, are “polymorphous and, in [their]
general lack of conformity to established norms, perverse.”53 Reflecting
upon the virtues of queer listening, in their introduction to Queer Episodes
in Music and Modern Identity, Fuller and Whitesell propose:
[Q]ueer listening implies an element of perversity, an orientation somewhere at cross-
purpose with that of music’s creators. This notion may appear disrespectful…But we prefer
to see it as taking advantage of a loophole built into the musical contract. Perhaps because
of its lack of conceptual specificity…music can offer no real guarantees of a faithful passage
of meaning from the composer to the listener…queer possibilities are inherent in the
polymorphous nature of music’s bodily engagement…54

Quoting Stuart Feder’s psychoanalytic biography of Charles Ives, Fuller

and Whitesell elaborate upon this inherent polymorphism. Situating music’s
relation to the body as potentially queer is fundamental to the “underlying,
unconscious fantasy of a collaborative ear…capable of being awesome and
shameful and of engendering creativity…it was a truly bisexual organ, and
therein lay its power and its threat.”55 Fuller’s and Whitesell’s argument
aptly situates queer listening as a mode of interpretation—an excavation of
meaning afforded by the polymorphous perversity of the ear.
Concomitantly, if we extend this notion of queer listening to incorporate
music and aural fetishism, not only are we queering our interpretation of
music, we are radically queering the function of music listening itself.
Where the former queers musical listening through reconstituted meaning,
the latter proffers a form of musical listening that itself becomes a queer sex
act. Sexualized bodies are not simply the occupants of music’s territory;
rather music and sound occupy the province of queer (fetishism/perverse)
sex. While there are many practical matters that require further
investigation and potentially other constitutions of aural sex to examine, I
hope this is a provocative step towards a queer understanding of the sexual
depth, complexity, and pleasures afforded by music. Dare I suggest this
shift in perspective should be read as a signification provocation to revisit,
and, especially as scholars, to reconsider what we (think we) know about
the ways musical pleasure and queer perversions combine: if not for the
sake of scholarship or legitimization of this fetishistic practice, then for
what pleasures we may be sacrificing if we resist experimentations with
“getting off” on sound.
N
1. This chapter is dedicated to Monica Pearl, Amalia Ziv, and Zoha Weiman Kelman. Without your
critical enthusiasm I may not have pursued this idea. I also thank Anna-Elena Pääkkölä for her
valuable feedback on the first draft.
2. Kathleen Guidroz and Grant J. Rich, “Commercial Telephone Sex: Fantasy and Reality,” in Sex
for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, ed. R. J. Weitzer (New York:
Routledge, 2010), 139–161.
3. In Guidroz and Rich’s ethnographic account of female phone sex workers, examples of phone
sex discussions requested by their predominantly male clientele spanned topics such as
“straight” sex, lesbian sex, transgender sex, love and romance (or what is sometimes called “a
girlfriend experience”), anal sex, fetishism, bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism
and masochism, rape scenarios, mummy/daddy play, infantilism, and bestiality; Guidroz and
Rich, “Commercial Telephone Sex.”
4. See Bruce Johnson, ed., Earogenous Zones: Sound, Sexuality and Cinema (London: Equinox,
2010).
5. Sonic Erotica audio recordings are available for free download both via the iTunes Store and
their website, http://www.sonicerotica.com. The quoted text above is taken from the descriptive
summary accompanying Sonic Erotica iTunes podcast feed,
https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/sonic-erotica.com-free-erotic/id432446478.
6. BDSM is shorthand for a range of “unconventional” sexual practices including bondage,
discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism.
7. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th
ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
8. See M. Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New
York: Free Press, 1999).
9. See Hinman’s discussion on the pathologization of “alternative sexualities” and how, as a
psychotherapist, she engages music as a tool to help her clients express their feelings of sexual
difference. I point to her work because of its tangential relationship to themes of this chapter; M.
Hinman, “Understanding Clients with Alternative Expressions of Sexuality Using Music,” in
Expressive Therapies for Sexual Issues: A Social Work Perspective, ed. S. Loue (New York:
Springer, 2013), 137–155.
10. Numerous scholars have criticized the “mainstream” as a problematic binary structuration and a
speculative term at best; see, for example, Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett, and Jodi Taylor, eds.,
Redefining Mainstream Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2013). Thus I use the term
loosely. Furthermore, one could argue that given the success of the BDSM-themed erotic novel
Fifty Shades of Grey, which has sold over 60 million copies worldwide, setting new records for
the fastest-selling paperback of all time (E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey, New York: Vintage
Books, 2012), it is problematic to use “mainstream” as a label for normative sexual prudishness.
11. I first broached the topic of this chapter in an article entitled “Taking It in the Ear: On Musico-
sexual Synergies and the (Queer) Possibility that Music is Sex.” The ideas presented here pick
 up and significantly build upon what I had preliminarily referred to in my previous article as a
musico-sexual fetishism; Jodi Taylor, “Taking It in the Ear: On Musico-sexual Synergies and the
(Queer) Possibility that Music is Sex,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26, no.
4 (2012): 603–614.
12. Nils Lennart Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown, eds., The Origins of Music (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000).
13. While there is a rarely cited condition called melophobia, which is an irrational fear of music,
such anxieties are more likely a cultural or moral response, and less likely linked to musical
sonorities. See, for example, the philosophical discussion in Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Bearing a
Grudge against Music,” Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 7.
14. Charles Darwin (1871), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 337.
15. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York:
Columbian University Press, 2008), 32.
16. See, for example, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch:
The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994); Fred Maus, “Sexual and
Musical Categories,” in The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention,
Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 153–175;
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991); J. A. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Music Technologies of Queer
Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2006); Derek B. Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003); J. Taylor, Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer
World-making (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012); S. Whiteley and J. Rycenga, eds., Queering the
Popular Pitch (New York: Routledge, 2006).
17. David Hesmondhalgh, Why Music Matters (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
18. Jodi Taylor, Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making (Bern: Peter
Lang, 2012).
19. See Taylor, Playing it Queer, for further empirical evidence that demonstrates the ways in which
sexual actors use music to set and narrate the parameters of sex.
20. Tia DeNora, “Music and erotic agency: Sonic resources and social-sexual action,” Body and
Society 3, no. 2 (1997): 43–65.
21. Rooted in ca. sixteenth-century European colonialist discourses, fetishism was originally a term
that explorers, travellers and later anthropologists used to describe the worshiping rituals of
people believed to be “primitive,” “savage,” or “uncivilized”; fetish objects including totems,
amulets, talismans, and the like; Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
22. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (Camberwell: Allen Lane, 2008),
57, 56.
23. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and
Other Works, vol. 7, ed. J. Strachey and A. Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977),
353–354.
24. Cited in McClintock, Imperial Leather, 194, emphasis in original.
 Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism (New York: New York University
25.
Press, 1994).
26. See, for example, Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse
Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Gamman and Makinen, Female
Fetishism; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:
Routledge, 1992); Elizabeth Grosz, “Lesbian Fetishism,” Differences 3, no. 2 (1991): 39–54;
McClintock, Imperial Leather; Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in
The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. S. Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 363–372; Amalia Ziv, “The Construction of the Female Subject in
Pornographic Fiction” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2005).
27. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York:
Vintage Books, 1977).
28. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in
The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London:
Routledge, 2001), 29–60.
29. See, for example, “Audiophilia,” Time, January 14, 1957; Shuhei Hosokawa and Hideaki
Matsuoka, “On the Fetish Character of Sound and the Progression of Technology: Theorizing
Japanese Audiophiles,” in Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity, ed. G.
Bloustien, M. Peters, and S. Luckman (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 39–50; Marc Perlman,
“Consuming Audio: An Introduction to Tweak Theory,” in Music and Technoculture, ed. René
T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gray (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003); Barry
Willis, “Toys for Boys?” Stereophile 16, no. 1 (1993): 101–111.
30. Alexander Stein, “A Cello Bow as a Magic Wand,” Psychoanalytic Review 87, no. 5 (2000):
723.
31. Alexander Stein, “The Sound of Memory: Music and Acoustic Origins,” American Imago 64,
no. 1 (2007): 73–74.
32. Jehovanism is the ideological view that any other form of sex outside of reproductive marital
coitus pollutes the body—according to Saint Paul the temple of the Holy Spirit—profanes God,
and is a profound threat to social order; Murray S. Davis, Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene
Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983).
33. Ibid., 157–159.
34. Ibid., 127.
35. Clor cited in ibid., 128.
36. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (London:
Pandora, 1990), 123.
37. John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis, “Aural Sex: The Female Orgasm in Popular Sound.” The
Drama Review 40, no. 3 (1996): 103.
38. Ibid., 108.
39. Further details on OhMiBod technologies and more recent product designs can be found at
http://www.ohmibod.com.au.
40. Chris Ashford, “Queer Theory, Cyber-ethnographies and Researching Online Sex
Environments,” Information and Communications Technology Law 18, no. 3 (2009): 299.
41. This definition is available online at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=auralism
and, according to the site, it was first entered in 2008 by Gary Heathen. However, I have also
 come across exact replications of this definition on other online forums, and therefore cannot be
certain as the origin of the term.
42. http://www.fetlife.com; http://www.collarme.com; http://www.deviantside.com;
http://www.informedconsent.co.uk.
43. See Association of Internet Researchers, Ethical Decision-making and Internet Research:
Version 2.0, at http://aoir.org/documents/ethics-guide/.
44. See Ashford, “Queer Theory, Cyber-ethnographies and Researching Online Sex Environments.”
45. Schor, “Female Fetishism,” 365.
46. The quoted text is taken from a publically accessible chat forum. This post was made on
November, 5, 2011 and can be accessed at http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/67262-okay-
graydemi-fetishism-probable-tmi-definite-tl;dr/.
47. The quoted text is taken from a publically accessible chat forum. This post was made on
February 22, 2012 and can be accessed at http://godslavestory.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/one-
more-reason-to-cuss-at-my-om/.
48. The quoted text is taken from a publically accessible blog Something Kinky!, which regularly
includes “info posts” explaining the meaning and practice of various fetishisms. This post was
made on August, 6, 2012 and can be accessed at http://kinkyasarose.blogspot.com.au.
49. Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Armidale, Victoria: Circa, 2003), 168.
50. Suzanne Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay
and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 80.
51. Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000).
52. Fred E. Maus, “The Disciplined Subject of Musical Analysis,” in Beyond Structural Listening:
Postmodern Modes of Hearing, ed. A. Dell’Antonio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2004); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
53. Fred E. Maus, “Classical Concert Music and Queer Listening,” Transposition. Musique et
sciences sociales, 3 (2013), http://transposition-revue.org/Classical-Concert-Music-and-Queer.
54. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, “Secret Passages,” Queer Episodes in Music and Modern
Identity (Urbana, University of Illinois, 2002), 16–17.
55. Stuart Feder, Charles, Ives, “My Father’s Song”: A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven:
Yale University Press), 335.
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 CHAPTER 15

TRANSCRIPTS
Toward A Queer Phenomenology of the Field
Recording
 DRE W DANI E L

W does queerness sound like? Within the domain of music, there is a

potentially infinite number of answers to this basic question; this volume
exists to thicken the possible set of responses. But what if the very leap
toward music as the domain from which to draw responses is already, itself,
too narrow to accommodate the fugitive movements of the queer? How
might sound—not music, but sound itself—already partake of a certain self-
estranging quality of shock, difference, or resistance to normative meanings
for which the critical shorthand of “queer” remains apt?
Firing up a portable digital recording device in search of sounds that
might suggest answers, I recorded a walk from my house out into the street,
across two major urban arteries at the heart of Baltimore, and back to the
privacy of my office on campus. When I arrived at my destination, I shut
the door and immediately spoke out loud about what I had just experienced
while making that recording. What follows, in sequence, are two
“transcripts”: Transcript 1 is a necessarily incomplete, sound-by-sound
transcription or prose translation of the noises and events captured on the
field recording. Transcript 2 is a more literal transcript of my remarks about
that experience.
Taken together, these distinct transcripts can help to present a series of
theoretical and methodological questions that point toward a perhaps
counterintuitive axiomatic suggestion: sound, as such, is queer.1 I have
annotated moments in each transcript with interpolated passages that
perform a work of analysis, questioning, and queering in the wake of these
discordant, asymmetrical texts.
The texts of each of these two transcripts are printed in bold type to
distinguish them from the annotations, and location information is
presented in bold italic. Some of the added commentary is theoretical and
methodological; some is personal and descriptive. Readers are encouraged
to decide for themselves how to read this text; some may wish to read the
transcripts first and the annotations afterward as a causal sequence, while
others may choose instead to read the annotations as they arise, interrupting
the transmission with cross-talk and commentary. In each case, transcripts
are introduced by sentences in italic type, which describe the location and
setting.
 T 1

We are in my boyfriend Martin’s office, on the second floor of our house.

This room, like all rooms, has its own sonic signature that is complex
and individual. As a physically bounded space, it has a resonant frequency,
which could be drawn out through practices of recording and rerecording
sound within the room.2 But the sonic specificity of the room only partially
touches its lived particularity as the room of my boyfriend, Martin, his
office on the second floor of our home in Baltimore, the house where we
make electronic music together as Matmos. He has used maps of the world
as wallpaper, and they cover every surface with a multicolored assemblage
of different locations. Would this alteration of the surface itself affect the
resonant frequency? It isn’t likely. Things can be visually garish and
sonically flat. Listening to the recording, I have no way of hearing the
sound as “the sound of Martin’s room,” and so the need to insert a
parenthetical explanation of where we are indexes the haplessness, or
indifference, of recording as a memorial practice to the human needs that
motivate it.
The distant sound of an Al Hirt LP of popular favorites scored for
trumpet plays in another room, with the horn sound undergoing a
Doppler shift in passing as I move through the house.
The practice of making field recordings constitutes a useful means of
remediating and estranging recordings themselves, necessarily including
recordings of music. Hearing a recording—in this case, an unusually loud
vinyl pressing of pop instrumental kitsch—within a domestic space
produces a mise-en-abyme effect of recordings nested inside other
recordings. In moving the microphone across the speaker field, I effectively
filter, color, and transform the givenness of the original Al Hirt LP. The
manic exertions of Hirt’s braying tones show up as camp when played back
across the distance between the present and their origins in the postwar
boom of “space age bachelor pad” albums that would presumably allow
heterosexual male nerds to demonstrate their hi-fi systems to would-be
conquests; when rerecorded in the acoustic space of a home, that
functionality is foregrounded and rendered both pathetic and even more
comic. Putting a flamboyantly large sound into the verité of a small space
demonstrates the gap between the fantasy worlds proposed within art and
the lived spaces in which those fantasy worlds are consumed and
experienced. The practice of rerecording is becoming more frequent as a
compositional response to a world that is increasingly colonized by the
sound of playback.3
Sound of Martin speaking out loud, pretending to speak
“backward.”
If a “field recording” is simply any recording that is not done in a
purpose-built, recording studio environment, that hardly explains what is or
is not included within “the field,” or on what terms that inclusion or capture
takes place. Here, we encounter a basic ethical issue implicit in the practice
of field recording: the problem of consent. Do we need to ask for
permission to record the sounds around us? Whose sounds are they? If, in
storing and reusing sound, we take something external and render it “ours”
and subject to our control and repetition and reuse, ought we to give fair
warning to any living agent within the radius of our microphone?
The history of field recording as a practice is itself caught within a
sticky web of proximity with ethnographic discourse, and thus it stands in a
potentially compromising embrace with the often-racist histories of the
ethnographic capture and control of native peoples as objects of knowledge
for the human sciences. Bracketing these longer intellectual histories of
anthropological encounter and historical archiving, it is simply obvious that
people who do not wish to be recorded can justifiably feel violated by the
act of recording the sounds they make. My boyfriend’s solution when he
sees that I am making a recording in his proximity is to either remain silent,
refusing to participate in the generation of sound, or to speak out loud only
in nonsensical noises that communicate his recalcitrance.
This is a means of “opting out,” which is both funny and obnoxious and
a kind of running private joke between us, but on the other side of that
intimacy, there stands a strong feeling that it is unethical to be recorded
without one’s consent. Yet I do not warn the strangers on the street that I am
recording while walking past them. This can simply be an index of the
feeling that public space is shared space, and that public sounds are a
common held by no one and everyone who participates in and moves
through public space—a space that anyone can document as they so choose.
At a certain point, the size and obviousness of recording devices become
ethically significant. A large, woolly looking wind-sock or wind-baffling
device over a conspicuously large and expensive microphone is hard to
miss, and it reveals to passerby that recording is taking place. But a small,
handheld device that could be a phone of some kind is less likely to trigger
this sort of recognition. There is, then, a kind of choice about self-revealing
or remaining “in the closet” that is particular to the identity of being a
sound-recordist, which takes on its own epistemological drama—the feeling
of being in on a secret that others are imagined not to grasp, which
resembles the cycles of concealment and disclosure generated by
nonnormative sexual identities.
Kissing noise. “Bye.” Door opens from the house into the ambience
of everyday urban existence.
There is something infuriatingly vague and impotent about the capacity
of the phrase “everyday urban existence” to stand in for what it supposedly
represents on the page; the entire problem of replacing sounds with words
nestles here. Which urban space is this? Beirut? Sao Paulo? Gaza?
Manhattan? Shanghai? Lhasa? What does “urban” mean? Frequency of car
sounds? Population density? The aura of crime? The promise of shopping?
Do cities necessarily sound like human beings? Machines? Animals? Which
species are present and included within that acoustic space, and are they
subject to environmental threats and constraints (and if so, what)? What
kinds of vehicles are moving, and what is their source of fuel? How
frequent are the sounds of public transportation, and what might their
frequency tell us about the economic grids, tax bases, and infrastructural
supports that make that city possible? What nonhuman material agents
(oceans, rivers, other species) are present within the sound of the city?
What languages are being spoken, and what does their ratio of
representation tell us about the mesh of race and class?4
Surflike crashes of traffic noise, car horns, and the oceanic passage
of vehicles. An insect chorus swoops up into the stereo field and dies
down again. High whine of city bus brakes. Oddly wooden squeaking
noise. Sudden, bassy launch of a moped. (young male voice) “Are you
guys registered voters?” Swell of murmuring traffic. “Well if you’d like
to register in Maryland and you go to Hopkins…” Girls chatting in
response, just out of audibility. “Okay, um.” “That’s all it is.” Odd
metal tapping, in rhythm. Grinding drag of a “wheelie” suitcase across
pavement. Traffic continues to rise and fall. A voice says “6,” and then
a grinding purr as a bus slows down. Insects rise up and traffic fades as
the environment moves from street to campus. My own breathing.
(sound of young women talking) “…and you run your mouth.” “But
I’m helping you out.” “You get the hell out of my face.” Laughter.
“Yeah, because from what we had researched, she said…” Campus
bells toll four times, loud, indicating the hour, and the curtain of insect
noise rises up in the decay of their notes. (young male voice) “The only
one they sell, which is terrific, is…” Footsteps crunchier now, on a
different surface, and their speed increasing. The distant city noise
resolves into a flatlined tone. Sudden hush as a door is passed through.
Footsteps resound in a hallway. A deeper hush. Distant speech sounds
modulated, as in a hospital. Key jingle. Door unlocked. Door opens
then shuts.
The door constitutes one of the crucial sound-objects dislocated by the
compositional practices of musique concrète on the contested border
territory between sound as the givenness of what surrounds us and music as
an aestheticized domain of choice, mastery, control, and reproduction. This
is the case because of Pierre Henry’s foundational composition Variations
pour une porte et un soupir (“Variations for a Door and a Sigh,” 1963), one
of the masterpieces of music created through the manipulation and
processing of sound on magnetic tape. Henry’s sound sources are minimal:
a door, the sound of breathing, and a kind of metallic “sigh” created with a
musical saw. These simple sounds are subjected to a dizzying range of
mutations and transformations of pitch, timbre, and attack, with each
parameter morphing and mutating as the sounds originally created by the
door, the saw, and the voice are relocated in various unreal acoustic spaces
created with tape echo effects and reverberation chambers.
The queerness of the border zone between sound and music abides in
neither the comfortably human sigh nor the comfortably material (thus
“dead” and “nonhuman”) door, with its repertoire of familiar squeaks and
creaks. Rather, queerness abides in the hybrid capacity of the metallic saw
noise to be a kind of interstitial hybrid, a quasi-object that is neither fully a
material object nor fully human, but somehow expressive and thinglike at
the same time. The sighing metal is caught up in a kind of “uncanny valley”
of the lifelike through Henry’s labor-intensive processing and studio
manipulations, which force this sound to yield increasingly athletic and
expressive responses to the (real, human) sigh and the (real, inhuman) door
noises that surround it.
Gradually, this hybridity becomes transferable, and the sigh sounds less
and less necessarily human and alive, while the door comes to seem
increasingly animate and, to use Aristotle’s term, “ensouled.” In the
process, Henry’s work chafes against the key Aristotelian distinction
between voice and other kinds of sound: “Now voice is a kind of sound of
an ensouled thing. For none of the things without soul gives voice, though
some are said by analogy to give voice, such as the flute and the lyre and
whatever other of the things without soul have the production of sustained,
varied, and articulate sound.”5
Pierre Henry’s work, and much of the ontologically engaged work in
musique concrète that was created in its wake, constitutes an expansive
attempt to complicate the range of possible analogical extensions of “voice”
toward the inhuman components of the material world. This orientation
toward the musical affordances of everyday objects stands in practical
tension with the initial theorization of musique concrète by its inventor and
first practitioner, Pierre Schaeffer, who longed to disconnect the “objet
sonore” from its referential ties to its particular sources. But even Schaeffer
thought of his project as a kind of inquiry into the basics of materiality as
such, noting in 1948:
Sound material in itself has inexhaustible potential. This power makes you think of the atom
and the reservoir of energy hidden in its particles, ready to burst out as soon as it is split.
Instead of composing a series of studies I would do well, if I were logical and worked
without bothering about an immediate result, to record only “samples,” each one taken from
an initial noise. After all, isn’t this noise the same as an orchestra makes?6

Exhaustion here comes full circle. The seeming inexhaustibility of sound

as a manifold for ongoing audible experience exceeds the time and energy
afforded to any particular living system (it will end only when all living
systems die). Sound precedes and exceeds us. And it is here that fatigue and
stress and the need to slow down and recover set in, in the gasping sounds
that I make as I reach the threshold of a door and cut off the rush of urban
life and sound around me in favor of the privacy of an academic space.
 T 2

We are in my office in Gilman Hall on the campus of Johns Hopkins

University in a small room with a carpeted floor that absorbs sound
reflection.
So a walk from my house to my office, which I always thought of as
taking about five minutes, in fact takes nine minutes and thirty
seconds.
Experienced in real time, the entire recording takes fourteen minutes and
divides unevenly into nine and a half minutes of sound and four and a half
minutes of speech. When rendered in language, the differences between the
first and second halves of the recording are immediately apparent. The
sounds could be transcribed in an infinite number of ways, with more or
less attention to subtleties of timbre and the grain of the sound, with more
or less nuanced accounts of the attack, duration, and decay of particular
sounds, and with more or less care to the question of how best to articulate
complex phenomena of simultaneously experienced multiplicities as a
linear, one-word-at-a-time string of signifiers. No such basic conceptual
difficulties attend the transcription of the second half, which renders itself
rather neatly into words, but which, in the process, suppresses its own status
as also always sound. The transcript does not convey the cadence and
emphasis and inflections of spoken utterance, nor does it render the
breathless rush of certain passages and the languor of others, nor does it
present the swirls and eddies of affective change afoot within the emotional
and embodied act of speaking, the little crests of feeling localized within
each syllable.
Distinct in both their provenance and their plausibility, the asymmetry in
place between these two transcripts is as obvious as it is misleading. I’ll
flag the asymmetry first. Speech is at once language, and hence subject to
transcription and silent dissemination as print, and yet in its moment of
utterance, it is materially expressed as sound. But sound isn’t yet language,
and perhaps cannot ever be except through a process of attenuation,
filtering, and translation so lossy as to foreclose the very premise of
transcription or translation as such.
Accordingly, with respect to their reliability as accounts of “what
happened,” these two transcripts unzip from each other quite easily. We
ought to be skeptical of the capacity of the first transcript to stand in for
what it represents, while, assuming there was no deliberate scribal error, we
can probably rely upon the second transcript. Yet, at a more microscopic
level of focus, the very act of digitally recording audio is itself already a
kind of inscription, for the smooth analog waves of sound as vibrations in
the world are themselves being attenuated and rendered into a digital
approximation, a string of encoded zeros and ones that are also, themselves,
already lossy with respect to the originals that they store and preserve. So
the distinction between the two transcripts can itself be made to soften and
blur.
And the act of recording instantiated a basic difference between
moments of synchronization between action and sound and moments
where sound did not register the sort of totality of what it feels like to
live in a body and move through a soundscape while being a
participant in that world.
As film-sound theorist Michel Chion has pointed out, the practice of
watching films encourages the expectation that visual events and sonic
events will somehow correspond in intensity, producing a sense of
simultaneity and connection across registers that Chion terms “points of
synchronization”; against this media-primed expectation, real life shows up
as disjunctive or impaired, insofar as visually striking events do not
necessarily have an equally striking sonic accompaniment, and vice versa.7
It started with a kiss from Martin in which what I was seeing and
feeling was marked by a sonic spike, an event that I’m sure on the
waveform will look like a thick, sharp black bar.
The failure of the sonic register of experience captured on the digital
sound file to correlate with the subjective memory of how experience
emerges was most marked at precisely the points where “sexuality” was at
stake: The kiss was something that I didn’t see (I closed my eyes), but
something that I felt as a bodily event of contact, and sonically, it sounds
like almost nothing, a faintly smudged, percussive nonevent that stands out
when I play it back only because I know what to listen for. Were the sound
played to a stranger, they would not recognize this as “the sound of a kiss,”
though that is what it is.
The difference between the generation of sound artists who worked with
magnetic tape and the present generation is most marked in the
reascendance of the visual as part of the way in which we work with sound
now. Whereas a musique-concrete composer working with a field recording
in the 1970s would have anticipated playing back the sound of the kiss
recorded on tape, someone working in a digital environment at the present
time looks forward to seeing the waveform on a screen and using their
capacity to see differences in the level and character of the signal as part
and parcel of what it means to edit and isolate sound. We look at sounds,
and in so doing, the question of what it means to expect synchronization
between the sonic and the visual undergoes another turn of the critical
screw.
Martin’s awareness of being recorded made him not speak out loud
in intelligible English, but instead speak in funny backward sounds like
“epp zapp wupp derp.” As soon as I was walking down the street, I
noticed that there was a constant kind of oscillation between moments
where an action such as a car passing by would be something that I
would perceive that would also register as sound, you know, on the
recording levels of the input channels and then, uh, moments in which,
uh, I experienced something that left no sonic trace or register. I
walked by a police officer on a Segway, and the police officer on the
rubber wheels of the Segway made no sound whatsoever but my, you
know, heart rate rose and my skin started to conduct a little more, and
I started to sweat so I could register in my body the kind of anxiety that
the proximity of police generates in me. But if you listened to the field
recording, you would never hear the sound of the police.
The phrase “the sound of the police” is hardly accidental, but is, of
course, a citation of KRS One’s anthemic hip hop single “Sound of Da
Police,” a song about the institutionalized racism of police presence in
African American communities, with its insistently catchy chorus “Woop!
Woop!/That’s the sound of the police/Woop! Woop!/That’s the sound of the
beast.”8 KRS One’s song is a complex artifact of its own, and worthy of a
separate essay, but for my purposes here, it usefully remediates a signature
noise of urban existence: the police siren. KRS One flags the way that the
panic-inducing police siren claims the right to noise as an asymmetric index
of top-down control, against which the vocal imitation of the siren as a
human cry attempts to speak back to power and replay one of its signature
sounds as a tactic of critique, mimicry, and opposition.
If this open colonization of public space by audible signals of authority
is still in evidence across the urban soundscape of the present in poor
neighborhoods, the nearly silent rubber wheels of the Segway show up as
the polite “sound of the police” within spaces of white privilege within
Baltimore, such as the Hopkins campus. Buoyed by government funding
and research grants, academic workers presumably have the right to
proceed undisturbed by the intrusive sound of sirens, and so the constant
sense of police surveillance that goes along with the security state protocols
of the present is rendered helpfully mute so that academics can go about
their business (including the business of tenure track faculty talking about
queer phenomenology to their digital recorders in the padded safety of their
own private offices). Accordingly, one does not hear “the sound of the
police” on the field recording.
You wouldn’t grasp the silent Segway wheels on the recording, nor
would you grasp the silent exchange of the probably gay dude that
cruised me and gave me a look of recognition as he silently walked by.
No sound from him at all. That again is not on the tape.
It seems to me that this moment is important precisely for its banality. It
is a moment of simultaneous recognition and loss. In a moment of
recognition, two gay men hail each other as sexualized subjects within the
public sphere, silently, through discreet glances. In a moment of loss, this
recognition produces no sonic trace, and thus the sound of the event, as
sound, refuses to grant any priority or interest to that everyday moment of
recognition. As such, this moment opens usefully onto the vexed distinction
between “the gay” and “the queer.”
If the register of publicly legible identities and the sexual practices (from
cruising and flirting all the way to public sex) that batten upon them takes
place within the domain of gay and lesbian and bisexual signifying regimes,
the sonic is, as they say, “a horse of a different color.” The sonic is a
register of physical vibrations, of the ontology of vibrational force within
the world, and the two domains need not correlate or correspond. The
failure of this gay moment to become sound—which could easily be
recuperated into a melancholic discourse as the sound of self-oppression, of
self-silencing, of “the closet”—could also be used in a different way, to
foreground what is “queer” about sound as such. What is queer about sound
is its very refusal or recalcitrance, its resistance to or deviation from our
expectations about what is or is not significant.
Of course, there are plenty of ways that gay and lesbian and trans
identity can show up as sound; one’s tone of voice can sound “faggy,”
“butch,” or in some sense nonnormative—a husky-yet-female voice, a
falsetto-yet-male voice, for example. But the queerness of the sonic obtains
at the points at which sound as physical vibration unsettles or fails to accord
with the normative force with which we inhabit, present, and perform our
own identities, whether gay or straight or otherwise.
As it happens, this field recording abounds with moments of divergence
between the gay and the queer. The young man asking people if they are
registered voters in Maryland was working for the Human Rights Campaign
(HRC), the most mainstream lobbying group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) rights and a highly vocal advocate for the marriage
equality movement; he was engaged in signing up Hopkins students to
donate money to the HRC to further their (since successful) efforts to
legalize gay marriage in Maryland. The sound of his conversation with
potentially supportive strangers was a moment of gay risk, or speaking out
and claiming space for gay rights and the dignity and validity of gay and
lesbian subjects.
In comparison with that usefully and normatively apparent “gay
moment,” queerness emerges in the curious sound of the car-becoming-a-
wooden-rocking-chair, which I am about to describe as the transcript
continues. There’s nothing “gay” about the sound of that car, but there’s
certainly something “queer” about it, if we take the queer to be that which
disrupts normative signifying regimes: Within the context of the sound
recording, the sonic presentation of the car as a small, domestic, wooden
object (a rocking chair) rather than as a large, potentially lethal vehicle
exemplifies what I am calling the “queerness of the sonic” as such.
 But then there are interesting moments that are on the tape. The
kind of comic interaction between two women, one asking for help, the
other saying “Get the hell out of my face,” uh, was delivered with facial
expressions that suggest, you know, a lot of humor and intimacy and
friendliness. But I think sonically there was actually a lot more of an
edge of aggression in the way that the exchange registered, and I’ll be
curious to hear that when I play it back. Everywhere I was surrounded
by other people, surrounded by technology, surrounded by vehicles,
economies, bodies. But I was always acting on that with the
directionality of how and in what way I pointed the microphone, the
little muscle adjustments, the little micromovements that I made that
would flag things as content worthy of grabbing.9 I also noticed the sort
of disjunction between what a thing is and what it sounds like in the
passage of one car which made a really noticeable creaking and
squeaking sound. But the creaking sound was very wooden. If you
played that sound for someone, you would imagine that perhaps that
was a rocking chair. It didn’t sound anything like a vehicle, certainly
not a car in movement. So I think the recording also manifests the
strange independence of sound from the cloud of, you know,
associations that we tie to the signs that we affix to sounds, our sense
that a certain kind of object is going to make a certain set of sounds is
part of how we parse what we’re hearing all the time, but everyday,
there are misfits, there are points of noncorrelation that emerge when
you start to record.
The autonomy of the sonic from the register of visual and linguistic
meaning can arrive in unexpected ways. Although in the context of this
chapter, this autonomy was disclosed through the experience of the
disjunction between sound-as-recording and an experience of being in the
world, that disjunction can itself be discovered within the realm of music,
and it is in no way specific to field recordings.
A specifically musical case in point of the “queerness” of the sonic can
be found in the practice of Judy Dunaway, a virtuoso performer of music
written for and performed upon balloons. In a performance at the Red
Room in Baltimore, the entire packed room was absolutely silent as we sat
hunched together watching Dunaway strap a three-foot-wide, white weather
balloon to her waist with guide ropes. Two separate contact mics, spaced a
foot apart, were taped to separate sides of the balloon, which bulged off her
belly like a grotesque parody of a pregnant stomach. Once strapped
securely in place, she spread her legs and sat down, clamping this white
inflatable surface in place with her stockinged knees. She then grasped two
vibrators, checked their battery and speed settings, turned them on, and,
with eyes clenched shut and a fierce look of concentration upon her face,
slowly edged the tips of the vibrators against the trembling membrane of
the balloon’s thin skin. The signal from the contact mics was carried out
into the public address system in combination with the substantial bass
resonance of the balloon itself, and the room was filled with a wall of
dense, low frequencies subtly beating against each other—a sound at once
instantaneously powerful, and yet also sufficiently complex to reward
extended, meditative consideration.
The sound felt immense, out of proportion to both the size of the object
that caused it and the size of the room; closing one’s eyes produced the
distinct sensation of having been transported to a much larger acoustic
space. The strongest point of comparison, when keeping one’s eyes shut and
considering the performance purely in terms of incoming audio, was to the
sound of distant planes taking off, heard when one is in proximity to a large
commercial airport hub. Subtle variations in the angle of Dunaway’s hands
and in the pressure of the vibrator tips against the balloon would result in
modulations of the beating frequencies, with minute adjustments producing
constant shifts and slides up and down in intensity and pitch that might be
analogically compared with the effect of moiré patterns as optical
phenomena.
Dunaway’s performance quilts together a broad range of elements culled
from diverse ontological levels, which collectively define the expanded
range of objects proper to a queer phenomenology of sound: “Performance”
could name the complicated intersection of an action (stroking); an image (a
woman with her legs spread, a giant white orb); a frequency as a physical
vibration in a room; a thin membrane of plastic encountering air at two
different temperatures on either side of its surface; a waveform as it was
digitally recorded and displayed on a laptop’s screen by the engineer at the
sound board; and a state of embodied, socially extended being together in
the world (with the audience as a temporary perceptual community). Thus,
in this case, “sound” does not designate a unity, for we were not hearing the
sound of a balloon but the sound of an extended technological assemblage:
a balloon and a vibrator and a human hand and a contact mic and a speaker
and a certain size of room are all brought together by Dunaway into an
expressive chain of connection and interaction. The queerness of this
performance obtains not in the material assemblage of this particular signal
chain, but in the expressive leap from source to sound, in which a hybrid
object in process—a balloon-becoming-plane—was made manifest. Judy
Dunaway’s balloon takes on a certain queerness in the undecidability of its
becoming, one that might be fruitfully compared with the queerness of the
car-becoming-rocking-chair that I experienced on the street and
reexperienced in the playback of my field recording. These fugitive
materials illustrate how queerness dislodges and expands being,
transforming objects and forcing us to redraw the relational boundaries of
their—and our—identities in the process.
And that too is a part of what it’s like to work with sound, think
about sound, and think about sound in movement.
 A : O P

By way of—or perhaps instead of—conclusion, I want to clarify my

intentions in hijacking the phrase “queer phenomenology” from its creator,
Sara Ahmed. I shall define the term in relationship to its philosophical
precursor first, and then redeploy it for my own purposes. Very roughly,
“phenomenology” refers to a philosophical tradition that typically produces
so-called thick descriptions of the way that phenomena show up for
embodied consciousnesses. Such a practice is exemplified in a famous
passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945):
“Sense experience is that vital communication with the world which makes
it present as a familiar setting of our life. It is to it that the perceived object
and the perceiving subject owe their thickness. It is the intentional tissue
which the effort to know will try to take apart.”10
Against this backdrop, Sara Ahmed has coined the phrase “queer
phenomenology” to complicate the relationship of the phenomenological
subject to her surroundings through the troping of “orientation” as both a
spatial location and an index of a processual and open way of thinking
about sexuality and identity as necessarily linked in complex ways with
racialized embodiment and political territory.11 In the work of Ahmed and
others inspired by her example (and in opposition to those who might
regard queerness as itself an incipient form of new normativity), the mesh
of self-and-world proposed by phenomenology undergoes a rereading that
brings out the problem of queerness as something that resists identification
and incorporation and thus pushes back against the normative implications
of belonging implicit in the familiarity of the phenomenal world posited by
Merleau-Ponty.
That said, what does queer phenomenology have to do with sound?
Insofar as phenomenology analyzes the way that perception creates both
self and world in a coconstitutive loop, there is a basic sense in which
“thinking about sound” and “doing phenomenology” are more than kin and
less than kind. This tense kinship brings us to a long-simmering
methodological tension that surfaces when the subject is sound, which is
nicely epitomized in that pseudo-profound chestnut of lowbrow
philosophical musing: the question “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s
no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer depends upon
who counts as “one,” and the reason hinges on the basic conceptual
distinction between “sound,” as a signal that is audible to living systems
such as humans and animals, and “vibration,” as a spectrum of ontological
force that extends both below and above the range of audibility. This
occasions a splitting of interpretive labor between phenomenology, defined
here as the description of the way that phenomena show up for embodied
consciousness, and ontology, the free-standing metaphysical inquiry into
the nature of being or beings as such.
So far, phenomenology has been the default setting of sound studies,
even when it gets inflected with historically specific arguments; the
listening mind is the implied reference point and destination for the field.
This attitude is epitomized in the confident declaration of Jonathan Sterne
that “human beings reside at the center of any meaningful definition of
sound.”12 Sterne has a more nuanced position than this anthropocentrist
slogan lets on, presenting sound as necessarily subject to change when
placed against an evolutionary historical backdrop in which species
themselves are always altering; as species evolve, what can show up as
“sound” will itself necessarily adjust. But the emphasis upon sound as
something that is “for consciousness,” to take up the language of
phenomenology, persists regardless of these niceties.
Against this tendency, in the past few years sound studies has seen the
entrance of other philosophical and disciplinary commitments that are not
necessarily tethered to phenomenology but which think, as it were, from the
ground up rather than from the mind down. In a manifestolike chapter titled
“13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” from his text Sonic
Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, Steve Goodman articulates
the possibility of sound studies no longer held captive to any insistence
upon listening minds and firing nerves:
An ontology of vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of
acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Sound is merely a
thin slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals. Such an orientation therefore should
be differentiated from a phenomenology of sonic effects centered on the perceptions of a
human subject, as a ready-made, interiorized human center of being and feeling. While an
 ontology of vibrational force exceeds a philosophy of sound, it can assume the temporary
guise of a sonic philosophy, a sonic intervention into thought, deploying concepts that
resonate strongest with sound/noise/music culture, and inserting them at weak spots in the
history of Western philosophy, chinks in its character armor where its dualism has been
bruised, its ocularcentrism blinded.”13

Suitably chastened by the metaphysical reminder that there are other

zones of vibration than those audible to humans, a “queer phenomenology”
might thus name a practice with a doubled mission. First, by way of
response to Goodman, queer phenomenology can complicate the allegation
that human interiority is simply a “ready-made” by registering the
differences within and between subjects as a result of the incompleteness of
the sex/gender system’s operations upon consciousness; there is no “ready-
made,” no universally available subjectivity in the first place, only a
multiplicity of lived differences. But in learning from and listening to
Goodman’s critique of the phenomenological limits of sound studies as a
human-oriented practice, a bringing to bear of vibrational ontologies onto
the scene of sound studies might ontologize the very queerness operative in
“queer phenomenology” itself by forcing it to acknowledge its barriers,
limitations, and assumptions anew—in particular, its overemphasis upon
cultural determination and human historical narratives at the expense of a
host of nonhuman actants and agents.
I am hoping that a recalibrated mode of queer phenomenology might let
us think both gender and sexuality as a self-differential system and think
about the expanded scene of ontological materiality that is free-standing
and mind-independent. Accordingly, I am arguing for a “both/and”
approach of inclusivity and connection, rather than a forced choice between
distinct critical vocabularies and concerns. Queer phenomenology must thus
become, as Bikini Kill put it, “worse than queer” if it wants to do justice to
both the messy experience of lived sexuality and the extrahuman borders of
the sonic.
N
1. I have made this case elsewhere, in a more explicitly methodological and theoretical essay to
which this current chapter stands as a more practical and extroverted sibling. Drew Daniel, “All
Sound Is Queer,” The WIRE, 33, November 2011.
2. For an example of how this might be done, see Alvin Lucier’s seminal work of process music,
“I Am Sitting in a Room.” Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting In A Room (Lovely Music, 1980, CD). For
a reading of this work and its implications, see Brandon Labelle, “Alvin Lucier and the
Phenomenal Voice,” Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (London: Continuum,
2006), 123–133.
3. On his “Amateur Doubles” double LP, the experimental musician and sound artist Graham
Lambkin documents the audio generated by various car trips in his Honda Civic, including the
rerecordings of cassettes of music by Phillippe Besombes and Jean-Louis Rizet as replayed by
the car stereo and the resonant chambers of his car’s interior; Lambkin’s archive offers a
particularly cryptic example of remediation-as-composition. Graham Lambkin, Amateur
Doubles (Kye, 2011, LP). Sound becomes re-placed through this act and, in the process, the
original changes.
4. See R. Murray Schafer, “The Post-Industrial Soundscape,” The Soundscape: Our Sonic
Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977), 71–103.
5. Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), 178.
6. Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music, trans. Christine North and John Dack (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 15.
7. See Michel Chion, “On Synchronism,” Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia of Sound, eds.
Diedrich Diederichsen and Constanze Ruhm (Vienna: Academy of Fine Arts/Schlebrugge,
2010), 20–26.
8. KRS One, “Sound of Da Police,” Return of the Boom Bap (Jive Records, 1993, LP).
9. For an example of a composition that mobilizes the inherent musicality of the gesture of
wielding a microphone itself, see Karlheinz Stockhausen, ““Mikrophonie I (1965), für Tamtam,
2 Mikrophone, 2 Filter und Regler,” Mikrophonie I & Mikrophonie II (Columbia Masterworks,
1965, LP).
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Phenomenal Field,” The Phenomenology of Perception trans.
Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), 52–53.
11. See Sara Ahmed, “Sexual Orientation,” Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 65–109.
12. Jonathan Sterne, “Hello!” The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11.
13. Steve Goodman, “13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” Sonic Warfare: Sound,
Affect and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 81–84.
R
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Bonnet, Francois. The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Translated by Robin Mackay.
London: Urbanomics, 2016.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2010.
Labelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Continuum, 2006.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London:
Routledge, 1989.
Pettman, Dominic. Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World). Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
Schaeffer, Pierre. In Search of A Concrete Music. Translated by Christine North and John Dack.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.
Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003.
Szendy, Peter. Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies. Translated by Will Bishop. New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015.
PA RT I V

LIVES
 CHAPTER 16

Q U E E R I N G B R I G H TO N
S HE I L A WH I T E L E Y
 A B H

B lies sixty miles south of London and, like the UK’s capital city,
has a rich history; it has been dubbed the San Francisco of Sussex.
Landmark architecture includes the Royal Pavilion, which was conceived as
a monument to style, finesse, and sexual pleasure.1 The iconic Regency
dandy, Beau Brummel (1778–1840) was among its regular visitors. The
town’s notoriety as a haven of promiscuity attracted a growing alternative
sub-culture of homosexuals, lesbians, cross-dressers, and teenage boy and
girl prostitutes as well as a number of so-termed Molly Houses.2 The
Theatre Royal had been given the Royal Assent by the Prince of Wales in
1806 and it opened on June 27, 1807, attracting both royalty and an
audience of cross-dressers and drag-queens, dubbed at the time
“Margeries,” “Mary-Anns,” and “Poofs.” Then, as now, the pink pound was
important. The Victorian period, regarded traditionally as conservative and
overtly moral, was also a hotbed of promiscuity and cross-dressing, and the
landmark trial of “Fanny and Stella” (Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton) in
1870 was indicative of the involvement of the “respectable” middle class in
what was viewed at the time as national degeneracy. As an anonymous
poem from the late nineteenth century tells it, “When they were in the stalls
/ With their low-neck’d dresses and flowing shawls / They were admired by
one and all / This pair of He-She Ladies.”3 Their conquests included the
Duke of Newcastle’s son, Lord Arthur Clinton, as well as the American
consul in Edinburgh, John Safford Fiske. The trial of Oscar Wilde (1854–
1900), a regular visitor to Brighton convicted of “gross indecency” by Mr.
Justice Wills on May 25, 1895, thus comes into perspective as one legal
rebuke among many.
Another famous visitor to Brighton was Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), the
poet and author of the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness (1928), who
lived nearby in Rye, East Sussex.4 While not sexually explicit, her novel
was the subject of a UK obscenity trial, which ordered all copies of the
novel to be destroyed. The United States allowed its publication only after a
lengthy court case. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), the socialist poet and
member of the Fabian Society, was a strong advocate of sexual freedom,
believing that homosexuality was innate and not sinful. Carpenter wrote
several pamphlets on sexual freedom. He has a commemorative Blue
Plaque celebrating his place of birth at 45 Brunswick Square, Hove.5 More
recent residents include the poet and author Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West
(1892–1962), the illegitimate bi-sexual daughter of the English diplomat
Lionel Sackville-West and the Spanish dancer Josefa de la Oliva (known as
Pepita). A loyal friend of sculptor Auguste Rodin, she had a house designed
by Edwin Lutyens in Roedean (Brighton) and another for her guests in
nearby Worthing. Her affairs included Violet Trefusis and the novelist
Virginia Woolf, who was one of the first people to be cremated at the
Brighton Downs Crematorium.
The dramatist Terence Rattigan (1911–1977), author of The Browning
Version and The Winslow Boy, the author and journalist Collie Knox (1899–
1977), and the pantomime dame and music hall artist Dougie Byng (1893–
1988) also lived in the Brighton area. The Brighton Hippodrome (1897–
2007) provided a venue for variety theatre, music hall, and vaudeville, and
boasted a flamboyantly decorated interior, with a large horseshoe-shaped
auditorium and Rococo embellishments.6 Local artists included Byng, Max
Miller, and conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton, whose vaudeville
career began in their home town in 1911 at the age of three. Other resident
celebrities included the journalist and radio and TV personality Gilbert
Harding (1907–1960), the broadcaster, actor, and producer Alan Melville
(1910–1983), and Sir David Webster (1903–1971), chief executive of the
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. More recent Brightonians include the
comedian and novelist Julian Clary (b.1959) and the journalist Julie
Burchill (b.1959). Simon Cowell, of X-factor fame, was born in Brighton in
1959, and Laurence Olivier and his first wife Vivien Leigh lived at the
Royal Crescent, Brighton until the 1970s. Dusty Springfield (1939–1989)
moved to Wilbury Road, Hove with her parents in the early 1960s and
formed The Springfields with her brother Tom before moving into a solo
career. She is commemorated locally on the number 18 Brighton and Hove
Bus. The dramatist Joe Orton (1933–1967), posthumously famous as the
gay British playwright of the sixties, is remembered for his scandalous
plays, most notably Entertaining Mr Sloane and, in Brighton, for Loot,
which was performed at the Theatre Royal in February 1965 and in 1970
was made into a film, with location shots mainly in Brighton. As Rose
Collis writes, “For gay men, as Orton discovered when he visited the town,
‘cottaging’ in public toilets was one way of meeting sexual partners,” and
Orton’s diaries record “in loving detail…the post-coital chatter of men with
whom he had sex.”7 His murder by lover Kenneth Halliwell (August 9,
1967) established him as an enduring queer martyr/icon associated with
aggressive gay masculinity. Prior to Orton’s death and Halliwell’s suicide,
they were looking to buy a house in Brighton.8
 I O

My first encounter with Brighton’s alternative culture was during the late
1950s and early 1960s when I discovered the 42 Club. I had been earning
my pocket money playing piano in a hotel lounge and found a kindred spirit
in Tony, who shared my enjoyment of “queering” the lyrics of such popular
songs as “Misty” and the Al Jolson ballad, “Climb upon my knee, Sonny
Boy.” Anther popular ditty in Tony’s repertory was A. A. Milne’s
“Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace.” Tony occasionally played piano
in the cocktail bar of the Argyle Hotel, Middle Street, Brighton, which
included in its clientele the drag artist Danny La Rue. Tony’s particular
favorite was “The Lavender Cowboy,” a ballad in 3/4 time with four
balancing phrases in each verse. Its lilting melody and vocal narrative
parody such traditional cowboy songs as “Home on the Range.” As the
lyrics reveal, to the dismay of his fellow cowboys this cowboy rode “side-
saddle” on “a filly called Daffydowndilly, the prettiest horse in the West.”
The song exhibits the camp approach to gender transgression in its critique
and mockery of the culturally established masculinity of the cowboy.
Hence, he is shot in the last verse, because “You can’t be a cowboy with
only three hairs on your chest!” Originally sung by Vernon Handley in
1939, it was declared a “blue record” by radio stations and banned.9 It was
later recorded by Tom Robinson. Best known for his anthem “Glad to be
Gay,” written for the 1978 London gay pride parade and banned by the
BBC in May 1978, Robinson also wrote “2-4-6-8-Motorway,” which
alludes to a gay truck driver. At the time of his recording, Robinson was the
only well-known gay artist covering “The Lavender Cowboy,” and his
version is close to that of my friend Tony. It was only one of Tony’s
established repertoire of songs, which notably included Judy Garland’s
iconic “Over the Rainbow” and other musical showstoppers of the time. As
our friendship developed he invited me to the 42 Club—at the time the only
gay bar in Brighton.10
Situated on the sea-front, close to the West Pier, the 42 Club offered a
very theatrical experience. Pre-1967, homosexuality was still an
imprisonable crime, and while the customers ranged from somewhat
androgynous boys to extrovert queens, the members I came to know had
assumed pseudonyms that were either feminized versions of their own
name, such as Paulene, or ones they must have felt suited their personalities
—my favorites being Languid Lil, Laureline, and Betsy May (after the
Queen Mother11). Part of the excitement was the secrecy surrounding the
queer scene. It was underground and colorful. Curiously it was also
moneyed, with many of its members living in Kemp Town’s fashionable
listed buildings: Arundel Terrace, Chichester Terrace, and Lewes Terrace.12
As Patrick states in the oral history “Daring Hearts,” “Brighton has always
had a gay mafia—all those expensive queens, you know, throwing cocktail
parties, with art dealers and old actresses. It was a very closeted place, there
was an awful lot that went on behind heavily brocaded curtains.”13 Also
significant is the Lorelei coffee bar in Union Street, part of the intricate mix
of alleyways and winding streets in Brighton’s historic South Lanes. Lorelei
opened on a Saturday night after the 42 Club closed. Characterized as
“camp,” it was famous for its jukebox, bohemian charm, and chips and
cheese (a deep soup bowl of chips covered with grated cheese).
Drag had its origins in theatre,14 and in Brighton it was an established
part of music halls, variety and cabarets. Artists such as local resident
Dougie Byng, mentioned above, became synonymous with pantomime
dames; he was a pioneer of what is now regarded as camp, becoming a
major influence on future drag artists. His songs, such as “Mexican Minnie”
(“all jolly and ginny…Though I’m well off the map, I’m just covered in
slap”) mixed “sophistication, schoolboy humour and double-entendre.”15
He also wrote the words and extra music for the musical Prince Zorpan
where, in one scene, he impersonated a lady violinist singing “I’m the pest
of Budapest that turned the Danube so blue.”16 For an openly gay
performer, being a drag queen was also a political statement, an affirmation
of his sexuality and cultural identity, and another of Byng’s songs, “Doris,
the Goddess of Wind,” was revived in Alan Bennett’s 2010 play, The Habit
of Art. Like Dusty Springfield, he has a Brighton bus named after him.
The Brighton and Hove queer social scene centered largely on the 42
Club, house/cocktail parties, cabaret and the Sussex Arts masquerade ball.
The 1950s and 60s were a time when publicly acknowledging one’s
homosexuality was risky. For the majority it was a period of isolation, fear,
and repression. Not least, the postwar period was “a time of increased
conservatism on many fronts, although there is no consensus about why this
was so,” accompanied by a growing legal persecution of homosexuality,
among other forms of so-termed “deviance.”17 Meanwhile, the Homosexual
Law Reform Society and the Minorities Research Group in the UK sought
to end legal prohibitions, and the 1967 Sexual Offences Acts finally
“decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adult men (a full ten
years after the government-commissioned Wolfenden Committee’s report
first proposed this change) and, in effect, repealed the repressive
Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the
very law that had resulted in the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.”18 However,
as Patricia Juliana Smith points out, “Queer culture did not…begin with
these dramatic moments in time; rather, it had flourished…with an elaborate
and highly developed sensibility, a subcultural vernacular and semiotic
system, and cultural veneration of certain figures.”19 This chapter continues
with two examples reflecting gay culture in Brighton before the legal and
cultural changes of the late 1960s. The first is the BBC radio-comedy
program “Round the Horne,” the second, the alternative language-forms of
Polari, as embodied in a poem by my friend John McCullough.
 Q I

Public representations of queerness, including lifestyle and language, are in

part a cultural construction. As Richard Dyer points out,
In some measure queers acted in certain ways because that’s how the cultural imaginings of
them proposed they/we act, but at the same time those imaginings were based on actual
practices. Again, if queers acted, and even felt and thought, to some extent like the culture
suggested they should, it was only to a certain extent, and the ways in which they broke
with, undermined and played with the culture became, in turn, part of the raw material from
and with which they handed on queer cultures and others produced imaginings of them.20

“Round the Horne” is one such example. Transmitted in four series of

weekly episodes from 1965 until 1968, it was created by Barry Took and
Marty Feldman and starred Kenneth Horne, with Kenneth Williams, Hugh
Paddick, Betty Marsden, and Bill Pertwee. Featuring sketches and a parody
of a classic film or novel, it was accompanied by Edwin Braden’s big band,
the Hornblowers. The series opened with Horne’s answers to a non-existent
quiz, heavily laced with sexual innuendo. Answers to the question “Where
Do You Find It,” for example, included “wound round a sailor’s leg, on top
of the wardrobe, floating in the bath, under a prize bull, and in a layby on
the Watford Bypass.”21 The show’s most memorable characters were played
by Kenneth Williams, whose parody of an English folk singer included
ditties such as “Green grow your nadgers-O!” and “Bind My Plooms with
Silage.” The series’ most popular sketch featured Julian and Sandy, two
flamboyant out-of-work actors played by Williams and Paddick, with Horne
as their comic foil. One episode started with a firm of solicitors called Bona
Law, a play on the name of Prime Minister Bonar Law; Bona Law
announced “We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time,”
when homosexuality was still illegal. Julian and Sandy also introduced their
various fashionable enterprises, including “bona pets” and “bona bijou
tourettes.”22 Most notably, their hyper-camp exchanges were informed by
Polari, the queer underground language.
 The association of camp with a subcultural language is integral to the
discussion of the Brighton queer scene during the 1950s and 60s. A few
words can be found today in gay publications, used for camp effect, and
Brighton and London both have hairdressers called “Bon Riah.”23 Polari
has a long history. Originating as a form of cryptolect24 developed by
actors, circus and fairground showmen, merchant navy sailors, and the
gay/queer subculture, it can be traced back to the nineteenth century and
possibly earlier. As a developing language, it combined Italian, Romany,
rhyming slang, and post-World War II Yiddish. “In the British Merchant
Navy, where many gay men joined ocean liners and cruise ships as waiters,
stewards, and entertainers it was used both to allow gay subjects to be
discussed without being understood [by outsiders] and as a camp way of
asserting identity.”25 The need for a subcultural linguistic code declined
with the legalization of adult homosexual acts (1967) although there has
been somewhat of a revival. In 1990 Morrissey released his album Bona
Drag (nice outfit) as well as the single “Piccadilly Palare,” a Polari
description of male prostitution (“So bona to vada…oh you! Your lovely
eek and your lovely riah”26). “Danny the Street,” based on Danny La Rue,
and featuring a transvestite street, appeared in Grant Morrison’s 1990 comic
book, Doom Patrol, and the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine offers a fictitious
retelling of the rise and fall of glam rock, with a flashback to the 1970s
when a group of characters converse in Polari against humorous subtitles.27
Linguistics professor Paul Baker has published two books on the subject.28
Most recently, following the success of the Liberace biopic Candelabra
(2013, dir. Steven Soderbergh, with Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt
Damon as his young boyfriend Scott Thorson29), the Sunday Times article
“Mein Camp” featured a full-page color photo of a Calvin Klein shoot from
1996 by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodgh Matadin subtitled “Man I Feel
Like a Woman.” The article makes an interesting contrast between male
camp (“the fluent, boneless wrist gestures, the speech patterns that trill up
and down and the heavy emphasis on key words”) and female camp (“based
on an exaggeration of a real personality, often the individual’s own”).
Examples included Lady Ottoline Morrell, patron to the Bloomsbury group,
the famous Edwardian male impersonator Vesta Tilley, Marlene Dietrich,
the magazine editor Diana Vreeland, and Josephine Baker, “naked but for a
bunch of bananas slung around her hips,” performing “with a knowing, self-
deprecating honesty that makes the person involved just as amused as the
viewer.” The article also provides advice about “Instant Camp”: “drop some
Polari…into your conversation” by using expressions such as “Vogues:
Cigarettes. ‘Can I cadge a vogue?’” and “Bona drag: Nice outfit (see the
same-titled album by Morrissey).”30 Theatre camp, with its roots in Soho
theatre, has also been resurrected in the ITV series “Vicious,” which
features Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi sipping G&Ts in the
Garrick Theatre Bar, nurturing their aged dog, and turning everything into
an often self-defensive witticism.31
 I T

The reference to “Round the Horne” underpins the retro nature of Polari.
Poet John McCullough, also a researcher into Brighton’s queer heritage and
author of The Frost Fairs (a 2011 Book of the Year for the Independent
newspaper and the Poetry School, and a recommended summer read in The
Observer32) has written a poem which provides a somewhat nostalgic
glimpse of the lost queer culture of the early to mid-twentieth century.33 As
letters and diaries in the archive at Brighton Ourstory underline, with the
police kept busy, World War II provided homosexuals on the home front
with a unique opportunity for self-expression. John moved to Brighton in
2000 and worked as a barman in a number of Brighton’s queer venues like
The Bulldog and The Amsterdam with their soundtrack of drag cabaret and
house remixes of the latest chart hits. It was only later, however, that he
discovered Polari. He enjoys “the texture and musicality of the language,
the suggestive delight it takes in long vowels, stridents, and lateral
approximants which reveal its origins as an amalgam of Italian, Yiddish,
thieves’ cant and Cockney slang. Its sounds are packed with excess and
excitement, its giddy flourishes married to an earthy, puncturing humor
which ensures no one gets above their station.”34
John has provided a glossary of Polari words to assist in reading this
poem: bona—lovely; martinis—hands; eek—face; aunt nells—ears;
zhooshy—tarted up; trolling—mincing; ogle riahs—eyelashes; omi-palones
—effeminate men; bevvy—drink; dolly—beautiful; feelies—children; bijou
—small; vada—look at.
Georgie, Belladonna, Sid
Paper, scissors, stone. Grinning poster boys
for Winston’s bona home front, the flashing sky
pink as a boudoir. Sid’s craggy martinis thump

away with a powder puff to the gramophone

trills of ‘There’s a Small Hotel’. My eek hovers
above Lady B’s sink, bleach storming my scalp.
Open your aunt nells, dear. No beauty
without agony. Bitch. A zhooshy recruit,
I have plucked and plucked to prove devotion,

my fitness for trolling and jitterbugging

in prearranged gloom. Kohl, rouge, bronze lipstick.
Steadfast sisters, we tarry like Fates on the periphery

of guest-houses where forces are stationed,

B stitching sequins to maroon gloves by the light
of a tissue-papered torch. Sid bats his ogle riahs

in ten minute spells. We’re the bang they want

to go out with, saintly omi-palones who fall
when we stroke the Polish navy’s smooth serges.

Talk is ruthless: weather, duties, family—

bevvy at mine? My favourite’s a Yank.
Ed Paxton, his fluent hands unknotting the rope

of my body, loosening dreams that have never been,

will never be freer. Between his legs
I’m the right shape, intrepid, all-seeing.

The horrors of peace are many. Street lamps slam on

beside snapping bunting, thrashed Union flags.
What’s wrong with your eyebrows? my brother says.

I stare blankly back, incapable of irony,

laughter. Sid moves to Orkney—Bless her
Chatsworth Road heart—has five dolly feelies.

Belladonna signs up for the merchant navy.

She writes to me, praising bijou striped curtains,
Black sailors, the Atlantic’s sharp smell

though I do not reply. I linger here, still paper

but folding, folding. The streets swarm with mammoth
skirts, decency, bedsits. I’ve used the last smudge

of American shampoo. Each dusk I vada

the ripped-open, scattered rose sky and pray
to God for the safe return of my Blackout.
While Polari is closely associated with camp, its performance situates it
within a queer rather than exclusively male context. Seeing camp, and the
specific example of Polari, “as a performative critique of social
normativities and a political praxis…releases camp from its historically
limited signification of gay male effeminacy and introduces it into the
political and transgressive repertoire of queer style and logics of excess.”35
In terms of style it signifies performance rather than existence, with humor
providing “a means of dealing with a hostile environment and, in the
process, of defining a positive identity.”36
 A C S : B
H ’ A S
B P

The website Queer in Brighton provides insight into the City’s past and
present queer scene.37 Including a picture gallery, biographies, events, and
news, it is an archive of queer heritage. It is but one of the many websites
originating in and serving Brighton’s established LGBTQ community.
Many sites offer information on the clubs, among them “Autostraddle—
Queer Girl City Guide Brighton UK,” which provides listings of events and
“all things queer,” including information on the safest club nights. In
December, 2007, for the first time in the UK, music which encouraged
violence towards minority groups was banned in Brighton’s clubs and
concert venues. Meanwhile, the Brighton & Hove LGBT switchboard offers
support and help for all areas of life and connects queer people in the area
with charities and services. For the under 26, there is also the Allsorts Youth
Project that offers drop-ins and individual support for the LGBTQ
community.
Historically, the current scene can be connected to The Zap Club, which
first opened in 1982. Founded by Neil Butler, Patricia Butler, and Amanda
Scott, The Zap Club aimed to mix radical art with cutting edge
entertainment, and its first shows were presented in a cabaret format mixing
performance art, comedy, dance and theatre. In 1984 it moved to the Kings
Road Arches, finally closing in early 2005. Famous for its radical music
and open-mic nights during the 1980s through to the “Streets of Brighton”
festival events, the collaboration with QueenSpark led to the publication of
its cultural history in the online heritage site, My Brighton and Hove
(2007).38 Julian Clary, performing as “The Joan Collins Fan Club” (which
had only one member), was among Zap’s iconic performers, and his PVC
and rubber-clad persona attracted a substantial following.39 The Zap Club
also ran Club Shame, an influential gay club night founded by Paul Kemp,
two years before Manchester’s Flesh night and London’s Trade. Considered
well ahead of its time, it was heralded as “the blue print of clubbing for the
90s” by Gay Times.40 Kemp is also responsible for producing the
“Alternative Miss Brighton” and building the internationally renowned
Wild Fruit brand, known for its all-inclusive, uninhibited club experience
with DJs including Boy George and Fatboy Slim, also a Brighton resident.
Kemp’s Alternative Miss Brighton Shows have been staged at the Theatre
Royal and the Brighton Dome and included performances by Lily Savage,
Graham Norton, Julian Clary, Rhona Cameron, Nicholas Parsons, and
Michelle Collins. Kemp has been involved with Brighton Pride since its
inception, becoming Pride’s biggest business investor and fundraiser for
eighteen years, and establishing the Dance Big Top, which he produced for
fifteen years.41
Popular music can be considered a social force that constructs both
heteronormativity and resistant queer sexualities and gender identities,
whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgender. Thus, social
relations merge with musical performances and invoke a different way of
listening or viewing, a different and alternative engagement with the
performer. Brighton’s Theatre Royal has been the venue for live
performances both by queer icons and by tribute bands that celebrate them.
Justin Hawkins was joined by his brother Dan during a Hot Leg gig at the
Ocean Rooms, Brighton, as part of The Great Escape Festival on May 15,
2009, and was subsequently part of Lady GaGa’s “Born This Way Ball”
tour. The Freddie Mercury tribute band “Killer Queen” is also a regular
attraction, while “One Night of Elvis” with Lee Memphis King, Europe’s
most successful Elvis tribute artist, celebrates his career from his 1950s
rock ‘n’ roll heyday through to his Vegas performing years.
I would also mention resident writer and performer Rose Collis who,
after a career as a journalist and author of ten books, performed with Queer
Ukuleles, the UK’s only queer ukulele band, for eighteen months. She then
joined Brighton’s Rainbow Chorus, performing in the 2011 Brighton
Fringe, before appearing at Paul Burston’s Polari literary salon at London’s
Southbank Centre. She then performed at Shoreham Library as part of
LGBT History Month and then at Brighton’s Marlborough theatre. Her
scripted banjo cabaret-style show “Trouser-Wearing Characters” draws on
the people she has written about,
 combining music, stories, vignettes and songs (evergreens and originals) about some of her
favourite, eclectic “trouser-wearing characters,” from 50s media star Nancy Spain to
masquerader “Colonel” Victor Barker,42 cabaret legend Douglas Byng to ‘the f**king lady’
herself, actress Coral Browne.43

Collis recently performed at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in February 2013.

The review by Lucy Nordberg hailed it as a “theatrical exploration of
colourful characters who defied expectations in order to reinvent
themselves.”44
As Jodie Taylor comments, “The queer scenic space is unimaginable
without music…it has been a tireless and faithful servant to queerness.”45
From Vaudeville and Music Hall, through to contemporary electro-pop and
such iconic stars as Lady GaGa, the alternative fringe scene, and artist Beth
Ditto, the 2013 Brighton Fringe also offered musicals (“Priscilla Queen of
the Desert” and “The Lady Boys of Bangkok”), while “Piers and Queers”
conducted a guided tour of queer Brighton. The Pride event for the same
year featured performances and DJ sets from musical acts including Paloma
Faith, Ms Dynamite, Stooshe, MKS, Alison Moyet, and Hazel Dean, as
well as Brightonians such as Freemasons, Al Start, and Nicky Mitchell.
Queer Brighton owes much to its cultural history, not least its music, night-
clubs, and scenes, which support and nurture its rich heritage of sexualities
and performance styles through local cultural knowledge while providing
personal narratives of queer self-making and expression. It is a continuing
story, but nevertheless one that builds on its queer history of networks,
friendships and kinships. As the website Queer in Brighton states:
“Brighton is our unique City—our Queer Home.”46
N
1. The Royal Pavilion, a former royal residence, was designed by John Nash. It was built in three
campaigns, beginning in 1787, as a seaside retreat for George, Prince of Wales, who, due to his
father’s illness, became the Prince Regent in 1811 at the age of 48. He acceded to the throne in
1820.
2. In eighteenth-century England, the term “molly” referred to an effeminate, usually homosexual
male, and, like other third sex identities “molly” was one precursor to the broader homosexual
identity of the twentieth century. Much of the evidence about Molly Houses comes from the so-
termed “buggery trials.” Under the 1533 Buggery Act, homosexual acts remained a capital
offence. Patrons of Molly Houses adopted female dress and a female name and affected
feminine speech and mannerisms, which included marriage rituals and role-play.
3. Quoted in Neil McKenna, Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England
(London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 1.
4. Among her many lovers was were the Austrian lieder singer, Mabel Batten (whose portrait was
painted by John Singer Sergeant c.1897), Batten’s cousin, the sculptor Una Troutbridge, and
blues singer Ethel Waters.
5. In the UK blue plaques commemorate a link between an individual and a location significant in
their life. Hove was twinned with Brighton in 2000 to become the City of Brighton and Hove.
6. The Grade II* listed building, in the category of "particularly important buildings of more
than special interest" in the National Heritage List for England, has been empty since
2007. Wikipedia, “Brighton Hippodrome,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Hippodrome.
7. Francesca Coppa, “A Perfectly Developed Playwright: Joe Orton and Homosexual Reform,” in
The Queer Sixties, edited by P. J. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 87.
8. A list of famous residents can be found in Wikipedia, “List of people from Brighton and Hove,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from:Brighton_and_Hove.
9. As Time magazine wrote on March 25, 1940, “Blue songs are naturally not allowed on the radio
networks. Last week NBC revealed that 147 songs are on its Blacklist. Because their titles are
suggestive, 137 may not even be played instrumentally. Among them: ‘Lavender
Cowboy’…‘Dirty Lady’…‘But in the Morning, No’…Many another song had to be laundered
before NBC will play it. Not to be sung in ‘Thank You Father’ are the lines: ‘Though your
father’s name was Stanley, Thank God that he was manly.’” “Lavender Cowboy” started out as a
poem, published by Harold Hertsey in 1923, and appeared in a western in the 1930s called
“Oklahoma Cyclone,” sung by Al St. John. Ewen Hail wrote the music, published under the title
“Singing Rawhide.” “Lavender Cowboy” appeared on Blue Bird Records in 1939 performed by
Bob Skyles and his Skyrockets. It included the warning “Not licensed for Radio Broadcast.” A
history of “The Lavender Cowboy,” including the above quotation from Time, appears in JD
Doyle, “Lavender Cowboy: Charting a Song’s History,” Queer Music Heritage,
http://www.queermusicheritage.com/mar2005lavender.html.
10. The 42 Club was used mostly by male homosexuals, including those from homosexual
subcultures such as drag queens and transvestites.
 Dyer provides the example of the Queen Mother as an embodiment of Britannic royalty and, in
11.
her gown, gloves, picture-hat, and twirling parasol, camp; that is, “it’s all a question of how you
look at it.” Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 52
(see also Figure 4.1, p. 53).
12. Kemp Town was primarily the work of Barry and Wilds senior and was conceived as a seven-
part design: two sea-facing terraces (Arundel Terrace and Chichester Terrace), a square (Sussex
Square) with houses on three sides, and a two-part crescent (Lewes Crescent) joining these
sections. All seven parts are listed at Grade I (‘‘of exceptional interest). Similarly, the four parts
of Brunswick Terrace and the east and west sides of Brunswick Square, which formed the main
part of the Wilds and Busby partnership’s Brunswick estate, have been awarded Grade I status.
13. Brighton Ourstory, “Ourstory’s History: Daring Hearts,”
http://www.brightonourstory.co.uk/ourstory-s-history/daring-hearts. The site’s owners stopped
adding new material in 2013. “After twenty-four years of searching out and telling the histories
of Brighton’s lesbian, gay and bisexual communities and individuals, Brighten Ourstory is
unable to continue in this work…We hope we have sown the seeds of interest for those who
come after—there is plenty yet to do—and made a bit of history ourselves.” Brighton Ourstory,
http://www.brightonourstory.co.uk.
14. Halberstam differentiates the theatrical traditions of gender impersonation and drag in gay
culture. Judith (Jack) Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1998).
15. Sheridan Morley, The Great Stage Stars (London: Angus and Robertson, 1986), 57–58.
16. Morley, The Great Stage Stars, 58.
17. Emily Hamer, Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians (London: Cassell,
1996), 144.
18. Patricia Juliana Smith, ed., The Queer Sixties (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), xii–
xiii.
19. Smith, ed., The Queer Sixties, xiii.
20. Dyer, The Culture of Queers, 11.
21. “Round the Horne,” February 15, 1967. Barry Took, ed., The Very Best of Round the Horne
(Wellingborough: Equation, 1989), 160.
22. The show’s double-entendres went “way beyond the usual confines of a Sunday lunchtime radio
slot” and its “risqué content provoked a constant battle with moralists and censors at the time,
including Mary Whitehouse and Cecil Smith, but the BBC Director General…stood by the show
and refused to ask the writers and actors to tone it down.” BBC, “Round the Horne,”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/roundthehorne/. The Bona Law sketch may be found in Took,
ed., Round the Horne, 170-176.
23. A list of words from Polari has been compiled by Chris Denning, “Polari,” http://chris-
d.net/polari/.
24. A cryptolect is a jargon which is intended to exclude those from outside the group.
25. Denning, “Polari.”
26. “So good to see…oh you! Your lovely face and your lovely hair.”
27. The subtitled scene from Velvet Goldmine, “Vada Mistress Bona,” can be seen at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI4gxNPKOwE.
 Paul Baker, Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang (London: Continuum, 2002),
28. and Baker, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men (London: Routledge, 2002).
29. A recent addition to the depiction of camp life in film; an early example is the 1970 movie The
Boys in the Band (dir. William Friedkin)
30. Colin McDowell, “Mein Camp,” The Sunday Times: Style, June 2, 2013,
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mein-camp-p5sc82rm6vw.
31. “Aside from Queer as Folk and Sugar Rush—both made for Channel 4—few fictional television
programmes have focused centrally on lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT)
relationships. But new ITV sitcom Vicious, starting tonight at 9pm, could change things.
Starring theatrical luminaries Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi, the comedy is about
Freddie and Stuart, an ageing gay couple who have lived together in their small London flat for
nearly 50 years. They enjoy reading, walking their dog and bickering. Written and created by
Will & Grace writer Gary Janetti and award-winning playwright Mark Ravenhill, Vicious is the
first time that an LGBT couple has been cast at the fore of an ITV comedy.” They “happen to be
gay” rather than being typecast as “gay characters,” and the programme was welcomed by the
LGBT charity, Stonewall, which added, “Sadly there are still too many examples of programmes
poking fun at gay people, or suggesting that we’re almost entirely defined by our sexual
orientation. Gay people come from many different walks of life, and it’s important that this
reality is made more visible on TV.” Daisy Wyatt, “Will New ITV Sitcom Vicious Starring Sir
Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi Prove a Watershed for Gay Relationships in TV Drama?,”
The Independent, April 29, 2013, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/tv/features/will-new-itv-sitcom-vicious-starring-sir-ian-mckellen-and-sir-derek-
jacobi-prove-a-watershed-for-gay-8595198.html.
32. As Jason Roush’s review of The Frost Fairs points out: “John is an inheritor of some important
gay predecessors whose presence stands out in his work: the relaxed formalism of Thom Gunn,
the earthy sublime of Mark Doty, the chatty stylishness of Frank O’Hara, who himself appears
as a ghost-like image in John’s poem ‘Reading Frank O’Hara on the Brighton Express.’ In the
midst of watching John re-paint Brighton, I laugh every time I read the lines ‘with different
kinds / of queen walking different kinds of dog,’ because it’s such a precise offhand
observation.” He adds, “It’s not difficult to see how the landscape of a place like Brighton has
influenced the visionary tone and otherworldly spirit of John’s poems.” Jason [Roush], Review
of John McCullough, The Frost Fairs, popsublime, July 30, 2011,
http://popsublime.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/john-mccullough-frost-fairs-salt.html.
33. John McCullough, “Georgie, Belladonna, Sid,” in The Frost Fairs (Norfolk, UK: Salt, 2011),
25–27. Reprinted by permission of the author.
34. John McCullough, conversation with Sheila Whiteley, March 3, 2013.
35. Jodie Taylor, Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making (Bern: Peter
Lang, 2012), 72.
36. Taylor, Playing it Queer, 72.
37. Queer in Brighton, http://www.queerinbrighton.co.uk/.
38. My Brighton and Hove, www.mybrightonandhove.org.
39. Cora Bailey, “Zap: 25 years of cultural innovation. Joan Collins Fan Club, 1988–1990s,” My
Brighton and Hove, September 13, 2006,
http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__7594.aspx.
40. Quoted in Cora Bailey, “Zap: 25 years of cultural innovation. Club Shame, 1989–1996,”
http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__7593.aspx.
41. For a summary of Paul Kemp’s activities, see LinkedIn, “Paul Kemp,”
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/paul-kemp/24/693/873.
42. On April 15, 1929, a few months after Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was booed,
banned, and burned, a trial concluded at the Old Bailey with the sentencing of Colonel Victor
Barker to nine months imprisonment. For Colonel Barker was, in fact, a woman. Six years
earlier, as Col. Victor Barker, Valerie Lilias Arkell Smith had married Elfrida Hayward in St
Peter’s Church, Brighton and the trial became “one of the most scandalous news stories of the
decade.” Rose Collis, “Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment (Virago 2001),” Rose Collis,
Playwright, Performer, Author, Singer, Musician, Producer and Historian,
http://www.rosecollis.com/books/colonel-barkers-monstrous-regiment/.
43. Rose Collis, “Trouser-Wearing Characters,” Rose Collis, Playwright, Performer, Author, Singer,
Musician, Producer and Historian, http://www.rosecollis.com/stages-present/trouser-wearing-
characters.
44. Collis, “Trouser-Wearing Characters.”
45. Taylor, “Playing it Queer,” 214.
46. Queer in Brighton, “About Us,” http://www.queerinbrighton.co.uk/about/.
R
Bailey, Cora. “Zap: 25 years of cultural innovation. Club Shame, 1989–1996.” My Brighton and
Hove. September 13, 2006. http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__7593.aspx.
Bailey, Cora. “Zap: 25 years of cultural innovation. Joan Collins Fan Club, 1988–1990s.” My
Brighton and Hove. September 13, 2006.
http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/page_id__7594.aspx.
Baker, Paul. Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London: Continuum, 2002.
Baker, Paul. Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men. London: Routledge, 2002.
Brighton Ourstory. “Ourstory’s History: Daring Hearts.” http://www.brightonourstory.co.uk/ourstory-
s-history/daring-hearts.
Collis, Rose. “Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment (Virago 2001).” Rose Collis, Playwright,
Performer, Author, Singer, Musician, Producer and Historian.
http://www.rosecollis.com/books/colonel-barkers-monstrous-regiment [book announcement].
Collis, Rose. “Trouser-Wearing Characters.” Rose Collis, Playwright, Performer, Author, Singer,
Musician, Producer and Historian. http://www.rosecollis.com/stages-present/-trouser-wearing-
characters [performance announcement].
Coppa, Francesca. “A Perfectly Developed Playwright: Joe Orton and Homosexual Reform.” In The
Queer Sixties, edited by P. J. Smith, 87–104. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Denning, Chris. “Polari.” http://chris-d.net/polari.
Doyle, JD. “Lavender Cowboy: Charting a Song’s History.” Queer Music Heritage.
http://www.queermusicheritage.com/mar2005lavender.html.
Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Hamer, Emily. Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth-century Lesbians. London: Cassell, 1996.
LinkedIn. “Paul Kemp.” http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/paul-kemp/24/693/873.
McCullough, John. “Georgie, Belladonna, Sid.” In The Frost Fairs, 25–27. London: Salt Publishing,
2011.
McCullough, John. Conversation with Sheila Whiteley, March 3, 2013.
McDowell, Colin. “Mein Camp.” The Sunday Times: Style, June 2, 2013.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mein-camp-p5sc82rm6vw.
McKenna, Neil. Fanny & Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England. London: Faber
and Faber, 2013.
Morley, Sheridan. The Great Stage Stars. London: Angus and Robertson, 1986.
My Brighton and Hove. http://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk.
“‘Polari’ slang, subtitled scene from Velvet Goldmine ‘Vada Mistress Bona.’” YouTube video. Posted
October 31, 2009 by user “serotta2.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI4gxNPKOwE.
Queer in Brighton. http://www.queerinbrighton.co.uk.
Queer in Brighton. “About Us.” http://www.queerinbrighton.co.uk/about.
“Round the Horne,” February 15, 1967. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BJnj3LFtYSY.
[Roush], Jason. Review of John McCullough, The Frost Fairs. popsublime, July 30, 2011.
http://popsublime.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/john-mccullough-frost-fairs-salt.html.
Smith, Patricia Juliana, ed. The Queer Sixties. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Taylor, Jodie. Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making. Bern: Peter Lang,
2012.
“‘Polari’ slang, subtitled scene from Velvet Goldmine ‘Vada Mistress Bona’.” YouTube video. Posted
October 31, 2009 by user “serotta2.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI4gxNPKOwE.
Took, Barry, ed. The Very Best of Rond the Horne. Wellingborough: Equation, 1989.
Wikipedia. “Brighton Hippodrome.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Hippodrome.
Wikipedia. “List of People from Brighton and Hove.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_from:Brighton_and_Hove.
Wyatt, Daisy. “Will New ITV Sitcom Vicious Starring Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi Prove
a Watershed for Gay Relationships in TV Drama?” The Independent, April 29, 2013.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/will-new-itv-sitcom-vicious-starring-
sir-ian-mckellen-and-sir-derek-jacobi-prove-a-watershed-for-gay-8595198.html.
CHAPTER 17

( TO ) Q U E E R
“A” Life to Music
 E L I Z A BE T H GOUL D

I begins with 14 women murdered at Montreal’s École Polytechnique on

December 6, 1989, for being “feminists,” despite their desperate disavowals
as they are gunned down. A characteristically American story—except that
it occurs in Quebec, galvanizing Canadians to establish a long-gun registry
in 1991, and to observe December 6 as National Day of Remembrance and
Action on Violence Against Women. Stephen Harper’s conservative
majority government (despite winning less than 40 percent of the popular
vote) scraps the registry in 2012 and destroys the records—over the
objections of the Quebec government, police chiefs across Canada, and
Montreal Massacre survivors. The story starts with Montreal, not because
of the shooting itself, but because of the response of a music professor at
the university where you begin your doctoral studies less than three months
before.
“Terrible. Tragic. A deranged man committing an isolated, unspeakable
act.” You nearly leap out of your chair—quite obviously he cannot speak it.
But in too many ways, neither can you—for you do not know then about the
nearly 1,200 Aboriginal women murdered or missing in Canada;1 you do
not know then about the thousands of women murdered each year by
current or former intimate partners in the United States and Canada;2 you
do not know then about 200 million missing women worldwide, due to
infanticide and selective abortion,3 and insufficient food, poor education,
inadequate healthcare, lack of birth control, or childbirth mortality—in so-
called developed countries. What you do know then is that men may be
“men,” but women are forever “girls”; that the professor’s use of “guys” for
everyone—to be “collegial”—is as illogical as it is offensive; that the style
manual he assigns (for the last time)—in 1989—mandates the use of the so-
called generic “he”—“a simple, practical convention rooted in the
beginnings of the English language [well, modern usage dates only from the
nineteenth century[,]4 .…has lost all suggestion of maleness in these
circumstances[,] .…has no pejorative connotations;…is never incorrect.”5
Silent conventions, silencing language, silence embodied voices.
Telling these stories requires the literary trope of apostrophe that
“animates the absent, the lost, and the dead,”6 which you deploy while
mixing tenses in an effort to scramble and thus suspend time. Writing in the
second person “manipulates the I/Thou structure of direct address in an
indirection, fictionalized way.”7 It functions as a rhetorical device through
which “the speaker is simultaneously eclipsed, alienated, and confused with
the addressee.”8 The purpose of this is to elide who is speaking, who is
reading, and to create distance from both the speaker and the writing as
speaking, calling into question not only the presumed authority of what you
think you know as a function of language, but “the adequacy of language”
itself. The second person apostrophe, temporally suspended, opens spaces
for the you who is becoming-you, a Deleuzian becoming of potentiality
destabilizing fixed identities in shifting assemblages “bound up in some
other production, forming a machine”9 of lesbian and of music. This is the
you who really fucking scares you, who you cannot see, but who you must
hear—in order to claim your own ontological becoming—in the time of the
infinitive, to queer and to music, the act before the actor, a life before the
life; music before musician.
Related to gender and sexuality, the second person apostrophe stands in
for the displaced “I” of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity.10
As a counterdiscourse11 to the notion of self-identical identity, the “self as a
prior truth,”12 Butler’s performativity accounts for disruptions to
heteronormativity and identity itself. It accounts for you: exactly what
scares you:
This is not a performance from which I can take radical distance, for this is deep-seated
play, psychically entrenched play, and this “I” does not play its lesbianism as a role. Rather,
it is through the repeated play of this sexuality that the “I” is insistently reconstituted as a
lesbian “I”; paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes as well
the instability of the very category that it constitutes. For if the “I” is a site of repetition,…
then the I is always displaced by the very repetition that sustains it.13

Thus, forever displaced, the “I” that is lesbian is never yet always you. With
no you that is an a priori “I,” there is no “I”; which is to say you, there is no
“I” prior to the repeated iterations of you—not only that, these iterations are
never repeated completely “faithfully”; they are always already enacted at a
distance, a somewhere else both deeply enmeshed and apart from this
displaced, if not exactly lost lesbian “I.”
Butler’s displaced lesbian “I,” however, is forever mute. She is written
on your body, “produce[d] on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the
gait (that array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation), .
…always a surface sign, a signification on and with the public body,”14 that
materializes momentarily, a phantom always already displaced as a function
of melancholic psychic loss. You can see Butler’s displaced “I” if only
fleetingly and uncertainly, but she cannot speak—or more to the point, she
cannot sing.15 The second person apostrophe, however, is the you that you
see clearly, but refuse to hear, as she is becoming-you—on the outside of
language.16
 “W A F S A ?”

Speaking to staff and supporters of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast

(Houston, Texas), Jessica Valenti outlines her response to the persistent and
pernicious stereotype of feminist anger—theorized so succinctly by Sara
Ahmed in terms of “feminist killjoys”:17

It’s not that I’m angry. I’m exhausted.18

Exhausted that graduate students don’t just accept the stereotype of feminist
anger, they embrace it. You start over every year, every time they first read
feminist scholarship in music.19 This year, they respond unusually
vehemently to Suzanne Cusick’s essay, “Gender, Musicology, and
Feminism.”20 You think they will identify with it because Cusick actually
writes the words, “music education”; because they can substitute those
words every time she writes “musicology” and not distort her meaning.
Instead, they demand, “Why is Cusick so angry?” That Cusick is not angry,
that she is describing Ruth Crawford’s anger, expressed in Crawford’s
exclamation, “Damn them!” at being deliberately excluded—by the man
with whom she studies composition and later marries21—from the meeting
to organize what eventually becomes the American Musicological Society
—completely escapes them, even after you point it out.
Exhausted by student hostility, a feminist scholar from outside the
United States and Canada, invites you—in 2011—to speak about feminism
and feminist research with her musicology class. Noting the paucity of
feminist scholars in music education (Julia Eklund Koza, Roberta Lamb,
Patricia O’Toole), you describe feminist incursions in musicology and
ethnomusicology (for instance, Jane Bowers, Susan Cook, Suzanne Cusick,
Bev Diamond, Ellen Koskoff, Susan McClary, Pirkko Moisala, Kip Pegley,
Ruth Solie, Elizabeth Wood—and so many more) as robust, if contested—
arguing that as a set of tools of critique and inquiry invoking music and
education values of interconnectedness, creative experimentation, and trust,
feminism opens up otherwise inaccessible and unexplored problematic
fields related to music engagement in terms of passion and lived
experience.22 Presenting an earlier version of this argument in 2008 at an
international philosophy of education conference, you have no response to
an audience member’s dismissal, “Well, feminism doesn’t have much
purchase here,” without specifying whether her comment refers to the
professional organization hosting the conference or to the country where it
is held. It is 2016 when a feminist musicologist in the United States
observes that if she mentions even one composer who is a woman in her
music history class, students complain on teaching evaluations that she only
discusses women composers.

So it’s not that I’m angry. It’s that I’m shocked.23

Shocked that they do not—cannot—identify with Crawford, and feel

absolutely no empathy for her—these students who are so concerned with
so-called social justice in music and music education. Because the students
have internalized media constructions of feminism as an issue of equal
rights and opportunity in a quest for personal happiness, in 2013 they still
define feminism as unhappy middle-class white women dissatisfied with
their lives; feminism, for them, has nothing to do with patriarchal sexism,
heterosexism, racism, or classism, manifested as discrimination and
segregation. After all, that’s fixed—long ago—if it existed at all.
“Huh! You play pretty well, young lady.” This is a compliment, in 1975,
the only one you hear—if you don’t count an undergraduate man’s
exclamation upon rushing into your practice room: “You play with
balls!”—during a year studying saxophone performance in graduate school.
Your undergraduate sax teacher warns you of the perils of pursuing a
performance career: “You have to play twice as well to get half as far.”
Saying this with a straight face, he continues, “I know one woman sax
player who has a successful career. Of course, she wears—only—body
paint from the waist up when performing.” Glancing at your gender
nonnormative breasts, you remark, “Body paint won’t help.”
The first graduate school that you write to about a saxophone teaching
assistantship ignores your query. After a few weeks, you mail a second
letter, using the name you are to be burdened with had you been born a boy:
“Edgar Burritt Gould”—reason enough to be born a girl. Everything else in
your letter is worded exactly as in the first. An envelope containing
application materials arrives about two weeks later. You study with Mr.
“You play pretty well, young lady” (at another university) because your
undergraduate sax teacher—after asking if you wrote the first letter “in
crayon”—phones him about letting you play an audition, the one that elicits
his surprise.

It’s not that I’m angry. I’m incredibly sad .…heartbroken really.24

Sad—devastated really—that feminist work ongoing for at least 35 years in

musicology and music education, as well as in music and society generally,
can be so easily ignored, discounted, dismissed, and most disappointingly,
disappeared. It’s 1991, and Susan McClary’s musicological nuclear bomb,
Feminine Endings,25 flashes, electrifying the air at the first Feminist Theory
and Music (FT&M1) conference. Recalling FT&M1’s contentious closing
plenary, Philip Brett accepts your invitation to participate in the closing
plenary of FT&M6 (which you host July 2001)—where he recounts his and
coauthor Elizabeth Wood’s protracted struggle with the editors of the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians over their groundbreaking essay,
“Lesbian and Gay Music.”26
The opening keynote speaker for FT&M6 is Roberta Lamb, whom you
first meet at FT&M1, where she founds Gender Research in Music
Education (GRIME). She gives you a draft of what becomes her remarkable
essay, “Aria Senza Accompagnamento: A Woman Behind the Theory,”
innovative in construction and layout, incisive in naming the “violence of
noise” that is racism, sexism, and heterosexism in music, “the family secret
that is never told.”27 Later, Roberta reads your work, speaks your name, and
you come out as a “middle-aged [at 40?] lesbian”28 in the Philosophy of
Music Education Review special issue on feminist theory. It is more than 20
years before anyone who talks to you about the article mentions the lesbian
part, when a gay man—in 2015—asks how it felt to come out so publically
—in 1994.
While you know she must have attended FT&M1, you don’t recall
actually meeting Adrienne Fried Block until fall 1991 when you follow
Carol Matthews (now your spouse in Canada and “special friend”
everywhere in the United States then) to New York. Adrienne is ubiquitous
in the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center Music
Department, befriending and mentoring every woman—or so it seems—
who walks through the door, including your beloved Carol, a PhD student
studying composition with Thea Musgrave. Adrienne inquires about your
research, schedules lunch, and embarks on an endless journey of mentoring
—both of us. She phones, cajoles, arranges meetings, offers advice on
everything from theoretical framing to career development to dyeing gray
hair for job interviews. You’re not yet a CUNY student (later you study
contemporary feminist theory with Beatrice Kachuck), but Adrienne invites
you to the Women and Music Study group that she organizes with Carol.
Adrienne’s organizing activities are legendary, of course, yet it is her
research on the status of women serving on university music faculties29 that
brings you face to face with her today, as you recently finish a research
project leading a team of Canadian and US researchers in a study
investigating gender, race, and tenure status of Canadian tenure-stream
postsecondary music faculty members. That the project is fully funded
speaks to the expertise of your collaborators. Slogging through the extra
work—feeling too old at 60 to take it on—you (reluctantly and painfully)
embrace the research as furthering, if only slightly, Adrienne’s aspirations
for the profession—which the study reveals, are now unattainable. With
rapidly declining numbers of tenure-track positions and stagnate tenure
rates for women and people of colour, gender and racial inequity in the
profession will only worsen.30
So yes, I’m exhausted and I’m shocked and I’m sad—and you know what? I am [really
fucking] angry. I am furious!31

Furious that they refuse to acknowledge, let alone confront, misogyny

directed at girls and women who are harassed, assaulted, and murdered in
schools; 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary (Newtown, Connecticut),
12 of whom are girls, 6 school employees, all of whom are women, and the
shooter’s mother. Always carried out by adolescent boys or men in the
United States during the last 30 years—
Conspicuously absent is any mention of…who has committed the violence…[;] masculinity
is the single greatest risk factor in school violence….. And yet, if the killers in the schools…
 had all been girls, gender would undoubtedly be the only story…Someone might even blame
feminism for causing girls to become violent in vain imitation of boys.32

—virtually all school shooters are white and bullied, most typically for
being gay,33 although none apparently are—“One could say that
homophobia is the hate that makes men straight.”34 Indeed, school shooters
construct identities of violent hypermasculinity through the cultural texts of
music that express anger and violence toward society in general and women
in particular.35 In a profession where pervasive gender, sexual, and racial
stereotyping of music occupations, instrument selection, curricular content,
and materials persist unabated, enforcement of policies that prohibit
bullying, sexual harassment, and assault remains the work of those who
experience it36—instead of those who perpetrate it, or the institutions where
it occurs.

[T]he real question is not why am I angry; the real question is why aren’t you?37

Your entire friendship consists of a few games of pool played after lunch
one day most weeks during the academic year. Nevertheless, you are
stunned in 2000 when he announces that he has asked a troop of Boy Scouts
to present the US flag on stage during the annual Veteran’s Day concert of
the community band that he conducts and for which you serve as utility
infielder, playing tenor saxophone or bassoon as needed. He does not reply
when you remind him that the Boy Scouts recently reaffirmed their policy
banning gays and lesbians; looks away when you insist he would never go
on stage with the Boy Scouts if they discriminated against African
Americans in this way; nods when you tell him that you will not play the
concert, cannot play any concert with a band willing to appear on stage with
an openly homophobic organization. In all the years you know each other,
even when he encourages and conducts Carol’s Symphony for Band, he
never once speaks about your relationship with Carol, the open secret for
which you can be fired without cause or recourse; the secret that your
colleagues and students are only too eager to “unknow.”38
So you construct your gender performance there not as cross-dressing,
but as heterosexual drag, because drag functions as drag only when the
audience “knows” you are not what you perform—when your colleagues
and students know you are not heterosexual:
Drag constitutes the mundane way in which genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn,
and done; it implies that all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation.…
[T]here is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation
for which there is no original.39

Mindful of its functioning as a signifier for illness, starvation, and

deprivation, you buzz-cut your hair, conceiving it as a gesture of solidarity
with exiled Tibetan women who shave their heads in support of a free Tibet.
You also wear an earring, an upside-down Black triangle, used by the Nazis
to signify “antisocial” women, which is to say, unmarried women,
prostitutes, and single mothers, inasmuch as lesbian existence is impossible:
Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely that which does not appear and that which, to
some degree, can never appear. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why sexuality
is to some degree always closeted, especially to the one who would express it through acts
of self-disclosure.40

But perhaps not so much to those who drag the closet. If the “epistemology
of the closet” is unknowing the knowledge, the secret refusing transparency,
drag is the unknowing that announces itself, singing on the outside of
language.
Previously, you invoke the inverted triangle to resist—well, survive—a
school principal’s verbal abuse for your agreeing—not volunteering as you
are a first-year teacher in the school feeling compelled when no one else
moves—to act as union representative for an experienced teacher the
principal attempts to dismiss—for no discernible reason. Your body breaks
out in hives, which you learn to control by smiling politely during the
tirades, applying for doctoral school, resigning, and taping upside-down
cut-out Black triangles over each day on the calendar in your classroom
until the school year ends. You leave for graduate school just as the
acceptance letter arrives. Two and a half years later, you hesitate on the
stairs of your Brooklyn flat, frozen in the terror of the awful power of
authority in schools—at all levels—then push the door open to hear
elementary students that first day in your part-time music teaching position.
 The question for you remains: What are you so afraid of? Accepting the
2012 Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award, Lana Wachowski
describes the “mounting fury” she feels toward her mother after a childhood
incident when her mother “rescues” Lana (“Larry” then) from a teacher
who is yelling at and then hitting her for failing to take her place in the
boys’ line on the school playground. Lana’s mother drives her home and
asks what happened. Realizing that she has “no real language to describe
it,” Lana stares at the floor. When her mother demands that she look at her,
Lana resists “because when I do,” she explains, “I am unable to understand
why she can’t see me.”41
Hearing Lana’s words, you nearly break down. Her fury and frustration
describe exactly your experience as a child—an experience that more than
50 years later, she articulates in a way that you finally comprehend. The
realization that you could have died without understanding catches your
breath:
Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began
to believe the voices in my head—that I was a freak, that I am broken, that there is
something wrong with me, I will never be lovable. .…Years later I find the courage to admit
that I am transgender and that this doesn’t mean that I am unlovable.…. I dressed as
feminine as I could, wanting to be seen by strangers as Lana. Hoping that waiters would not
call me “sir” or “he,” as if these people suddenly had the power to confirm or deny my
existence.…. Invisibility is indivisible from visibility; for the transgender this is not simply
a philosophical conundrum—it can be the difference between life and death.42

You are not transgender, notwithstanding 15 years of deal-making with God

to make you a boy—not because you want to be one, but because you want
to do boy things—which, as it turns out, includes kissing a woman (upon
which you thank all the goddesses for not making you a boy and making
you a woman) who woos you for her annual “spring offensive” directed
toward unattainable lovers.
Your mother sees you clearly as she tirelessly attempts to teach you to
walk, talk, dress, and make up like a girl, all the while trying to convince
you to change your nickname from “Liz” (bestowed on you by your grade
one teacher) to “Liza” (with beautiful Liz Taylor clearly out of reach, “ugly-
duckling” Liza Minnelli might do). What she is unable to do, you now
realize, is hear you. Unlike Lana, you mobilize language through your fury,
protests that reverberate around you as noise, defining you simultaneously
as angry and unworthy, “without examples, without models,” or hope of
being seen as other than what your mother sees: a perfectly visible tomboy
who can’t even manage to excel at the sports she loves due to poor hand-
eye coordination (you similarly fail at her required piano lessons because
you cannot locate your hands on the keyboard)—attributable, you later
believe, to your refusal to crawl, which would have placed your head down
and your back exposed to three older brothers in a generally under-
supervised environment. According to your father, you “hitched” on your
hip for about a day, then stood and walked—away. Lana Wachowski’s
mother looks beyond the phantom Lana to see the mute Larry materializing
before her, inciting Lana’s fury at her mother’s blindness. Your mother,
horrified by the phantom you materializing before her, silences your claims,
inciting your fury at her willful deafness.
 A L

Whenever we write, we speak as someone else.

Gilles Deleuze43

As a set of specific experiences and occurrences, your life empirically

represents “the accidents of the life [specific and individual] that
corresponds to it,”44 unique perhaps, but unremarkable as matter(s) and
mattering. In contrast, a life (indefinite and singular) comprised of
virtualities “engaged in a process of actualization”45—which is to say,
engaged in a process of becoming—that exceeds individuation as pure
immanence, evades transcendence of the subject, immanent only to itself:
A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through that are
measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities
that are merely actualized in subjects and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have
moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between
moments.46

Never specified, always indefinite,47 emerging in the time of the infinitive,

to queer, to music, a life, has nothing to do with you individually and
personally, and everything to do with you singularly and impersonally,
necessitating—all these years always already present—activism, ways of
interacting based on what exists prior to individuality as well as when
“individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a
[wo]man who no longer has a name, though [s]he can be mistaken for no
other.”48 Ill with pulmonary disease, Gilles Deleuze writes this last essay in
the months before he is no longer able to work and commits suicide.
An undergraduate student taking your sexual diversity studies course
urges you to
[m]ake sure your partner tells your class every year—about being a lesbian and free-lance
musician in LA during the ’60s, hanging out with the gay guys. We need to hear her stories
—how hard it was to be gay then. It’s still hard to be gay.
Hard enough that it’s five years before you return to the upscale cinema in
downtown Toronto where a young woman brazenly and publically taunts
you for being a man in the women’s washroom. Asserting that your walking
into the space announces that you are a woman, you wonder, why does this
hail reverberate so loudly? Rationalizing that an assured, articulate young
woman’s hail is evidence of the success of feminist work, you wonder, how
can this hail, delivered while beautifully dressed and coifed in this space
defined by whiteness, not assert class privilege? Joking that you will sing a
chorus of “I Feel Pretty” from now on when entering all public washrooms,
you address—at last—what are you so afraid of? So you ask a woman (an
immigrant in this country, as are you) to style your hair (what there is of it);
and when she hands you a mirror, you startle to glimpse—fleetingly but oh-
so-clearly—the phantom you, your forever displaced psychic “I” that “does
not play its [woman-ness] as a role”—the queer musician woman
becoming-queer musician woman.
N
1. Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women Overall—By the
Numbers.” In Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview,
http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women-national-operational-
overview, posted May 27, 2014. See also, Native Women’s Association of Canada
(L’association des Femmes Autochtones du Canada). What Their Stories Tell Us: Research
Findings from the Sisters in Spirit Initiative, 2010, https://nwac.ca/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/2010-What-Their-Stories-Tell-Us-Research-Findings-SIS-
Initiative.pdf.
2. Violence Policy Center, When Men Murder Women: An Analysis of 2013 Homicide Data,
http://www.vpc.org/studies/wmmw2015.pdf. September 2015. See also Canadian Women’s
Foundation, “Fact Sheet: Moving Women Out of Violence,”
http://www.canadianwomen.org/sites/canadianwomen.org/files//FactSheet-
VAWandDV_19_08_2016_formatted_0.pdf. Updated April 2014.
3. Anna Diamantopoulou, “Violence Against Women: Zero Tolerance,” speech given at the closing
of the international conference, European Campaign Lisbon/Centro de Congressos de Lisboa,
May 4–6, 2000, http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-00-161_en.htm, paragraph 3.
4. Ann Bodine, “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular ‘They,’ Sex-Indefinite ‘He,’
and ‘He or She,’ Language in Society 4 (1975): 129–146.
5. William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (New York: MacMillan, 1979): 60.
6. Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Diacritics, 16 no. 1 (1986): 31.
7. Ibid., 30, emphasis in original.
8. Ibid., 32.
9. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York and London: Routledge, 1995): 184.
10. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, edited by Diana Fuss (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 13–31.
11. Annette Schlichter, “Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity,” Body and
Society, 17 no. 1 (2011): 31–52.
12. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 18.
13. Ibid., emphasis in original.
14. Ibid., 28, emphasis in original.
15. Schlichter, “Do Voices Matter?”; see also Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Thinking and
Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
16. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
17. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,
2010).
18. Jessica Valenti, “Why Are Feminists So Angry?” (transcript). The Nation,
http://www.thenation.com/blog/172524/why-are-feminists-so-angry#; posted January 30, 2012),
paragraph 9. Throughout this chapter, I have woven brief quotations from Valenti’s speech intro
my discussion. These appear in italics.
19. For a discussion of the entanglements of feminism and queer theory, see Annamarie Jagose,
“Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology, 9 no. 2, (2009): 157–174.
20. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas
Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 471–498.
21. Ellie Hisama, “The Question of Climax in Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet, Mvt. 3,” in Concert
Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin
and Richard Hermann (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995), 285–312.
22. Written in 2008, this was published three years later in slightly different form: “My intent is to
demonstrate that as tools of critique and inquiry invoking education and music education values
of interconnectedness, creative experimentation, and trust, feminism(s) opens up otherwise
inaccessible and unexplored problematic fields related to teaching and learning in terms of
passion and lived experience.” Elizabeth Gould, “Feminist Imperative(s) in Music and
Education: Philosophy, Theory, or What Matters Most,” Educational Philosophy and Theory,
43, no. 2 (2011): 132.
23. Valenti, “Why Are Feminists So Angry?” paragraph 13.
24. Ibid., paragraphs 18, 20.
25. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
26. Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, “Gay and Lesbian Music,” in Queering the Pitch: The New
Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas
(New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 351–389.
27. Roberta Lamb, “Aria Senza Accompagnamento: A Woman Behind the Theory,” Quarterly
Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, IV–V, no. 4–1 (1993–1994), 7.
28. Elizabeth Gould, “Getting the Whole Picture: The View from Here,” Philosophy of Music
Education Review, 2 no. 2 (1994), 92.
29. Adrienne Fried Block, “Women in the Profession of Higher Education,” College Music
Symposium, 40 (1974/2000): 55–61. See also Adrienne Fried Block, “The Status of Women in
College Music, 1986–87,” in Women’s Studies/Women’s Status, edited by Nancy B. Reich, 79–
158. (College Music Society Report No. 5; Boulder, CO: College Music Society, 1988).
30. See Louis Bergonzi, Deanna Yerichuk, Kiera Galway, and Elizabeth Gould, “Living with
Tenure: A Survey on the Demographics of Tenured and Tenure-Track Music Faculty at
Canadian Post-Secondary Institutions,” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music. While this
study was limited to Canadian institutions, my analysis using the College Music Society’s
Directory of Music Faculties in Colleges and Universities, U.S. and Canada, 2010–2011, as
well as a survey of member institutions of the National Association of Schools of Music (Data
Summaries 2009–2010: Music. Reston, VA: Higher Education Arts Data Services, 2010), found
that gender imbalances in US and Canadian postsecondary institutions are remarkably similar
(also see Gould, “Feminist Imperative(s) in Music and Education”).
31. Valenti, “Why Are Feminists So Angry?” paragraph 22.
32. Michael S. Kimmel and Mathew Mahler, “Adolescent Masculinity, Homophobia, and Violence:
Random School Shootings, 1982–2001,” American Behavioral Scientist, 46, no. 10 (2003):
1442 (emphasis added).
33. Ibid. See also Jessie Klein, “Teaching Her a Lesson: Media Misses Boys’ Rage Relating to Girls
in School Shootings,” Crime Media Culture, 1 no. 1 (2005): 90–97.
34. Kimmel and Mahler, “Adolescent Masculinity, Homophobia, and Violence,” 1446.
35. Tomi Kiilakoski and Atte Oksanen, “Soundtrack of the School Shootings: Cultural Script, Music
and Male Rage,” Young, 19 no. 3 (2011): 247–269.
36. For a first-hand description, see Auntie Bellum Contributor, “The Four Harassers of the History
Department,” AuntieBellum: An Honest, Unapologetic Voice for Southern Women,
http://auntiebellum.org/mag/the-four-harassers-of-the-history-department/?
elqTrackId=134c85f24995493dab74a392aa5e47b9&elq=4a8aa6de212743fa954d4fa459fc807d
&elqaid=12484&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5088; posted February 7, 2017.
37. Valenti, “Why Are Feminists So Angry?” paragraph 27.
38. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990).
39. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 21, emphasis in original.
40. Ibid., 25.
41. Lana Wachowski, “Lana Wachowski’s Wachowski’s HRC Visibility Award Acceptance Speech”
(transcript), The Hollywood Reporter, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lana-
wachowskis-hrc-visibility-award-382177, posted October 24, 2012.
42. Ibid., 2.
43. Gilles Deleuze, “Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–
1974 (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 143.
44. Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. A. Boyman
(New York: Zone Books, 2001), 29, emphasis in original.
45. Ibid., 31.
46. Ibid., 28, 29, emphasis in original.
47. John Rajchman, “Introduction,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books,
2001), 7–23.
48. Deleuze, “Immanence,” 28, 29.
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 CHAPTER 18

ENDANGERED TENDERNESS
Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann
C HARL E S F I S K
 A M S -D

T first academic conference I ever attended—in Toronto in 1984, when I

was nearly 40—changed my life. At that conference, Susan Youens gave a
talk about the figure of the Fremdling in Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle.
The man whose aimless wanderings Franz Schubert chronicles sets off on
his journey with the words, “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh ich
wieder aus”: “A stranger I came, a stranger I depart.” What becomes
apparent in the course of the cycle is already implicit in those opening lines:
this man is an outsider not only in his current setting, but in any setting to
which he might ever find his way. Despite his confession of love for the
woman who has spurned him, he never portrays her in any detail. Her
image as even a past beacon of hope and comfort has been irredeemably
eradicated. All we encounter, again and again in the course of 24 songs, is
the pervasive sense of alienation embodied in the frozen landscape through
which the wanderer so aimlessly makes his way. He is too queer to feel at
home, or even to interact, with anyone except the homeless, barefooted
organ grinder to whom he calls out in his final song.
As I listened to Youens’s talk, I understood, more clearly than ever
before, why Schubert had long been the composer with whom I most
strongly identified. In a flash, the term Fremdling came to identify for me a
certain figure who haunted not only so many of Schubert’s songs, but also
much of his instrumental music, including the piano music I’d already been
playing for over 20 years. And thus it occurred to me, for the first time, that
as a complement to playing Schubert’s music, I wanted to write about it. I
would explain how the troubled presence of that haunting figure manifested
itself through stark juxtapositions of seemingly incompatible elements:
dramatically contrasting passages in mutually remote keys, one close to
home, the other distant; or moments of tender lyricism overshadowed by
forbidding gestures, so that Schubert’s tenderness often seemed to me an
endangered tenderness, a tenderness to be expressed only at one’s peril.
Years before hearing Youens in Toronto, as an adolescent in the early 1960s
too ashamed of my strong sexual attraction to other men to imagine ever
acting upon it, I felt recognized by Schubert’s music. Like the tenderness in
that music, mine, too, was endangered. If I felt and expressed that
tenderness with a man, I would risk disgrace. And if I tried to develop and
express it with a woman, I would risk exposure as an impostor. But it was
as if Schubert’s music, of its own compassionate accord, embraced me in its
loving presence. Reassuring me of my capacity for love, his music lifted me
from my shame and restored to me a sense of personal value.
Almost 40 years have now passed since 1977, when I became willing to
identify myself as a gay man. Along with many others, I am tempted to
suspect that Schubert, too, was homosexual. But whether or not Schubert
was gay—or homosexual, or whatever term might be deemed the least
anachronistic for a Biedermeier Austrian—can his music be plausibly
identified as queer? Yes, Schubert’s music often conveys a sense of
endangered tenderness. And yes, it has played a profoundly comforting and
restorative role for me, first as I denied my own homosexuality, then later as
I struggled to come to terms with it, and finally even today, when I have
fully embraced my own sexuality for many years. I know, too, from
conversations with friends, that it has played a comparable role for others.
But does that make the music queer?
I am inclined to regard queerness in music, as in any art, as a property of
a relationship, whether between artists and their own art, or between that art
and other individuals who experience it. As Schubert’s music began to take
possession of me, I experienced it as recognizing and assuaging, more
powerfully than any other music I knew, my torment over my own
homosexuality. Whether it played a similar role in Schubert’s own life, as
seems possible, is both impossible and unnecessary to know.
Writing specifically about gay male culture, David Halperin argues that
“non-gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their
particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness. In the place of an
identity, they promise a world.”1 More specifically, as Wayne Kostenbaum
has written, “In music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal
without saying a word.”2 In my late adolescence, long before I could take
possession of my own homosexuality, Schubert’s music—which it would
never then have occurred to me to regard as “gay”—conjured for me not
only an empathetic personal presence, but also a kind of place: an
environment to which I could belong more fully than to any other. This was
a world in which I could reconcile myself, if not to my sexuality, at least to
the queerness—the Fremdling status—that my sexuality entailed. By
playing his music, I could provide that Fremdling, to an extent, with both a
spiritual and a physical home in the world in which I actually lived.
Two other composers whose music has furnished me with havens of
self-recognition and self-acceptance are Frederic Chopin and Robert
Schumann. Although neither Chopin nor Schumann left evidence of
homosexual interests or activities—each, in fact, had a long relationship
with a famous woman—both composed music that some might more
readily identify as “queer” than Schubert’s, in the ordinary sense of being
odd or deliberately unconventional. Would any of Schumann’s
contemporaries or immediate successors ever have chosen to emulate his
Kreisleriana or Humoreske? And what were they to make of Chopin’s Bb-
minor sonata, of which Schumann himself wrote: “The idea of calling it a
sonata is a caprice, if not a jest, for he has simply bound together four of his
most reckless children.”3 This chapter offers descriptions of music by these
three composers. In discussing the music of Chopin and Schumann, I will
not resort to accounts of my own relationships with it as heavily as I shall in
discussing Schubert’s. Occasionally, I shall call something “queer,” without
specific qualification. This will always be some aspect of the music that has
seemed to me to implicate my self-identification with it as a gay man.
Although it will never imply a quasi-objective attribution of “queerness” to
the music itself, it will always register my suspicion of a musical reflection
of an eccentric, possibly problematic facet of the composer’s personality.
 S ’ “F ”

First, I turn to passages by Schubert in which I most strongly sense the

“endangered tenderness” of which I write.4 The piece that first took hold of
me in this way was the Sonata in A Minor, Op. 143 (D. 784), which I
encountered in 1963, just as I was about to enter college. A two-note
rhythmic motif obsessively pervades its opening movement. In all the forms
that this motif assumes, its first, more accented note or chord is linked to a
quieter second element to yield a rocking or swaying effect. Throughout the
sonata’s first thematic area, with its slurred descending leaps, the effect of
this motif is ominous, but when the music moves to the citadel of E Major
for its second theme5 and repeated notes replace those rocking intervals, its
effect becomes soothing, as if to envision a safe haven from the perils of the
opening music. Only years later did I gain an explicit understanding of why
this music so captivated, even embraced me as I first came to know it: it
seemed that, like my own capacity for tenderness, the tenderness of its
second theme was under threat from the sinister forces harbored within the
opening thematic complex. And only years later did I learn that Schubert
had composed this sonata in the winter of 1823, while quarantined with
secondary syphilis, and thus at a time when his own capacity for tenderness,
not to mention his life itself, must have seemed especially imperiled.
Another passage in which sweet, gentle music suddenly, almost
magically emerges from an ominous setting is the G-Major second theme of
the B-minor “Unfinished” Symphony (D.759), composed in October 1822,
only a few months before the D.784 sonata. In the symphony, the
tenderness of the exquisite second theme seems not merely under threat but
irretrievably lost, except as a halcyon memory. The return, just after the first
bleak climax in the development, of its syncopated accompaniment pattern,
in minor, without the melody that it was intended to accompany, seals that
loss. The eerie memory of that devastating climax subtly returns to haunt
the angelic sweetness of the slow movement.6 Although one can probably
never prove it, I have long been tempted to believe that Schubert already
knew of his syphilitic infection that October, and that it was in response to
that knowledge that he returned his focus so seriously to instrumental music
after three years of largely unsuccessful operatic projects, composing music
so evocative of loss and mourning.
In November 1822, only a month later, Schubert completed an
instrumental work in several movements for the first time since completing
the “Trout” Quintet in 1819. This piece, the “Wanderer” Fantasy, draws its
motivic material from the 1816 song “Der Wanderer” (D.493). As I have
argued elsewhere, the theme of the fantasy’s slow movement variations, the
C#-minor stanza that culminates with the line “Ich bin ein Fremdling
überall” (“I am a stranger everywhere”) emerges as a tonal Fremdling,
abruptly establishing a stark tonal contrast with the C Major of the
Fantasy’s opening and closing movements.7 Although the “Wanderer”
Fantasy might have been regarded as a “queer” work in its own time,
fundamentally without formal, tonal, or motivic precedent, its triumphant
conclusion seems to have made a pioneering bid for greatness, and hence
for a viable alternative to “normativity,” by taking into account—and even
celebrating—its own queerness. And indeed, in its fusion of fantasy and
sonata forms, its tonal scope, and its motivic cyclicism, it became the most
obvious model for the tone poems of Liszt and later nineteenth-century
composers.
Like some of the innovations of other composers striving for originality
and personal authenticity in the wake of Beethoven, the musical and
technical advances of the “Wanderer” Fantasy might be most fruitfully
regarded as “proto-normative.” The same cannot be said, however, of the
ways in which the second themes of the “Unfinished” Symphony and the D.
784 sonata so poignantly emerge from their ominous contexts. Unlike the
broadly formal and motivic strategies of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, these
uniquely affecting moments, and the expressive quandaries to which they
give rise, cannot be imitated without simply being reiterated, and hence
losing their expressive power. The cauldron of past associations with the
term “queer” may make it seem ill suited to these musical passages, but that
term is appropriate to the ways that those very passages mirror the affective
predicaments of so many who have adopted it in defining themselves.
A A W : S ’ L T
S Q

The moods and concerns evoked by the songs of Winterreise, as well as by

the D.784 sonata and the “Unfinished” Symphony, transcend the purely
emotional. The winter wanderer sings not only of loneliness and desolation
—all-consuming emotions—but also of his profound alienation, of the utter
groundlessness of his existence, of his irremediable spiritual homelessness.
If he were not intensely alive, he could not sing as he does; yet there is no
one who can hear his songs as he longs for them to be heard. To invoke a
commonplace expression frequently associated with the existentialists of
later generations, as he wanders aimlessly, he becomes ever more aware of
the absurdity of his existence and longs ever more ardently for death.
Within months after first hearing this A-Minor Sonata, I began to play it.
To play its second theme, that citadel of tenderness, was not simply to
caress the keys. It was to be embraced by the piano, to experience the
instrument itself as a restorative human presence. During that same year, I
began listening to the last two string quartets, the string quintet, and the last
piano sonata. I experienced all of these pieces—and still experience them
today—as arenas not merely of emotional, but of existential exploration. In
the two quartets, the world evoked is threatening and inhospitable; in the
quintet and the sonata, it is the opposite: a heavenly realm to which one can
only dream of admission.
The opening gesture of the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) is
not simply agitated or angry; it is evocative of a bleak landscape, a
windswept emptiness, an environment in which no one can feel at home.
Already in the continuation of its first phrase comes a fleeting glimpse of a
warm haven, but only as a glimpse of the unattainable. Later, the second
theme dwells for longer in such a haven, but again it is unattainable, as its
cadential resolutions are repeatedly undermined. Its gentleness—along with
its joviality—are once again under threat, and with them, the very existence
of the one who dreams of experiencing them.
 Thinking about these for me, queer, or at least queerable pieces by
Schubert as existential quests leads me to interrogate queerness itself as an
existential concept—one that in its rejection of clearly defined designations
of identity opens itself to the indeterminacy, and hence to the full intensity
(as well as to the potential rootlessness), of selfhood as it is actually
experienced.
I have never held any religious belief, much less the kind of belief that
might have shielded me against queer temptations. But if I were to seek,
through example, a definition of “religious experience,” I might begin with
my first encounter with the opening of Schubert’s G-Major String Quartet
(D.887). First come the jagged juxtapositions of major and minor modes,
imposing and expressively impenetrable; then, immediately afterward,
follows the pleading of the solo violin to stay aloft above the trembling,
free-falling descent of the lower strings. For me, this opening juxtaposition
has sometimes evoked a lonely quest to comprehend the incomprehensible
or to secure a sense of one’s place in a mysterious and inhospitable world.
The echoing answer of the cello intimates that such a plea might somehow
be answered, but in its fragmentary character and tonal ambiguity, it does
not dispel the atmosphere of loneliness.
As I first experienced it, this opening filled me with awe; I felt I had
never heard anything more beautiful, at once so intimately moving and so
evocative of mysterious grandeur. With the second theme, through its
dancing syncopations and ingratiating harmonic sleights of hand, I could
envision a place of comfort, but again only fleetingly. This was music that
embodied, through the imaginary materiality of tone and rhythm, an alien
environment and an attempt to find a sense of place, and of self-identity,
within it. In the tremolando passages of the development, I felt the sense of
a vast and desolate space persists—a space within which, at points of
momentary arrival, the opening plea sounds again. In its recapitulation, the
dark juxtapositions of the opening are softened, as if they become more
internalized and assimilated. But the song of the cello with which the slow
movement opens is still lonely and desolate, and only becomes more so in
the face of the harsh, implacable outcries of the stark, contrasting episode.
There are different ways to love this music, as well as not to love it. But
inasmuch as I initially experienced myself as its lonely, existentially
challenged protagonist, my love of it has been a queer love. Once again, as I
first came to know it, it afforded me the solace of an imaginary world in
which to accept, at least in sublimated form, the queerness of my affections.
Even though that world itself, as configured in the quartet, was forbidding,
it embodied for me the recognition of my own life-world as I actually
experienced it, and through that recognition, it became a source of life-
affirming comfort for me.
 S ’ E Q

I have given one example of dramatically contrasting passages in mutually

remote keys, the slow movement theme of the “Wanderer” Fantasy, and I
turn now to others. Perhaps the locus classicus is Schubert’s last sonata,
D.960, in Bb Major. Joseph Kerman described the low, pianissimo Gb trill
at the end of the sonata’s opening phrase as “a mysterious, impressive,
cryptic Romantic gesture.”8 As I wrote elsewhere, “If…the opening phrase
of the sonata were to mean something, the strangeness of the trill might cast
doubt on that meaning. If that phrase has a mood, then the trill abruptly, if
quietly, alters it. From wherever the theme may come, the trill comes from
somewhere else.”9 It is from the “composing out” of the trill’s Gb, the
lowered submediant, that the tonal and dramatic conflicts of this movement
arise. If one hears the opening, hymnlike theme as being sung by an angelic
chorus, one might then imagine that a member of that chorus, drawn to the
mysteriously alluring trill, enters the realm, the remote key of Gb Major, to
which it beckons. At first, this seems a realm of enchantment in which that
singer can linger without harm for a spell before rejoining the group. But
when he returns, he is cast out before reaching a cadence with the chorus,
hurled back into the once-alluring G-flat realm, now transformed into an
F#-minor scene of banishment. The entire long movement can be heard as
the quest of this castaway to regain admission to the opening chorus. While
the trill that catalyzes this drama is itself strange enough to be called
“queer” in an ordinary, old-fashioned sense, it is easy, as well, to identify
the singer who responds to its allure as queer in a broader, more
contemporary sense.
In contrast to the starkly imposing, alienating scenes evoked by the
openings of the “Death and the Maiden” and G-Major quartets, and more
like the beginning of the B-flat Sonata, the opening theme of the C-Major
String Quintet (D.956) is Elysian, evocative of a spacious, eternally tranquil
setting. If I believed in Heaven, this would be its musical embodiment. But
it was with the Eb-major second theme, more than with the first, that I felt
personally identified as I first became familiar with this music. This is, once
again, a song of vulnerable tenderness, a song uncertain of belonging in the
Elysium in which it finds itself, but seeking to secure its place there. Its
reappearances in the midst of darker and more threatening terrain in the
development were—and still can be—almost unbearably poignant for me.
So, too, can the theme of the E-major slow movement, again a song, like
the first movement’s beginning, that might be sung by a supernatural being,
for it moves too slowly to be carried on human breath, or to conjure a state
attainable in this life.
Perhaps it is the entire environment, rather than any discrete being
within it, that is singing, and thus inviting whoever hears it to be enveloped
in its song. But so it is, as well, with the anguished F-minor middle section,
singing in despair over the unlikelihood of ever finding a true home in these
surroundings, and yet finally being drawn back into them. The movement’s
final phrase, with its wrenching momentary return from the serenity of E
Major to the anguish of F minor, as a threat raised but immediately
dispelled, epitomizes for me in a single progression the struggle with
alienation, the existential quandary that seems to me to underlie so much of
Schubert’s music, and that has enabled me to feel so recognized and
comforted by it.
 C ’ A

Although Chopin is not known, or even widely suspected, to have been

homosexual or bisexual, his personal idiosyncrasies were pronounced
enough to draw him into the ranks of queerdom, if understood in a broad,
not specifically sexual sense.10 As George Sand wrote of him during their
winter together in Majorca: “I am so used to seeing him in the heavens that
it does not seem to me that his life or his death bears witness to anything for
him. He does not rightly know himself on what planet he exists. He does
not take any account of life as we conceive it and as we feel it.”11 To an
even greater extent than for many other composers, Chopin’s music was his
world—a queer, in a sense hermetic world made up almost exclusively of
piano music, almost all of its inhabitants representing the genera that he had
either created or so thoroughly re-created that they all virtually belonged to
him: his mysterious, dream-filled nocturnes; his magnificent etudes; his
stylized mazurkas and waltzes, not for dancing; his textless ballades; his
wild, free-standing scherzi; his massively heroic polonaises; his cyclically
organized preludes; his expansively rolling impromptus; and then, only near
the end, his unique Fantasy, Barcarolle, and Polonaise-Fantasy. Rather than
remaining a mere outsider in the day-to-day world that he physically
inhabited, I might propose that Chopin instead became the only true insider
in this separate, even mystical world of his own creation, which through its
sheer magic lured others to join him there.
All three of Chopin’s last major, uniquely titled solo works culminate in
apotheoses.12 In each, a tender theme quietly introduced in a remote major
key (the lowered mediant) in a central episode, as if in reverie or relatively
stilled reflection, returns in a glorious, full-textured transformation in the
home key, like a dream come true. But with the possible exception of the
Barcarolle, each subverts, in its own way, the triumph for which it has so
compellingly prepared, as if in the realization that such apotheoses can only
come to pass in fantasy—at least in the worlds envisioned in these pieces.
In the Barcarolle, although the joy of this climax is unalloyed, the
ruminative coda that ensues from it is harmonically complex and
expressively ambiguous, a chiaroscuro of light and shadow. In the Fantasy,
only the first two measures of the once-quiet B-major theme return in Ab-
major glory before it breaks off, receding into mere echoes of itself. Carl
Schachter’s description is apt: “like a dream, its elements dissolving into
nothingness just when we think we have finally grasped their meaning.”13
In the Polonaise-Fantasy, the return of its dreamlike B-major episode
reaches the full cadence denied it before, but in the wake of that grand
cadence, the music recedes into a reflective mode, in what Anthony
Newcomb calls “an intentional backing away from, and consequent
ironisation of, the final ‘apotheosis.’”14
In each of these cases, the tender dream envisioned by the quiet, tonally
remote passage at the music’s center, when it presses for full actualization,
is denied assurance that such a realization can be achieved. Is it permissible
in these cases to speak of “queered apotheoses” in their implication that so
much of what counts as triumph is ephemeral, and that the striving for
conquest, victory, or salvation, on which so much of worldly life is
predicated, is so often based on illusion?
Several of Chopin’s best-known and most dramatically effective longer
pieces conclude violently, thus envisioning tragic outcomes for whatever
tender moments have arisen earlier in them. In the first scherzo and second
ballade, the effect, for me, is one of innocence crushed. In the third scherzo,
when the subdued, E-minor meditation on the hymnlike second theme
quietly fragments without reaching a cadence, and that theme is quietly
reborn in C# major, an apotheosis is promised. The melodic line begins to
soar Heavenward, only to be wrenched into submission and swept into a
swirling, concluding torrent. In the first and fourth ballades, glorious
apotheoses of the initially charmed, gentle second themes do in fact come
about, only then to be subverted by darkly tumultuous final perorations.
To play these gentle themes, like those that emerge at the heart of the
Fantasy, the Polonaise-Fantasy and the Barcarolle, is once again to
surrender myself, even if only for the moment, to the loving embrace of the
piano. But the tenderness in this music is not merely endangered; it is
doomed. The third ballade does indeed conclude with a fully realized
apotheosis of its opening theme, and such other pieces as the second
scherzo, the “Heroic” Polonaise, and the B-Minor Sonata end joyously. But
Chopin’s attitude toward apotheotic thematic transformation seems far more
fluid and ambivalent than that of any of his Romantic contemporaries,
comparable in some respects to the skepticism of those who identify
themselves as “queer” in place of such unambiguously delineated
designations of identity as “gay” and “lesbian.” Chopin’s ambivalence
contrasts, as well, with the sense of homecoming that so many (although by
no means all) of Schubert’s compositions finally achieve.15
 C I B W ?

Chopin’s favorite of his waltzes, that in A minor, Op. 34 no. 2, has always
been my favorite as well.16 It is also, arguably, the queerest of them.
Because of the dronelike accompaniment and modal inflections of its
opening section, one might initially mistake it for a mazurka. The left-hand
melody, dolefully rocking at first between E and F, has always reminded me
of a Slavic folk song, thereby evoking for me a lonely, possibly homesick
protagonist (whether Fremdling, étranger, or nieznajomy). In the second
section of the waltz, the melodic line strives upward, as if trying to gain the
momentum of the dance, and begins to glide freely only in the lengthening
of the phrase at the section’s end. If the third section captures the festive,
social mood of the dance, it does so only tenuously, as it sways back and
forth between major and minor, “very much,” as Jim Samson claims, “in the
manner of the mazurkas.” 17 In the fourth, an amorous melody in the tonic
major floats above the gliding of the waltz rhythm, now in full swing. The
once-lonely protagonist seems to have succeeded in joining in. But in the
fifth, that entire melody is echoed in the minor mode, again with
mazurkalike, now Phrygian inflections, as if to capture the mood of the
dancer who comes to the realization that the fulfillment of which he has just
dreamed can perhaps only be imagined, but never attained.
All of the sections but the first then come a second time, in an endeavor
to recover the spirit of the dance, first achieving it, but soon again retreating
from its rapturous flow into lonely reflection. Only now, after this second
cycle, does the longing opening theme return, this time leading to a new
melody, at first in its own low register, but in the end arching upward to be
joined from above by another voice—a real, if fleeting, companion—before
falling back into the melancholy but gentle swaying of the opening theme.
Samson notes another generic mixture at the waltz’s end, where, he claims,
“the nocturne invades the waltz.”18 It is as if this music can only strive to
become a waltz rather than simply being one.
I do not remember thinking consciously, when I first learned to play this
waltz as a ninth grader, of a personal narrative linking it with my own
situation. At the time, I had only recently realized that my sexual longings
were considered pathological. But I clearly sensed in myself a recurring
inner scenario that was mirrored by the emotional trajectory of the piece: a
scenario beginning with a lonely, self-cradling song, from which its
protagonist strives to rise, by joining in the dance, to social acceptance and
even to some form of amorous bliss; but he finds no fulfillment. He tries
and fails again; but in the end, he turns in a different direction—one in
which he can imagine finding, even if he cannot yet realize it, the
fulfillment he seeks.
I don’t wish to claim that Chopin’s waltz tells such a story; I would
rather invoke the story as “telling” the waltz, as translating my queer
experience of it into concrete images. Its protagonist is an outsider who tries
to seek inclusion by transforming the mazurka that comes naturally to him
into a waltz, a dance that anyone can supposedly dance. Although he may
seek, and may even imagine, finding happiness within the world of that
dance, he will never really find it there. In the end, he will have to start a
new song in a voice more fully his own, like the song that comes near the
end. Only then will he find another dancer who enters his own world by
joining in song with him, as happens in the dreamlike passage just before
the opening mazurkalike song returns for the last time. Can one infer
anything about Chopin’s personality from his preference for this waltz
above all the others? Perhaps not; maybe it is simply the most beautiful. But
his preference for it might reflect a self-identification with it that transcends
purely aesthetic considerations.
 C ’ “D ”

I have written elsewhere about three pieces by Chopin, all composed in

1835, that prominently feature duet textures—not merely at specially
charged moments, as in the A-Minor Waltz, but throughout: the Etude in C#
Minor, Op. 25 no. 7, and the two nocturnes, in C# minor and Db major, of
Op. 27.19 As I wrote, “I experience each of these three pieces as
instantiating in its own way a problematic relationship between self and
other: in the C#-Minor Etude, the shattered dream of a blissful union; in the
C#-Minor Nocturne, the resigned union of a lonely self with a lonely other,
almost as if to a Doppelgänger; in the Db-Major Nocturne, the struggle—
fulfilled only at the end—to unite with a reluctant partner.”20
Of these characterizations, the one with which I have felt least satisfied
is that of the C#-Minor Nocturne. Thinking again about these pieces, it
occurs to me that this is the queerest of the three. As it begins, the
placement of the lowest bass notes as the last of each sextuplet clouds the
metric framework. The initial chromatic ascent of the melody feels as if the
ground might slip away from it. In its registral separation from its hollow-
sounding accompaniment, this theme sounds not merely lonely, but spectral
—an effect intensified by its emphases on the Neapolitan degree and the
way it trails off without reaching a cadence. Like Schubert’s “Death and the
Maiden” Quartet, this music, in its own way, evokes an alien world. When a
second voice enters into dialogue with the first, the opening melody
becomes more grounded, especially in its brief, hopeful turn to E major, but
still trails off, as then does its new partner, again without reaching a
cadence. After the agitated crescendo of the middle section, culminating in
a maniacal song of illusory exultation, the spectral opening melody returns,
again to be joined, sooner than before, by the second voice. This time, still
without harmonic support, they accede to a cadence together, from which
blooms a condensed, quietly transfigured return of the maniacal motif from
the middle section—again, as before, in the major mode.21
I still hear resignation in that cadence, but I can now understand it as the
resignation of each of the voices to its own queerness. Recognizing that
quality in each other, they can now come together in resolution and
experience that resolution as the blessing that the nocturne’s conclusion
appears to confer on them.
E E S ’
K

Of the pieces that I have chosen to consider in this chapter, perhaps the final
one, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, is the queerest in what I have called “an
ordinary, old-fashioned sense.” The first eight measures of its opening
movement, marked äusserst bewegt (extremely in motion), syncopated
throughout, leave their metric framework virtually undetectable. The
contrast between this agitation and the tenderness of the movement’s
middle section is also extreme—so extreme as to make that tenderness feel,
once again, vulnerable. The tempo and expressive indications for every one
except the last of the remaining seven movements are modified by sehr, the
German word meaning “very”: sehr innig und nicht zu rasch (very inward
and not too quick); sehr aufgeregt (very agitated); sehr langsam (very
slow); sehr lebhaft (very lively); once again sehr langsam; and finally, or I
should say penultimately, sehr rasch (very quick). Until the end, the
musical and expressive contrasts continue to be extreme and abrupt, both
within and between movements. But perhaps queerest of all, and most
wonderful, is the way that the bass of the concluding movement, to be
played schnell und spielend (fast and playfully), continually slips away
from the music that it is meant to accompany, making it all the more in-
drawing and mysterious.
Kreisleriana captivated me from the first time I heard it performed in
1968 by another student at the Yale School of Music. I knew immediately
that I had to play it—not just someday, but someday soon. More capacious,
for me, than any other piano piece I had ever heard, it encompassed the
expressive extremes of intimacy and wild abandon. The musical and
pianistic impulses that drew me sometimes to the wildness of Liszt’s first
Mephisto Waltz, Bartók’s Out of Doors Suite, and Copland’s Piano
Variations, and at other times to Schubert’s quieter impromptus and
Moments musicaux, Brahms’s Eb-major and A-major intermezzi, and
Debussy’s Hommage à Rameau and des pas sur la neige, could all be
addressed by studying and performing Kreisleriana. It was a piece with
which I wanted to become intimate, and to which, in a sense, I longed to
“bare my soul” and to be transported wherever it could take me. Because of
its extraordinary commingling of the gentlest and dreamiest music with the
wildest and most powerful, I sensed that in playing it, I could come of age,
in the sense of having well-grounded pride in myself, without suppressing
those aspects of myself that felt most vulnerable and, in that stereotypical
sense, childlike.
As it happens, I performed Kreisleriana for the first time only in 1977,
just a few months after finally accepting and acting upon my own
homosexuality. My grandmother regretted being unable to come to my
performance. But she proudly relayed to me that my Aunt Jinny, her
daughter, had told her that, for the first time ever, I had really “played like a
man.” Of course there is nothing in itself queer about playing this piece;
pianists of all sorts and stripes have performed it without arousing
speculation about their erotic and personal lives. More than with much of
my other repertoire, however, the desire to take possession of my own
queerness is what seems to me to have energized my own absorption with
this profoundly felt, but fanciful music.
 Q — N ?

If one does not limit the application of the term “queer” to sexually
dissident individuals or their creations, how then does one determine an
appropriate range of its use? Robert Schumann was clearly in some respects
an odd character. He dreamed up the imaginary characters Florestan and
Eusebius to represent, respectively, the aggressive and contemplative sides
of his personality, and a third character, Master Raro, to mediate between
them. Following his suicide attempt, he was confined for the last two years
of his life to an asylum. Johannes Kreisler, the creation and alter ego of the
versatile, eccentric, but presumably heterosexual E. T. A. Hoffman and the
source of Kreisleriana’s title, might today be classified as a manic
depressive or bipolar personality, as Schumann himself has sometimes
been.22
Schumann aspired to recognition as a public figure, not only as a
composer, but also as a conductor, editor, and journalist, and did not
hesitate to make known some of his most pronounced idiosyncrasies.
Would either Chopin or Schumann, if living today, have been willing to
designate himself as “queer”? Who can say? Too much else has changed.
But I, for one, am more comfortable applying that term to the reclusive
Chopin, who seems to have kept much of his inner life secret, than to the
generally more public Schumann, who aspired to a central position as an
arbiter of aesthetic standards and taste.
As already intimated, I have based my ascriptions of queerness to pieces
of music primarily on the quality of my own relationships with them. There
is much music that I have loved and performed that I am much less inclined
to identify in that way. J. S. Bach is possibly my favorite composer, and
possibly also the one whose music I play best; but I do not regard my
relationship with any of it—even the extraordinary, mysterious, radically
chromatic 25th variation of the Goldbergs—as queer. Nor does any of
Beethoven’s piano music, with the possible exception of his penultimate
sonata, Op. 110, evoke for me the emotional scenarios that I associate most
strongly with my struggles with my own sexuality.
 While the expressions of tenderness in these composers can affect me
just as profoundly, I do not experience them—as I do in Schubert, Chopin,
and Schumann—as islands of tenderness. In first becoming familiar with
and learning to play the pieces that I write about here, I rarely if ever
thought explicitly about how they might have reflected my own emotional
and existential quandaries. I simply felt recognized and comforted—and
knew why I needed that solace. But in thinking about them since, I have
recognized that what drew me to them so powerfully, beyond what one
might naively consider their purely aesthetic qualities, were the ways that I
heard reflected in them the vulnerabilities and the sense of alienation that I
associated with my own sexual and emotional life. In writing about them,
both now and in the past, I have sought to identify and describe in these
pieces the qualities through which they could come to hold the same kind of
significance for others in their struggles for self-acceptance and self-
definition.
N
1. David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 112.
2. Wayne Kostenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
(New York: Poseidon, 1993), 190.
3. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff (New York: Pantheon, 1946),
140.
4. In a poignant and sensitive account that resonates with my own experience, Philip Brett hears in
Schubert’s music “a fluctuation, a vacillation, a carefully constructed undecidability…that
affects the identity of more than notes” (159). See his “Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and
Performance of Gay Male Desire,” 19th-Century Music, 21:2 (Autumn 1997): 149–176.
5. I use the term “citadel” deliberately here. In a Classical sonata in a minor key, the second
thematic area most often occurs either in the relative major (with the same key signature) or the
dominant minor key (whose key signature differs from that of the home key by only one sharp
or flat). The key signature of the major key of the dominant, however, differs from that of the
home key by four sharps, making it a remote key and hence a potential citadel—a safe haven—
in relation to what has come before.
6. For a detailed explication of these passages, see Charles Fisk, Returning Cycles: Contexts for
the Interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptus and Last Sonatas (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2001), chap. 4: “Retelling the ‘Unfinished.’”
7. Fisk, Returning Cycles, chap. 3: “The Wanderer’s Tracks.”
8. Joseph Kerman, “A Romantic Detail in Schubert’s Schwanengesang,” Musical Quarterly 48
(1962), 36–49.
9. Charles Fisk, “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold,” in Music and Meaning, ed. Jenefer
Robinson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 179–200.
10. With respect, in particular, to Chopin’s sometimes apparent androgyny and sylphlike character,
see Jeffrey Kallberg, “Small Fairy Voices: Sex, History, and Meaning in Chopin,” in Chopin
Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 50–
71.
11. George Sand, Correspondance, 25 vols, ed. George Lubin (Paris: Garnier, 1964–1991), vol. 4,
646.
12. For a brief but cogent discussion of Chopin’s apotheoses, see Edward T. Cone, Musical Form
and Musical Performance (New York: Norton, 1968), 84–86.
13. Carl Schachter, “Chopin’s Fantasy, Op. 49: The Two-Key Scheme,” in Chopin Studies, ed. Jim
Samson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 253.
14. Anthony Newcomb, “The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative,” in Chopin
Studies 2, 100.
15. I am thinking most specifically here of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy and Fantasy in C Major
for violin and piano, his Piano Trio in Eb Major, his String Quintet, and his last two piano
sonatas.
16. Jim Samson, The Music of Chopin (London: Routledge, 1985), 125.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Charles Fisk, “Chopin’s ‘Duets’—and Mine,” in 19th-Century Music XXXV (Spring 2012):
182–203.
20. Ibid, 201.
21. Ibid., 197–198, for a brief explanation of this relationship.
22. Peter Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1985), xii.
R
Brett, Philip. “Piano Four-Hands: Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire.” 19th-Century
Music XXI/2 (Autumn 1997): 149–176.
Cone, Edward T. Musical Form and Musical Performance. New York: Norton, 1968.
Cone, Edward T. The Composer’s Voice. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1982.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.”
In Queering the Pitch, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 67–84. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Fisk, Charles. “Chopin’s Duets—and Mine.” 19th-Century Music XXXV/3 (Spring 2012): 182–203.
Fisk, Charles. Returning Cycles: Contexts for the Interpretation of Schubert’s Impromptus and Last
Sonatas. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
Fisk, Charles. “What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold.” In Music and Meaning, edited by Jenefer
Robinson, 179–200. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Halperin, David. How to Be Gay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Kallberg, Jeffrey. “Small Fairy Voices: Sex, History, and Meaning in Chopin.” In Chopin at the
Boundaries, edited by John Rink and Jim Samson, 162–186. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
Kerman, Joseph. “A Romantic Detail in Schubert’s Schwanengesang.” Musical Quarterly 48 (1962):
36–49.
Kostenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New
York: Poseidon, 1993.
McClary, Susan. “Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music.” In Queering the Pitch, edited
by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 205–233. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Newcomb, Anthony. “The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative,” in Chopin Studies 2,
edited by John Rink and Jim Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Ostwald, Peter. Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1985.
Sand, George. Correspondance. 25 vols. Edited by George Lubin. Paris: Garnier, 1964–1991.
Schachter, Carl. “Chopin’s Fantasy, Op. 49: The Two-Key Scheme.” In Chopin Studies, edited by Jim
Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Schumann, Robert. On Music and Musicians. Edited by Konrad Wolff. New York: Pantheon, 1946.
Solomon, Maynard. “Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini.” 19th-Century Music XII/3
(Spring 1989): 193–206.
 CHAPTER 19

M U S I C A L AWA K E N I N G S : T H E
EXPERIENCES OF A QUEER
MUSIC THERAPIST IN THE
FA C E O F H I V A N D A I D S
 C OL I N A NDRE W L E E

L and working as a young gay music therapist though the pandemic of

HIV and AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a remarkable and
overwhelming experience. Reflecting now on the enormity of the situation
and on my professional role, I do not think I could have fully understood
beforehand the power that music would have in helping clients transcend
the realities of their illness. For me, as a gay therapist, this was a time of
bitterness but also enlightenment—a time that is indelibly etched in my
memory. I struggled in every session to balance my own insecurities,
alongside offering musical connections that would reflect a client’s needs
and the developing therapeutic relationship.
At this time AIDS was considered a palliative condition, that is, a
condition in which care can provide, at best, comfort, rather than cure.
Music became for many clients, however, not just a source of increased
comfort, but also a feast of creativity and expression when pain and loss
were everywhere around them. It was as if the experiences of a co-creative
musical dialog could help them face with greater clarity the uncertainty of
their future.
I reflected on my identification as a gay man and a music therapist, and
why it was important to be open about my sexuality in this work.1 My
response to HIV and AIDS and my decision to take a professional role
came in part because I was gay. When the AIDS crisis became a global
reality, it felt as if gay men had two choices: either to hide from what was
happening, or to become actively involved. I remember my first awareness
of the seriousness of the situation while watching the news about San
Francisco around 1982 from my home in England. San Francisco was
affected early in the epidemic, and even though it seemed a long way off I
knew in that moment that I would become involved. I had to try to find a
way to involve myself professionally and personally. I was able to fulfill
this vocation when in 1988 I was offered the PhD music therapy research
fellowship at City University, London. The focus of my project was
evaluating the effects of music therapy with clients living with HIV and
AIDS through qualitative and musicological methodologies.2 Though
HIV/AIDS can appear in any demographic group, almost all of my clients
were gay men.
My sexual orientation naturally became part of the therapeutic process.
Responses musically and therapeutically had to be understood in the
context of being gay and what this meant in terms of the developing
therapeutic relationship. For the first time in my career, I was faced with the
true meaning of transference and how my clients and I were inextricably
linked as members of a minority group. In the presence of clients, it seemed
as if I were standing in front of a mirror. Could this have negatively affected
my role as therapist, or even made it impossible for me to work effectively?
On reflection I believe my identification with clients was the exact reason
why I was able to offer a precise and emotionally valid musical-therapeutic
opening. As I thought about my new experiences as a gay man offering
palliative therapy to other gay men, I also wondered how my identity had
affected my work with my previous clients. Creating music therapy
relationships with clients who had profound physical and developmental
disabilities, I was already aware that I related to them differently from the
ways my heterosexual colleagues did. Having personally experienced
marginalization—often feeling like a second class citizen—I had direct
experiences of loss that allowed me to relate to the different losses of all my
clients, not only the gay men among them.
Music therapy is a predominantly white, female, heterosexual, cisgender,
and middle class profession. Thus, it has grown into a culturally safe
profession. There are very few therapists from visible or invisible minority
communities who have shared their life-experiences and related them to
their clinical work, or who have considered working with the LGTBQ
community.3 As a gay therapist I needed to address my personal
authenticity at every level of my work. I began to understand that through
uncertainty comes truth, and through vulnerability comes strength.
In the beginning, AIDS was perceived as a gay disease; indeed, this
conception determined the 1982 medical term GRID, “gay-related immune
deficiency.” Drug users, another group of undesirables affected by the
disease, were similarly publicized in a negative light. The only group
receiving any understanding were hemophiliacs, who were classed as the
“innocents.” Finger-pointing and accusations were the order of the day. It
was as if society needed scapegoats in order to understand the maelstrom of
this very public disease. At this time, the heterosexual community, who
blatantly waved their fingers in admonition, felt protected and safe. AIDS
became a death sentence for gay men, and, in the absence of knowledge of
the means of transmission, at first it seemed the only way to survive was
through celibacy.
Entering the world of HIV and AIDS felt like joining a community
swirling in a vortex of uncertainty. As a professional music therapist, I had
developed, through my previous practice, a way of working that gave me a
sense of confidence and knowing. In the new context of AIDS, however,
adapting these ideas meant entering an unfamiliar space where my previous
boundaries and clinical knowledge would have to be rebuilt. As a gay man,
I felt, perhaps foolishly, that I knew my identity and place in the world. I
was in a long-term relationship and was rather self-congratulatory about my
standing in the heterosexual community. But in the face of my ensuing
work, this feeling of secure knowledge became extremely unsure. As I took
my first tentative steps into merging the professional and personal sides of
my persona, I wondered how best I might contribute, in my capacity of
musician and therapist, to the rawness and reality of this new world of HIV
and AIDS that I had previously seen only through the media. I was petrified
yet elated at the thought of the beginnings I faced in entering the work.
Music is a volatile art. It can depict the uncertainties of living and dying,
as well as the exuberance and potential of life. We have only to look to the
Western composers who have used their compositional gifts to explore grief
and loss (for instance, Berg in his violin concerto in response to the death of
Manon Gropius), as well as those composers who have expressed the
affirmation of living (for instance, Beethoven in his Symphony No. 6 in F
major, Op. 68, “Pastoral”). Their artistic achievements are at the heart of
how music can explore that which is beyond rational thought and verbal
precision. Life and death, joy and sadness, tonality and atonality become
merged into expressions of musical and therapeutic euphoria that are at the
heart of the music therapy process.
 As a composer/music therapist, I traveled an often-circuitous route
through the maze of music, communication, and emotions that often found
themselves in the most unexpected yet inspirational places. My therapeutic
responses lay on two levels: that of words and conscious exploration of the
process, and that of music and its world of subliminal messages and
contexts. Both gave rise to questions that often could not be directly
answered through clinical assessment or supervision. I learned to accept
that place of not knowing as a positive yet vulnerable-making experience.
As a therapist, I was often in very difficult clinical scenarios, in which
music itself became my refuge and place of comfort. Clients would often
divulge, through music, parts of themselves they never knew existed. It
seemed that they would navigate planets and galaxies unknown to us both.
In trusting music, I was also able to trust the process and its impact on the
client’s inner emotional world. Through this ongoing evaluation and
balancing of musical form and clinical form, I began to create my own
unique theory of practice, entitled “Aesthetic Music Therapy” (AeMT).4
AeMT has been and continues to be directly affected by my work as a
music therapist in HIV and AIDS.
The condition of HIV/AIDS is now part of the fabric of society. Life
with HIV/AIDS and music share many things in common, not least the need
for immediacy of expression, the experience of being alive now, not in the
past or future, but in our living sense of nowness, with everything that
means for the eruptions of creativity that are available through music. Thus,
music and life with HIV/AIDS depict life and living, creativity, illness, and
loss.
As I worked with clients facing the end of their lives, improvisation
became a volatile yet precise means of expression. Music acted as a means
to explore that which was often beyond verbal exploration. Through the
examination of musical emotions, clients found themselves in a new place
of being, one that was no longer dependent on the restrictions of conscious
reality. Clients often described this feeling as being like “flying,” as will be
illustrated in the case vignette of Alfredo, later in this chapter. Playing
music was a time when they left the realities of their diagnosis and became
a part of a creative expression that was healthy and authentic. Music
therapy, however, was not only a form of escapism. It also helped address
the realities of living on a more concrete level and could directly address
problems such as pain and general physical deterioration.5
I held weekly sessions at London Lighthouse6 as part of my PhD
research at City University, London, from 1988 to 1991. I worked with
individuals and groups in the Ian McKellen Hall, as well as in sessions on
the residential unit with clients who were critically ill and/or dying. I
received professional supervision at the end of each day’s work. The music
therapy room included a grand piano and an extensive range of tuned and
untuned percussion instruments. The percussion instruments were selected
specifically so that anyone could play them. Sessions were open and
reflective of each client’s individual requirements. Most clients would elect
to play through the freedom of improvisation while some preferred to
explore through song. Improvised sessions would begin either in silence or
with a short verbal introduction contextualizing the client’s immediate
needs and the potential for music-making. I worked mainly from the piano
while clients would be free to explore the percussion instruments available.
They could remain with an individual instrument or move freely around the
room as the dialog developed. Clients were encouraged to use their voices
freely as well as play instruments. After opening introductions,
improvisations would start from silence. I would wait until the client began
to play. Listening carefully to the their opening musical explorations, it was
my responsibility as therapist to contextualize their playing and create
musical form that would reflect their emotional needs and potential for a
positive therapeutic process and outcome. Improvising a session was not
unlike creating a symphony with themes, counter-themes, development, and
recapitulation. At the end of the co-creative music making we would take
time, either in silence or verbally, to reflect on the client’s music and
psychologically return to the conscious world of words. All sessions, with
the permission of the client, were recorded. I would listen back to every
session and analyze the musical-therapeutic relationship. This work
informed the following sessions and provided clarity and focus for the
therapeutic direction of our work.
This chapter is one of memories: memories of clients, their process, and
expressions through music; memories of wonderment, pain, and innate
musicianship; and memories of musical expression and fortitude in the face
of suffering. The following case vignettes are not full clinical descriptions,
but rather short examples that highlight musical expression that was as
creative and free as music itself. They also describe and place in context my
responses to the demands on my role as therapist. I describe my
uncertainties, as well as concrete creative flights, in my interactions with
some of the most musically insightful people I have ever met.
 C : F R B

Charles came to music therapy with focus and energy. After a previous life
in full-time management and the trappings of an executive life, he found
himself unemployed, acutely ill, and with huge expanses of time. His HIV
diagnosis meant that he was free to explore his love of music and art.
Creating in the face of his illness became an obsession for Charles. It
consumed him and allowed him to fulfill his creative destiny. He attended
art and music therapy sessions at London Lighthouse with the unbridled
passion of a great artist. In music, he exhibited a raw energy that was
driving and colossal. In art, his paintings used huge blocks of dramatic
color that revealed a man with a huge indomitable spirit.
Charles entered the music therapy relationship with sincerity and trust.
Immediately after our work began I knew I would have to be insightful in
my verbal interpretations of his music. The improvisations we shared were
full of energy and pain. At the beginning of our work his emotionally
focused expressions made me feel vulnerable and insecure. With the
guidance of my professional supervisor, I explored how best to help his
extrovert, musically explosive spirit and place it within the duality of our
therapeutic relationship while retaining the safety of my role as therapist.
His improvisations were rhythmically driving. They moved forward
with a granite sense of determination that made them feel as if they had
always been in existence. We had simply caught them in the moment of co-
creative music making. These were more than free improvisations. They
were structured compositions, from their beginnings through to their
complex development and final conclusion. My role was to be imbedded
yet apart from Charles’s musical expressions—to be a therapeutic-musical
reflector.
Charles often spoke at length at the beginning of sessions. There was an
urgency to express verbally that which was burning within him, which then
naturally moved toward music-making, as if his verbal and musical roles
were to begin as separate entities that would eventually merge as the session
developed. His own words best describe the process:
 In the beginning, I did not know what to expect, or realize how music therapy could help
someone get better from their illnesses. After a few sessions, however, once the trust
between us had been established, I started to understand the importance of searching within
ourselves. Having the facility to express through music, without the constraints of technical
or learned ability, enabled me to express my feelings in a totally new way. Listening to tapes
from sessions gave me insight into the way I was feeling and the way I interacted with
people, depending on the environment I was exposed to during the week. This additional
facility has helped me to tackle any diseases and difficulties that come my way.7

Charles would often request audio copies of our sessions so that he could
utilize them and connect the feelings from sessions directly into his life
during the week.
Charles and I worked together for nearly two years. During that time, I
came to understand the balance between the musical affirmations of life and
the resolve needed to explore impermanence though co-creative music-
making. When I first met Charles, he seemed emotionally tired and
physically weak. The trauma of his HIV diagnosis was so painfully
apparent that it seemed to jump physically in front of him. Miraculously,
after he began art and music therapy everything changed. Charles’s physical
appearance went through a metamorphosis; he put on weight and his
complexion became clear. Over the initial months of sessions, his demeanor
became one of a man connected to the earth, alive, as if he had been reborn
—as if, through creative expression, a huge weight had been lifted from
him. Our sessions together were always electric. Whether through words or
music, the urgency he bought to our work left me breathless. I felt as if he
were running down the steep side of a valley, and I was running behind
trying to catch up and be alongside him. The exhilaration of his
improvisations and my memory of them are as palpable and vivid to me as
when they were first created.
After our sessions had ended, and a few days before he died, I visited
Charles in hospital, as he had specifically asked to see me. When I entered
into his room, his presence leaped toward me from his bed. Charles
beckoned me to sit near him. For the next thirty minutes, he described the
impact of our work on his life. The affirmation of music therapy for him
had been overwhelming, yet there was a sense that he was not thanking
himself, nor myself as therapist, but rather music itself for being such a
powerful intermediary expression of his life with AIDS. As our time
together ended, he told me that he was not scared of dying but rather that he
was excited that this, his next journey, would be one of continued discovery.
I left our meeting with the understanding that for Charles music had been a
powerful color in his life, not beige or white, but strong burning reds and
blues that enflamed him and gave voice to a creative and fearless spirit.
Before he died Charles gave me one of his paintings from his time in art
therapy. See Figure 19.1; an image of the painting also appears on the cover
of this book. The picture has remained in my life as a constant reminder of
our relationship and the power of creativity to transcend illness.

FIGURE 19.1 “Odyssey Three,” January 1990

 C : S L

Colin was a singer, born in Wales. Even though he had no sustained formal
training, his voice had a quality that immediately called for one’s attention.
He sang his living and dying with intense beauty and meaning. Singing for
Colin was like breathing: it was a natural progression from his inner world
to the outer reality of his illness. He used his voice to explore that which
was beyond conscious knowing, moving toward a manifestation of his life
and the difficulties he faced living with HIV and AIDS. For Colin, singing
was not only an artistic escape, but also a time to explore the realities of his
potential decline and death. Colin was one of the few clients I worked with
at Lighthouse who used songs as the core of their therapy.
In sessions, Colin sang Italian arias, songs from musicals, and traditional
Welsh ballads. We did not improvise. The quality of his voice left a marked
impression on me. There was an edge to the emotional quality of his voice
that always left one wondering about the unanswered parts of his life, a
sense that he was holding back from the real trauma that had brought him to
music therapy. As a therapist, I never verbally pressure a client to divulge
more than they are comfortable with. It was my hope that, given time,
Colin’s musical intensities might herald an opening through words. His
choice of songs and the intent with which he sang them were clear
indicators, to me as therapist, that this work was crucial to his life and
subsequent physical decline.
Colin had always wanted to sing and perform in public. At Lighthouse I
would arrange small concerts in the Ian McKellen Hall that would allow
clients, staff, and local musicians the space to perform and play music in a
supportive, informal environment. For many clients music therapy was
intensely private, but for some like Colin the chance to perform was
intensely therapeutic and personally gratifying. Learning music, a process
of growth, while facing death, a process of loss, is an extremely powerful
therapeutic force. Improvisations are of the moment and should never be
taken outside the therapeutic arena. Songs, however, are different, and can
be explored both in the immediacy of an individual session, but also as
potential performances in different community settings. This can be taken
to a level of sensitive performance that will enhance the therapy and
provide a forum for clients to express and share with others. There is in this
progression a sense of accomplishment that is a very powerful therapeutic
tool.
I remember vividly a concert in which Colin sang two Italian arias and
the song “I Dreamed a Dream,” from the musical Les Miserables. I
accompanied him on piano. The quality of his voice resounds in my
memory to this day. It was as if his songs cut through to the core of his
personal yearning, while the lyrics portrayed a bigger picture of a
community in crisis. There was a sharp quality in his voice, tinged with a
depiction of intense emotional longing. His singing spoke to a greater
audience, and I was left with an overwhelming feeling of smallness in my
role as music therapist.
Loss and singing are powerful allies. Both have the ability to portray a
rawness that is at the heart of music and health. My impressions of Colin
are of a human spirit caught in the urgency of his illness. There seemed so
little time to find his true path in the mayhem of his physical deterioration.
Through singing, however, he was able to find stillness. For a short time,
this musical stillness allowed him to move away from the realities of his
illness and find peace.
I remember Colin’s funeral. There was music, of course, and a recording
of him singing. His songs conveyed his life more clearly than anyone could
have expressed through words. At the end of the service, I gave his family
an edited recording of him singing in sessions and in concerts. This was
something Colin had requested, and its content had been discussed between
us before he died. They thanked me for giving them a musical legacy of his
singing and for my time with him in music therapy.
Colin was an intensely shy man, who did not express himself easily
through words. Through music, however, he was able to reflect on his life
with HIV and AIDS. Through singing, he shared a profound sense of the
fragile nature of humanity. I remember Colin with the utmost clarity and
respect. The quality of his voice is a constant reminder of the power of
songs to create a safe therapeutic space that is immediate and tangible. I
remember his smile after he had sung a phrase that was beautifully
measured and that had worked in the context of a song—how it connected
though my playing, as an accompaniment for him, and contributed to our
developing therapeutic relationship. Colin never fully shared why he came
to music therapy or the impact that therapeutic singing had for him. But I
knew that for him, singing was a time of passionate musical awakenings, a
time that allowed him to be healthy and whole.
 A : R M

It seemed as if Alfredo came to music therapy from nowhere. Our first

meeting came unexpectedly as I was re-arranging instruments between
sessions. Leaving to take a short break I noticed someone waiting outside
the room. Alfredo immediately introduced himself and asked if it would be
possible to arrange an individual music therapy session with me. My
schedule always kept a session open for new referrals and situations such as
this. I explained that I had some time now if he wanted to talk and that we
could then arrange a more formal session later that day if needed. He
agreed. Entering the room, he sat in one of the two chairs adjacent to the
piano and percussion instruments.
Alfredo explained that he had never learned to play instruments
formally, but knew he had an instinctual affinity to music. He was curious
to know if music might help him to explore and accept the recent trauma of
his HIV diagnosis. English was not his first language and he had difficulty
in expressing his true feelings to his friends. He hoped that music, as a non-
verbal medium, might afford him the opportunity to express the rawness
and confusion of his feelings. We arranged for a session later that afternoon.
His expectations of music therapy were not uncommon. With them,
however, came a weight in my role as therapist that never became easier
over our time together. Alfredo’s energy and positive anticipation made me
nervous, and I wondered if our initial music-making might be of value, or
perhaps a disappointment for him.
As he entered the music therapy room later that day, I saw a seriousness
that required no verbal introductions. Moving silently to the large pair of
congas, he began playing with both hands. I tried to match the energy of his
playing and create a musical form that could contain and reflect his intense
musical outpouring. The improvisation lasted approximately thirty
minutes.8 It was a colossal symphony with separate movements and themes
that were recapitulated and developed. It was as if his musical awakening
had always been within him and we were simply opening the door to allow
his intense feelings to become an aural reality. His opening rhythmic
patterns were extraordinary and his xylophone playing, later in the
improvisation, nothing less than miraculous. For someone who had never
played an instrument before, Alfredo’s sense of compositional form was
extraordinary. I experienced huge waves of electricity and exhilaration as
the session progressed.
I remember clearly the final passage of the improvisation. It felt as if the
closing theme had already been composed. In this music there was a deep
sense of longing. The theme was reminiscent of a Strauss tone poem or a
Mahler symphony. After the improvisation had ended we sank back into our
chairs breathing deeply. There was a long silence that neither of us dared
break.
Alfredo finally spoke, expressing that for him the music had felt like
“flying.” In the music, he had been transported from the realities of his
physical and emotional pain. Alfredo was the first of my clients to use the
metaphor of “flying” in music therapy. Future clients would use this same
metaphor as a description of the power of music to rise beyond their
grounded reality. To allow clients to “fly” musically is one of the greatest
gifts music therapists can offer clients in the face of illness and loss.
Alfredo and I had nine more sessions, each more extraordinary than the
last. After our final, tenth session he thanked me, left, and I never saw him
again. I remember Alfredo as a man who lived in music, a man with dignity
and remarkable compositional gifts.
 E : T B G

Eddie came to music therapy for three years.9 Our work together formed
one of the major parts of my doctoral research. He was one of the most
innately creative clients I had the privilege of working with. Though Eddie
was musically untrained he exhibited a level of musicality that was equal to,
if not greater than my own. The following description of an individual
session from the final year of our work together is a testament to the power
of music and provides the reader with the opportunity to hear a complete
improvisation from a session.
The day began as usual. I arrived early at London Lighthouse to arrange
the room and prepare myself emotionally for the sessions ahead. At the
front desk candles would be lit in honour of anyone who had recently died.
That morning, noticing there were three candles, I enquired as to the names.
One of the three was a member of staff who had died during the night and
who had worked until recently in Lighthouse’s restaurant. I knew this
person was a close friend of Eddie’s and felt sure he would not know about
the death until he came for our session later that morning.
The previous week we had discussed the possibility of Eddie bringing
his guitar to sessions and how we might improvise together on guitar and
piano. As a self-taught musician he had a great love for modern jazz. We
both had an affinity for Keith Jarrett as well as the freer jazz of such players
as Evan Parker. I remember waiting for Eddie to enter the room, feeling
nervous and unsure about how the session might proceed.
Eddie came into the room with a sense of great intent. He looked
directly at me for a moment and then averted his eyes. He sat down on a
chair near the piano and took the guitar out of its case. Without speaking he
nodded for me to help him begin tuning his guitar. I played an E on the
piano, which is the note of the guitar’s lowest string. After a few minutes he
finished and then sat in silence with his head bowed. The silence felt
unbearable. Eventually he raised his head and said simply “let’s play.”
His opening phrases felt full of reflective sadness. I stepped back from
my emotional responses in order to be effective in my role as therapist. I
responded with equally fluid phrases, allowing his music to speak without
copying or trying to mold his ideas. Our musical dialog was free from any
structured rhythms. We developed our ideas at a musical-emotional distance
from each other. Eventually I saw the opportunity to create a more cohesive
musical figure from which I hoped Eddie would be able to express more
melodically. I played repeated patterns to allow Eddie a more independent
musical voice. After a while our dialog returned to its separate identities.
Following another rhythmically constant section the improvisation became
more relationally complex. Later in the improvisation Eddie offered me the
opportunity to take the soloist’s role by providing a guitar accompaniment,
allowing me to improvise melodically. It is rare for the therapist to be
musically supported by the client but in that moment, it felt right and bore
testament to the depth of our musical relationship. Heading into the final
passages Eddie became rhythmically more determined and for the first time,
I felt, truly expressed his grief. In that moment I wondered if he would lose
control. The moment passed, however, and the improvisation ended quietly
and at peace.
As you listen to Audio Example 1, remember this music was created in
the moment. The aesthetic content of the improvisation and its therapeutic
intent are of equal importance. It is a complete improvisation, not an
excerpt, and is one of the finest examples from my work at Lighthouse. It
bears testament to the inherent qualities of music to express that which
often may seem inexpressible.
Audio Example 1. may be found at https://soundcloud.com/fred-everett-
maus/eddie-with-colin-lee-music-therapy.
 C

Working as a therapist with clients who are dying is a highly charged and
volatile experience. In order to be effective, the therapist must know and be
attuned to their own relationship with loss. As a gay music therapist
working with gay clients with HIV and AIDS, it was important for me to
understand that over-identification could potentially be detrimental to the
therapeutic relationship. Indeed, I would often ponder on my own status as
an HIV-negative gay man and how best to address my clients’ needs in an
open and supportive musical environment. Perhaps I could not fully
understand their position as I was not facing death in the same way. What I
could offer, however, was a non-verbal lens through which they could
musically explore their life and future living with the virus.
HIV/AIDS has changed considerably over the last twenty years. It is no
longer a death sentence and as such the need for intense therapy is less
critical. To some extent, the urgency of the work described in this chapter
does not now exist. These narratives come from a time when young people
were dying suddenly, at times from quite aggressive illness. There seemed
little time to grasp their diagnosis before symptoms of the virus appeared
and deterioration began. The mostly gay young men I worked with had only
a few years at best in which to grasp the urgency of their lives. It felt as if a
whole generation of gay men simply disappeared.
In creating Aesthetic Music Therapy, I intended to highlight the need for
musicological thinking to be equal to that of psychotherapy and medicine.
This seemingly simple yet controversial view of music therapy has
continued to elicit question and debate. AeMT advocates that the therapist’s
musical skills be equal to their clinical skills. I am a music therapist because
I strive to know and understand music as a composer and musician, and
because I strive to know and understand the therapeutic process-relationship
as it addresses the needs of my clients.
How can music depict and make sense of the trauma of loss within the
bounds of an illness that was stigmatized as socially unacceptable, and to
some extent still is? From my own experience, I learned that the nature of
music itself took on new meaning when working with expressions of
endings and death. Music became an agent that would allow clients to see
themselves in a new light, to be involved in creative expression that was
healthy when so much around them was illness and decline. For some, the
link between acknowledging loss, and experiencing the hope of music,
became fundamental to their growth in therapy.
Writing this chapter has been an illuminating process. Acknowledging
the role of my sexuality in the therapeutic process has subsequently led me
to reconsider my role in the music therapy relationship and process.
Therapists enter work not only as professionals but also as human beings,
with all our frailties and foibles. The trauma of living and dying with HIV
and AIDS is still laden with complex emotional and physical expectations
and realities. Through music it is possible to understand loss in a different
light, one that is also about hope and healing. As one of my clients
expressed:
It’s almost as if we each have a song to sing. If you sing your song, your life has meaning,
but if that song is either destroyed or not allowed to surface, then you are living very much a
second-hand life. It [music therapy] was very much the recovery of my song. I remember I
said, “I don’t know what to sing. What is my song? Where is my song? I can’t find it. Help
me find it”…I had seriously lacked the means of expression that was linked to my own
feeling and my own emotions—centred in my own creativity.10
N
1. Colin A. Lee, “Reflections on Being a Music Therapist and a Gay Man,” Voices: A World
Forum for Music Therapy 8, no. 3 (2008),
https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/415/339; Colin A. Lee, “Aesthetic Music
Therapy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy, edited by Jane Edwards (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016) 515–537; Colin A. Lee, Music at the Edge: The Music Therapy
Experiences of a Musician with AIDS, 2nd ed. (Routledge: London, 2016).
2. Colin A. Lee, The Analysis of Therapeutic Improvisatory Music with People Living with HIV
and AIDS, PhD diss., City University, London, 1992.
3. Kristen M. Chase, “Therapy with Gay and Lesbian Clients: Implications for Music Therapists,”
Music Therapy Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2004), 34–38; Lee, “Reflections”; Lee, “Aesthetic Music
Therapy”; Lee, Music at the Edge; M. Forinash, “On Identity,” 2009,
https://voices.no/community/?q=colforinash290609; Bill T. Ahessy, “Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual
Issues in Music Therapy Training and Education: The Love that Dares not Sing Its Name,”
Canadian Journal of Music Therapy 17, no. 1 (2001), 11–33; Elizabeth York, “Inclusion of
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Content into the Music Therapy Curriculum:
Resources for the Educator,” in International Perspectives in Music Therapy Education and
Training, edited by Karen D. Goodman (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 2015), 241–166.
4. AeMT considers music therapy from a musicological and compositional point of view. Looking
at theories of music to inform theories of therapy, it proposes a new way of exploring clinical
practice. See Colin A. Lee, The Architecture of Aesthetic Music Therapy (Gilsum, NH:
Barcelona, 2003), 1. See also Lee, “Aesthetic Music Therapy.”
5. John F. Mondanaro and Christine Vaskas, “Music Therapy and HIV/AIDS Related Pain,” in
Music and Medicine: Integrative Models in the Treatment of Pain, edited by John F. Mondanaro
and Gabriel A. Sara (New York: Satchnot Press, 2013), 373–402.
6. London Lighthouse was Britain’s first major residential and support centre for people living
with HIV and AIDS in the UK and was opened in 1988. The centre was committed to providing
the best possible care so that people affected by AIDS could live. (Lee, “Aesthetic Music
Therapy.”)
7. Colin A. Lee, “Music of the Spheres,” in Inside Music Therapy: Client Experiences, edited by
Julie Hibben (Gilsum, NH: Barcelona, 1999), 141–146.
8. A more musicological analysis of this session can be found in Lee, “Aesthetic Music Therapy,”
515–516.
9. The title of this case study was inspired by Michael Tippett’s (1905–1998) composition, The
Blue Guitar (1982–1983).
10. Lee, Music at the Edge, 148.
R
Ahessy, Bill T. “Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues in Music Therapy Training and Education: The
Love that Dares not Sing Its Name.” Canadian Journal of Music Therapy 17, no. 1 (2001): 11–33.
Chase, Kristen M. “Therapy with Gay and Lesbian Clients: Implications for Music Therapists.”
Music Therapy Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2004): 34–38.
Forinash, M. “On Identity,” 2009. https://voices.no/community/?q=colforinash290609.
Lee, Colin A. The Analysis of Therapeutic Improvisatory Music with People Living with HIV and
AIDS. PhD Diss., City University, London, 1992.
Lee, Colin A. “Music of the Spheres.” In Inside Music Therapy: Client Experiences, edited by Julie
Hibben, 141–146. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona, 1999.
Lee, Colin A. The Architecture of Aesthetic Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona, 2003.
Lee, Colin A. “Reflections on Being a Music Therapist and a Gay Man.” Voices: A World Forum for
Music Therapy 8, no. 3 (2008), https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/415/339.
Lee, Colin A. “Aesthetic Music Therapy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy, edited by Jane
Edwards, 515–537. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Lee, Colin A. Music at the Edge: The Music Therapy Experiences of a Musician with AIDS. 2nd ed.
Routledge: London, 2016.
Mondanaro, John F., and Christine Vaskas. “Music Therapy and HIV/AIDS Related Pain.” In Music
and Medicine: Integrative Models in the Treatment of Pain, edited by John F. Mondanaro and
Gabriel A. Sara, 373–402. New York: Satchnot Press, 2013.
York, Elizabeth. “Inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Content into the
Music Therapy Curriculum: Resources for the Educator.” In International Perspectives in Music
Therapy Education and Training, edited by Karen D. Goodman, 241–266. Springfield: Charles C.
Thomas, 2015.
 CHAPTER 20

TO WA R D A T R A N S * M E T H O D I N
MUSICOLOGY
 DANA B AI T Z

T objects that we attend to are enabled by things outside the scope of our
attention. Sara Ahmed recalls Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological
description of a writing desk and considers who is at the desk, what enables
the desk and the activity of writing, and the physical relationship between
the desk and writer.1 I wonder how Ahmed’s phenomenology of “the
woman at the writing desk” can help us reconsider what is seen and heard
in transgender musicality. What could a phenomenology of “the transsexual
woman at the piano” tell us about music, embodiment and experience?
 T T W P

I play piano primarily in my home. This activity aligns the femininity of

domestic space, keyboard instruments,2 and musicality in general.3 Such
“gender consonance” may lead the casual observer (in the
phenomenological natural attitude) to perceive an unremarkable musical
scene. Yet this seemingly conventional mapping of subjects, spaces, and
objects is offset by the male assignment that I received at birth. Even
though my male-to-female transition is relatively invisible in this musical
episode, the fact that my sexed history is distinct from that of cissexual
women brings new implications.
We are reminded that material objects and relations that seem familiar
and unremarkable are in fact far from inevitable. The elements that come
together in this scenario are not obvious or predictable. The production of
bodily structures is worth considering here. Similarly, the musical notes,
sounds, movements, and responses demand a critical and open attitude as to
their production, interrelationships, history, uses, and effects. By
“bracketing,” or suspending our customary ideas about how musical and
bodily structures emerge and signify, we are able to examine the actual
conditions that enable their materialization.
This musical episode accentuates the human production or “thrown-
togetherness” of materiality. My piano playing is not mine alone; it is a
collaboration among participants including music teachers, piano builders,
endocrinologists, and surgeons. Iris Marion Young offers a phenomenology
of girls’ throwing techniques.4 We may ask whether I “throw” notes like
other female pianists or more like men, given a musculature derived from a
masculine enculturation and XY chromosomes with years of estrogen
therapy. In the past, I often sang while I played; medical procedures have
made my singing less successful, again pointing to the historically specific
nature of this (strictly instrumental) episode. The fact that the physical
conditions of this scenario are chosen, not arbitrary, demonstrates our
investment in materiality. We see that the musical subject here sews
together material elements with determination and agency.
 This musical subject repeats some prior scripts while deviating from
others, illustrating the ambivalent relationship that we have to established
discourse. On one hand, this subject departs from (or “queers”) idealized
sexual acts and expressions by having changed sex. Yet in each moment
that the subject persists and remains intelligible, new scripts are being
established and circulated. This subject requires the coherent citation and
repetition of some practices, while also destabilizing other practices.
Belonging and legibility, far from being dismantled, are inscribed deeply
into the body and the music. Yet, inevitably, it is done newly and
distinctively. Observers of this episode would certainly see and hear a
balance between acts that are receding and new ones that are coalescing.
This defines transsexual and, more generally, trans* subjects. Yet turning
away, the observer would perceive this intertwining elsewhere as well.
E P E
B

Cross-gender identification can be realized in many ways. For instance, a

person can change their social presentation or can change enduring physical
properties of their body. These two ways are extreme points in a complex
continuum; in this chapter, it will be helpful to focus on the contrast
between these two forms of gender signification.
Social presentation of gender and sexuality, associated with queerness,
involves aural, visual, and performative signifiers such as clothing, speech,
and body language. Transsexual identification centrally involves lasting
physical change. Enduring physical change less often figures in queer or
lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) identifications. The queer and transsexual
endpoints of the continuum reflect very different expressive strategies and
epistemologies, different ways of inhabiting, experiencing, and
understanding the world.
These two modes of expression and the epistemologies that they admit
are not equally widespread. Those particular to queer sexual expression are
naturally more prevalent than those specific to transsexual expression and
experience. Since the “ways of knowing” that emphasize material and
embodied experience are so central to transsexuality, I will focus on those
in this chapter.
The term “transsexual” marks one part of the much broader “trans*”
spectrum. The prefix trans- is followed by an asterisk in order to emphasize
the wide range of identities designated by the term. Although trans* is
effectively an all-encompassing shorthand for the full range of transgender,
transsexual, and related cross-gender identifications, the asterisk attempts to
draw attention to this diversity and resist any potential to find sameness
among these various identifications. In focusing especially on transsexual
approaches, I give a partial account of the broader range of trans*
phenomena and trans* methods. In the final sections of the chapter, I note
that eventually, a satisfying methodology must bring together many
different trans* and queer experiences.
A quick survey of some trans* musicians illustrates the diversity of their
work and the range of methods required to study their music. Rae Spoon
and Ryan Cassata are both folk-based singer-songwriters and trans-
masculine people. While Cassata’s punk and activist leanings help fuel
compelling invectives against cisssexualism and homophobia, Spoon’s
quieter and more eclectic tastes lead them to broach trans* topics more
indirectly and intermittently.5 New Orleans bounce artists Big Freedia and
Katey Red create loud, festive complements to Cassata’s activism. With
gender-fluid identifications that resist clear categorization, they call out
explicit sexual refrains over energetic dance grooves. The acclaim that
Jennifer Leitham receives for her rhythmically punctuated and traditionally
styled jazz bass playing is increasingly offset by the interest that she also
receives in her status as a transsexual woman.6 Both Foxxjazell and Mykki
Blanco employ hip-hop sounds and visuals while they cross over (or cross
out) gender boundaries. Foxxjazell’s “Boy, Girl, Whateva” (2010) is a
celebratory and danceable counterbalance to Blanco’s murky and tormented
“Join My Militia” (2012). In a reflective essay, classical singer Alexandros
Constansis (2008) provides a detailed account of how his voice changed
over the course of his transition from female to male and offers techniques
that other transsexual men may use to preserve their singing voices
throughout their transitions. Terre Thaemlitz’s electronic work contrasts
with Anohni’s chamber pop music, yet both describe male-to-female
transgender identifications and exhibit deep commitments to formal
innovation in their respective styles.
Numerous configurations of aesthetic practices, gender identities, and
sexual embodiments can be seen among these musicians. Many can be
examined effectively using established concepts and methods within critical
musicology; that is, with approaches that could be considered queer rather
than transsexual. For instance, Cassata’s YouTube performance of Michael
Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” exemplifies Judith Halberstam’s description
of the “non-tribute cover,” as the original is imbued with new connotations
of sex change and trans-masculine identification. While the song’s lyrics are
unchanged, Cassata’s out transgender protagonist, asserting himself in a
straightforward documentary style, conveys a new masculinity. Foxxjazell
epitomizes the sexually liberating capacities of queerness in “Boy, Girl,
Whateva.” Over a decisive dance beat, the singer raps: “I’m the type of man
who handles his business/I’m the type of girl you wonder ‘who is this?’…/
Take me as a boy, a girl, whateva.” Big Freedia’s New Orleans bounce
music (a subgenre of hip-hop) is rowdy and playful. The physicality of
Freedia’s music is strong (with shouted vocals, sexual themes, and a dance
emphasis), but carries no straightforward relationship to gender. By using
both masculine and feminine pronouns and by presenting herself
androgynously, Freedia refuses gender binaries and biological determinism.
He (she) has identified as a gay man while using a feminine name and
“coming out” with a debut album entitled Queen Diva. These “disjointed”
or “compound” subjects exemplify the antiessentialism Philip Brett and
others describe in the introduction to Queering the Pitch, the gender fluidity
that Lawrence Kramer detects in Schumann’s Carnaval, and the subversive
pleasure that Stan Hawkins finds in Prince.7 All of these queer musical
subjects attain freedom from material constraints. That is, an emphasis on
the “immaterial” sphere of gender performance allows the subject to
transcend limitations related to bodily sex. Cassata and Foxxjazell express
their sexual identifications primarily through aural, visual, and performative
signifiers. These take precedence over and contrast with their secondary sex
characteristics, such as voice and bone structure. Sexual morphology no
longer determines or reflects sexual identity.
In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble captivatingly articulated this
model of sexuality. Around the same time, musicologists developed ideas of
queerness and constructivism in general; they emphasized a surpassing or
transgression of structural limitations by assigning meaning primarily to
“ephemeral” fields, including the discursive, rhetorical, ethereal, social, and
cognitive. In such an interpretive practice, performative utterances and
musical reception gain significance, allowing queer iterations to arise and
depart from historically given and structurally determined configurations.
The undoing of a heterosexual matrix, and stable signifiers more broadly, is
evident in many of the transgender musicians listed in this discussion;
Mykki Blanco, Big Freedia, and Ryan Cassata all circulate gender
presentations and musical texts that fall outside of normative classifications.
These queer and transgender artists seem alluringly bold and rebellious
because of their immediately perceptible transgressiveness. Their gender
identities transcend bodily constraints, and their music likewise derives
meaning from discursive rather than structural features. Similarly, in a
nontransgender context, Mitchell Morris describes the meaning of “It’s
Raining Men” as determined not by its technical features, but by dance club
social dynamics; such transcendence of material musical features is a
classic, and powerful, expression of queer liberation. Such emancipation
from material constraints seamlessly accommodates and supports
transgender figures. Thus, the musicology of queerness has not prevented
transgender subjects from being cited and, in a particular way, interpreted.
However, not all trans* musicians make ideal subjects for queer
musicology. Such lack of fit with queer interpretive methods shows the
need for a specifically trans* musicology. A project that emphasizes the
perceptible disruption of normative sexualities, or more generally the
perceptible subversion of identity, will not find much of interest in the
relatively plain sights and sounds of Jennifer Leitham’s bass trio. Her
virtuosic, left-handed playing technique and keen rhythmic sense may be
the most immediately notable aspects of this “straight-ahead” approach to
jazz.
Rae Spoon’s most popular song and video to date, “Come On Forest Fire
Burn the Disco Down,” meditates on ancestry and European-American
indifference to a colonial past.8 There is no discernible comment on
Spoon’s being transgender or on any form of queerness. Formal elements
(chords, notes, instrumentation, lyrics, etc.) appear to be emphasized
instead, as reviewers have noted.9 The physical challenges that Constansis
experienced as his laryngeal structure changed have little connection to the
social performance of gender and the psychic constitution of sex.
On the other hand, formal analysis immediately picks up interesting
features in these artists’ work. Leitham’s rhythmic accuracy is particularly
impressive in her 2006 recording of “Turkish Bizarre.” Her bass solo
abandons its quick 7/8 ostinato and gradually stretches the limits of both the
B tonality and the 8-bar phrases that pervade most of the song. Long after
phrase symmetry and bar-counts appear to be lost entirely, the bass returns
to the opening ostinato on precisely the 64th bar of the solo. Reviews of
Spoon’s “Forest Fire” make frequent mention of the depth of songwriting
that it shows, its folky simplicity, and its timbral features. I wonder if the
song is popular not because it manifests queer or transgender themes, but
because its tacit acknowledgement of masculinity allows Spoon to focus on
the song’s underlying musical and lyrical features.
The information that Constansis provides on the evolving structure of
the larynx contributes important knowledge to the “physical” fields of
biology, medicine, and vocal performance. Not only is gender fluidity or
transgression difficult to find in the work of many trans* musicians, their
gender identities may actually appear to affirm sexual norms, presenting as
an alignment among sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Their trans-ness
may seem complicit with the same heteronormative forces that queer
advocates commonly challenge.10
The music of these trans* artists frequently foregrounds its formal
elements—notes and sounds. The material orientation of music by
transgender artists is not easy to integrate with most queer theory and queer
musicology. The same trans* musicians often emphasize formal elements
sexually as well, requiring that their own bodily sex be meaningful and
cohesive. These concerns with musical and bodily materiality are related,
and attention to these relationships is one path forward for trans*
musicology.
As queer musicology drew on models from queer theory across
disciplines, so my argument will benefit from some of the accounts and
arguments that transsexual theorists provide. There are many ways of
understanding the distinctions between transsexuality and queerness, and
many of these have implications for musicologists. This chapter introduces
the most salient and fertile of these distinctions: transsexual theory’s focus
on materiality. Transsexual writers often insist on the central role that the
body’s morphology plays in their lives, both psychically and socially.
Rather than transcending bodily sex (by highlighting psychic affiliations
and discursive fields), transsexuality is associated with investing in the
body. Sexual signifiers that cannot be psychically incorporated are not
subverted or recoded—they are physically changed.
Jay Prosser describes the physical process of changing sex as a journey
from the inability to own or recognize one’s body to full proprioception.
That is, the individual may exhibit bodily features that they cannot fully
identify with (agnosia) and perceive others that are not physically present
(phantomization). Through physical alterations, the individual gains a body
that they know and recognize as their own. Prosser explains this transsexual
impulse to align the body with its mental map by acknowledging the central
role that our bodies play in shaping our experience and subjectivity:
“Subjectivity is…a matter of psychic investment of self in skin.”11 Drawing
on Didier Anzieu’s description of the “skin ego,” he shows that a coherent
ego is attainable only through bodily wholeness.12 Placing the body at the
seat of cognition departs in a fundamental way from widespread
psychoanalytic accounts that explain the body as a psychic projection or
other discursive formulation. Julia Serano’s understanding of bodily sex
closely resembles Prosser’s. For her, the fact that physical sex change is
unthinkable for most people is strong evidence of the basic role that bodily
sex plays in determining our experience and cognitive well-being.
Otherwise, she writes,
[a]ctors playing transsexuals would go on hormones for a few months in order to make their
portrayals more authentic…And contestants on reality shows would be willing to change
their sex in the hope of achieving fifteen minutes of fame. Of course, such scenarios seem
absolutely ridiculous to us. They are unfathomable because, on a profound, subconscious
level, we all understand that our physical sex is far more than a superficial shell we
inhabit.13

Serano and Prosser present an ontology of the subject that includes, and
even foregrounds, the material body. Materiality is a meaningful part of
who we are. It contributes to how we are known to ourselves and to others.
Transsexual lives are easily misrepresented unless material conditions
and subjective experiences are understood as valid sources of knowledge.
Viviane Namaste shows that empirical observation helps prevent the
habitual erasure of transsexual lives. For instance, she points to an
assessment of violence directed toward sexual minorities produced by the
Montreal police in the mid-1990s.14 The assessment implicitly emphasized
commonalities among LGBT people and specifically failed to take into
account the unique social practices and geographic distribution of
transsexual women. This lack of attention to lived experience and material
conditions resulted in a miscalculation of homophobic violence and a
complete overlooking of transphobic violence.
Henry Rubin incorporates transsexual perspectives into his work by
employing phenomenological methods. The trans* men that he interviews
generally reject the queer and universalizing trope of “a world without
gender identity,” instead highlighting the experience of being quite
definitively gendered. Transsexual men often experience their identities as
fundamentally distinct from lesbians, despite the fact that these two
identities shared the category of “sexual invert” until the mid-twentieth
century. Thus, genealogical models of queerness can produce descriptions
of transsexuality that are at odds with actual transsexual experience.
Rubin’s phenomenological method recognizes lived experience as an
important source of knowledge, a valuable complement to objectivist and
discursively focused research.15
Transsexual theorists point us toward the material in multiple ways.
Prosser and Serano show that bodily structures are meaningful and
experientially “real”: they affect psychic integrity and determine how we
understand ourselves and each other. Namaste and Rubin draw attention to
how our bodies and identities emerge through time, and they find ways to
account for these structures and experiences in their research. Describing
these multiple projects as a reorientation toward materiality is a shorthand,
but as we will see, the term opens up important perspectives on our
methodologies in music studies. This investment in material structures
distinguishes transsexual from queer studies and shows how the queer
methodologies that account for Cassata, Freedia, and Blanco cannot account
for trans* music more broadly.
 M S M

We can learn from transsexual scholarship by relating the materials of

music to the materials of sex. Trans* musicians who depart from queer
ontologies often direct our attention toward their textual and material
practices. We saw that Constansis’s primary interest lies in his anatomical
and rehabilitative work pertaining to singers with a specific morphology.
Similarly, Leitham’s “Turkish Bizarre” and Spoon’s “Forest Fire” are
regularly appreciated for their compositional and performance merits. The
same is certainly true of numerous transsexual musicians who are not open
about their transitions.
It would be appropriate, then, for research on these musicians to reflect
their textual and material focus. For instance, we may examine the
economic pressures and constraints uniquely faced by transsexual artists.
Researchers may attend to the artistic implications of balancing high
transition-related expenses against musical expenses, and to the ways that
economic incentives to produce music without prominent “trans” themes
affect artistic output. Musicologists might investigate the material
conditions affecting the emergence of this music, such as the role played by
uniquely transsexual bodily experiences (Leitham describes having to exert
herself more to play the parts that she learned before transitioning). These
inquiries certainly attend to the intersection of music, sex, and gender
identity (in terms of experience, structure, and embodiment) but are not
primarily focused on the discursive negotiation of gender roles (a frequently
unremarkable aspect of transsexual musicians, as we have seen).
Clearly, this material orientation requires a literal understanding of
sexual minorities: sexual identity here is a definite and discernible quality
that uniquely marks these individuals.16 This is consistent with some
previous examinations of LGBT musicians, and differs from figurative or
metaphorical interpretations of queer and trans* tropes in music.17
Transsexual theorists are far from alone in their recent reorientation
toward materiality. “New materialist” scholars show that a reappraisal of
“the real” is overdetermined, with multiple fields of study (particularly the
natural sciences) increasingly attending to the emergence and impact of
material conditions.18 While many different explanations of “the real” are
generated by this diverse field, most agree that the significance of our
material texts has been underestimated and undertheorized. Like transsexual
scholars, new materialists return their attention to the corporeal and tangible
dimensions of their subjects. For example, Rosi Braidotti grounds her
material feminist examination of “life itself” in the morphological and
fleshy “zōē” (or zoological) and not predominantly in the discursive “bio”
(or biological):
Zoē, this obscenity, this life in me, is intrinsic to my being and yet so much “itself” that it is
independent of the will, the demands and expectations of the sovereign consciousness.19

Karen Barad presents a comparable account of the perpetual intertwining of

matter and discourse; for her, “they have not grown up separately from one
another.”20 This understanding requires a reinstatement (and refinement) of
causality and realism. Like transsexual theorists, new materialists do not
generally accept materiality as a given, but instead examine how matter
emerges (i.e., “materialization”) and gains significance for us.21 These
projects bring attention to how material elements become meaningful and
how we might examine them.
Queer sexual subversion can be addressed without losing sight of how
parent cultures continue to inform and ground queer subjects. Musical
reception can be described without downplaying the influence of notes and
sounds. Here, the performative does not eject or disparage the constative.
Gender fluidity can be celebrated without obscuring our deep reliance on
cohesive and coherent bodily sex.
 M F T

Recognizing the roles of material structures in music and sexuality is not a

full and sufficient solution to the inaccessibility of trans* identities in
musicology. While transsexuality certainly calls for access to
nonconstructivist and promaterialist methods, more fluid and contingent
gender and sexual orientations do not. As we saw, these queer and
transgender affiliations are built on the overcoming of materiality and the
foregrounding of discursive signifiers. New materialists Diana Coole and
Samantha Frost propose a “multimodal methodology” that would capture
activities on multiple socioeconomic levels simultaneously.22 It seems
possible to widen the scope of their methodology to account for the activity
of a purely nonmaterial and ephemeral nature as well.
This kind of integrated approach to the study of sexuality was
anticipated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She pushes back against a strict
constructivist approach by emphasizing the unique knowledge generated by
empirical and quasi-essentialist inquiry.23 Her aim is to affirm the strengths
and limitations of both research orientations, and end the impasse between
them. As we saw, Rubin attempts to do precisely this through his
innovations in phenomenology. Julia Kristeva proposed a similar
“ambivalent” or “articulated” model of linguistic meaning, which suggests
a way that complementary expressive modes in music can be brought
together.24 In order to develop a musicology that accommodates this wide
range of trans* identities, a very supple or broad methodology is required.
While the ways that an artist conveys their sex and their musical
expression may be correlated, we should not expect that correlation to be
consistent. Leitham and Constansis emphasize formal elements in their
music and in their trans-sexed identities. Conversely, a “queering” of
origins is apparent in Cassata’s music and sexuality: his cover performance
alters the meaning of the original text, just as he transcends his high
“female” voice by presenting as a man. His singing in the “Man in the
Mirror” video, posted under the username “xQUEERKIDx,” is praised
specifically for this quality (from a top-rated comment, posted by user
“psychandsoc,” for this YouTube video):
Ryan, your voice sounds awesome just the way it is.…don’t listen to the people who say it
would sound “good” or “better” on T.…how the fudge are they supposed to know? lol.…
you are amazing man! :)25

These examples may appear to establish a pattern wherein a gender identity

that emphasizes material elements is correlated with music that does so as
well. Yet this correlation is somewhat flexible. Sexuality and musical
practices are related yet separate. For instance, electronic art musician Terre
Thaemlitz is quite outspoken about her queer and gender-fluid identity. This
points to an emphasis on sexual signifiers that are ephemeral and
discursive, rather than those that are morphological and fixed. Her music,
however, relies heavily on material features—internal references and
musical syntax—for its appeal. A similar pairing of gender fluidity and
formal musical interest is presented by singer-songwriter Anohni.
Conversely, Namaste describes important early MTF transsexual
contributions to punk, a genre that operates on a highly social and
subcultural level.26 We must recognize, then, that the fundamentally
arbitrary relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality extends to other
forms of expression, including music. This elasticity requires us to be
nuanced in how and where we perceive “queerness,” and also to
acknowledge the actual and uneven texture of how various musics and
artists relate to queerness.
Thaemlitz and Namaste’s MTF punk rockers serve as a reminder that as
we attend to queering practices in music, we must consider the contrasting
bodily and “normative” affiliations of music participants. We’ve seen that
transsexual participants in music scenes have been regularly erased due to
an overzealous methodological commitment to discursive and
postmaterialist analyses. Acknowledging that queer artists regularly
produce music that is highly formal in its orientation (and vice versa)
reminds us to maintain an ambiguity in our research (to “drive both ways”)
—an important step toward better integrating transsexual voices into our
work.27
 Further, the contrast between queer and transsexual modes of expression
could imply that queer cultural production is somehow conceptual rather
than visceral. But this is far from the truth. For instance, much has been
written about the close ties between gay men and sexualized dance music
scenes. Diane Railton describes the visceral, and often gender-transgressive,
nature of dancing (on stage) to pop music:
[D]ancers…cannot maintain a stationary position. They perspire. Their bodies become
sweaty. They become breathless. The performance is defined by its physicality.28

This description could easily apply to many trans* musicians. Cassata

typically sings with extreme passion, intensified in some videos by being
topless. Big Freedia’s bounce music is sexually charged. Clearly, her music
is experienced strongly and corporeally, as is reflected in the lyrics to “Azz
Everywhere” and “Make Ya Booty Go,” and in the signature hypersexual
dances (including twerking) performed to the music.
In these examples, the fact that the music is experienced quite carnally
has no relation to the way that gender identity is signified (or to the way
that musical meaning is constituted). While Big Freedia’s femininity is
unmistakable, it is not signified primarily through body morphology, but
more through the cultural coding and rhetoric of pronouns, makeup, and
clothing. She mobilizes discursive fields of meaning more than material
ones. Similarly, the gender-transgressiveness of Railton’s (sweaty and
breathless) dancers is localized in the attire and dance moves that they
adopt, not in their bodily features. Halberstam makes this queer
transcendence of materiality very clear in his discussion of the disco
sensation Sylvester:
[H]is falsetto also cuts him loose from his anatomy and takes him into a sorority of female
singers. Sylvester’s falsetto connects him to Black female divas, to the queen’s throat, but it
also highlights what Joon Lee calls “the joys of castration.”29

Clearly, the visceral response (or lack thereof) that music can elicit has no
bearing on how sexual identity is produced, the kinds of identities
facilitated by the music, or the methodologies best suited to investigating it.
By separating the music’s visceral qualities from the ways in which
sexuality is signified, we are able to achieve clarity about the music’s
deeper cultural affiliations and the research methods that it suggests.
 F D

This work is preliminary, since it establishes a methodological foundation

that makes trans* subjects more accessible to musicologists. First and
foremost, it focuses our attention on how the identities of trans* musicians
are composed and how music may (and may not) reflect these identities. We
see some of the factors that have made certain trans* identities available to
us within a queer framework and made other trans* identities invisible.
More important, though, we see that constructivist and poststructuralist
epistemologies and methodologies account for only a part of our experience
and musical expression.
Trans* subjects help illustrate the coemergence of materials (such as
notes and sounds, personal narratives, conditions of production, and bodily
states) and their discursive processes and relationships (including our
reception of the music, the social components of sex, and the cognitive
determination of bodily and musical structures). Investing heavily in both of
these concepts is inevitable; this dual investment unites musicians as
dissimilar as Jennifer Leitham and Ryan Cassata. Their music and
sexualities mediate or articulate them, inevitably emphasizing one or the
other. A trans* musicology maintains an awareness of this dualism.
New inquiries into trans-musical lives are made possible by this
conceptual groundwork. For example, Mykki Blanco’s music may be most
salient in how it departs from and denaturalizes sexual norms (i.e., its
dystopian representation of transgender), but we may also explore the
conditions of its emergence and the structures that give it meaning. We may
examine how the rhythms in “Join My Militia” are historically contiguous
with previous funk grooves, the economics and labor relations that shaped
the song’s production, and the significance of male embodiment and
normative parent cultures in the singer’s persona and repertoire. A
multimodal approach recognizes the intertwining of stable and unstable
signifiers in Blanco’s work.
Jennifer Leitham’s “Turkish Bizarre” is notable primarily as a
prodigious jazz tune. Yet clearly this formal interest is complemented by
destabilizing and contingent elements in her work. Her transition prompts
us to question the ways that other bodies materialize, take shape, and come
into our awareness. Her status as a female jazz bass player destabilizes a
common understanding of jazz and gender roles; it points to the culturally
and historically situatedness of other forms of knowledge and the stakes
involved in upholding or contradicting this knowledge.
Thus, through trans* musicology, we begin to reinstate a personal
narrative (and the conditions producing it) as a source of knowledge.
Transsexual scholars show that these personal accounts are unique and
valuable; they use phenomenological methods to integrate this
counterknowledge with the perspectives that constructivist and genealogical
methods offer. The diversity of trans* experience and scholarship requires
us to situate meaning at the intersection of material and ephemeral fields of
significance. Not only do transgender studies emphasize the need for an
integration of disparate spheres of meaning, but they offer new and useful
strategies for accomplishing this. This integrated trans-based approach can
only be beneficial to queer, cissexual, and other musical subjects.
N
1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Sara Ahmed,
“Orientations Matter,” in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 234–257
(London: Duke University Press, 2010).
2. Mavis Bayton, “Women and the Electric Guitar,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and
Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, 37–49 (London: Routledge, 1997).
3. Philip Brett, “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” in Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett,
Elizabeth Wood and Gary Thomas, 235–256 (New York: Routledge, 1994).
4. Iris Marion Young. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment
Motility and Spatiality,” Human Studies 3, no. 1 (December 1980): 137–156.
5. Cassata’s music is widely available through his YouTube channel:
www.youtube.com/user/xQUEERKIDx. Spoon uses the pronouns “they” and “them” rather than
specific masculine or feminine ones. (Spoon “Biography”; Leslie Scrivener, “The Realm
Between ‘He’ and ‘She’,” The Star, April 7, 2013.
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/04/27/the_realm:between_he_and_she.html.)
6. Meyerson, Andrea, director. I Stand Corrected: The True Story of Upright Bass Player Jennifer
Leitham and her Transition That Rocked the Jazz World. StandOut Productions, 2011.
7. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch (New York:
Routledge, 1994); Lawrence Kramer, “Rethinking Schumann’s Carnaval: Identity, Meaning,
and the Social Order,” in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History, 100–132 (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Stan Hawkins, “Subversive Musical
Pleasures in the ‘The Artist (Again) Known as Prince’,” in Settling the Pop Score, 159–200
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2002).
8. “Popularity” is measured here by the number of views on Spoon’s YouTube channel and number
of plays on their CBC Music page.
9. Ash, Amanda. “Rae Spoon: SuperiorYouAreInferior.” Exclaim!
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/rae_spoon-superioryouareinferior.
10. Critiques of transsexuals for complying with a repressive gender system have been rebuffed by
numerous transsexual theorists, notably Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on
Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007, 345–362; Julia
Serano, “Rethinking Sexism: How Trans Women Challenge Feminism,” AlterNet.org, August 4
2008.
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/93826/rethinking_sexism:_how_trans_women_chall
enge_feminism; Sandy Stone, “The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in
Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein
(New York: Routledge, 1991).
11. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), 73.
12. Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1989).
13. Serano, Whipping Girl, 88.
14. Viviane Namaste, Invisible Lives: the Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 149–154.
15. Henry Rubin, “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and
Gay Studies 4(2) (1998), 267; Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among
Transsexual Men (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 30.
16. This account of transsexuality is consistent with Sedgwick’s “minoritizing” model of sexuality;
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990. The implications of this are quite far-reaching, but are outside the scope
of this chapter.
17. Brett (1994); Gillian Rodger, “‘He Isn’t a Marrying Man’: Gender and Sexuality in the
Repertoire of Male Impersonators, 1870–1930,” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern
Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, 105–133 (Urbana: Board of Trustees of the
University of Illinois, 2002); Stephen Amico, “Su Casa es Mi Casa: Latin House, Sexuality,
Place,” in Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, 131–154
(New York: Routledge, 2006).
18. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms,
ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–46 (London: Duke University Press, 2010).
19. Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New Materialisms, ed.
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (London: Duke University Press, 2010), 208.
20. Karen Barad, “‘Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns, and Remembers’: Interview
with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews, and Cartographies, ed. Rick Dolphijn and
Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 51.
21. Prosser, Second Skins, 30–32; Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms”; Gayle
Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010).
22. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 32.
23. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 40.
24. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984).
25. This comment pertained to Cassata’s 2012 YouTube video of “Man in the Mirror.” That video,
along with the comments on it, has since been removed from YouTube. A newer video of the
same song, generating new comments, was uploaded to YouTube in 2015.
26. Namaste, Invisible Lives, 73–92.
27. ambiguous, a. <. L. ambigu-us (f. ambig-ěre, f. amb- both ways + ag-ěre to drive) + -OUS.
28. Diane Railton, “The Gendered Carnival of Pop,” Popular Music 20(3) (October 2001), 327–
328.
29. Judith Halberstam, “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy,” Women & Music 11 (2007), 55.
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edited by Sheila Whiteley, 37–49. London: Routledge, 1997.
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by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 201–220. London: Duke University Press, 2010.
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Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, vii–ix. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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(2008).
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Halberstam, Judith. “Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy,” Women & Music 11 (2007): 51–58.
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Phænomenologie und phænomenologischen Philosophie (Halle, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
1913).
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University Press, 1984. Originally published as La révolution du language poétique (Editions de
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Leitham and Her Transition That Rocked the Jazz World. StandOut Productions, 2011.
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 CHAPTER 21

QUARE TIMES: AN
I N T R O D U C T I O N TO A Q U E E R
PERSPECTIVE ON
AFROFUTURISM AND A
R E A D I N G O F S U N R A’ S S PA C E I S
THE PLACE
 T I M S T ÜT T GE N

T chapter follows two queer-of-color propositions and combines them

into a perspective addressing queer notions of post-slavery. The first is E.
Patrick Johnson’s term “quAre,” which not only puts the “A” of the “Black”
in the middle of “queer,” but also addresses its sonic quality. In his
wonderful essay “Quare studies, or (almost) everything I know about Queer
I learned from my grandmother,” Johnson remembers how his grandmother
would, in her “thick, Black, Southern dialect” pronounce the word “queer”
as “quare.”1 This sonic disruption subverts the sound and meaning of the
now canonical term “queer” and relates it to the Southern Black narrative of
post-slavery. Johnson also underlines that his grandmother meant by
“quare” characteristics associated with the term “queer”: “On the one hand,
my grandmother uses ‘quare’ to denote something or someone who is odd,
irregular, or slightly off kilter,”2 while on the other hand it functions as an
echo of the past and sounds slang stemming from Black vernacular cultures.
Therefore “quare” might function as a subtle but productive intervention
into the (white) term “queer.” Even if not intentionally racist, the unmarked
whiteness of “queer” and its origins in white discourses have provoked
many discussions in queer of color contexts:
There are gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgendered people of color who embrace “queer.” In
my experience, however, those who embrace the term represent a small minority. At the
“Black Queer Studies at the Millenium” conference,…for example, many of the conference
attendees were disturbed by the organizers’ choice of “queer” for the title of a conference on
Black sexuality. So ardent was their disapproval that it became a subject of debate during
one of the panels.3

A quare perspective not only addresses “Black homosexuals” but also

argues, beyond identity politics and the hetero-homo-dualism, for a
quareness addressing the trajectory of slavery.
I want to combine the quare with another queer-of-color intervention,
José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. For Muñoz, queerness is a mode of
the utopian per se as it shows a never-ending dissatisfaction with the present
of things. Muñoz calls for a perspective of queer collectivity that refuses
contemporary propositions of inclusion and appeasement:
Queerness is not yet here.…Put another way, we are not yet queer.…We have never been
queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be.…The future is queerness’s
domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and
feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must
strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a
then and there.4

The “then and there” of queer utopia is neither escapist nor naive. Instead it
performs a militant critical optimism against the nostalgia of the past and
the limits of a now that will always fail to include all precarious subjects in
the human. “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not
enough, that indeed something is missing,” writes Muñoz. “Queerness is
essentially about the rejection of the here and now.”5 As Muñoz lays it out,
the domain of the queer is the ornamental, the aesthetic, and the
performative. The performative is “a doing towards the future.”6 The
phenomenon of Afrofuturism as well as the communal practices of quare
free jazz performer and composer Sun Ra and his bigband, the Arkestra, are
at the center of this chapter, mostly through an analysis of John Coney’s
film Space Is the Place (1974; script by Joshua Smith, Sun Ra, and others).
Sun Ra has been described as gay in several publications, mostly after his
death.7 But I want to concentrate on the sonic and performative notions of
his oeuvre, which for me are more quare than his sexual orientation.
 A : G N

The concept of Afrofuturism was first elaborated by Mark Dery,8 though

Mark Sinker and Greg Tate also contributed to its formation.9 Dery defines
Afrofuturism as follows:
Speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American
concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African
American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced
future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism
gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately
rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible
traces of its history, imagine possible futures?10

Afrofuturism stems from minor genres, most notably science fiction, that
have been mostly excluded from the major cultural canon. For Dery, this
reflects the low social positions Blacks had in American life of the
seventies and eighties. But Dery also asks if the area of science and
technology isn’t already a hegemonic one, as scientific advantages such as
modern ships and weapons contributed to the enslavement of Africans. As
he puts it,
Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists,
streamliners and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective
fantasies?11

And he emphasizes that

African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendents of alien abductees; they inhabit
a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance
frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too
often brought to bear on Black bodies.12

It is precisely the experience both of alienation and of appropriation-like

empowerment that made the speculative, highly imaginative genre of
Afrofuturism such a powerful tool for new fantasies of Black futures.
 A A A , S
S

A central image of Afrofuturism is the spaceship, whose meaning depends

on its flipside image, the slave ship. On the slave ship, hundreds of
thousands of slaves came to America through the notorious “Middle
Passage,” the sea space between Africa and the Americas. Like many
inventions that made a brutal difference during slavery, the ship was a
symbol of modernity and globalism. Scholars such as Cesare Casarino
mention the ambivalence of the ship and link it to the crisis of modernity:
“If the nineteenth-century sea narrative produced the matrix of the crisis of
modernity, such a matrix in these narratives was materialized above all as
the space of the ship.”13
The ship is also mentioned in Michel Foucault’s writings on heterotopia.
Different from utopias, heterotopias are spaces where time and action
function differently than in normalized reproduced structures of labor and
institutions of capitalism. Places like the cemetery, the church, but also
brothels and flea markets have their own functionality and include different
traditions and rituals. Heterotopias also have a different temporality,
sometimes only open on special days or open, like the brothel or the jazz
club, during the night. And as Foucault writes: “The ship is the heterotopia
par excellence.”14
While Casarino analyzes the ship in its ambivalent relation to the newly
emerging global dimension of capitalism, and Foucault categorizes it as a
heterotopia, where days and nights function differently than on the
mainland, Black scholar Paul Gilroy categorizes it as a powerful motif of
Black tradition, which has its place in the works of Black writers such as
Frederick Douglass, Aimé Césaire, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, and
Langston Hughes:15
The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—is
especially important for historical and theoretical reasons.…Ships immediately focus
attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African
 homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural
and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.16

Therefore the ship symbolizes a paradoxical interface between modernity

and its regressions. As Gilroy continues:
Ships also refer us back…to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave-trade and its
relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation. As it were, getting on board
promises a means to reconceptualise the orthodox relationship between modernity and what
passes for its prehistory.17

Kodwo Eshun has underlined how central the idea of alien abduction is for
Afrofuturist visual discourses:
And there’s the key thing…The idea of alien abduction, the idea of slavery as an alien
abduction which means that we’ve all been living in an alien-nation since the 18th century.
…The mutation of African male and female slaves in the 18th century into what became
negro, and into the entire series of humans that were designed in America.…The key
thing…is that in America none of these humans were designated human.18

Therefore the primary dualism we face from a quare perspective is not

between male and female, or hetero- and homosexual, but between (white)
humans and Black non-humans. From this point of view, Afrofuturism’s
quare practice is one I would like to call alien drag.
The cover of one of his most successful albums, Mothership Connection
(1974), shows George Clinton jumping out of a spaceship in a playful,
happy manner. As Clinton says in the documentary film Last Angel of
History by John Akomfrah (1996), “The record had to find another place
we hadn’t perceived Black people to be. And that was on a spaceship.” The
ship and its technologies are used in an affirmative way to produce another
sound that would beam the listeners of Mothership Connection into another
future.
What George Clinton was for funk music—a pioneer and innovator—
and Sun Ra was for the jazz avant garde, the Jamaican composer and
producer Lee “Scratch” Perry was for reggae and dub music. It is unclear
whether those three inventive figures knew about each other. There are
many more examples of Afrofuturist imagery, but the legacy of these three
is already more than extraordinary. John Corbett, researching Black music
utopias, agreed:
What is remarkable, uncanny perhaps, about the story of these three musicians…is how they
have independently developed such similar myths. Coming from different backgrounds,
working in different musical genres, based in different parts of the music industry, making
music for almost exclusively separate audiences, with divergent political and commercial
concerns, Ra, Clinton, and Perry have created nonetheless three compatible personal
mythologies . . .19

In Return from Planet Dub (2009), Perry’s whole sound is situated at

another planet. Perry returns to earth, though, to enlighten the listeners with
his nonhuman sounds, mostly produced in his legendary studio the Black
Ark. Of course, in the science fiction genre other planets are not only
associated with threats to the human species, but also with technological
and other knowledges that make the other species superior. Therefore,
aliens and their technologies function as a line of flight from the slave
narrative and the racist present of the Americas.
The necessity to break with history and therewith an essentialist identity
politics was already mentioned in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in the
final epilogue of the book:
I am not a prisoner of History. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that
direction. I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing
invention into life. In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.…But I
have no right to put down roots. I have not the right to admit the slightest patch of being into
my existence. I have not the right to become mired by the determinations of the past. I am
not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.20

These icons invented their personas in the sixties and seventies. Today,
contemporary forms of hip hop and soul continue the Afrofuturist legacy.
For example, the rapper Kool Keith has constructed the persona of Dr.
Octagon, an alien gynecologist and surgeon (Dr. Octagonecologist [1996],
The Return of Dr. Octagon [2006]). The doctor crosses humans and aliens
to produce new hybrid species and stems from the planet Jupiter. As “Black
Elvis,” another one of his many alter egos, Kool Keith embodies the singer
who stole the blues from the Black race and sold it to white record
companies (Black Elvis/Lost in Space [1999]).
 Futurist Black women cyborgs have become part of the Afrofuturist
kaleidoscope. Janelle Monae performs a feminine cyborg-character called
Cindi Mayweather in her series Metropolis (Metropolis: The Chase Suite
[2007], The ArchAndroid [2010], Electric Lady [2013]). Nostalgic African
references such as armor and earrings connect with the identity of the
futurist cyborg. Monae’s character Mayweather inhabits a tragic love story
with a human. The aesthetic of Monae’s project references Fritz Lang’s
science fiction-cinema classic Metropolis (1927), which also featured a
tragic female robot character.
The Afrofuturist world is embodied by many different characters using
the visual representation for forms of cyborg and alien drag. Their
narratives vary and cannot be limited to a clear exodus, like the mothership
bringing its people back to Africa. On the contrary, along with new links to
the past, visions of the future emerge, moving beyond the framework of the
human and the national. There is no perfect way back or forward for
Blackness, but instead, many paradoxically linked particles of a re-
actualised past and a highly inventive future that might have found its home
in a diaspora that is beyond and in-between nations and times.
 B A , B N

The Black Atlantic in both its geographical and ethical implications poses a
radical questioning of the nation, including currents of Black nationalism.
At the same time it remains a space of resonance for what happened on the
many ships moving through the Middle Passage.
As a system that includes historical, cultural, linguistic, and political
communication with roots in the enslavement and deportation of Africans,
the Black Atlantic is a virtual space that addresses historical forms of loss
(like the loss of the homeland) as well as new, hybrid forms of belonging
that see neither the way back to Africa nor any simplified Black
essentialism as the final goal.21
For Gilroy, the age of post-slavery gave birth to a new form of Black
culture, a form that refuses to rely on essentialist notions of Black liberation
movements such as Negritude. The Black Atlantic is not held together
through essence, religion, or tradition. On the contrary, it connects
ungroundedness and dislocation to use them for a progressive perspective
of diaspora:
Diaspora is a useful concept because it specifies the pluralization and non-identity of the
Black identities without celebrating either prematurely. It raises the possibilities of
sameness, but it is a sameness that cannot be taken for granted. Identity must be
demonstrated in relation to the alternative possibility of differentiation, because the diaspora
logic enforces a sense of temporality and spatiality that underscores the fact that we are not
what we were.22

A major inspiration for Gilroy was the story of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–
1963), a Black author who wrote the pioneering Black liberation book The
Souls of Black Folk (1903).23 As a student, Du Bois had a scholarship that
allowed him to travel to Europe and study in Germany. For him it was clear
that there was no white-versus-Black cultural battle of purity to be fought;
instead, he took from European culture what he found interesting and useful
for the ideal of a Black liberatory enlightenment. Du Bois defined three
phases of Black emancipation that would also play roles for Gilroy: first,
concrete resistance against the institution of slavery; second, further forms
of struggle for civil rights from an integrative humanist point of view; and
third, the right for Black-owned spaces, where Black communities could
produce their own statements and cultural articulations. The third phase,
which after Gilroy is opened towards new forms of community and futures,
is closely associated with music:
Though music plays a significant role in both of the earlier phases, the third can be defined
by the project of liberating music from its status as a mere commodity and by the associated
desire to use it to demonstrate the reconciliation of art and life, that is, by exploring its
pursuit of artistic and even aesthetic experience not just as a form of compensation, paid as
the price of an internal exile from modernity, but as the favored vehicle for communal self-
development.24

Slaves were not taught how to write. So music became the primary space
for Black culture. Record shops, clubs, discos, and radio channels thus
function as archives and future spaces for Black cultural statements and
references. Not even primarily bound through language, Afrofuturist visual
and sonic politics could be called the radical music of the Black Atlantic,
referencing both past traumas and futurist visions of new Black
subjectivities and practices
It is breathtaking, funny, and surprising how John Coney’s film Space Is
the Place intervenes concretely into the linear blaxploitation narrative and
confronts it, through Sun Ra’s spaceship landing on Earth, precisely in the
America of the ongoing civil rights movement.
Already the beginning of the film presents a clip from another world.
Before the audience is introduced to any earthly narrative, we follow Sun
Ra walking through a spaced-out surrealism that seems to represent a
peaceful harmony of nature, but also among non-human figures that could
be spirits or ghosts. Some have no faces, but mirrors where the face should
be; there are plants that have grown out yellow hands. The film seems to
situate Sun Ra on another planet or in a non-human fantasy. While Sun Ra
walks through this fascinating landscape, wearing Egyptian symbols and
headdresses, the strange music of Sun Ra’s Arkestra appears, mixing jazz
trumpets with fragmentary percussion. Then Sun Ra starts talking: “The
music is different here. The vibrations are different. Not like planet Earth.
Planet Earth sound of guns, anger, frustration. There was no one to talk to
on planet Earth.”25
We are not visiting just some other world, but a world which is
presented as an alternative. Earth is only one planet of many, shaped by
white views. Blackness possibly stems from another world, one that seems
not to be shaped by events like slavery and not determined by white
suppression.
Space Is the Place is also a film of an encounter. Two Black genres
meet: blaxploitation film and Afrofuturist science fiction. Sun Ra breaks up
the narrative structure of the film through discrepant time-images, and
directly challenges the narrative through the sounds he produces.
 T S B
E

Earthly narration begins in Chicago, in 1943. Appearing first as an other-

worldly entity, subsequently Sun Ra appears as Sonny Ray, an earthling
who works in an exotic dance club. The limited artistic freedom of Sonny
Ray is evident through the intervention of a Black pimp who enters the club
with two worshipful women. The Black pimp denounces Ray’s playing
—“sounds like shit”—and gets the boss of the club to bring the exotic
dancers back to the stage. He smokes a big phallic cigar.
In response, Ray’s piano playing becomes anti-melodic, taking away the
structure that supported the exotic dancers’ movements. A fire starts, as
though ignited by Ray’s jagged music; smoke fills the room, glasses
explode, and the guests flee the club in panic. Of course, the pimp is not
happy about Ray’s interruption. To resolve their conflict, he asks Ray to
play a card game. His role as Sun Ra’s antagonist is highlighted by the
name he has in the script: the Overseer. As the website Culture-Court
comments:
This is the Overseer. “If he sees something he wants, he gets it.” His name suggests the
slavery-era supervisor who takes care of business for white folks while his style reflects the
stereotype of the big-shot ghetto operator in films like Superfly, the Mack who runs the
rackets, shifts the drugs and pimps the girls.…If you want to put a neo-Gnostic gloss on it,
the Overseer is the Archon who keeps the people enslaved in their sensual addictions; while
Ra is the Divine Spark of the Pleroma who strives to lift them to a higher plane.26

The Overseer conforms to the clichés of the blaxploitation macho. But he is

not an anti-hero fighting police suppression or the state. All he cares about
is sex, money, and power, including violence against women. This negative
form of Black masculinity seemed to have been unacceptable to Ra: he
asked that the film be edited into a version that eliminated twenty minutes
of heterosexist material.27 A longer version would be distributed only after
Ra’s death in 1993.
 As Black feminists like Michele Wallace and Hortense Spillers have
shown, slavery brought a symbolic castration of Black men. White slave
owners fathered children with Black women; Black men could not claim
fatherhood and defend the family community.28 The Black macho
developed as a counter-reaction.29 To the present, this constellation of
Black heteronormative masculinity is read as “Black authenticity.” In
contemporary rap, for instance, a masculine performativity that relates itself
to the urban, the street, gangs, and violence is supposed to “keep it real.” As
E. Patrick Johnson notes:
Black authenticity has increasingly become linked to masculinity in its most patriarchial
significations. That this particular brand of masculinity epitomizes the imperialism of
heterosexism, sexism and homophobia, therefore, is not surprising.30

Sun Ra’s performativity poses a radical alternative to such notions of Black

authenticity. On one hand, the overseer is depicted in the classic fancy suit
and always surrounded by sexualized women. The quare alien drag of Sun
Ra, on the other hand, undermines the clichés of hegemonic models of
white and Black masculinities.
 D O : A
B M

Therefore it is no surprise that Sun Ra is concretely positioned as the

opponent of the Black pimp. In the next scene, a surreal situation in the
desert interrupts the worldly reality of the club. Sun Ra and the Overseer sit
at a table and play a mystical card game against each other (Figure 21.1). Its
goal is nothing less than the question of the direction of the Black future.
Sun Ra in this duel doesn’t resemble any contemporary idea of the human.
While slavery dehumanized Blacks beyond a categorical distinction of
gender or sexual orientation, it seems that from Sun Ra’s point of view,
mimicking the human might end in reduced and regressive personifications
of it, like the stereotype of the Black pimp.

FIGURE 21.1 Sun Ra and the Overseer, from Space Is the Place (1974)
 The first round of the mystical card game starts with the question of
mobility. While the Overseer draws a card with a fancy car, notorious from
blaxploitation narratives, Sun Ra draws a card with a spaceship. Soon he
will land it on planet Earth. As journalists and other curious humans await
him, the ship arrives and opens its doors. Sun Ra and his followers, wearing
clothes that both look spacelike and African, set their feet on planet Earth.
The spaceship seems to be driven by sound. We see Sun Ra playing
keyboards inside the ship; his improvisatory sound practice navigates it.
The practice of noisy free jazz improvisation precedes any form of visual
representation. Instead, it even produces it.
While the long history of blues and jazz connects to narratives of Black
suffering and slave songs, and represents another form of “Black
authenticity” through the traditional acoustic instruments, the space sounds
of Sun Ra’s Arkestra clearly break with the tradition—as if the slave songs
were not the real songs of the Black community. Sun Ra experimented with
synthesizers and electronic effects long before it was fashionable, mixing
them with traditional instruments and versions of older, African sound
sources. His hybrid interplanetary Arkestra went beyond any familiar ideal
of a Black sonic tradition. As Paul Gilroy notes, hybridity is an essential
element of the sonic culture of the Black Atlantic:
My point here is that the unashamedly hybrid character of these Black Atlantic cultures
continually confounds any simplistic (essentialist or anti-essentialist) understanding of the
relationship between racial identity and racial non-identity, between folk cultural
authenticity and pop cultural betrayal.…Arguments are still made about the relationship
between authentic jazz and “fusion” styles supposedly corroded by the illegitimate
amalgamation of rock influences or the struggle between real instruments and digital
emulators.31

Kodwo Eshun argues that phenomena like sonic Afrofuturism, using anti-
traditional instruments and producing new posthumanist genres such as
Detroit house music, should inspire a new form of theoretical reflection.
Instead of endlessly repeating narratives of tradition, Black suffering, and
the street, and interpreting everything in relation to the biography of the
artist, Afrofuturism defamiliarizes the notion of any “authentic” root and
location:
 Rejecting today’s ubiquitous emphasis on Black sound’s necessary ethical allegiance to the
street.…The mayday signal of Black Atlantic Futurism is unrecognizability, as either Black
or Music. Sonic Futurism doesn’t locate you in tradition; instead it dislocates you from
origins. It uproutes you.32

The speculative sonic worlds themselves should be central to any critical

writing about them, instead of being treated as gimmicks or minor
deviations from the familiar Black music histories. As Space Is the Place
demonstrates, the otherworldly space-politics that Sun Ra radically affirms
are key to understanding his contribution. Sun Ra’s future is linked to an
understanding of Blackness that intentionally goes beyond anything already
known or told. Understanding the dehumanization of Blacks in slavery as
crucial and not buying in to any humanist myth of inclusion, he argues in
one of his performances: “I am not a human being! I come from a different
sort of horizon!”33
 Q C : B
B A

No wonder Sun Ra was considered a traitor by some in a jazz community

whose ideas were shaped by Black Nationalism. Jazz singer Betty Carter
denounced Sun Ra’s project as “bullshit” and commented that “he has got
whitey going for it.”34 In Space Is the Place the question of Sun Ra’s
“realness” is reflected through two Black teenagers who discuss whether
Sun Ra is “real” or a mere “sellout” using his idiosyncratic performances to
sell more records.
In a central scene of the film, Sun Ra reacts to these doubts in his
particular way. Followed by mystical figures wearing Egyptian masks, he
enters a Black community center representative of the spaces created in
many American cities since Black liberation. Posters on the wall take note
of the ongoing struggle of Black pride, representing influential figures like
Huey Newton and Angela Davis, while one kid is reading a book by LeRoi
Jones. With Black youth singing, dancing, discussing, and playing pool, the
beginning of the scene could be part of a classic documentary reflecting
Black community work and experience of the late sixties or seventies. Sun
Ra and his associates provoke curiosity and laughter from the kids in the
center. Sun Ra introduces himself politely: “I am Sun Ra, ambassador from
the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space.” The kids laugh
louder and continue the conversation by asking their guest if he is “not a
Black hippie or something.” Then they ask the central question: “How do
we know you’re for real?!” Sun Ra answers:
I am not real, I am just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did, you people
wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You not real. If you were, you would have some status
among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I
come to you as the myth, because that’s what Black people are: myths. I came from a dream
that the Black man dreamed long ago. I am actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.
I’m gonna be here until I pick out certain ones of you to take back with me.
Provocative and radically quare, Sun Ra asks the Black kids to distance
themselves from the domain of the human and its promise of final
inclusion, and to identify instead with the myths (of Black people). This
might reflect not only the many crimes in slavery that only could be
documented through oral history and the slave narratives, but also the
destruction of the link to Africa and its past. This lack, it seems, can only be
countered through new myths that imagine a Black temporality beyond both
the traumatic past and the limited present. As quare Afrofuturist writer
Samuel R. Delany once argued: “We need images of tomorrow, and our
people need them more than most.”35 Delany elaborates:
The historical reason that we’ve been so impoverished in terms of future images is
because…as a people we were systematically forbidden any images of our past. I have no
idea where, in Africa, my Black ancestors came from because, when they reached the slave
markets of New Orleans, records of such things were systematically destroyed. If they spoke
their own languages, they were beaten or killed. The slave pens in which they were stored
by lots were set up that no slaves from the same area were allowed together. Children were
regularly sold away from their parents. And every other effort conceivable was made to
destroy all vestiges of what might endure as African social consciousness. When, indeed, we
say that this country was founded on slavery, we must remember that we mean…that it was
founded on the systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural
remnants.36

It is easy to accept that Sun Ra distances himself from the authenticity

represented by the Black macho; it is more difficult to follow his polemical
rejection of contemporary Black pride based on inclusion and human rights.
But precisely this playful polemic (the scene is not without humor) shows
his radical approach. From Sun Ra’s perspective, the planet Earth is one of
many planets, not the center of the universe. Blacks need not only more
representation on Earth, but a new world. While the pimp is positioned as
an opponent, the Black youth in the community center are the people Sun
Ra wants to address and convince of his messianism. The Black power
struggle is visible through the various pictures and writings in the
community center. If there is a clear distinction between familiar Black
power politics and Sun Ra’s intergalactic project, both share the goal of
Black emancipation, in part through technology. The Black Panthers and
Sun Ra’s Arkestra shouldn’t be seen as fully antagonistic, even if Sun Ra’s
position can only be fully recognized through its transgression of Black
common sense. A progressive critical race perspective should positively
recognize both positions. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), whose work is
part of any canon of Black Nationalism, underlined, there was no need to
“make” Sun Ra a member of the Black Nationalist movement; clearly he
already was.37
 D M : B P ?

Sun Ra’s final act in this duel is the organization of a concert with his
Arkestra. But shortly before the concert begins, the audience already
waiting impatiently, Sun Ra is kidnapped by the FBI, an event that links to
the history of slavery. The arrogant agents bind him to a chair, put a
headphone on his head, and play “Dixie.”
No music could be more radically antagonistic to the sound of the
Arkestra. “Dixie” was a popular song by the white Minstrel- and Blackface-
performer Dan Emmett, a star in the US-entertainment industry from his
first performance in New York in 1859. In “Dixie,” Emmett constructs the
perspective of the Black freeman, nostalgically longing to go back to the
South, “in de land ob cotton.” This revisionist fantasy became popular
amongst whites, romanticizing their longing to reinstall the conditions of
slavery. John Lock mentions sadistic situations where Black workers were
pressured to sing the song in front of their white bosses:38
It continues to polarize opinion in the South, its performance at a range of occasions from
state functions to football games still provoking protests from African Americans. “Dixie”
can thus be seen as a song that whites have traditionally used to remind Blacks of their
“place”…, in the land of segregation and inferior status. The figure of the homesick Negro,
wishing “to lib and die in Dixie,” long persisted as a stereotype in American culture.…In the
musical symbology of Space Is the Place, Dixie stands for the false history (his story) to be
found in white misrepresentation of Black life and Black status.39

In the end, Sun Ra is freed by Black kids from the community center, who
seem to understand that Sun Ra is not a traitor, but plays a relevant part in
their cause. Arriving just in time to give his concert, Sun Ra counters the
traumatic loop of the past, “Dixie,” with the energetic performance of the
Arkestra.
 T P E : F
Q P

After the concert, attended by an excited Black and white audience, Sun Ra
beams a few of the Black people he has met on Earth onto his ship. The
music opens the space to another Black future and intervenes successfully
in the same old stories both told by white revisionism and the stereotypes of
blaxploitation. The last scenes of the film are an Exodus from planet Earth.
Sun Ra’s proposition reminds one of a radical interpretation of the flight
from slavery and colonial time, an escape route from the Earthly present.
There is no real hope for Earth any more and therefore it explodes. The film
seems to interpret this explosion as a metaphor. We see the spaceship leave,
pieces of the planet floating in all directions of the universe, and a voice
shouts: “In a far out Place / In Space / We’ll wait for you!” The audience
must decide for itself which way to go toward a better another future.
This leaves us with multiple readings of Sun Ra’s multi-faceted and
sometimes contradictory oeuvre. The performative and musical gestures of
Sun Ra’s work are affirmative, posing an alternative to narrow, violent
forms of liberatory struggle. But the radical critique of the Earthly present
may be read as pessimistic.
In any case, for Sun Ra the present is not enough. This reminds us of
José Esteban Muñoz’s arguments about queer time in Cruising Utopia:
“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an
insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”40 Sun
Ra’s alternative is not only post-American or post-national, but also post-
earthly and post-human. The quare assemblage of Sun Ra’s spaceship, one
of many images of the Arkestra and his vital sounds, decenters Earthly
common sense, and with it, straight white time. Space Is the Place
indirectly but consequentially poses slavery as a paradigm that cannot be
fully overcome. This appears not only in the Afro-alien drag performativity
of the Arkestra and the funny but serious narrative of the film, but also the
sonic politics of the music itself, which subverts the notion of the Black
entertainer in favor of the Black inventor—or even the Black messiah.
 T A : S E

Already in the Black popular cinema of the 1970s, blaxploitation, the visual
narrative has a special dialogical relation to the soundtrack.41 It complicates
the experiences of the hero and adds another layer of critical discourse to
the story. In Space Is the Place, the free jazz of the Arkestra intensifies this
tendency, breaking with conventional song structures and creating affective
sounds that move toward the limit of what is considered music. In Space Is
the Place, sounds themselves produce interruptions in the story and produce
the magical energy for the spaceship. They signify a different relation to the
cosmos: more in harmony with it while also reflecting its multiple and
creative chaos and complexity. As Kodwo Eshun put it, “In a strange way,
your ears start to see.”42 The sounds of the Arkestra open doors to new
images, worlds, and temporalities. Live concerts (and the Arkestra has
played a lot of them) become the main ritual by which to leave the prison
house of the present. The experimental, non-human, often noisy nature of
the live performance is extra-ordinary in its intensity, through the sheer
volume of the noise produced by sometimes more than a dozen individuals,
affecting the bodies of both band-members and audience, and through the
extreme duration, as these concerts would sometimes go long beyond the
usual convention of one to two hours. Thus, the live performance produces
an affective break with common subjectivities of the present and the
everyday.
The final chapter of Cruising Utopia argues for a form of queer ecstasy,
moving people beyond a “here and now.” The collective improvisatory
practice of the Arktestra, which called one of its albums Out there a Minute
(1989), is the perfect modus operandi for Muñoz’s suggestion:
We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient.
…We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present.…Willingly we
let ourselves feel queerness’s pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we
must feel. We must take ecstasy.43
Obviously, Muñoz’s statement that “we must take ecstasy” is not limited to
its pharmacological meaning. He translates the Greek term “ekstasis” as “to
be outside oneself,” a perfect description of the effect of the Arkestra’s
practice. (While Muñoz refers to the use of drugs and the music of the
indie-band The Magnetic Fields, Sun Ra is not mentioned in his book.)
 C I

Free jazz, with its deep relation to spontaneity and collective dialog, seems
to deliver a world of sounds whose whole goal is to go beyond the everyday
and create something new. This existential dimension of jazz is also present
through its affective level that hits the ear beyond normative effects of
conventional songs and melodies. As Gilroy noted, music and performance
in Black cultures can’t be explained through textuality and narrativity,
because the pre- and anti-discursive components of Black meta-
communication happen on another affective level.44
The multiplicity and power of Black sound is also addressed by the
lyrics of the Arkestra. As June Tyson sings, in one of the few songs of the
Arkestra with lyrics: “The Sound of Joy is Enlightenment!” The sound itself
is supposed to have the power to enlighten the audience. Fascinatingly, the
musicians of the Arkestra, sometimes known professionals, sometimes
autodidacts, not only rehearsed a lot with their leader: their music was also
inspired by his endless speeches about the politics of the cosmos and the
potentiality of Black subjectivity, as if his teachings would translate directly
into the music itself. Sometimes the music was supposed to have
therapeutic power, as the album Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (1967)
makes clear in its title.
In “Becoming-Music” the Deleuzian writer Jeremy Gilbert also
underlines the special dimension of collective improvisation:
Collective Improvisation always involves a non-signifying communication of energies, a
complex dissemination of forces between the performers in the ensemble.…The sociality of
improvising musicians is always constituted by transversal relations which cannot be
understood in terms of any logic or signification.45

The practice of the Arkestra could be called processual. Ongoing

changes of band members, costumes, instruments, equipment, and lengths
of songs challenged the relationship between original and copy. As Sun Ra
said, whether onstage or offstage, he and his band would be always
rehearsing. Gilbert notes that improvised music has often been considered
irrelevant in relation to the composed and structured genres of the West.46
Jazz challenges this narrative, especially free jazz of the Arkestra’s kind.
The endless multiplicity of sound was named “cosmic sound” by Deleuze
and Guattari,47 a term that Sun Ra also used to describe his own music. And
the abstract, noisy parts of the Arkestra’s music make its sound so non-
human, so outer-worldly. Szwed remembers how “noise” was associated
with the music of the Arkestra as it gained its audience: “‘Noise’ was one of
the first words which came to mind to many of those who heard Sun Ra’s
Arkestra in the 1960s. ‘Noise,’ in the abstract, is what scientists call
phenomena which are unpredictable, out of control, beyond the system.”48
 Q A P

The practice of collective improvisation was central to the community of

the Arkestra. Every day they rehearsed many hours:
“We’d rehearse all day and right up till you performed, get off at 4 a.m., rehearse, at 12 until
4, then back again.”…The long rehearsals were part of his plan, a way of building up
stamina and testing commitment. One of the musicians estimated that they practiced 180
hours for every hour that they played in public. It was not unusual for them to rehearse for
hours before the gig, pack up their instruments, and proceed right to the performance.49

Instruments can be seen as prosthetics of the body, making the members

look and act like musical cyborgs. In the communal life of the Arkestra,
which provided a family for Blacks with social problems or a past of
addiction or prison, the production of costumes, performances, records, and
cover-artworks was part of daily life. The collective work and life of the
Arkestra were a social factory. As in Andy Warhol’s Factory (so much more
central than the Arkestra in the predominantly white canon of queer art),
life and art created a unique and productive interface.
Sun Ra made this collective machine work at an extraordinary level,
going beyond the limits of its members’ personalities. During the sixties,
when big bands mostly faded in favor of individualized performers, the
Arkestra held a true counterposition to this trend, continuing to symbolize
Black collectivity even in economically difficult times. At the same time,
the quare assemblage communal life of the Arkestra posed an alternative to
the normative nuclear family.
Deleuze and Guattari used the concept of the assemblage to describe
collective transversal structures of interacting forces and subjects without a
clear hierarchy. Assemblages are complex, non-dualistic networks and
constellations, which go beyond the limited scope of subject positions.
While subjects and identities can be part of assemblages, they are named as
a part among many other elements, including material forces and practices,
technologies and objects, machines and prosthetics. Of course, Sun Ra’s
musicians have identities, but these identities both diminish and become
more than themselves in the collective process. As the Deleuze Studies
webpage of Manchester Metropolitan University puts it:
An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the
subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity. The human assemblage is a
multiplicity that forms new assemblages with existing social and cultural assemblages of
material movement, force and intensity.50

The quare assemblage of the Arkestra becomes the metaphorical and

material space for inventing and experimenting with new sounds and
therewith, new forms of Blackness. Sun Ra called his musicians “tone
scientists.”51 He claimed that in the Arkestra no sound played would be
wrong. Either the collective was on the right track towards space or it was
not: “The lesson was that it was a common enterprise and that solutions to
the problem were a collective matter.”52 To put it in the words of Kodwo
Eshun: “That’s very much what Sun Ra’s doing: he’s using the Moog to
produce a new sonic people.…He’s using it to produce the new astro-Black
American of the 1970s.”53
 A N E

This was one of the first chapters submitted for the Handbook, on January
16, 2013. The author died on May 12, 2013, before he could work with the
editors on revisions. The published chapter is a revision by Fred Everett
Maus in consultation with Tavia Nyong’o.
In the most important respects the manuscript was in excellent
condition. The present version follows the manuscript closely. We have not
altered the structure or thought of the original submission. In other respects,
the manuscript reflected the limitations of a non-native speaker with good
but imperfect English, and the status of an intermediate draft. We made
numerous changes for standard English usage and grammar, but these were
superficial.
We made decisions about spelling in cases where the manuscript was
different from our preferred usage or inconsistent. We have capitalized
“Black” and spelled “African American” with no hyphen. In the
manuscript, “quare” usually appeared with capital A. We saw no good
reason for this unusual spelling of what has become a familiar term, and we
used “quAre” only once to reflect Stüttgen’s intention. The manuscript
consistently used “slaveship” rather than “slave ship,” to heighten the
resemblance to “spaceship”; again, we included this only once to allow the
emphasis on the relationship.
Stüttgen’s bibliography listed some German translations of scholarly
texts. We have substituted English-language versions. The manuscript
included numerous full-color images. We have included one of these. We
encourage readers to seek out the other images mentioned, which are easy
to find online.
The editors regret not being able to discuss the manuscript with the
author. It might have developed further. A version of Stüttgen’s dissertation,
the source of this chapter, was published as an issue of a Danish magazine
(Stüttgen 2014). At the time of his death, he was preparing to take a
fellowship to revise the dissertation for a book manuscript. This chapter
represents Stüttgen’s decision about a first publication drawn from the
dissertation.
Of course, further publications on Sun Ra and Afrofuturism have
appeared since Stüttgen wrote; we particularly direct attention to Kara
Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures.54 The 2014 release of Space Is the
Place by Harte Recordings includes a DVD with both versions of the film,
a CD of music associated with the film, brief contextual essays, and
numerous images.55
N
1. E. Patrick Johnson, “Quare Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I
Learned from my Grandmother,” in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black
Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 126.
2. Johnson,“Quare Studies,” 126.
3. See endnote 4 in Dwight A. McBride, “Straight Black Studies: On African American Studies,
James Baldwin and Black Queer Studies,” in Johnson and Henderson, eds., Black Queer
Studies, 87.
4. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New
York University Press, 2009) 1.
5. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
6. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 3.
7. On Sun Ra’s sexuality see, for instance, Val Wilmer, “Obituary: Sun Ra,” The Independent, July
1, 1993, and John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century
Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
8. Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1994), 180.
9. Kodwo Eshun refers to Sinker and Tate in Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in
Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet Books, 1998), 173–193.
10. Dery, Flame Wars, 180.
11. Dery, Flame Wars, 180.
12. Dery, Flame Wars, 180.
13. Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002), 19.
14. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. by Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 27.
15. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), 13.
16. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4.
17. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 17.
18. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 192–193.
19. John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994), 11.
20. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press,
2008), 204–205.
21. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 13. Jasbir K. Puar gives a contemporary queer perspective on the
“Black Atlantic.” Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley comes even closer to my reading of what I would
call the “Quare Atlantic.” See Puar, “Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and
Globalization,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, nos. 1–2 (2002), 101–137, and
 Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, nos. 2–3 (2008), 191–215.
22. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 23.
23. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (London: Longman, 2002).
24. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 124.
25. As far as we know, all quotations from films were transcribed by the author, rather than
transcribed by someone else or taken from a written source–Editors.
26. See http://www.culturecourt.com/Br.Paul/media/SpaceisthePlace.htm.
27. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Is_the_Place.
28. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics
17, no. 2 (Summer, 1987), 64–81.
29. Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso, 1990), 20–21.
30. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 48.
31. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 99.
32. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 3–4.
33. See the famous “skyscraper performance” in Robert Mugge’s 1980 documentary A Joyful Noise.
34. Quoted in Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 120.
35. Delany interviewed in Dery, Flame Wars, 191.
36. Delany interviewed in Dery, Flame Wars, 191.
37. Interview with Amiri Baraka in Don Letts’s documentary Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet
(2005).
38. Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra,
Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 72.
39. Lock, Blutopia, 72.
40. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
41. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common
Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 102–103.
42. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 180.
43. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 185.
44. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 75.
45. Jeremy Gilbert, “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation,” in Ian
Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, eds., Deleuze and Music (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2004), 124–125.
46. Gilbert, “Becoming-Music,” 126.
47. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 379–381.
48. John Szwed, Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon, 1997),
228.
49. Szwed, Space Is the Place, 119.
50. See http://www.eri.mmu.ac.uk/deleuze/on-deleuze-key_concepts.php.
51. Quoted in Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 161.
52. Szwed, Space Is the Place, 114.
53. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, 185.
54. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019).
55. Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (San Francisco: Harte Recordings, 2014).
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Black Queer Studies.” In Black Queer Studies, edited by Patrick E. Johnson and Mae G.
Henderson, 68–89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York
University Press, 2009.
Puar, Jasbir K. “Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization.” GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 8, nos. 1–2 (2002): 101–137.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17,
no. 2 (Summer, 1987), 64–81.
Stüttgen, Tim. In a Qu*A*re Time and Place: Post-Slavery Temporalities, Blaxploitation, and
Afrofuturism between Intersectionality and Heterogeneity. Max Jorge Hinderer, Liad Kantorowicz,
Nicolas Siepen, and Margarita Tsomou, editors. Special issue of SUM Magazine. Berlin: b-books,
2014.
Sun Ra. Space Is the Place. San Francisco: Harte Recordings, 2014. Recording.
Szwed, John. Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, nos. 2–3 (2008), 191–215.
Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. London: Verso, 1990.
Wilmer, Val. “Obituary: Sun Ra.” The Independent, July 1, 1993.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-sun-ra-1482175.html.
 CHAPTER 22

MUSICAL ABJECTS
Sounds and Objectionable Sexualities
 JE NN Y OL I VI A JOH NS ON

T are still human sexual desires that, in 2020, are deemed

unacceptable. They are often marked, simultaneously and paradoxically, by
sensational overexposures and eerie erasures; by abstracted politicizations
and evacuated narratives; by solemn acknowledgements and awkward
silences. With our silent, horrified, sometimes fascinated gaze toward the
realm of the unacceptable, we observe these kinds of desires without fully
understanding them. Those who have these desires are constructed as
frightful enemies, demons to be feared. Those who realize these desires do
so in the shadows of everyday life. And those who suffer because of these
desires do so in ways that strike me as so much more complicated than our
current social scripts and infrastructures can manage to accommodate. In
many cases, stories of intolerable sexual desires lead to shaken heads, to
soft murmurs, to helpless shrugs—to speechlessness.
What are sometimes left behind—in the wake of these awkward silences
and avoidances, these untold and sometimes untellable stories—are sounds:
the crackling LP of an ethereal boy soprano crooning a haunting melody,
accompanied at the piano by the choir director who sexually abused him; or
the exoticized timbres of Balinese gamelan in the context of a contemporary
opera, employed by a celebrated twentieth-century composer as a leitmotif
for a fictional grown man’s sexual desire for a twelve-year-old boy—a kind
of desire this composer himself knew all too well.
My performative of not naming names—yet—gestures toward the many
eerie silences and absences I continually confront when researching stories
of music, sexual abuse, and pedophilia.1 On the one hand, these kinds of
stories are “known”—the information is there, in scattered but findable
locations, and in many such cases I know victims personally. But the larger
populace seems anxious to avoid thinking about this extra-musical
information, to consider these phenomena, as Amy Hammel-Zabin
summarizes, “too horrific to attempt to understand”2; to decide, as many
have with Wagner’s anti-Semitism,3 that the sexual desire of Benjamin
Britten for young boys and the long history of child molestation at the
American Boychoir School should not in any way impact how we hear the
music they made.4
I am interested in these avoidances, in these decouplings of the musical
from the biographically sexual. I am interested in what is being obfuscated
by these decouplings, and what recoupling some of these stories could
potentially open up for our understanding of sexual desires that might best
be described using Julia Kristeva’s term abject: that which, for some, is
simultaneously revolting and fascinating. I am also interested in what it
could mean for us to think about these abject sexualities and behaviors, and
their relationship to music, in the context of queer theory, an episteme that
has historically drawn upon experiences that take place outside of
normative, dominant hegemonies—experiences of alterity and otherness. If,
as José Muñoz posits, queerness is “not yet here,” and is a “warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality,”5 I wonder whether
embarking upon a queer understanding of sexual perpetration and violence,
or a queer approach to art made within sexually problematic contexts, might
grant us the potentiality for a world in which such abusive and exploitative
behaviors become far better understood—and far less prevalent. I also
wonder how thinking in this way might not only impact our ability to better
understand the complexity of sexual perpetrators, but might also afford us a
deeper comprehension of what I have often observed to be a complicated
ambivalence on the part of some victim-survivors, whose experiences of
sexual abuse can be rife with contradictory feelings and emotions.
My interest in looking critically and carefully at intolerable sexual
desires in the context of music stems from a startling interview with
Lawrence Lessig, the celebrated copyright lawyer and author, who in 2005
spoke frankly with New York magazine journalist John Heileman about
how, as an adolescent boy in the 1970s, he was sexually abused at the
Columbus Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey. The interview
describes a conversation Lessig had with his abuser, choir director Donald
Hanson, years after their terrifying relationship had begun, and after it was
known to Hanson that Lessig was aware of the extent of his transgressions:
One evening near the end of Lessig’s final year at the school, he went with Hanson for a
walk around the grounds. As darkness descended on Albemarle, Lessig finally, tentatively,
 gave voice to his gathering misgivings about Hanson’s behavior.
“Is this really right? Should you really be doing this?” Lessig asked.
“You have to understand,” Hanson replied, “this is essential to producing a great
boychoir.” By sexualizing the students, he explained, he was transforming them from
innocents into more complicated creatures, enabling them to render choral music in all its
sublime passion. “It’s what all great boychoirs do,” Hanson said.

Unlike the many mass-mediated stories of sexual abuse allegations

against music teachers that I have encountered over the past decade, in
which the “mystical” power of music is alleged to have been used to seduce
young students into deviant sexuality, Lessig tells a story in which deviant
and exploitative sexuality was used to elevate the grandeur of musical
sounds themselves—to imbue the luminous oscillations of the voices of
dozens of boy sopranos with haunting lost innocence, lost innocence made
material. Hanson appears to argue that, had he not sexually exploited and
traumatized these boys, perhaps they would have sounded different, not as
effective—less fragile, less ghostly, less sublime. This is a chilling
conviction, one that forces me to ruminate on my own belief that extreme
experiences can audibly alter the music we create, and can result in things
sounding potentially more expressive or meaningful than they otherwise
might. Acknowledging this in a general way is not difficult for most
musicians, I imagine; but believing in this power to the extent that one
becomes more invested in the potential magic of musical expressivity than
in protecting other humans from emotional or physical harm is, I suspect, a
far more persistent mindset in the world of musical pedagogy than most of
us would like to believe. Of course, one could also easily conclude that
Hanson was less invested in musical beauty than in using music as a
shameless legitimization of his reprehensible behavior. I wouldn’t dismiss
this possibility, but I would also question what it is about the materiality of
music in particular that seems to have become so synonymous, for Hanson,
with innocence and childhood sexuality—and why he chose music itself as
the medium through which his desires could become so strikingly and
disturbingly manifest.
As an artist who works primarily with sound, I find that all of this gives
me pause; indeed, I have often wondered whether painful things I have
endured in my own past have provided me with unique ways to express
sensitivity and fragility, especially given what Vladimir Jankélévitch has
called the “ineffability” of music—music’s power to mean infinitely, to
signify without limits. And yet, many of my own pieces directly reference
or tell stories related to my memories; in other words, I don’t cover these
stories up, or stay silent about what inspired their sounds. This distinguishes
music like mine from music created within an abusive context, music which
is materially marked by trauma but which does not (or cannot) explicitly
reference it. This is the music I will explore here; music that I will call, after
Julia Kristeva, abject:
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a
threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope
of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be
assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let
itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects
it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just
the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it
is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and
repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside themselves.6

For Kristeva, the most central criterion for something to be “abject” is

that it must be simultaneously threatening and attractive. Kristeva also
writes that an “abject” is not an “object,” nor an “other”; it cannot be
distinguished as something separate from the subject, “I,” but is instead the
reaction of the subject to a stimulus that does not inherently or necessarily
exist as abject. Music, made up of complex propagations of air molecules in
the form of mechanical waves, exists only when we are hearing it and
responding to it, and whatever it signifies to us individually is wrought from
a strange mixture of what our unique backgrounds and proclivities dictate
and whatever outside contexts about what we are hearing are offered. I will
explore the music in this essay in its abject form—in its status as a material
that is inextricable from the human memories and emotions with which it is
so complicatedly intertwined. I am drawn to these musical abjects, these
vibrations, despite feeling frightened of what brought them into being. I am
also frightened that I can still be drawn to them despite what I know; and I
am further frightened because I might, for reasons I cannot explain, perhaps
be even more drawn to them than I was before.
To mark the music I will explore here as abject also enables me to
articulate important differences between sounds that intentionally represent
dangerous sexual desires (such as the sinuously chromatic music of Richard
Strauss’s Salome, in which a young girl is desired by her step-father, or the
snarling brass and guitar-ridden soundscape of The Who’s rock-opera
Tommy, in which a young boy is molested by his uncle), and sounds that
were created in the wake of real-life situations of sexual trauma, violence,
or pedophilic desire. Intentionally deviant sounds—sounds that employ
conventionally “creepy” musical tropes such as chromaticism, dissonance,
minor modes, screeching timbres, lengthy low pedal tones, and the like—do
not strike me as abject, because we can understand them within fictional
contexts, in ways that don’t directly threaten us or the histories of the
people who created them. Abject sounds, by contrast, emerge from
situations like the boychoir’s lost innocence, or Benjamin Britten’s
charming, delicate works for boy soprano. These abject musics have the
ability to obfuscate the secret longings behind their creation with their
seeming beauty and innocence. They attract with their mesmerizing sounds,
but simultaneously repel because of what may have happened—even
simply on the level of abject desire—to create them.
If these musical abjects are so skilled at obfuscating the situations that
enabled their creation, how then can I propose that we listen to them for
traces of their secrets? An easy answer would be to assume that these
composers and interpreters were using so-called “beautiful” music to escape
the misery of their unacceptable, intolerable desires, and that the generally-
agreed-upon beauty of what we hear,7 so starkly contrasting with the
situations within which they were made, represents the abusive or
unethically-desiring musician’s impulse to bury their pain and luxuriate in a
musical salve, to erase any hint that their desires have gone awry. But
perhaps it is precisely the ability of these musicians to sublimate their
unacceptable desires into alluring, gorgeous, shiveringly beautiful music
that can potentially enable us to reframe these kinds of situations as
inherently ambivalent, as inherently bound up with things that are beautiful
and sublime as they are with things that are atrocious, horrible, and
unthinkable. Perhaps our ability to view these situations as inherently
complicated and ambivalent will bring us one step closer to ending the
torments felt by both abusers and the abused.
 In the two scenarios described above, an older man sexually desires
young boys. The word we currently use to describe this kind of desire is
pedophilia, although recent legal and medical scholarship has further
divided these populations into pederasts (pedophiles who have
transgressed), pedophiles who have not harmed children (many of whom in
the English-speaking world are represented on the anonymous website
Virtuous Pedophiles, or VirPed),8 and child molesters who are not
pedophiles, but molest children for other reasons.9 Pedophiles can be
further categorized as exclusive or non-exclusive, indicating whether they
are only attracted to children, or can also be attracted to people of other
ages.
It is largely agreed that Benjamin Britten was a non-exclusive pedophile
who did not transgress, who enjoyed a long and loving romantic partnership
with the tenor Peter Pears, and whose love of adolescent boys was openly
known.10 Philip Brett has argued that a better term to describe Britten is an
ephebophile, or an adult who is attracted to adolescents rather than
children,11 which one might conclude is a slightly more “acceptable” way
to view Britten’s unfulfilled desires. The few scholarly works that directly
address Britten’s desires for young boys also emphasize his professionalism
and unwillingness to cross the line, and narrativize Britten’s affections for
boys as innocent, if effusive, manifestations of Britten’s happy memories of
his own boyhood.12 While we cannot know for sure the extent to which
Britten suffered these desires as a form of torment, or merely acknowledged
them as impulses he would never dare act upon, the information about
Britten’s sexual desires for children that is mostly absent in the historical
and scholarly canon seems to my ears strikingly present within his music:
the haunting straight-tone of Miles’s prepubescent voice practicing
seemingly innocent Latin words in The Turn of the Screw (revealed by
Valentine Cunningham to in fact be words for male genitalia; according to
Cunningham the phrase “O amnis, axis, caulis, collis, clunis, crinis, fascis,
follis, bless ye the Lord” is translatable as “O arsehole, scrotum, penis,
bless ye the Lord”13); that same boy screaming in almost sexually
suggestive contours to the ghost of his adult male tormenter near the end of
the opera (“Peter Quint, you devil!”); the serpentine relationship between
the trilling organ and the hooting boy soprano in the second movement of
Rejoice in the Lamb, suggestive not only of the Cat Jeoffrey’s silken
movements, but also, perhaps, of sexual interplay; and, in a hauntingly non-
vocal representation, the other-worldly shimmers of the vibraphone and
gamelan, understood, by Brett and others, as the death knell of
Aschenbach’s fatal desires for the young boy Tadzio in Death in Venice.14
Again, I find the decoupling of Britten’s complex pedophilic desires from
(most) musicological considerations of his work rather astounding, given
how saturated his music seems to be with themes of children losing their
innocence, adults experiencing impossible desires, and spiritual figures
exuding a jubilance that sometimes borders on anxiety, delusion, and
sublime despair. I wonder whether acknowledging the relationship of
Britten’s sexual desires to his celebrated (and somewhat abject) musical
output wouldn’t enable us to view pedophilia in a much more complicated
light—not necessarily as a form of queerness itself, but as an emotional and
sexual reality that deserves the kind of complex intellectual consideration
that queer theory affords us.
The second of the two pedophiles described above is a far lesser-known
musical figure: the Canadian choir director Donald G. Hanson, who was
hired by the Columbus Boychoir School (now the American Boychoir
School) in 1970. Over the course of the twelve years that Hanson lived and
worked at the school, he is alleged to have engaged in sexual relationships
with dozens of boys aged 10 to 14. In addition to Hanson, two other staff
members at the school—the headmaster, John Shallenberger, and a
teacher’s aide, William Sargent—were also accused of luring students into
sexual relationships.15 Among the most outspoken of the victims are
Lawrence Lessig (mentioned above), John Hardwicke, and Robert Byrens,
the once-celebrated boy soloist Bobby Byrens, who was told by Pope Paul
VI on an American Boychoir tour to Italy in 1972 that he possessed “the
voice of an angel.”16 Byrens recently used this very descriptor as the title of
his memoir, The Voice of an Angel: Poems and Letters for Spiritual
Renewal from a Fractured Life, a collection of written fragments about the
traumas he endured at the school. In one of these poetic letters, Byrens
directly addresses William Sargent, the teacher’s aide who repeatedly
sexually abused him:
Letter To My Abuser
 I had just turned twelve at the end of August before the school year began in September of
1972. Within weeks of school beginning, I was settled in my new room when you first
invited me downstairs to your apartment for a “sleep over.”…
We watched television and you began serving me wine…Then you pulled out your sofa
bed and we climbed in to watch TV. We watched Masterpiece Theatre and to this day I still
break out in a cold sweat whenever I hear that theme music again…
I remember every detail as though it happened yesterday. I remember your apartment,
your little TV that you used to lift up and down with your erections under the covers, your
dark straight hair, your protruding two front teeth—everything! Every detail has been seared
into my memory to keep me company for the rest of my days…. This is your legacy to me.17

A strikingly similar set of memories is described by John Hardwicke,

who also attended the American Boychoir School in the early 1970s and
endured repeated sexual abuse and harassment by choir director Donald
Hanson:
I know I’ve been changed, hurt unbelievably. There’s not a moment that goes by that I
haven’t been affected by this. Mr. Hanson used to masturbate the stick shift in the car, so I
get in my car and immediately that memory comes to mind. Mr. Hanson shaved my face one
of the first times it was ever shaved. So I put on shaving cream and he’s there. Mr. Hanson
drank brandy, so I can’t stand brandy. Beer tastes like his urine. I kiss my wife and Mr.
Hanson’s tongue is in my mouth…. There’s a snake that was put inside me, and it coils
through my intestines and has become mixed up in my whole being. It’s alive and it talks
and I can’t get it fucking out.18

Hanson’s legacy as narrativized by these interviews and materials is,

unlike Britten’s, entirely clear-cut: this is a monster who molested children.
That this monster also made music with his victims has for the most part
been left out of the story, most likely because it seems beside the point;
Hanson as described in many of these interviews could perhaps have just as
easily been a baseball coach, Cub Scout leader, or clergy member. Yet as I
continued to research this story, I found myself struck once again by a
narrative decoupling: that of the musical from the sexual. I once again
wondered what a careful examination of the musical world in which these
traumatic situations occurred might be able to further reveal to us about the
complexity of pedophilia and sexual abuse.
In one haunted corner of the Internet, a lonely YouTube video allows us
to hear the exquisite soprano of 1970s-era Bobby Byrens, the boy soloist
accompanied by the rest of the American Boychoir (likely including
Lawrence Lessig and John Hardwicke) in a slithering, impressionistic work
by Charles Davidson. The piece itself, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” is
a choral setting of poetry written by Jewish children interned at the
concentration camp Theresienstadt, in the city of Terezin in German-
occupied Czecholovakia, during World War II. The layers of trauma are
thickly intertwined here: we are listening to lyrics composed by European
children enduring the horrors of the Holocaust, set to sweetly hollow
musical vibration by the throats of a group of American boys nearly thirty
years later—many of whom were at that very time sexually involved with
their choir director, accompanying them now with Debussy-like figurations
on the piano.
Byrens’s supine child-voice, sparkling yet oddly submissive, brings to
my mind the work of trauma specialist Bessel A. Van der Kolk, who writes
that “trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself…the
emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are
experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the
present.”19 Knowing, in sensorial and somatic detail, both Byrens’s and
Hardwicke’s harrowing stories of that time in their lives, I cannot help but
reconstruct my hearing of their performance of “I Never Saw Another
Butterfly” as aurally imprinted with both metaphorical and literal markers
of trauma. By virtue of listening to these boys create music, we hear Byrens
and Hardwicke as “not in charge of themselves” at all, but instead under the
notational sway of the score, and the (musical, sexual) sway of the older
male charged with (musically, sexually) educating them. The piece opens
with one such abusive male (Hanson) playing the piano alone, a plaintively
haunting tune, slightly repetitive. After a moment of pause, Byrens enters
alone with a virtuosic yet fragile stepwise climb to an almost untenably
high climax, at first chromatic and then quickly, sweetly diatonic, a phrase
that at its high-register ending elides liquidly with the furtive re-entrance of
the piano. Byrens’s next musically naked phrase repeats the words and
melodic contour of the end of the first phrase—“another butterfly”—around
which the piano quietly and furtively tiptoes. This continues two more
times—the boy’s strained and hollow throat repeating “another butterfly” in
gradually transposed keys, stepping down, down, down, while the piano
continues to ambulate with soft, sneaking footsteps around him. An
intimate relationship between piano and voice—between man and boy—is
hereby established, one that I will never hear again as anything but sexual
in nature and imbalanced in power.
In my research of other performances of this work, I found that many
choirs forgo employing a single soloist for this introductory material;
instead, the opening lines are sung by everyone in unison.20 Hanson’s
decision to isolate Byrens as soloist in the Boychoir’s version is a chilling
illustration of the ways in which so many of the survivors of abuse at the
school describe having been continually singled out, continually plucked
away from groups of other boys to convene one-on-one with teachers or
aides or cooks in closed classrooms and bedrooms.21 After a sexual act in a
practice room or a teacher’s private quarters, a boy would then be jarringly
returned to public life, to crowded classrooms and rehearsals with other
boys. This oscillation between private and public conforming bears out as
the music continues: when the other choirboys finally join Byrens and
Hanson in their Svengali-like musical dance, they do so homophonically, in
clipped, almost whispered phrases, ones that become increasingly
chromatic before the piano rejoins them on an unsettlingly marcato
augmented chord. Collectively, the boys sound tense, as though they are
keeping a hushed secret from both each other and themselves, and yet are
all too aware of what they are mutually enduring.
As the piece continues to build momentum toward a devastatingly
chromatic and somehow fragile climax, it also seems to stand still, a quality
contributed to by repetitious roilings on the piano and frequent stops and
starts between phrases. While listening, I feel a physical sensation of being
stuck, of being trapped—a sensation that is deeply evoked by the origin
story of the poetry, but is increased tenfold by the constricted sine-tone
timbres of the boys’ voices, who seem somehow to be both screaming and
whispering. Perhaps it is also the faint, dusty noise of the vinyl record from
which this recording was digitized that gives me this “whispery” feeling—a
further layer of sonic imprintedness that immediately evokes the sound of
the 1970s, a time now past, but which, for Byrens and Hardwicke, remains
a frighteningly real and sensory present. The noise of the LP and the
hollow, non-vibrato timbre of the voices indicates both the intense presence
of the music and a simultaneous feeling of absence, of erasure, of lack—of
something having been slightly scratched away, or some aspect of the sound
having gone uncaptured by the imperfections of the technology. I am
reminded of the empty nothingness that I am met with every time I try to
research what became of Donald Hanson; for all the vividness with which
his memory remains present for his victims, he himself has vanished from
public life like a ghost.22 I am also reminded of the simultaneous
nothingness and excess of traumatic memories, which can emerge as
impossible to narrate, and are yet frequently experienced as repeated and
vivid bodily sensations. Walter Benjamin, paraphrasing Freud, once wrote
that “[traumatic effects] are often most powerful and most enduring when
the incident which left them behind was the one that never entered
consciousness”23; listening to this recording, I become ever more aware of
how experiences of childhood sexual abuse can feel simultaneously so
absent from one’s consciousness and so impossibly, uncomfortably close to
one’s body and sensorium. This vinyl record of the Boychoir is an artifact
of a time that is both lost and persistent, a fragment that is hauntingly
performative of the paradoxical here-ness and gone-ness of childhood
sexual trauma.
The fact that I also find this music beautiful—gooseflesh-beautiful, in
fact—disturbs and haunts me. Do I wish I had a different relationship with
this piece, one untainted by its secrets of abuse and trauma? Would I find it
as fascinating, as alluring? As upsetting? I find myself concluding that what
I find most moving about this recording—this abject music—is that it
makes me think about Donald Hanson’s relationship to it. I wonder to what
extent I am hearing the music as he heard it—I wonder to what extent this
music enables me to know, somehow, what it might feel like to have been
him. It also makes me wonder about his own past: was he once a choirboy
who was also molested by his choir director? Did he find solace from that
possible pain in music like this? Did choral music, which he so disturbingly
described as the reason for his transgressions—“to produce a great
boychoir”—also allow him to simultaneously escape and gain mastery over
the horrors of his own childhood memories, and his actions as an adult? Is
there any possibility that his harmful impulses could have been curtailed by
a deeper sublimation of his desires through sounds—and, if so, could this
kind of realization of dangerous sexual desires strictly through music
potentially help others? For some reason, this recording gives me an
empathy for Hanson that I likely would not have if I had never heard it,
further marking it as abject—I do not necessarily want to feel for Hanson,
nor any sexual abuser, despite my suggestion that doing so could create a
more safe and just world. What Hanson did was horribly wrong, and the
number of people he is known to have hurt is staggering. The acts
themselves are unforgivable; but what of the desires? Are these
unforgivable as well? And what of the music? Is it any longer (or was it
ever) an aesthetic object worthy of our admiration and enjoyment? Can
abject music still be beautiful music; can we still love it, even as we
acknowledge the atrocities of its making? Or is acknowledging the beauty
of abject music also dangerous, providing us (or me, anyway) with
empathic feelings toward someone that we ultimately shouldn’t have?
Unlike Benjamin Britten, Donald Hanson and William Sargent were
alleged pederasts: they stand accused of having transgressed an almost
unbelievable number of times, traumatizing many young boys in the
process. Their erotic urges are ones that many of us would be hard pressed
not to label as “evil,” as “degenerate”—as deserving, when acted upon, of
the highest possible punishment. Yet Lessig has also described his
experience of the trauma of being sexually abused by Hanson as follows:
“I’ve never felt angry, or really angry, at Hanson,” Lessig says. “Hanson’s sick. He’s got a
disease. The real evil isn’t the Hitler. The evil is the good German. The evil is all those
people who could’ve just picked up the goddamn telephone and stopped it.”24

Even as Lessig described his abuser as relentless and reprehensible, he

still, during the summer he was fourteen, begged his parents to permit him
to travel with Hanson to his summer home, where they were sure to engage
in further sexual relations.25 In his chilling testimony to John Heileman,
Lessig also acknowledges the possibility that his abusive experiences with
Hanson may have impacted his later success as an attorney and author who
probes fundamentally thorny ethical questions. By citing these
ambivalences, I in no way mean to suggest that being sexually traumatized
in childhood provides any benefits to victims, nor do I necessarily agree
with Lessig that Hanson bears diminished responsibility for his actions on
account of his “sickness”—although I do agree that the adults in Lessig’s
life who looked the other way, in avoidance of abjection, played their own
harmful roles. Instead, I ruminate upon Lessig’s emotional contradictions to
remind us in general of the intensely complicated experience of sexual
trauma—the ways it seems to inherently confuse and continually alter the
internal narratives of the survivors themselves, and the ways in which—
rather like the music I listened to above—these experiences can incite
strange and unexpected forms of empathy towards those who appear to
deserve it the least. Indeed, a similarly contradictory feeling pervades an
interview that former boy soprano Robert Byrens (tearfully, one imagines)
gave to the New York Times in 2002, when describing his memories of
being favored by all of the abusive teachers at the American Boychoir
School for his ethereal, other-worldly voice: “If people in the audience only
knew…what went into making those sounds.”26
Is it fair, in fact, to detect ambivalence and empathy in either of these
reflections? In these passing acknowledgements that sexual trauma may
have enabled Robert “Bobby” Byrens to produce this musical splendor, and
enabled Lawrence Lessig to produce profoundly influential scholarship?
Maybe not. I’m fairly certain that all of these objects of abject desire would
elect never to have known their abusers or desirers, at least not in the
disempowering musical/sexual contexts in which they eventually found
themselves. It is also crucially important for us to acknowledge how
unbearable such ambivalent feelings can be in the wake of having been
abused; what may easily appear to us as clear-cut cases of the harmers and
the harmed can instead, for some abuse survivors, comprise a convoluted
emotional quagmire, a devastating invitation to wonder, even many years
later, who in fact is to blame, whether one deserved or did something to
provoke the abuse, or whether, as in the cases of Lessig and Byrens, the
abuser was in fact a catalyst of artistic or personal growth. Yet what would
happen if we attempted to acquire this same level of understanding of the
abject desires that begat these survivors’ experiences in the first place—
where they come from, and how they manifest—in sound and otherwise?
How might doing that work, despite its potential challenges to our love of
certain musical works or figures, help us build a queer potentiality more
akin to Muñoz’s utopia, in which desires of an unconscionable nature can
exist and be known without being immediately demonized or dismissed,
and also somehow never result in harm to another person?
 I don’t claim to know how to do this, or to know that it can even be
done. But I do believe that continuing to be silent, continuing to disavow
the presence of these kinds of desires and transgressions and the music they
can help produce, will only allow sexual traumas to continue to occur in
darkness and shadows. I ask that we not simply acknowledge that beautiful
things can be made by people who have aberrant desires or who are violent
to others; I ask that we historicize such musics as artifacts of these
problematic desires, and that we acknowledge, in our admiration of them,
that there are human beings among us afflicted with impulses that can cause
harm to others—impulses whose harms, both potential and actual, we
should all collectively work to ameliorate. As we continue to struggle with
formulating what exactly these desires are, or the myriad ways they affect
individual humans, our first step toward being able to do this is to try to
understand them, rather than erase, dismiss, pathologize, or demonize them.
Perhaps I reach too far, or imagine too naively. Perhaps I ask too much
of music, as the central heuristic through which I imagine this possibility of
increased understanding. Perhaps music simply isn’t up to the task; perhaps
we aren’t either. But I offer these suggestions in the spirit of care and
empathy, and from a quotation I have found myself haunted by during the
entire process of writing this essay—a quotation from the shadowy world of
David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks. This is a surreal, fictional
world in which a story of incest becomes entangled with the symbolism of
demons and the occult, and in which the casting of blame for sexual
deviancy becomes uncomfortably but productively problematized: is the
abuser himself evil, or is he under the sway of a demon?
Within this infinitely queer world, in which this question is never
satisfactorily answered, a ghostly character paraphrases Shakespeare’s
Hamlet as he encourages those around him to not disregard the mysterious
and terrifying things they might see in visions, or in dreams:
There’s more in heaven and earth

than is dreamt of in our philosophies.27

A
I am indebted to John Heileman for his beautiful article “The Choirboy,” which inspired much of this
work, and to Fred Maus for inviting me to present a shorter version of this paper at his 2017
conference “Music and the Inner World,” where I received a great deal of helpful feedback from
fellow participants (especially Seth Brodsky, Michael Puri, Nomi Dave, Francis Grier, Mitchell
Morris, and, of course, Fred himself). I also thank Lamia Balafrej, Immy Humes, and Janina Galler
for talking through many of these difficult ideas with me.
N
1. I do not mean to conflate sexual abuse and pedophilia, which are very different subjects. I am
grouping them together in this essay because they have in common a stigma that contributes to
their eerie silencing in musical histories and discourses.
2. Amy Hammel-Zabin, Conversations with a Pedophile: In the Interest of Our Children (Fort
Lee: Barricade Books, Inc., 2003), x.
3. In a 2000 article in The Guardian about opera composer Richard Wagner’s well-known anti-
semitism and his music’s relationship to Israel, Alexander Knapp is quoted as being “suspicious
of the[se] arguments” that Wagner’s music should continue to be banned in Israel. “For me
music, per se, cannot be anti-semitic,’ he says, ‘though its context may be—a distasteful parody
or racist text for instance. But how can a chord or sequence of chords be anti-semitic?’” Adrian
Mourby, “Can We Forgive Him?” The Guardian, July 21, 2000.
https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,3605,345459,00.html. Accessed September
25, 2016.
4. Here are references to the two “unnamed” situations I described in paragraph 2: I began by
referencing a recorded performance of boy soprano Bobby Byrens with the Columbus Boychoir
of Princeton, directed by Donald Hanson, singing the third movement, “The Butterfly,” of
Charles Davidson’s “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” The recording is available, as of
September 24, 2016, on YouTube.com at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd5FRpZVSNs.
The story of the child molestations that occurred at the American Boychoir School in Princeton,
New Jersey is best told by John Heileman in his article “The Choirboy,” New York Magazine,
May 30, 2005. The final references to Benjamin Britten are supported by the following texts:
Philip Brett, “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” in Music and Sexuality in Britten:
Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 149; and John Bridcut,
Britten’s Children (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) (Kindle edition).
5. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU
Press, 2009), 1.
6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982), 1 (emphases mine; I also adjusted the translation of “hors de lui” from “beside
himself” to “beside themselves” to refer to what I believe is a non-gendered phenomenon in
Kristeva’s thought).
7. I believe that the reader will agree with me that Benjamin Britten and the American Boychoir
have legions of fans and worshippers.
8. This website can be accessed, as of September 2016, at http://www.virped.org/.
9. Fred S. Berlin, “Pedophilia and DSM-5: The Importance of Clearly Defining the Nature of a
Pedophilic Disorder.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online 42
(4) (December 2014): 404–407.
10. Bridcut, Britten’s Children.
11. Brett, “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” 153
12. Bridcut, Britten’s Children.
13. Valentine Cunningham, “Filthy Britten,” The Guardian, January 4, 2002.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/jan/05/arts.highereducation. Accessed September
30, 2016.
14. Brett, “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” 149.
15. Diana Jean Schemo, “Years of Sex Abuse Described at Choir School in New Jersey,” New York
Times, April 16, 2002.
16. Schemo, “Years of Sex Abuse Described”.
17. Robert Byrens, The Voice of an Angel: Poems and Letters for Spiritual Renewal from a
Fractured Life. AuthorHouse, 2013.
18. Heileman, “The Choirboy,” 2005.
19. Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of
Trauma (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 205–206.
20. Recordings that employ the full choir in this introduction include the San Francisco Girls
Chorus on the Milken Archive album “Out of the Whirlwind—I Never Saw Another Butterfly &
To the Spirit Unconquered”; a recording on YouTube of the Virginia Children’s Chorus directed
by Wes Kenney, May 2001 (accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh_6ntoIpwI as
of September 2016); and the 2015 ARSIS recording of the Northwest Girlchoir, “Inscription of
Hope,” conducted by Rebecca Rottsolk.
21. Heileman, “The Choirboy,” 2005.
22. John Heileman writes in “The Choirboy” that “a few years after being fired by the school,
Hanson decamped for England, where Lessig ran across him one day in Cambridge—and went
punting with him on the Cam. (Since then, Hanson has been hiding out in France, or in
Switzerland, or in Canada; no one is certain where.)”
23. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 160 (italics mine).
24. Heileman, “The Choirboy,” 2005.
25. Heileman, “The Choirboy,” 2005: “Lessig once told me a story about the summer after he left
the Boychoir School. Hanson invited him to take a trip to the Hanson family compound in
Canada. Lessig badly wanted to go. But his mother said no, and when Lessig asked why, she
said, ‘I don’t know, there’s something weird about this.’ Lessig threw a titanic fit. ‘I screamed,
slammed the door, walked out of the house,’ he said. ‘I came back three hours later, and we
never said anything about it ever again.’ Lessig paused. ‘They knew.’”
26. Schemo, “Years of Sex Abuse Described,” 2002.
27. Twin Peaks (television), Tim Hunter, director. Season 2, Episode 9: “Arbitrary Law.” First aired
December 1, 1990.
B
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
Berlin, Fred S. “Pedophilia and DSM-5: The Importance of Clearly Defining the Nature of a
Pedophilic Disorder.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online 42, no.
4 (2014): 404–407.
Brett, Philip. “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” in Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected
Essays, 129–153. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Bridcut, John. Britten’s Children. London: Faber & Faber, 2006 (Kindle edition).
Byrens, Robert. The Voice of an Angel: Poems and Letters for Spiritual Renewal from a Fractured
Life. AuthorHouse, 2013.
Cunningham, Valentine. “Filthy Britten.” The Guardian, January 4, 2002.
Davidson, Charles. “I Never Saw Another Butterfly” (treble choir). Ashbourne Music Publishing,
1968.
Heileman, John. “The Choirboy.” New York Magazine, May 30, 2005.
Keates, Jonathan. “Boyishness as much as Boys.” The Guardian, June 13, 2006.
Kettle, Martin. “Why We Must Talk About Britten’s Boys.” The Guardian, November 21, 2012.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press,
1982.
Mourby, Adrian. “Can We Forgive Him?” The Guardian, July 21, 2000.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU
Press, 2009.
Pace, Ian. “Does Elite Music Teaching Leave Pupils Open to Abuse?” The Telegraph, February 20,
2015.
Schemo, Diana Jean. “Years of Sex Abuse Described at Choir School in New Jersey.” New York
Times, April 16, 2002.
Tenbergen, Gilian et al. “The Neurobiology and Psychology of Pedophilia: Recent Advances and
Challenges.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (2015): 344.
Twin Peaks (television), Tim Hunter, director. Season 2, Episode 9: “Arbitrary Law.” First aired
December 1, 1990.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of
Trauma. London: Penguin Books, 2014.
 PA RT V

H I S TO R I E S
 CHAPTER 23

MUSIC IN THE MARGINS

Queerness in the Clerical Imagination, 1200–
1500
 L I S A COLTON

A first glance, Western European culture between 1200 and 1500 might
seem neatly compartmentalized, with everything in its proper place.1
Structures of governance included the Catholic Church and the feudal
system, two complex patriarchal hierarchies within which the general
population experienced its sense of identity. Men and women were also
deeply aware of the strict divisions between differently gendered bodies and
social roles, pursuing the idealized presentation of the biblical Book of
Genesis in which Adam and Eve were created as complementary, but
different, types of individual in the image of God.2 As Goldberg has
commented, “Medieval people wanted to live in an ordered society, and
hierarchy was integral to the way they thought about order.”3 The related
hierarchies of status (those who prayed, fought, or worked), gender, and age
formed a recognizable framework for everyone from king to peasant. But to
look more deeply, the lives governed by those systems of categorization—
rich/poor; lay/religious; male/female—can be seen as fundamentally queer,
as it was obvious to all that the lived experience of any individual contested
such neat boundaries at every turn.
Given that medieval society based its central ideology of power on an
idealized Christian masculinity, many groups were implicitly marginalized;
these groups included women, Jews, Muslims, the physically or mentally
impaired, witches, and sexual deviants of all types (including those
practicing same-sex partnering).4 Practices—sexual or otherwise—that
subverted the social order of man’s dominance over woman and the natural
world were perceived as socially threatening, and were frequently marked
out as heretical. Marginalized identities and practices are not as historically
invisible as one might imagine. In fact, imagery of such is ubiquitous in the
border decorations of medieval manuscripts and other material objects
(including, but not limited to, the partially obscured carvings on
misericords, decorative motifs on the edges of stained glass, and masonry in
architectural spaces barely visible to the naked eye). The present chapter
examines visual evidence that elides sexually marginalized identities,
“queerness,” with their prominence in music-related images found in the
physical margins of devotional books created by clerics. What can such
musico-sexual iconography tell us about queer understandings of the human
body before 1500?
 W Q M A ?

Although queer theory was applied to music relatively late in comparison to

its adoption elsewhere in the humanities, its impact was significant. Philip
Brett and others have posed questions of sexual identity in music in
analytical work relating to repertoire after 1700, notably music by
composers whose own gender or sexuality lay outside of the normative
model of married man with children.5 Dramatic music, songs, and opera
have been particularly attractive to scholars, since analysts can identify
resonances between text and musical language in ways that suggest the
coding of queer identity in sound. In addition, a considerable amount of
work has dealt with music of the same period through examination of
tensions in, and resistance to, aspects of tonal language.6
Medieval scholarship has only recently started to explore notions of
queerness in music, in part because two dominant frameworks for studying
the music of later periods—the notion of “genius composer,” and tonality
itself—simply do not exist in the same way before 1500. The idea of the
professional “composer,” with a single, creative authority, was still in its
infancy during the later Middle Ages, so there is no straightforward
equivalent to studying the effect of a composer’s subjectivity on their
creative output. Furthermore, pre-tonal language demands a different
approach to its successor in terms of analytical method. Finally, the
mathematical and scientific aspects of medieval music, its theoretical basis
in particular, have traditionally been emphasized over the sensual side of
music, creating an apparent disconnection between medieval music and the
body that conceived and performed it.7 There have been some notable
studies of pre-tonal music since 2000. One of the most provocative has been
Bruce Holsinger’s Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, in which
the author explored a wide range of repertoire from perspectives informed
by queer theory and feminism.8 Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens:
Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to “Hedwig” took an
even broader historical approach, and sought to interrogate how music has
functioned in culture in ways that have defied norms, revealing tension
between standard conventions of expression and pieces that have resisted
these.9 The work of Elizabeth Eva Leach has shown that even medieval
music theory and notation were inflected by notions of gender, opening up
avenues for gendered and queer readings of early song.10 Discussions of
early modern Italian music have shown sexuality to be an integral part of
musical and visual culture.11 The purpose of this chapter is to formulate a
broad basis by which we might better understand queer sensibility in
medieval culture as it pertains to music in its conception, representation,
and performance, focusing especially on marginalized musico-sexual
identities in the margins of manuscript sources.
The first issue to confront is the concept of queerness and sexuality
before 1500. It is helpful to turn to Christian legal texts on this matter. In
the medieval world, going against the ostensibly natural, male-dominated,
order caused the same type of anxiety that we find in a modern society
where homophobia exists. Nature was seen to dictate that men had authority
over women, that the rational took priority over the emotional, and that
Christians were superior to non-Christians. Matters of non-normative sexual
or gendered behavior were therefore a cause for concern, as can be inferred
from canon law. The many amendments made to the Decretum, a collection
of canon law compiled by the Bolognese writer Gratian in the twelfth
century, attest to a growing concern about certain types of sexual behavior,
and the need to regulate these within the church and wider society. Some
matters, such as masturbation, were largely left to private confession, but
others—notably same-sex coupling, incest, bestiality, bigamy, and cross-
dressing—attracted detailed and diverse penalties across Europe.
Essentially, any type of sex that was not monogamous, and practiced by a
man and a woman, with the man “on top,” was considered to be against the
natural order. The marital status of an individual was less of an issue in
many cases, since for various reasons (notably poverty) long-term
cohabitation was quite commonplace. Anal sex between men was
differently legislated depending on whether the participant was active or
passive: to be passive in intercourse upset the natural order among men, and
was perceived as effeminizing. Sins against nature, peccatorum contra
naturam, could be so by reason of species (between humans and other
animals), sex (between two persons with the same genitalia), or manner,
which Johannson and Percy have defined as sexual activity “with a member
of the opposite sex but in the wrong orifice, any one that excluded
procreation”; we shall return to the depiction of “wrong orifices” later.12
Within this prevailing climate of criticism for “unnatural” behaviors,
there were many different levels of penalty that might be applied,
depending on locality, the most recent test cases, or the age or circumstance
of the accused. Dominican friar Raymond of Peñafort (ca. 1175–1275), for
example, argued that sodomy was more serious than mother–son incest.13
The Third Lateran Council (1179) “decreed that clerics guilty of unnatural
vice must either forfeit clerical status or be confined indefinitely in a
monastery”; one cannot imagine that being sent permanently to a
homosocial environment would prove either a significant deterrent or a
preventative measure against further sexual relations between men.14
Lesbian behaviors were rarely commented on in canon law.15 From the late
thirteenth century, legislation showed a renewed vigour in identifying
homosexual practices among men and applying often violent and torturous
penalties, including castration and burning. Yet long-term same-sex
partnering seems to have been tolerated in some areas. For example, as
Brundage has speculated, Pierre de La Palude (ca. 1275–1342) “even found
it necessary to explain at length why the Church did not allow homosexuals
to marry one another, which may indicate that he was aware, or at least
fearful, of attempts to extend social recognition to same-sex relationships
through some type of wedding ritual.”16 It is also difficult to establish the
reason for some decretals, or amendments, in terms of whether they are
firmly indicative of queer behavior; for example the £50 fine for
transvestites in Reggio Emilia may have been invented as a response to fear
that men were cross-dressing to gain access to women-only sections of the
church.17 What such legal pronouncements can tell us, however, is that
medieval society was aware of a diverse range of couplings and behaviors
that were understood as non-normative; for our purposes, we might identify
them as potential sites of queerness.
M Q T

What musical behaviors and practices might have been viewed as

transgressive? The work of Holsinger and Peraino has helped to locate what
might broadly be seen as queer identities within the medieval period.
Identities can be shaped as well as expressed through music; queerness, like
gender, can be viewed as performative in that it is dynamic and culturally
contingent. The relationship between interior experience and outward
practice in music invites a constant dialog between self and society. That
the externalizing of that interior world may be revealed through sound, and
through the performing body (such as through song) adds to the deep
connection between subjectivity and music. Peraino sees music as a
potential “site…of resistance”; she associates the word “queer” with
“questioning,” thus giving the idea of “queerness” a powerful political
function to mediate between what is normative and what is marginalized.18
As such, we might expect a close relationship between, and similar reaction
to, sexual and musical behaviors where either challenges cultural norms.
Furthermore, we might expect to see, in early texts, an elision of the
resistance to strict regulation of behaviors within society and the resistance
to stable portrayals of musical practices and experiences. And so it proves.
Musical iconography and descriptions of music-making frequently
problematize human sexual experience, such as the division of Man from
beast, in ways that reveal the interlocking of anxieties about sexual
identities and the sensual in music. That such images are almost exclusively
the products of male authors and male scriptoria (as far as one can
reasonably establish) is suggestive of a particular interest in subversive
topics by this social group.
Musical performance makes use of parts of the human body that also
have a function in sexual activity, but the genitals themselves may be
defined as the opposite of those body parts; the mouth was often viewed as
suggestive of, yet opposite to, the anus or vagina.19 Lips are used to blow
down wind and brass instruments, as well as for kissing; fingers are used to
produce different pitch tones as well as in caresses, arousal, and penetration.
The sin against nature “by reason of manner”—in which sexual activity
included employment of incorrect orifices—invites us to draw parallels
between the queer practices in some forms of sex and the non-procreative
use of sexual organs in music-making, the result of which was frequently
pleasurable to performer and listener. Parodic depictions of pseudo-musical
activity in which the instruments are replaced by other implements, or are
drawn being played by animals or human butts, might be seen to further
extemporize on the medieval anxiety in which the human body was both
divinely created and inherently sinful through its tendency towards carnal
pleasure.
That music might be related to experiences of gender and sexuality has
been explored not only in the scholarly writings of recent decades, but also
in scholarship originating deep in the medieval past. Music’s power to stir
the soul, and, by extension, the body, was admired as well as feared by
those with reforming spiritual hearts. For example, Aelred of Rievaulx and
John of Salisbury, writing during the twelfth century, lamented that the
vogue for elaborate singing could be dangerously effeminizing not only for
the audience but for male singers themselves.20 This corruption, according
to John of Salisbury, could result from interaction with the “lightness and
dissolution of dainty voices designed to achieve vain glory in the feminine
manner when singing the divine office,” particularly affecting those men
who were already prone to such effeminacy.21 Significantly for this chapter,
John was particularly anxious that listeners might mistake the singers for
sirens—human–avian hybrids—in such a way that disrupts the natural order
of man over beast and implies that the choristers are embracing sounds that
invite a blending of the otherwise distinct categories of nature.22 The
images on which the remainder of this chapter focuses include sirens and
hybrid beasts, whose grotesque features and sinful vanities remind the
viewer of the problems of regulating pleasurable sounds.
 Q M B : S
M P M

There is a distinct overlap of discourses relating to musical and carnal

pleasures in texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Music’s
historical role in romance and courtship is significant, from the troubadour
canso to the Lied of nineteenth-century Germany. But music was also
associated with the transgressive and forbidden sides of human sexuality.
Although they are not marginalia, two fifteenth-century woodcuts (see
Figures 23.1 and 23.2) illustrate the close relationship between musical
performance and erotic pleasures in ways that can be found across later
examples. The woodcuts depict activities associated with prostitution, such
as communal bathing. Instrumental and vocal performances occur in both of
these images, emphasizing the sounds of music-making and love-making in
combination. One might expect only improvised minstrelsy within brothels,
but both artists have been careful to indicate that the singers are literate,
using parchment rolls of notated polyphonic song: these are learned, civic
musicians. Holsinger has reminded us that instruments, especially those
crafted from skin, gut, and bone, are essentially resonating flesh;
furthermore, instruments like trumpets and woodwind require our mouths
and breath to make them sound. In this way, instruments of all types were
ripe for suggestive commentary.
FIGURE 23.1 Music-making, communal bathing and courtship. Anonymous woodcut (Basle, c.
1430). Mary Evans Picture Library, No. 10503332.
FIGURE 23.2 The influence of Venus on sexual desire. Anonymous woodcut (Italy, 15th century).
Newberry Library, Chicago.

A common way for the medieval scribe or illuminator to draw attention,

for a variety of purposes, to the sort of queer musical and erotic activities
discussed in this chapter was through strategies such as juxtaposition,
reversal, mirroring, or substitution. We can observe some of these
approaches in the woodcuts. The composition of Figure 23.1 faces the trio
of bathers with the trio of brass and wind; the remainder of the scene pairs
sexually active couples and duets of plucked strings (harp and lute, center)
and voice (top right). Each partner faces its mirror image, with the trios
mirroring one another at the top of the image, prominently signaled by the
fanfare trumpet. The impression is of a richly sensory scene (water, flowers,
music) within a garden of sexual pleasure.
 In discussions of devotional manuscripts before 1500, scholars have
sometimes seen marginal images as little more than decoration, or as
containing simple mnemonic reference points. Others have drawn attention
to the power of images as satire, or even as a counterpoint to the verbal text.
Michael Camille, in particular, has argued that “the art of the Middle Ages
was not a sombre expression of social unity and transcendent order,” but
“was rooted in the conflicted life of the body with all its somatic was well
as spiritual possibilities.”23 Manuscripts featuring musical instruments
arguably perform this function with particular frisson, the page conveying
not just scenario and physical gesture but also sound.
In a fifteenth-century copy of Pseudo-Aristotle (London, British Library,
Sloane 748), the margins thrive with such imagery, particularly dominated
by the reflection of a beast playing the bagpipes alongside a jester whose
genitals are on display (see Figure 23.3). Bagpipes could be made out of all
sorts of animals during this period, but usually the identifying body parts
(heads, skeletons) were removed to turn them into the wind chamber of the
instrument. In Figure 23.3, the drone of the bagpipes is mirrored by the
jester’s leg, propped up on the man’s left arm, which he plays with (while
playing with) his penis as if it is the fingered bagpipe chanter. The jester’s
right hand presses against his own chest, apparently forcing air downwards
towards his anus, leg-drone, and genitals, turning him into human bagpipes.
The reversal is one of man and beast, in which the musical and the sexual
are superimposed for moralizing or comic effect. A number of grotesque
hybrids complete the cluttered margin, some blowing horns which—in the
presence of the jester’s pseudo-musical appendage—might easily be
understood as additional penises. An array of queered blown instruments
and bodies combine to present a visual and sonic cacophony. A stronger
visual exemplar for a sin against nature is difficult to imagine.
FIGURE 23.3 © The British Library Board. Pseudo-Aristotle, De caelo et de anima. London,
British Library, Sloane 748 f.82v. Manuscript written by Malcolm Ramsey in 1487.

The surviving illuminated manuscripts of the later Middle Ages contain

a staggering array of depictions of musical instruments and practices, often
in a playful manner. Typically, such imagery comprises figures—human,
animal, or hybrid—singing or playing an instrument in the margins of a
religious text, occasionally with satirical play on the verbal text of the
central page. Certain initials, notably Psalm 97 Cantate Domino, invited a
tradition of historiated initials in which a group of male clerics gathered
around a lectern to perform a piece of music, sometimes identifiable as
polyphony.24 The extent to which such depictions of music-making were
intended to be realistic is not clear-cut, not least on account of the frequent
use of fantasy within images of performance. Overall, the purposes of
images in the margins must have varied from those simply “illustrating”
particular lifelike scenarios, to many others that shunned realism for some
other form of social commentary. In reference to the Macclesfield Psalter,
created in East Anglia in the second quarter of the fourteenth century,
Jeremy Montagu has speculated that the function of images was “to
delight,” and “to alleviate what one can only assume to have been the
longueurs of services, of reading through the Book of Psalms and other
parts of the liturgy, and perhaps of listening to sermons.”25 There is clearly
more to be explored than this functional interpretation of the manuscript
marginalia might suggest. Above all, I would argue that the manipulations
of human (and non-human) bodies and instruments emphasize the sensual
side of music itself, from the embodiment of sound to the way in which the
body can produce sound itself and through the use of instruments that
extend that capability.26
The instrument most frequently illustrated in the margins is the trumpet.
The trumpet is depicted in a wide range of places, and is not limited to the
illustration of a particular feast or Psalm.27 The standard exemplum in more
serious trumpet iconography was the image of heavenly angels, sounding
their instruments in heavenly praise, or to announce the Last Judgement.
Trumpets could be long or short, but are identifiable by their shape and by
their playing style; the instrument has no finger-holes or keys, and requires
strong breath through the mouthpiece to make it sound, sometimes shown
through the player’s distended cheeks (see Figures 23.1 and 23.2). Usually,
long trumpets are heavy, sturdy instruments. However, sometimes the shape
droops, suggestive of its weight or perhaps mocking the masculinity of the
player, as can be seen in Figure 23.4. The Macclesfield Psalter is richly
decorated in a style typical of the prestigious scriptoria of fourteenth
century East Anglia. Floral motifs, including borders shaped by leaves and
vines, are found throughout, and most pages also contain lively scenes of
various types, some clearly fanciful and others more documentary. The
detail of the trumpet player on f.223r shows an ape-man, whose nudity
implies his bestial nature; he is not fully human. Neither is he fully male:
the “man” holds a trumpet poorly, struggling to support its weight as it
droops before him. The pose requires the viewer to see the trumpet as
representative of the man’s genitals, which are otherwise hidden from view.
The users of this devotional book will have been confronted by an example
of the opposite of ideal masculinity; instead of chivalric knighthood, or
religious chastity, the figure fails to measure up musically or sexually.

FIGURE 23.4 Naked ape-man playing a drooping trumpet in the Macclesfield Psalter ©
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. MS 1-2005, f.223r.

Symbolically, the trumpet has been used for comic effect in terms of its
association with the pseudo-musical sound and experience of farting.28 As
Emma Dillon notes in her discussion of Dante’s Divina commedia, the
sounds of hell included a devil signaling to the devil army by making a
trumpet of his arse (de cul fatto trombetta).29 Such jokes work on two
levels: they reverse the place of the buzzing lips from those of the mouth to
the anus; and they also subvert the bright tone of the fanfare trumpet,
associated with pageantry. The fart is a poor musical alternative to the
nobility of courtly fanfares. If there is one visual joke that might exemplify
medieval humor as found in the margins of devotional books (as well as in a
wide range of satirical literature of the same period) it is that of the
substitution of the head for the butt, or for things that would normally be
done by the head being done with the butt, or vice versa.30 Clerical scribes
and illuminators were fixated on bodily functions such as pissing, farting,
and shitting; these were central pillars in their humor. Within this tradition,
depictions of trumpets reveal a further layer of anal fixation in the minds of
illuminators, since one can easily find numerous examples of trumpets and
other instruments being “played” in odd, impractical, or downright lewd
ways, conflating the musical with the primary physiological functions of the
human body. What such images have in common is their apparent
acknowledgement that the most extreme images were those showing
musical expression—reserved in the liturgy for the praise of God—as part
of a queer sensibility, a visual and sonic sin against nature and order.
Margins, quire ends, and other divisions in medieval books of
polyphony have been identified as queer spaces, a natural and literal home
for the marginalized.31 The images of trumpets found in devotional books
frequently emphasize that which is contra naturam, and do so playfully.
Although women do occasionally feature playing trumpets in manuscript
illumination, they are usually exceptional in some way in their gendered
identity. Figure 23.5 shows a marginal image from a fourteenth-century
Missal, a liturgical book for use in the celebration of Mass. At the base of
the page, two mermaids are shown with long trumpets. Mermaids are an
aquatic form of the siren, a hybrid creature found widely in the imagery of
the Middle Ages, whose music “positions her in the flowing spaces between
the human, animal, and spirit worlds.”32 Sirens and mermaids were more
often female than male, but they were also ambiguously gendered. Here, the
mermaids’ sex is signaled by their bell-like, pendulous breasts, and by their
long hair (a feature signaling their lascivious nature), but the presence of the
trumpets signals masculinity.33 The gender-queer nature of the image is also
enhanced by the mermaids’ poses. On the left, one mermaid appears to hold
the trumpet as an oar, rather than sounding it; the mermaid on the right-
hand side plays to her companion, but holds the instrument awkwardly,
unnaturally. As an image, the presence of the trumpets serves to emphasize
the sexual liminality of the figures in the margin.

FIGURE 23.5 Mermaids with trumpets. Den Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 78 D 40, f.129r.
Amiens, Garnerus de Morolio (scribe), Petrus de Raimbaucourt (illuminator). Missal, Use of St Jean,
Amiens, illuminated by Pierre de Raimbaucourt (1323).

As we have seen in some of the examples so far, a feature of images

containing trumpeters is a blurring of distinctions between (civilized)
human and (wild) beast. At the most basic level, this is achieved simply by
having creatures playing instruments, or by the player’s ambiguous species.
Sometimes, the animals play with apparent proficiency; at other times the
manner of playing reveals their incompetence within the authentic civilized
realm of the human. One of the things that separates humanity from beasts
is clothing, itself a marker of civilization, and in particular the focus on
naked bottoms draws attention to the private parts of human anatomy.
Animals wearing clothing or naked men therefore blur the distinction
between the two categories, and brass and wind instruments act as props to
emphasize the lack of civility of either creature.
Figure 23.6 shows an image from a late thirteenth-century secular
French romance text. The margin shows two apes: one holds his trumpet in
a conventional pose, but he does so aiming the bell up the rectum of the
other animal, who is not pleased. The reversal jokes here include the
trumpet being played into an orifice, and the wrong end of the instrument
being juxtaposed against the “wrong end” of the other ape. One can image
the sound and sensation, in which the rasping trumpet call is placed against
the second ape’s anus. The regular appearance of musical fart jokes
featuring trumpets can also be understood to have sexual and gendered
associations. As Allen points out, in Old Icelandic—and related languages
such as Middle English—there were separate words for a strong farter
(fretr) and a one who could only make a weak fart (físa). Significantly, to
accuse a man of being a físa was more offensive, because it implied
effeminacy, of not being a full and proper man.34 The apes below are thus
not proper men by virtue of their species, but also through the image’s
subversion of the culturally coded associations of sound, instruments, and
physical contact.
FIGURE 23.6 Apes playing trumpet. General Collection, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Old French Prose Lancelot del Lac (France, late 13th
century), Beinecke MS 229 f.147r.

As Allen has remarked, “the musical butt is ubiquitous in the Middle

Ages, and presupposes a larger analogy between the human body and
musical instruments.”35 Sometimes this analogy could be played out
through revealing the naked body playing the instruments, sometimes
through body imagery in the depiction of the instruments themselves. We
have already seen this kind of mirroring in Figure 23.3. Figure 23.7, from
the Rothschild Canticles (a devotional manuscript copied in the Rhineland
ca. 1300), shows an extension of the human body’s musical capabilities
with a naked man farting through a long trumpet. The figure’s masculinity
is problematized by his nudity and by his hairlessness. The trumpet is
decorated with drapery in the style associated with pageantry and chivalric
display.36 The sounding of the man’s body, the sound of his butt, is an
amplified, public announcement.

FIGURE 23.7 Naked man playing trumpet. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, MS 404, Rothschild Canticles, f. 134r.

Although Allen’s comments apply well to these images, a further

question remains: when does the musical body stop being the body of
sexual pleasure? For me, the literal resonance of the musical body,
juxtaposed with or penetrated by the mouth of the trumpet, emphasizes
distinctly sexual undertones. In images like Figures 23.6 and 23.7, the
implied vibration of the anus by either end of the instrument suggests
sensation or even pleasure from this musico-sexual act.
Some images help to establish the historical association between music
and sinfulness. The hybrid creature found in the fifteenth-century Prayer
Book of Charles the Bold (Figure 23.8) demonstrates the mirroring effect of
two trumpets: a man’s head playing a heavenly pointed instrument, as he
supports the shaft of a further fanfare trumpet, inserted into his anus. The
prayerful viewer is encouraged to contemplate on the purity of angelic
trumpeting (marks showing upward sounds are visible above the bell), set
against its reversal: the animal grotesque, whose sideways glance, and
distorted blowing cheeks imply the sinful nature of its music.

FIGURE 23.8 Prayer Book of Charles the Bold (Ghent and Antwerp, 1469) The J. Paul Getty
Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 37, fol. 32v (detail).
 C M

The images used in this chapter mainly emanated from a clerical production
context, rather than a monastic one. Clerical identity, by the later Middle
Ages, was defined by its celibacy as well as its learnedness, although even
after the reforms of the eleventh century and further interventions, secular
clerics sometimes maintained domestic arrangements with a partner or
children even into the thirteenth century.37 The waves of legislation during
this era were symptomatic of a crisis in clerical identity in which
masculinity was fundamental, as the increased focus on celibacy threatened
the clear distinction between men and women; in effect, the celibate clerk
occupied a third gender, in which gendered signifying acts of militarism or
childbearing were replaced by pseudo-chivalric battles of the flesh.38 The
clerical circles from which manuscripts such as Psalters, Missals, or other
decorated codices emanated were thus heavily conflicted in terms of sexual
identity, so it is little surprise that alongside the central page in which
religious or moral texts dominated, artists would choose to explore subjects
that reflected that liminality.
Illuminated manuscripts were typically commissioned by noble, lay
patrons, from a professional craftsmen each with his own unique
combination of imagery, symbolism, and humor. What did the makers and
users of the manuscripts featuring the sexual and musical body understand
from the designs in their books? Although it is possible that users employed
images simply to distract them from the duller parts of liturgical ritual,
arguably this idea misses the rich potential for social commentary in
pictures that represented the sounds of society, real and imagined. The
musical and sexualized images in the margins of medieval books blurred
the apparently stable categories of medieval society. Such images were
created by, and in turn commented on, human experience on the margins of
lay culture. Manuscript margins allowed readers to engage with the
fantastic, and with the queer. Many images are also shockingly obscene, “a
category that demands that we rethink our own assumptions and
preconceptions of the Middle Ages.”39 The shock engendered by such
obscenity does not necessarily suggest that the medieval reader would have
had a singular response, such as moral outrage or laughter. Instead of being
bound by the limits of standard hierarchies, marginal images encouraged
speculation of their opposite: the experiences, relationships, and acts that
were defined as being against nature, the God-given natural order. In short,
musico-sexual bodies allowed the reader to be involved in a queer
sensibility that lay outside of what was usually permitted in terms of the
norms of gender, class, or profession.
Music, at its most basic level, can be made without any instrument other
than the human body; the body is also the site for the perception of sound,
and where music is felt in terms of pleasure. As such, musical expression is
reflexive and circular: a singer conceives of what she might sing, performs,
experiences its vibrations in her body, and hears and understands its effects.
The medieval mind understood the sensual associations of music and the
instruments that produced it, and how the human body itself was inherently
musical in ways that could be fit equally for singing divine praise in
worship, or demonstrating mankind’s more base instincts. A fixation on the
body as instrument, and on the (mis)use of trumpets and bagpipes in
relation to the anus, is a frequent trope of manuscript imagery from 1200–
1500. Instrumentalists in marginal images amplified notions of the obscene
body. With bagpipes, “the offence…quite literally amplified by reference to
the wheezing wail of one of the noisiest and most unsettling sounds of the
period”; with trumpets, the protrusion of mouthpiece or bell into private
parts of the anatomy lampooned the highest forms of Christian, masculine
display, even satirizing the angels in heaven.40 The effect of such images
was to blur the divinely ordained categories of society, reveling in the
queering of traditional hierarchies by music and by the sounding sexual
body.
N
1. Notwithstanding the inherent problems of periodization—not least as understood in disciplines
such as music and art history—the period 1200–1500 will be understood as the later Middle
Ages within this chapter.
2. It is important to recognize that the Galenic, one-sex model of sexual identity was commonplace
in the period under discussion; within this one-sex model, men and women were expected to
have separate gender roles, and some social groups (notably monks and nuns) were sometimes
conceptualized as neither fully masculine nor feminine. On medieval gender and sexuality
before 1600, see especially Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990).
3. P. J. P. Goldberg, Medieval England: A Social History 1250–1550 (London: Bloomsbury, 2004),
3.
4. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London
and New York: Routledge, 1991).
5. Philip Brett’s work on Benjamin Britten’s music can be seen as typical of his pioneering
approach to understanding the role of studying the relationship between sexuality and music;
Music and Sexuality in Britten (Berkeley and London: Routledge, 2006). On the relationship
between music and sexuality, see also Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, eds,
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (London and New York: Routledge,
1994) and Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, eds, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern
Identity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
6. For an excellent study of the use of biography, historical context, lyric, and tonal language in
relation to sexuality, see Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
7. For an argument that writers of medieval music theory in fact saw “sensuous pleasure” as “the
ultimate goal of music,” see Frank Hentschel, “The Sensual Music Aesthetics of the Middle
Ages: The Cases of Augustine, Jacques de Liège and Guido of Arezzo,” Plainsong and
Medieval Music 20 (2011): 1–29 (quotation from p. 1). Medieval music theory texts are
explored in order to elucidate cultural attitudes in Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music,
Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
2007).
8. Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
9. Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identities from Homer to
“Hedwig” (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006).
10. Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Gendering the Semitone, Sexing the Leading Note: Fourteenth-Century
Music Theory and the Directed Progression,” Music Theory Spectrum 28 (2006): 1–21.
11. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver eds, Sexualities, Textualities,
Art and Music in Early Modern Italy: Playing with Boundaries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
12. Warren Johannson and William A. Percy, “Homosexuality,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality,
ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 155–189
(at p. 156).
13. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London,
1987), 399.
14. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 399.
15. See Jacqueline Murray. “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages,” in
Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191–211.
16. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 474.
17. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 536.
18. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, 5.
19. On the associations between women’s vocality and their sexual availability in medieval song,
see Lisa Colton, “The Articulation of Virginity in the Medieval chanson de nonne,” Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 133 (2008): 159–188.
20. For a full discussion of these texts, see Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, 157–168.
21. John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus, cited in Elizabeth Eva Leach, “Music and Masculinity in the
Middle Ages,” in Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, ed. Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 21–39 (at p. 30).
22. Leach, “Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages,” 30–31. See also Elizabeth Eva Leach,
“‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly as the Fowler Deceives the Bird’: Sirens in the Middle Ages,”
Music and Letters 87 (2006): 187–211. Further exploration of hybrids can be found in Margot
McIlwain Nishimura, Images in the Margins (London: The British Library, 2009), 46–50.
23. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992),
160.
24. A variety of Cantate Domino initials is explored in Christopher Page, “An English Motet of the
Fourteenth Century in Performance: Two Contemporary Images,” Early Music 25 (1997): 7–32;
see also a response to this article in Lisa Colton, “Languishing for Provenance: Zelo tui langueo
and the Search for Women’s Polyphony in England,” Early Music 39 (2011): 315–326.
25. Jeremy Montagu, “Musical Instruments in the Macclesfield Psalter,” Early Music 34 (2006):
189–203 (at p. 202). The full shelf mark is Macclesfield Psalter, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam
Museum, MS 1-2005. A colour facsimile with commentary is available ed. Stella Panayotova,
The Macclesfield Psalter (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
26. On medieval listening and the embodiment of sound, see Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound:
Musical Meanings in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2012).
27. Montagu, “Musical Instruments in the Macclesfield Psalter,” 189.
28. Valerie Allen, On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave,
2007).
29. Emma Dillon, “Representing Obscene Sound,” in Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald
(Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 55–84 (at p. 56).
30. On anal erotics in liturgical music, see especially the discussion of Parisian organum in
Holsinger, “Polyphones and Sodomites: Music and Sexual Dissidence from Leoninus to
 Chaucer’s Pardoner,” in Music, Body and Desire, 137–187.
31. Peraino makes this point in reference to a fascicle of the Montpellier Codex in “Monophonic
Motets: Sampling and Grafting in the Middle Ages,” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 644–680 (at
p. 664).
32. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, “Introduction: Singing Each to Each,” in Music of
the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2006), 1–15 (at p. 3).
33. For an extensive sample of images featuring instruments, see Lilian M. C. Randall, Images in
the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1966).
34. Allen, On Farting, 28.
35. Allen, On Farting, 28.
36. On this manuscript, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in
Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Sarah
Bromberg, “Gendered and Ungendered Readings of the Rothschild Canticles,” Different
Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008) [no page]; accessed
http://differentvisions.org/issue1PDFs/Bromberg.pdf.
37. On clerical masculinities, see Michael Frassetto, ed., Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on
Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform (London and New York, 1998); and P. H.
Cullum, “Clergy, Masculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England,” in Masculinity in
Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London and New York, 1999), 178–196.
38. On this point, see Jacqueline Murray, “Masculinizing Religious Life: Sexual Prowess, the Battle
for Chastity and Monastic Identity,” in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H.
and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2002), 24–42.
39. Nicola McDonald, “Introduction” to McDonald, Medieval Obscenities, 1–16 (at p. 11).
40. Dillon, “Representing Obscene Sound,” p. 75.
R
Allen, Valerie. On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages. New York, Palgrave: 2007.
Austern, Linda Phyllis, and Inna Naroditskaya eds. Music of the Sirens. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006.
Bullough, Vern L. and James A. Brundage eds. Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. New York and
London: Garland, 1996.
Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion, 1992.
Holsinger, Bruce. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass, and
London: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Leach, Elizabeth Eva. “‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly as the Fowler Deceives the Bird”: Sirens in
the Middle Ages.” Music and Letters 87 (2006): 187–211.
McDonald, Nicola, ed. Medieval Obscenities. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006.
Peraino, Judith. Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identities from Homer to
Hedwig. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2006.
Richards, Jeffrey. Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages. London and
New York: Routledge, 1991.
 CHAPTER 24

T H E Q U E E R H I S TO RY O F T H E
C A S T R ATO
 E MI LY WI L BOU RNE

This theme of sexual ambiguity is one to which I shall return, as have all writers
about castrati.

M epigraph is taken from the opening pages of Nicholas Clapton’s life-

and-times account of the last Vatican castrato, Alessandro Moreschi (1858–
1922); the emphasis is mine.1 Clapton’s generalization crystallizes a crucial
dimension of modern castrato reception: the castrato’s altered body insists
on the materiality and sexuality of musical sound. The surgical means of
production and the sexualized site of physical intervention have focused
scholarly attention on the body of the performer and on the reactions of
audience members to a voice and to a body that both fall outside the
framework of modern heteronormative desire. My point here is
emphatically not to suggest that castrati as a group should be considered
“gay.” Bodily morphology maps awkwardly onto sexual identity; anecdotal
and documentary evidence testifies to a rich spectrum of sexual behaviors.
Crucially, however, prepubescent castration (as is necessary to preserve the
castrato voice) interrupts the typical patterns of sexual development, and
therein lies the rub: Western culture has long glossed homosexuality as an
interrupted or failed instance of heterosexuality, and by that logic, the
castrato is always gay—even when he’s not.
Over the last 30 years, a cottage industry of scholarship has emerged
around the figure of the castrato, nurtured by the material and critical
desires of the new musicology, by a burgeoning interest in historically
informed performance, and by an increased overlap between music and
other disciplinary fields, such as literary criticism and the history of
medicine.2 As Clapton intimates, much of the literature is hung upon the
hook of the castrato’s “ambiguous sexuality.” Here, the attentive reader
might pause, for the choice of words betrays an interesting slippage: there is
not necessarily anything ambiguous about the sexuality of a castrated male
body. While the gendered presentation of some castrati was arguably
feminine, or indeed ambiguous—along with high voices, many castrati had
luxuriant hair, soft cheeks, and a distribution of body fat that accumulated
on their pectorals and hips—the inclusion of sexual identity within the zone
of ambiguity depends upon a routine conflation of cross-gendered behavior
with deviant sexuality (all sissies are gay; all tomboys grow up to be
lesbian).3 As queer readers, we would do well to recall Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s lucid and compelling admonition in the axiomatic introduction
to Epistemology of the Closet, “our by now unquestioned reading of the
phrase ‘sexual orientation’ to mean ‘gender of object-choice,’ is at the very
least damagingly skewed by the specificity of its historical placement.”4
It has become a queer theoretical commonplace to date the advent of
“homosexuality” (and “heterosexuality”) to the late nineteenth century, and
yet it remains terribly difficult to frame discussions of earlier historical
periods without reinscribing the binary axes of the modern sexual matrix.
Thus, for most critics and historians, the queerness of the castrato has been
taken for granted, and the amply documented desires of (some) castrati for
women, and of (many) female listeners for castrato voices and castrated
bodies, have too often been treated as surprising historical quirks in need of
explanation.
In this chapter, I am interested in thinking through the ways in which the
figure of the castrato has functioned within modern scholarship. It is both
an investigation into the castrato’s queer history and an argument for his
historical queerness. Most important, I am interested in decoupling the
castrato from the psychosexual matrix of contemporary reception in order
to resituate him within the signifying context of his own time. Sensitive
research on castrati as differentiated subjects of history reveals the cultural
contingency of the current discourse about sex and sexuality. Juxtaposing
castrato singers with gay, trans*, and queer modern identities, I argue for
the relevance of castrato scholarship and of the lives of castrato singers and
their admirers (of all genders).
 F : A D

The Italian term “castrato” is an obvious cognate for the English word
“castrated,” and yet its use refers to a specific historically and culturally
bounded period of the Western European past.5 From c.1550 onward, the
presence of altered male singers is documented in the church choirs of the
Italian peninsula. Their high soprano and alto voices provided an effective
solution to the expansive tessitura of Renaissance polyphony, which had
been jeopardized by rigid theological interpretations of the Pauline dictum,
mulieres in ecclesiis taceant—women should keep silent in church.6 As
Giuseppe Gerbino has made clear, castrated men were not a new component
of the Italian cultural landscape. While bodily mutilation of any stripe was
frowned upon under church law, the operation was widely regarded as a
cure for several ailments (including hernias, gout, and epilepsy), and, in
some jurisdictions, was exercised as a form of corporal punishment.7
What was new after 1550 was the widespread use of prepubescent
castration as a means to manufacture a high male voice—castration in the
service of song. While some adult castrati were blunt about the deliberate
construction of their voices, others obfuscated the details, particularly
during the later years of their popularity; tragic childhood accidents
necessitating medical intervention were a persistent element of biographies
and personal narratives, and while the details were often vague, wild boars
or unruly horses were frequently invoked.8
By all accounts, castrato voices differed substantially from adult female
voices and from those of unaltered men. Neither did they merely replicate
and extend the boyish voices of childhood. A full-grown castrato retained
the small, flexible vocal folds of a prepubescent boy, coupled with the large,
resonant lungs and chest of an adult male; indeed, some castrati were
noticeably larger in stature than their unaltered counterparts, for the
development of their growth plates and bone lengths were affected by their
unique hormonal makeup. The resultant voices were described using words
such as “delightful,” “powerful,” and “brilliant”—for us, rather opaque
signifiers for a voice that has been irrevocably lost to time.
 The loss of that voice has itself become a scholarly issue. There are (by
temporal definition) no living castrati, and the small handful of recordings
—all from 1902 or 1904, all by a single singer—offer an awkward
testament to the legacy of castrato sound.9 While the long musicological
discourse on authenticity should be sufficient to convey the impossibility of
hearing this music with “period ears,” the technological limitations of early
recording devices pose further problems related to timbre and tessitura; the
quality is not particularly good, although the recorded material remains
“pure,” in the sense that the recordings were not edited or improved upon
by contemporary record producers.10 The performing conventions of late-
Romantic vocal technique also serve to render the melodic treatment
foreign by the standards of the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries alike.
Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato on record, was 44 and 46 years
old during the recording sessions, and his voice was arguably past his
prime.11 Many auditors have found the recordings disappointing—a thin,
grating noise at odds with the lush, virtuosic sound described in
contemporary sources.12 Others wax lyrical about the voice, describing it as
“strong and powerful”; still others stress the “uncanny” qualities of
Moreschi’s voice.13 Two recent efforts offer fresh responses to the extant
material: Martha Feldman (2015) manages to listen past some of the
limitations of the recording medium, comparing Moreschi’s rendition of
Gournod’s Ave Maria to recordings made by female singers during the same
decade; Marco Beghelli and Raffaele Talmelli (2011) have listened for
traces of the castrati in the more-numerous and better-preserved recordings
of the next generation, separating out women and men who trained with
castrato teachers and suggesting that several now-defunct techniques might
be redolent of aesthetic qualities inherent to castrato song.14
Castrated voices remained a feature of Italian sacred music up to the first
decades of the twentieth century, although the broader popularity of castrati
paralleled the trajectory of Italian theatrical song. The earliest experiments
in dramatic monody took place in a courtly, academic milieu where chapel
singers—including castrati—were active participants.15 Early public opera
utilized castrati as verisimilar vocal representations of young, love-struck
men, while opera seria (the dominant operatic genre from around 1680–
1770) relied on the specific technical capacities of castrato singers as a
constitutive element of musical and dramatic structure. The piercing
brilliance, florid dexterity, and vaunted breath control of the best castrato
voices idealized the musical aesthetics of the seria sound, and the preserved
boyishness of the castrati themselves personified the young, noble heroes
and lovers who populated the seria stage. It is this context—sacred and
secular, choral and operatic, but always overwhelmingly musical—that is
invoked by the term “castrato,” setting him apart from castrated individuals
from other eras and places.
The delimitation of a specific period of castrato prominence is not to
imply that the historical reception of castrato singers and their voices was a
unified, consolidated whole—after all, the castrati dominated the Italian
musical landscape for over 200 years. Beyond Italian borders, the practice
of prepubescent castration was typically regarded with some suspicion, and
opinions differed wildly regarding the value of the voices produced, ranging
from celebration to condemnation. Between 1550 and 1770, public culture
changed as drastically as musical style, moving from the humanism of the
High Renaissance to the political citizenship of the Enlightenment.16 For
later generations, the barbaric aspects of castration intensified,
problematizing issues of consent and full political agency. Concurrent shifts
in musical style and individual subjectivity contributed to the decline of the
castrato and the eventual demise of the practice of castration.
S : T C ’ Q H

From the perspective of the present moment, widespread prepubescent

castration is unthinkable: the very idea makes grown men cringe and
parents protest. Yet the strength of that revulsion is also a measure of the
castrato’s fascination. Castration anxiety is a deeply embedded element of
the post-Freudian imaginary. The psychosexual trappings of modernity
condition the reception of castrati in popular and academic contexts.17 For
many modern readers, the body of the castrato is defined by lack, his
history fully coextensive with the disruptive violence of the cut. Displaced
by synecdoche, the castrated individual is rendered neither male nor female,
but a monster without access to full personhood, condemned to a
melancholy existence and continually longing for a prelapsarian plenitude
of love and sexual satisfaction.
This figure is exemplified in the work of Roland Barthes, whose S/Z (a
reading of the Honoré de Balzac story Sarrasine) has served as a critical-
theoretical gateway to the castrato for many commentators.18 First
published in French in 1970 and translated into English only four years
later, S/Z theorizes a castrato divorced from history. For Barthes, and for
Lacanians like Michel Poizat, the fact of having been castrated is loaded
with developmental significance.19 According to such readings, castration
separates sexual potency from the body; in the case of castrato singers, the
agency and aggressive eroticism typically associated with the male sexual
organ are displaced onto the singer’s voice. This voice-as-phallus functions
as a consolation prize, meted out in the absence of normal sexual
development: a powerful tool of seduction used to explain the popularity of
the castrato’s song.20
The foundational nature of Barthes and Lacan is evident at the origins of
queer musicology: in Queering the Pitch (1994), Joke Dame writes as a
modern listener enamored of early modern operatic texts, and more
specifically, as a lesbian listener entranced by productions in which female
singers replace the absent castrati.21 Dame regards the “lesbian
representation” effected when a woman plays the role of the (soprano) hero
as “a present from history, a history that has rendered the authentic casting
of castrati impossible, probably for good.” The title of Dame’s piece,
“Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,” references Lacan’s
claim that “the phallus can play its role only when veiled,” and the critical
core of the paper reads S/Z against the “grain of the voice,” in a double dose
of Barthian theoretics.22
Dame is not uncritical of Barthes’s oeuvre, and she is particularly
sensitive to the ways in which Barthes’s reading of Sarrasine skates over
the homoerotic elements of the story. Where Barthes favors a binary
economy in which the castrato is read as female or rendered effectively
neuter, Dame reemphasizes the extent to which homosexual desire is an
integral part of Balzac’s narrative. Unquestioned, however, is the
psychosexual conflation of castration and symbolic death, as well as the
phallic construction of the castrato’s voice.23 As Yvonne Noble has made
clear, Barthes takes Balzac’s unreliable narrator at face value, misreading
period detail as symptomatic of a rigidly polarized gender binary—more
typical of the present than the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century milieus
in which the castrato flourished.24
Given the ultimately presentist focus of Dame’s work, many readers
might well find the ahistoricism of “Unveiled Voices” a minor irrelevance.
Were the approach less emblematic of a tendency to naturalize the quirks of
modern personhood as universal, I might agree. Take, for example, Dame’s
observation (on the very first page), that “[e]ven in our time, the need to
categorize a voice according to gender, to assign a sex to the voice has not
ceased.”25 These words rely on an implied teleology toward an ever-
increasing tolerance and personal liberty (arguably true perhaps of post-
Victorian Western modernity, but certainly not applicable to larger swaths
of history). Such assumptions misrepresent the past as a less-evolved
ancestor of the now, and as such, they fail to see or hear the historical
castrato on his own terms.
Ultimately, in Dame’s piece, the “sexual ambiguity” of the castrato is
used to authorize queer (specifically lesbian) readings of modern
performances. Deploying the same logic, but operating from a different
subject position, Paul Henry Lang has argued for the downward octave
transposition of castrato roles in modern performance, explicitly positing
the polarized contrast of recognizably masculine and feminine voices as the
essential drama of Baroque opera. He provides an earwitness account of
castrato performance in order to buttress his claim:
[A]bout 1912, I heard two castratos—soprano and alto—who toured Europe with the Sistine
Chapel Choir. They were billed as victims of accidents (an old subterfuge ever since the
seventeenth century), but there they were, middle-aged and no longer at the peak of their
power, relics from another age. Though I was young, just about the age when a castrato
would have his “accident,” I vividly remember their voices because of the shock of hearing
grown men sing in the stratosphere. Their voices were white, clear, and powerful and had
absolutely no resemblance to a woman’s voice.26

Feldman has shown that the soloists concerned (Alessandro Gabrielli,

soprano, and Luigi Gentile, alto) were not castrati at all, but falsettists, even
though they were trained in the vocal idiom that Vatican castrati, such as
Moreschi, deployed.27 None of the publicity material that Feldman was able
to locate suggests that the men concerned were castrated; no mention was
made of an “accident.” On the contrary, a rare recording procured during
Feldman’s research was traced to the alto soloist’s son—contradicting even
the possibility of castration.
The castrato here appears only in the ear of the beholder. That Lang
remembered the story the way he did, however, is not surprising, nor do I
wish to suggest that he intentionally misled his readers. Rather, his narrative
can be understood as irredeemably modern. The assumptions that twist the
narrative furthest from the historical evidence are the details that render it
most convincing: the implied violence (assumed to lie behind the high male
voice); the forceful, obliterating adjectives used to describe a sound heard
only once, many years earlier (white, clear, powerful); and the perilous ease
with which the voice affects the listener, threatening his own manhood,
shocking him.
The tale—nominally about castrati—focuses on the narrator himself: his
youth and his vulnerable (though happily intact) sexual organs. For Lang,
like Freud, Balzac, and Barthes, the castrato’s voice sounded like the
phallus. This is the sound of loss and lack, cycling back through the lack of
audible testimony (recordings) to render the castrati themselves opaque—if
highly sexualized—symbols of cultural anxiety and a barbarous past.
 T : T H Q
C

When castrati are situated within an early modern epistemology of gender,

the Freudian overtones fade. A dense nexus of sexual desire and musical
satisfaction coagulated around the castrato voice. There is no doubt that
many audience members, of both sexes, found the castrati “sexy.” A
considerable number of sources document sexual relations between
unaltered men and castrati, and between castrati and women. Several
scholars have become mired in prurient detail concerning the erectile
capacities of castrated men, even though the conclusions have little
relevance to questions of castrato sexuality: the heteronormative metrics by
which altered male genitalia can be deemed adequate for penetrative sex
strike me as a particularly impoverished measure of sexual capacity.28
More interesting are recent attempts to understand the signifying value
of such relationships within the contemporary sexual imagination. Roger
Freitas’s work on the castrato Atto Melani proves an elegant model.29
Freitas emphasizes the sexual appeal of the castrated body, graced not only
with a voice of exceptional power and beauty, but also blessed with an
extended youth. Grounded in the contemporary rhetoric, Freitas stresses an
understanding of castration as an act of preservation and documents the
attraction of men and women alike to an ephebic ideal. The castrato—on
stage and off—teetered perpetually on the verge of manhood: old enough
for love and war, young enough to be tender, impulsive, and naive.
According to Freitas, the castrati thus personified an erotic ideal,
explaining their long-term fascination for audiences and their extended
reification at the acme of the Italian musical landscape. In a similar fashion,
an increasing body of scholarship on the English reception of Italian castrati
takes the desirability of the castrato as central—articulating ways in which
castrati could be understood as simultaneously effeminate and hyper-
heterosexual.30
 An important corollary can be drawn from Freitas’s work. His richly
historicized description of castration documents the desirability of castrato
bodies, as well as castrato voices. This shift in perception opens a
theoretical space within which scholars might imagine a prepubescent
young man actively desiring the surgical intervention of castration itself—
and not only for the vocal and/or financial benefits that the operation might
bestow. This castrato, actively desired (by others) and actively desiring the
physical and psychological benefits of his altered bodily state, nimbly leaps
over the yawning theoretics of castration’s “lack”—lack of genitals, of
sexual and political agency, of personhood, of ideological wholeness, of sex
appeal; he also adduces a number of correlations with modern queer
communities.
There is, on the one hand, a discomforting rhetorical parallel between
legislative discussion on the validity of marriage for castrati and
contemporary arguments around gay marriage,31 while on the other, the
temporality of the castrato’s “preserved” boyhood resonates with the
extended queer adolescence celebrated by Judith/Jack Halberstam (2005),
among others.32 For Halberstam, in In a Queer Time and Place, the “youth”
of queer communities is grounded in a decoupling of erotic behavior from
procreation, as well as an extended investment in social and musical
communities. Most dramatically, as increasing numbers of trans* people are
making public and political declarations of their identities and rights (often
at very young ages), the castrati provide an intriguing historical precedent
for intervention into the “natural” hormonal changes of puberty; they also
stand as a category of identity intimately linked to biological sex, and yet
independent of the gender of sexual object-choice.
Let us take a moment to be very precise. I do not wish to suggest that the
castrati were trans* (although some might well have identified in
continuous or contiguous fashion), nor do I want to collapse the castrati into
the modern trans* experience—and still less do I want to suggest that
“trans*” is or that “castrato” was a cohesive or uniform category. An
important differentiating factor between the two groups is that of consent.
And while many modern trans* individuals have had to and continue to
fight for access to treatments that bring their bodies into line with their
particularized sense of self, the same cannot be said of castrati.
 Given the widespread practice of castration in early modern Europe
(particularly Italy) and the tender age at which castrati were required to
undergo surgery, we must assume that many operations were performed
against the wishes of the boys concerned. Then, as now, such young
subjects were unable to provide full legal consent. As twenty-first-century
subjects, we are right to be appalled at the number of children who
underwent the operation; still, we need not assume that all castrati were the
victims of exploitative parents, patrons, or singing teachers.
Once we acknowledge that the castrati were themselves desirable, we
must also acknowledge those who actively desired to inhabit the category.
Whether such boys were drawn to the identity of “singer”—and the social
power, musical pleasure, and career opportunities that the term implied—or
to identify as the erotic ideal, we cannot possibly know. To pity all castrati,
however, is to foreclose upon the subjectivities of a distinctly early modern
personhood.
The voluntary castrato is quintessentially queer, for he slips between the
cracks of heteronormativity: he modifies his body to suit his desire and he
abdicates the procreative responsibilities of the heterosexual. At the heart of
this identity is a phenomenal, superhuman voice—and this marks a crucial
factor for queer musicology. The castrati were linked by an essential
musicality, regardless of their sexual preference or preferences. The
category “castrato” defined a caste of singers, a subcategory of castrated
men, not castrated men in general; and in that context, they provide a
compelling answer to Wayne Koestenbaum’s foundational question: “What
if ‘voice’ were, finally, a more useful rubric than ‘sexuality’?”33
“For some of us,” notes Suzanne G. Cusick, “it might be that the most
intense and important way we express or enact identity through the
circulation of physical pleasure is in musical activity, and that our ‘sexual
identity’ might be ‘musician’ more than it is ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ or ‘straight.’…
If music isn’t sexuality, for most of us it is psychically right next door.”34
To describe patrons with an excessive love for vocal music—often but not
always castrato song—Italianists use the word “melophile.”35 The word is
tied specifically to the melody-dominated genres of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, both the new (and newly professionalized) music of
the early baroque and the virtuosic, focused musical content of the da capo
aria as it flourished in operatic and chamber music from the later
seventeenth century onward.
Melophilia takes its delight in the centrality of voice, but also the central
role of the listener, and thus, by association, the expression of emotions.36
The repertory concerned deals almost exclusively with the experience of
love. “Melophilia” is used to imply a musical love that transgresses reason,
and it describes patrons who spent more money on operatic and chamber
singing than can be easily explained by reference to appearances or
prestige, to indicate those who lingered longer in musical pastimes than
they ideally should have—stealing time from business concerns and
familial obligations. The melophile thus participates in the excessive love
epitomized by castrato heroes: a love that is frequently placed into tension
with political duty or civic responsibility. The castrato who chose or
embraced his potential for virtuosic song privileged a melophile economy
over the market of heterosexual exchange, occupying a physical and
musical nexus of sex, love, and song. In such terms, the castrato is, indeed,
queer.
An important question remains: What are modern readers to make of the
queer castrato? I would like to offer three preliminary suggestions.
First, a reconfiguration of castrati in the absence of castration anxiety
permits a positive claim to their queer importance. While modern
scholarship has always viewed the castrato as queer (in all senses of the
word), the logic behind the claim is frequently suspect. Here, the castrato is
queer, but not because all castrati were gay (they weren’t); not because lack
of testicular function necessarily rendered them less male (it didn’t); nor
because a high voice necessarily rendered them feminine. And certainly not
because the mutilation of the body represents the deformations of
homosexuality in physical form, or because the disruption in typical sexual
development marked the castrati as failed heterosexuals. The primary
queerness of all castrati was a melophilic desire that was so strong that it
trumped the procreative imperatives of heteronormative sociality. At the
very least, the queer castrato suggests a means to rethink masculinity and its
connection to procreation; more ambitiously, he offers an opportunity to
disentangle the ways in which biological sex and gender confound each
other in our discourse about sexuality. His difference, too often hidden by
the habits of the modern sexual taxonomy, provides a cut through the fabric
of identification and subjectivity. The queer castrato allows us to worry at,
and ideally fray apart, some of the tightly woven threads of sex, the body,
and desire.
Second, once the castrato can be understood as an historically valid and
desirable identity—and not merely as a “barbaric,” “unthinkable” accident
of an earlier, less civilized age—the phenomenon of castrato popularity
ceases to function as part of an historical fiction whereby modernity
continually evolves toward tolerance and emancipation. This is a narrative
beloved by gay activists, and yet it operates in worryingly close
counterpoint with conservative religious claims of the increased
degeneration of modern society. Reality is far more complicated, and the
understanding that history was also complicated equips scholars with a
more sophisticated critical context within which to understand the
operations of personhood, identity, oppression, and agency.
Third, the queer castrato introduces us to melophilia as sexual identity,
productively decoupling the erotic, sexual consumption of music from the
gender of object-choice. For queer musicologists, melophilia suggests a
conceptual approach that can address a wider contingent of the LGBTIAQQ
coalition, and that, I would suggest, can only be a good thing.
N
1. Nicholas Clapton, Moreschi: The Last Castrato (London: Haus Publishing, 2004), 2.
2. For a detailed literature survey of castrato scholarship before and after the advent of the new
musicology, see Martha Feldman, “Castrato Acts,” in the Oxford Handbook of Opera, ed. Helen
M. Greenwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 395–418. Feldman also outlines the
characteristic sounds of castrato voices, their rise and fall in popularity, and their reception
history throughout Europe.
3. The hormonal consequences of prepubescent castration are described by most castrato scholars;
see, for example, Roger Freitas, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the
Life of Atto Melani (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009), particularly 133–135.
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2008), 35.
5. The process of “creating” a castrato is not part of the scope of this chapter. For details, see
Bonnie Gordon, “The Castrato Meets the Cyborg,” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 94–122,
particularly 113–115.
6. Corinthians 14:34.
7. Giuseppe Gerbino, “The Quest for the Soprano Voice: Castrati in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Studi
Musicali 32.2 (2004): 303–357, particularly 340 and 348.
8. During a discussion at McGill University, Keith Wace pointed out the intensely queer eroticism
of originary narratives in which young boys, wild animals, and genital contact are mixed in
dangerous and uncontrollable ways.
9. Digitized versions of Alessandro Moreschi’s recordings are available on YouTube, iTunes, and
Spotify, to list only the most obvious and widely accessed Internet resources.
10. Martha Feldman documents the technical limitations of early recording methods, and the
particular difficulties that the frequencies of the castrato voice posed. See Feldman, The
Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds, particularly chapter 3, “Red Hot Voice,” 79–132
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015).
11. The idea that Moreschi’s voice was past his prime when recorded circulates widely: a Google
search using the terms “Moreschi recordings past his prime” returns over 7,320,000 hits
(accessed June 3, 2013).
12. Clapton synthesizes a large number of responses to the Moresechi recordings; see, in particular,
197–216. See also Joe K. Law, “Alessandro Moreschi Reconsidered: A Castrato on Records,”
Opera Quarterly 2.2 (1984): 1–12.
13. It is not always clear which “uncanny” aspects are particular to Moreschi’s voice and which are
consequent on the dated recording technology; see Katherine Bergeron, “The Castrato as
History,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8.2 (1996): 167–184.
14. Even with these efforts, it is important to note that a single recorded example could never
provide an accurate impression of the capacities of the many hundreds of castrati who lived and
sang throughout the years of their popularity. Feldman’s book is cited previously; see also
 Marco Beghelli and Raffaele Talmelli, Ermafrodite armoniche (Varese, Italy: Zecchini Editore,
2011). As this chapter went to press, Martha Feldman alerted me to another publication that
deserves recognition: Corinna Herr, Kastraten und Falsettisten in der Musikgeschichte (Kassel,
Germany: Bärenreiter, 2013).
15. The Gonzaga, for example, requested castrati singers from Florence to aid in the 1607
performances of Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo. See Iain Fenlon, “Correspondence Relating to the
Early Mantuan Performances,” in Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo, ed. John Whenham (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 167–173.
16. The resultant shifts in castrato reception can be readily grasped by juxtaposing the ways in
which they are discussed and described by contemporary audiences, as summarized in
Gerbino’s,“The Quest for the Soprano Voice” (2004), along with Feldman’s “Denaturing the
Castrato,” Opera Quarterly 24.3–4 (2008): 178–199, and James Q. Davies, “‘Veluti in
Speculum’: The Twilight of the Castrato,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17.3 (2005): 271–301.
17. Susan McClary notes, with her typical prescience, “Too often, modern scholars view the castrato
through the lens of Freud’s theories concerned with castration.…we believe that this condition
would so shatter the sense of male subjectivity that existence would become meaningless.” See
Susan McClary, “Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in Seventeenth-Century Venetian
Opera,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Diciplines, ed. Mark Franko
and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England: 2000), 182.
18. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974).
19. Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1992).
20. Sexualized readings of the castrato voice were not unthinkable within early modern paradigms.
Indeed, as Bonnie Gordon has argued in Monteverdi’s Unruly Women (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005) and elsewhere, the voice in general was understood to resemble sexual
fluids. Giovanni Angelini Bontempi, for example, in his Historia Musica of 1695 (rep. 1976),
saw the voice of castrato singer Baldassare Ferri in terms of an “exchange of potencies…the
procreative power of semen replaced by the magical power of song”; the quote comes from
Feldman’s discussion see her, “Castrato Acts,” 403.
21. Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,” in Queering the Pitch: The
New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 139–154. A similar sentiment underlies the entire collection of articles
published as En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and
Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
22. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Flamingo, 1977),
179–189.
23. Dame, “Unveiled Voices,” 145: “[A]ccording to Barthes, the male subject Sarrasine has been
placed in the female position: passive, overwhelmed, and overpowered. Thus the fragment
anticipates his death—his castration, as Barthes puts it—at the end of the tale.”
24. Yvonne Noble, “Castrati, Balzac, and BartheS/Z,” Comparative Drama 31.1 (1997): 34.
25. Dame, “Unveiled Voices,” 139.
26. Paul Henry Lang, “Performance Practice and the Voice,” in Musicology and Performance, ed.
Alfred Mann and George J. Buelow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 196–197;
quoted in Feldman, The Castrato, 80.
 According to Feldman, the soprano Gabrielli was a student of Moreschi’s, and the alto Gentile
27. “a close acquaintance.” See Feldman, The Castrato, 309n5.
28. Freitas deals with the issue more gracefully than most, see Portrait of a Castrato. The fact
remains that only the conflation of penile penetrative sex with sexual activity more generally
allows the metonym to hold any kind of logical weight.
29. In addition to his book Portrait of a Castrato, Freitas discusses this material in the article, “The
Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato,” Journal of
Musicology 20.2 (2003): 196–249.
30. Within the early modern period, an overindulgence in female company was believed to render a
man effeminate. McClary is among those who emphasize this point; “Gender Ambiguities and
Erotic Excess.” See also Todd S. Gilman, “The Italian (Castrato) in London,” in The Work of
Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin
(New York: Columbia, 1997), 49–70.
31. Indeed, John Dennis, writing in England in the early 1700s, suggested that listening to castrato
voices could lead to same-sex marriage: “The more the Men are enervated and emasculated by
the Softness of the Italian Musick, the less will they care for [women]…I make no doubt but we
shall come to see one Beau take another for Better or Worse,” quoted in Gilman, “The Italian
(Castrato) in London,” 51.
32. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New
York: New York University Press, 2005).
33. Koestenbaum 1991, 211, as quoted in Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 321–322. The
quote continues: “Dispense with our sex rhetoric, and think of desire as articulated air, a shaped
column of breath passing through a box on its way to a resonator. Are we experiencing ‘voice’
or ‘sexuality’ when we greet or hold a controlled shaft of air moving from a dark place out into
the world?”
34. Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think
Straight,” in Queering the Pitch, 70–71.
35. Several authors have written on the erotic connotations of early modern vocal performance; see,
for example, Gordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women, and Amy Brosius, “‘Il suon, lo sgardo, il
canto’: Virtuose of the Roman Conversazioni in the Mid-Seventeenth Century,” (PhD diss., New
York University, 2009). Cusick provides an excellent exegesis of the term “melophile” in
relation to the civil trial of Sinolfo Ottieri, who was found guilty of entering a Florentine
nunnery in 1620; in defense of his actions, Ottieri claimed that he only wanted to listen to the
singing of Suor Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi. Several character witnesses testified to Ottieri’s
melophile bent; one even related an anecdote attributed to Ottieri himself, attesting that “he
neither enjoyed nor took pleasure in coito [sex], a fact that, ‘as if joking,’ he suggested might
have had its origin in a fall he took while hunting with a shotgun.” This story unfolds in
remarkable parallel with common explanatory narratives justifying castration, frequently
attributed to incurable injuries sustained during masculine pursuits such as hunting. In both
cases, the consequence is an unconventional desire for voice and for music. Suzanne G. Cusick,
“He Said, She Said? Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence,” in Rethinking Difference in
Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), 53–76; particularly “The Erotic Economy of Song,” pages
67–72; the quote here comes from page 69.
36. For two different interpretations of the role of the melophile listener, compare Cusick, “He Said,
She Said?” and Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011).
R
Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” In Image, Music, Text, 179–189. London: Flamingo,
1977.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974.
Beghelli, Marco, and Raffaele Talmelli. Ermafrodite armoniche. Varese, Italy: Zecchini Editore,
2011.
Bergeron, Katherine. “The Castrato as History.” Cambridge Opera Journal 8.2 (1996): 167–184.
Blackmer, Corinne E., and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En travesti: Women, Gender Subversion,
Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Brosius, Amy. “‘Il suon, lo sgardo, il canto’: Virtuose of the Roman onversazioni in the Mid-
Seventeenth Century.” PhD diss., New York University, 2009.
Clapton, Nicholas. Moreschi: The Last Castrato. London: Haus Publishing, 2004.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “He Said, She Said? Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence.” In Rethinking
Difference in Music Scholarship, edited by Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg,
53–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Cusick, Suzanne G. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.”
In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth
Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 67–83. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Dame, Joke. “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato.” In Queering the Pitch: The New
Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 139–
154. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Davies, James Q. “‘Veluti in Speculum’: The Twilight of the Castrato.” Cambridge Opera Journal
17.3 (2005): 271–301.
Dell’Antonio, Andrew. Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2011.
Feldman, Martha. “Castrato Acts.” In The Oxford Handbook to Opera, edited by Helen Greenwald,
395–418. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Feldman, Martha. The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2015.
Feldman, Martha. “Denaturing the Castrato,” Opera Quarterly 24.3-4 (2008): 178–199.
Fenlon, Iain. “Correspondence Relating to the Early Mantuan Performances.” In Claudio
Monteverdi: Orfeo, edited by John Whenham, 167–173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Freitas, Roger. “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato.”
Journal of Musicology 20.2 (2003): 196–249.
Freitas, Roger. Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani.
Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009.
Gerbino, Giuseppe. “The Quest for the Soprano Voice: Castrati in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Studi
Musicali 32.2 (2004): 303–357.
Gilman, Todd S. “The Italian (Castrato) in London.” In The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and
Sexual Difference, edited by Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, 49–70. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997.
Gordon, Bonnie. “The Castrato Meets the Cyborg.” Opera Quarterly 27 (2011): 94–122.
Gordon, Bonnie. Monteverdi’s Unruly Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York:
New York University Press, 2005.
Herr, Corinna. Kastraten un Falsettisten in der Musickgeschichte. Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter,
2013.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queens‘ Throat: (Homo)sexuality and the Art of Singing,“ in Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 205–234. London/New York: Routledge,
1991.
Law, Joe K. “Alessandro Moreschi Reconsidered: A Castrato on Records.” Opera Quarterly 2.2
(1984): 1–12.
McClary, Susan. “Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera,”
in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Diciplines, edited by Mark Franko and
Annette Richards, 177–200. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000.
Noble, Yvonne. “Castrati, Balzac, and BarteS/Z.” Comparative Drama 31.1 (1997): 28–41.
Poizat, Michel. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1992.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet, 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2008.
 CHAPTER 25

QUEERING MIDDLE CLASS

GENDER IN NINETEENTH-
C E N T U RY U S T H E AT E R
 GI L L I A N M. RODG E R

C dressing, also known now as performing in “drag,” is a mode of

theatrical performance most often associated with homosexuality in
contemporary society. This style of performance has been associated with
homosexual men, and more recently with lesbians, for more than a century,
but cross-dressing has a rich history in the Euro-American tradition that
spans multiple centuries. Vestiges of older styles of cross-dressed
performance remain, particularly in England and its colonies such as
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where there is a long tradition of
working class men assuming comic female attire on festive occasions. A
similar tradition can be found in African American culture in the United
States, as evidenced by a number of comic films in which Black men dress
as women (and in the case of the Wayans brothers, as white women). But,
for the most part, the nineteenth-century forms from which these practices
are descended are long forgotten. This essay will consider the range of
cross-dressed roles present in nineteenth-century music-theatrical forms in
the United States, and particularly in non-narrative and semi-narrative
forms such as minstrelsy, circus, variety, and burlesque. It will also consider
other kinds of performances present in these same forms that challenged
gender constructions of the period.
 E A US F
I

The oldest form of male-to-female drag performance depicts an older and

often grotesquely funny female character known as the “dame,” which has
its roots in English comic theatrical traditions. Even though women were
allowed to appear on the English stage after the restoration of the monarchy
in the seventeenth century, male actors continued to perform comic female
roles, perhaps because audiences did not want to see women in grotesque or
low comic roles (see Figure 25.1). The dame became a fixture of English
literary burlesque, pantomime, and other kinds of light comic theater by the
nineteenth century. While America shared English theatrical traditions from
the eighteenth century onwards, there is little mention of men in female
roles in the United States until the second half of the nineteenth century,
when comic theater forms of all kinds flourished.
FIGURE 25.1 Henry Dixey in a dame role. Cabinet card by Sarony, New York, ca. 1880. Author’s
collection.

In England the “dame” was a prominent feature of pantomime as well as

burlesque. Pantomime was an English form of theater based on
harlequinade and drawing in part on commedia dell’arte conventions. As
with European forms, it was not uncommon for the leading male character
to be played by an attractive actress dressed in breeches, while there was
always a grotesque female character that was intended to be played by a
man in drag. In Italian opera of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
century, that character was often a nursemaid sung by a tenor, for whom
there were few other roles in serious opera at the time. The heroic roles we
now associate with the tenor were sung by castrati, surgically altered men
who sang in a high range, or, if they were not available, by women en
travesti. The secondary male roles, particularly young or weak men such as
the role of Sesto in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto, were also written to
be sung by women, and the leading male role in comic forms was a
continuation of these traditions. The stepmother and ugly sisters in the
pantomime Cinderella are “dame” characters, while the role of the prince in
the pantomime version of that story was intended to be played by a young
woman. Indeed, in all of the nineteenth-century settings of this story of
which I am aware, the prince is a feminized character—even when played
by a man—and the ugly sisters are caricatures and grotesquely comic.
Female Impersonation in the United States
In the United States, in the period after the Civil War, a growing number of
actors began to specialize in portraying comic female characters in a broad
range of theatrical forms. George Fortescue, a corpulent man, was one such
actor (see Figure 25.2). Fortescue began his stage career as a performer in
variety entertainment and by the mid-1870s was a regular feature in female
character in the burlesque afterpieces that concluded the variety bill. These
relatively short one-act pieces took aim at whatever was the latest fashion
on the New York theatrical scene, and through miscasting, inverted power
relationships, puns, slapstick, and other nonsense, made as much fun of it as
possible. Fortescue came to prominence in the role of Catherine in Rice’s
burlesque, Evangeline, which did not make fun of a popular play but rather
of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem Evangeline, a Tale of
Acadie. Fortescue made the role of Catherine his own and appeared in
numerous revivals of the piece during the following decades.1 He also
frequently performed in the role of Buttercup in a burlesque version of the
Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Later in the nineteenth century
Fortescue commissioned comic plays that featured him in similar roles, but
he always stayed close to the conventions of the “dame,” which relied on
the comedy inherent in a large man playing an unattractive woman who
imagines that she is better looking than she is.
FIGURE 25.2 George Fortescue in female character. Cabinet card by Dana, New York, ca. 1880.
Author’s collection.

The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of the
glamorous female impersonator. While the dizzy dame was characteristic of
a broad range of comic genres and had her origins in pre-modern English
and European theatrical forms, the glamorous female impersonator was
found in just one genre—Blackface minstrelsy—and was an American
innovation not found in English theater until the mid-twentieth century. One
of the earliest prominent glamorous female impersonators was known as
“The Only Leon.” Francis Leon was active in minstrelsy beginning in the
late 1850s, when he was billed as a Master Leon the “wonderful danseuse
and soprano singer.”2 The use of the term danseuse (rather than dancer)
indicates that he was in female character, and he was valued in these roles
not only for his dancing skills but also for his ability to sing in falsetto in
the soprano range. Minstrel companies often presented burlesqued versions
of popular operas as after-pieces, and for this reason needed at least one
actor in the all-male cast who could sing the role of the heroine or prima
donna. Leon was in demand for this skill, and in 1860 he was working with
George Christy’s minstrels, one of the major minstrel companies of the
period. By the following year he had teamed with Edwin Kelly, with whom
he founded his own minstrel company later in that decade.
Minstrelsy emerged during a period in which American theater was
beginning to fracture along class lines.3 The elite audiences that had once
attended theater with poorer classes began to withdraw to their own theaters
during the 1840s. In the old-fashioned theaters that hosted melodrama, box
seats for the social elite dominated the auditorium and brought in most of
the income, but the area of seats on the main floor—the area now called the
orchestra seats—was known as the pit, and was the province of men.
Skilled artisanal master craftsmen mingled with their apprentices and
journeymen in the pit, which was a crowded chaotic space with bench
seating. In the first decades of the nineteenth-century, men of all classes felt
free to comment on the performance, and when they were displeased, the
audience felt free to riot. Theater riots were not uncommon before 1850,
and the riot at the Astor Place Theater in 1849 is now seen as marking the
end to this early period of theater in the United States. During the 1840s,
the elite audience had been slowly moving their allegiance to opera and
more serious spoken drama, and the Astor Place riot, which revealed a
conflict between the men who sat in the pit and gallery seats and the elite
audiences who occupied box seats, marked the point after which elite and
working class audiences no longer shared the same theaters or sought the
same entertainment. It also marked a point at which a myriad of theatrical
forms emerged to cater to different portions of a fracturing audience.
Minstrelsy’s audience was male, and was comprised of the young men
who had once been the scourge of the pit in the old-style theaters. These
young men, increasingly locked out of upward mobility because of the
decline of the apprenticeship system and the emergence of the factory
model of manufacturing, sought meaning in other parts of their life, and
particularly in the all-male rituals of leisure.4 Minstrelsy offered a range of
stereotypical characters that reassured the white male audience of their
superiority, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, the range of
stereotypical characters grew to accommodate new immigrants who
represented further layers of threat. The grotesque female dame was also
present on the minstrel stage, and in that context she often represented a
suffrage advocate or a temperance reformer or was paired with a male
performer in a comic husband/wife routine. Unlike the grotesquely funny
dame, the glamorous female character was not necessarily funny, indeed she
often embodied the feminine ideal and sang sentimental repertory.
The appeal that glamorous female impersonators such as Leon held for
their male audiences seems to have resided primarily in their ability to elicit
emotion. Sentimentality was broadly characteristic of nineteenth-century
American culture, and the function of the glamorous female impersonator
within a largely comic and irreverent entertainment form was to express
sentimentality that would have marked a male character as unmanly. Low
male characters of doubtful manhood, such as Irish characters or African
Americans, also expressed sentimentality, but in those cases the effect was
comic and it affirmed the inferior manhood of these characters; the primary
aim of the glamorous female impersonator, however, was to move his male
audience to tears. One of the role-types favored by the glamorous female
impersonator was the octoroon, a woman who was one-eighth Black, and
was light enough to pass for white but could not guarantee that her children
would not be darker. As a result, she was condemned to be unmarried, and
to serve as a mistress, a woman used and abused by men. In this complex
construction of illicit sexuality tinged with the allure of race, the glamorous
female impersonator also represented an ideal form of femininity in which
women were properly passive and attractive and dependent on men. The
fact that men in the audience may have been sexually attracted to Leon was
not an issue in a period in which, as long as a man was the active rather
than receptive partner in sex, his manhood was not in doubt.5
 Leon was not the only glamorous female impersonator active during the
1870s, but he was by far the most successful and best known until the early
twentieth century and the emergence of Julian Eltinge (see Figure 25.3).
Eltinge, like Leon, began his career in an all-male theater form, although in
his case it was a male amateur theatrical clubs associated with Harvard
University and with an elite volunteer militia in Boston. He was active
playing young women in dramatic pieces and burlesques, and gradually
moved into glamorous female impersonation. Some reviewers expressed
disgust at Eltinge’s performances, feeling that female impersonation was
distasteful and offensive, although they admitted that there was little about
his performances that was actually obscene. A review in the New York
Times noted: “once the [viewer gets] over the initial unpleasantness of the
idea of female impersonation, which is not easy for people of delicate
sensibilities, there is nothing particularly displeasing about Mr. Eltinge’s
efforts at femininity.”6 Despite the reservations expressed by some
reviewers, Eltinge was hugely successful with audiences and commissioned
a number of dramatic pieces that featured him in female disguise.7 He was
also featured in early silent films, and an appreciative theater manager, who
had made a fortune presenting Eltinge in New York, named his new theater
in his honor.
FIGURE 25.3 Julian Eltinge in female character. Unknown photographer, ca. 1910s. Author’s
collection.

Unlike Leon, Eltinge worked in a period in which sexuality and gender

were less clear-cut, and men now had to continually prove their masculinity
through their actions and pastimes. As a result, throughout his career
Eltinge was engaged in a complex dance in order to construct a socially
acceptable off-stage male persona while simultaneously representing a
feminine ideal on the stage. His publicity made much of the effort it took to
disguise his natural masculinity and the suffering he endured to depict a
beautiful woman, and articles in magazines also depicted him in typically
masculine pursuits such as horse-riding, playing tennis, and boxing. Eltinge
also took the instructive aspect of female impersonation one step further
than minstrel performance had, publishing his own beauty magazine to
instruct women in the art of make-up.8 The message of this publication was:
if I am willing to endure this pain and discomfort, then so should you
because you are so much closer to the ideal than me.
Eltinge’s off-stage masculinity was constantly in doubt, however,
because he could not produce a wife and family, and in the early twentieth
century the perennial bachelor was becoming suspect. Eltinge was also
threatened by a number of other female impersonators in vaudeville.
Younger performers such as Francis Renault and Karyl Norman achieved a
greater level of realism and glamour than Eltinge, who was passing the peak
of his career. In his act Norman, whose real name was George Paduzzi,
maintained the link between the glamorous female impersonator and
minstrelsy by billing himself as the “Creole fashion plate.” Other
performers active in the early twentieth century included a new style of
humor that referenced an increasingly visible homosexual subculture,
further cementing the connection between female impersonators and
homosexuals in the public imagination. Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan were
the most successful team to include camp humor in their act. This duo
formed in the early 1910s and quickly won success in a period in which
expressing knowledge of illicit sexuality marked one as sophisticated.
Savoy, the female impersonator of the duo, was effeminate on and off stage
and his act relied on camp humor including gestures, tone of voice, and
vocabulary that suggested double entendres and suggested the man beneath
the female clothing. Brennan was the “straight” man, playing a suave male
companion to the outrageous Savoy. Savoy’s act was thought to have
provided the inspiration for much of Mae West’s humor, and she mimicked
his mincing walk. West certainly acquired one of Savoy’s lines as her
signature: “Come up and see me sometime.”9
In the 1940s the popularity of female impersonation waned on the stage.
Vaudeville, the traditional employer of most of these performers, was
declining, and there was no place for such figures in the newly popular
book musicals of the period. As a result, female impersonation came to be
associated with small nightclubs catering to a largely homosexual clientele,
and the modern drag queen was born. These clubs extended the careers of
small-time vaudeville performers, and the best-known big-time performers
either retired or found alternate employment in Hollywood, often behind the
scenes. Savoy’s partner, Brennan, worked for a time as a script writer and
dialog director. Eltinge’s career was brought to an end by an anti-
homosexual ordinance in Los Angeles that prohibited men from performing
in drag on stage, and he lived in forced retirement until 1940. In 1940,
Eltinge returned to the stage in New York at Billy Rose’s Diamond
Horseshoe nightclub, and he had been performing there for almost a year
when he became ill. Eltinge died in 1941, just before his 58th birthday; the
causes given for his death varied from a kidney ailment to a cerebral
hemorrage.10 While female impersonation on the stage had become
associated with homosexuality, the “dame” tradition lived on in Hollywood
films for the next several decades. Actors such as Cary Grant, Jack
Lemmon, Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Paul
Lynde, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and Robin Williams among others,
donned female character in movies during the 1940s, 50s, 60s 70s, 80s, and
90s for comic effect. All of these actors relied on the comic disjuncture
between their masculine appearance and the female characters they
portrayed, and in many cases the women they portrayed were grotesque,
old, or ugly, in the tradition of the comic “dame.”
 E A US M
I

While female impersonation is more familiar to audiences today, male

impersonation was widespread and popular in a number of different
dramatic forms during the nineteenth century. Women took male roles in
almost all forms of theater and for a variety of reasons.11 Serious spoken
dramatic pieces allowed actresses to portray only a narrow range of
emotions, and ambitious actresses in the nineteenth century sometimes took
on male roles to extend their repertoire. Charlotte Cushman is probably the
best-known actress who regularly portrayed men on stage.12 The
Shakespearean roles open to women were Romeo, because he was a young
man, and Hamlet, because he was emotionally unstable and showed
weakness that was associated with femininity in that period. The French
actress Sarah Bernhardt portrayed both male and female roles through the
late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as did the American
actress Maude Adams, who portrayed some of the same roles as Bernhardt;
both women appeared in Edward Rostand’s play L’Aiglon in 1901. Like
earlier actresses such as Charlotte Cushman, these women were viewed as
being exceptional and so both their peers and their audiences tolerated their
transgressions of femininity.
Another form of male impersonation was the “breeches” or pants role
found in a broad range of theatrical forms, from burlesque and pantomime,
to commedia dell’arte and Italian opera. Beginning in the eighteenth
century, these roles were written specifically for women, and actresses were
sometimes called on to play the romantic lead. In Italian opera the
popularity of castrato singers was beginning to wane (along with the courtly
conventions of serious opera) by the mid- to late-eighteenth century, and in
the transitional period before the emergence of the tenor as the heroic lead
in the early nineteenth century, there were a number of leading roles written
for contraltos or mezzo sopranos en travesti. Donizetti wrote a number of
such roles, and even Baroque opera composers of Italian opera seria such as
Handel and Vivaldi had purposely cast women rather than castrati in
leading roles, because castrati were generally more expensive to employ,
were not always available and were sometimes temperamental performers.
The convention of casting a woman in the young heroic leading male
character in English forms such as pantomime and burlesque is related to
operatic conventions, and may originally have been intended as a parody of
Italian opera, which was hugely popular in England in the 1720s and 1730s.
By the nineteenth century, casting a woman in the leading male role had
become customary in these forms. There was no way to imagine that the
male hero was anything but a woman because the costumes were designed
to show the curves of their bodies. Actresses dressed in short breeches and
tights and were tightly corseted despite the fact they portrayed male
characters, and male audience members certainly enjoyed the unfettered
view of the actress’s body afforded by these costumes.13
 T F P
U S

The United States had inherited the British tradition of literary burlesque,
but the form did not come to rely heavily on scantily clad actresses until the
late 1860s, when Lydia Thompson and her troupe of British Blondes toured
the nation (see Figure 25.4).14 Thompson’s troupe was made up almost
entirely of women, except for one male actor who most often performed
“dame” roles. To these she added local actresses to play secondary roles and
hired an all-female ballet corps. Their repertoire included adventures like
Robinson Crusoe, and plays based on mythology, like Ixion. Thompson’s
tour elicited huge opposition from church groups and moral reformers,
because Thompson and her manager were in a romantic relationship but
were not married to each other. Actresses in legitimate theater, and
particularly the feminist actress Olive Logan, also decried this
entertainment; Logan feared that burlesque actresses, whom she regarded as
untrained impostors, would damage the reputations of highly trained
actresses active in respectable theatrical forms.15
FIGURE 25.4 Lydia Thompson in male character. Carte de visite, unknown photographer, ca.
1870. Author’s collection.

The main challenge presented by Thompson was that her troupe

appeared in respectable theaters patronized by middle class men and
women. The irreverent burlesques presented by Thompson presented a
topsy-turvy world in which power relations were inverted; as mentioned,
women acted like men, men were largely absent from the troupe, and the
one man present in the troupe dressed as a woman. In this entertainment
women strode across the stage, they made love to other women, they
smoked and spat and even cursed. And they addressed their audience
directly in asides, interrupting the already fractured narrative of the drama.
The burlesque presented by Thompson disrupted all of the conventions of
safe middle class drama, and was more reminiscent of the kinds of
irreverent fare found in working class theater. The opposition to Thompson
was driven by as much by outrage at her invading polite middle class spaces
as any indecency inherent in the works she performed.
The 1860s also saw a home-grown move towards casting actresses in
male roles in melodrama that came to be not unlike those found in
burlesque. The play most associated with this kind of role was the
sensational equestrian melodrama Mazeppa. This piece had made its
appearance on the American stage during the 1830s, and a good part of its
appeal lay in the feat of daring performed by the leading actor as he was
propelled across the stage, strapped to the side of a galloping horse while
dressed in little more than a loin cloth. The play was frequently performed
with a man in the leading role through the 1830s and 1840s, and was
popular enough to be the subject of burlesque by minstrel companies. In
1861, the actress Adah Isaacs Menken took on this role (see Figure 25.5).
While actresses were not expected to be completely respectable women,
Isaacs Menken went far beyond the acceptable, and much of her appeal on
the stage lay in the scandal attached to her name, which was due to her
willingness to assume male character and her inability to conform to middle
class female ideals in her off-stage life.16 Menken started the tradition of
women taking this dangerous role, and she was followed by a number of
actresses in the subsequent decades. The appeal of this role for a largely
male audience lay in watching an actress perform apparently impossible
feats of daring while dressed in a flesh-colored body stocking and a flimsy
robe. The appeal of female Mazeppas was little different than the appeal of
the female acrobat or equestrienne, who stunned her male audience by
performing impossible feats, even as she sexually titillated them with her
brief costume that exposed her legs and much of her body. Within the circus
tradition, female acrobats were a huge draw, and it was not unusual for
families of acrobats to dress their youngest male child as a girl if there was
no girl able or willing to perform with the family troupe.17
FIGURE 25.5 Adah Isaacs Menken as Mazeppa. Carte de visite by Disderi, Paris, 1867. Author’s
collection

As with Thompson’s burlesques, there were protests about female

Mazeppas, primarily because they were seen as low class and therefore
indecent entertainment.18 The discomfort over women in travesty roles in
the nineteenth century exposes an interesting fracture line within theater
between those who sought to broaden the theatrical audience to include
respectable middle class women and those who sought to appeal to the
traditional largely male audience. This battle was fought in American
theaters beginning in the 1840s. In the early nineteenth century elite
audiences, comprised of both men and women, were the financial
supporters of theater in America, but the majority of the audience was made
up of men of all classes. When upper class men brought their wives and
daughters to the theater, they were forced to behave themselves, but when
they attended alone they could take advantage of the complex of
entertainments centering on male pleasure that the theater offered. Not only
could they enjoy the drama, or enjoy harassing the actors on the stage, but
alcohol and snacks were freely available in all parts of the auditorium.
Prostitutes were found in the third tier of theaters until the early 1870s, and
while theater owners frowned on assignations taking place in the theater,
men could make appointments for later in the evening once the performance
had concluded.19 Even men who attended with their families could find
opportunities to slip out of their box seats to make an assignation or to
patronize the bar. Given that the house lights were not dimmed, the primary
enjoyment of women in the audience was to see the other members of the
elite audience, and to be seen themselves.
When this elite audience withdrew to the opera houses and respectable
theaters, the audience that remained was largely male. Respectable middle
class women were loathe to attend the theater because of its association
with both alcohol and prostitution, and it took the entrepreneurial efforts of
P. T. Barnum to persuade middle class families to attend theatrical
performances that were presented in a larger complex of entertainment that
was marketed as educational. Barnum created a space that was free from
alcohol and doubtful morality, and he was an important figure in reforming
American theater to make it safe for a family audience. In this same period
traditional theater managers, perhaps fearing competitions from venues
such as Barnum’s, began to expel prostitutes from their customary position
in the third tier, although the theaters were not entirely free of prostitutes
until the 1860s or later, when the design of theaters changed to eliminate the
third tier and the pit and to place greater emphasis on family seating.
The histories of American theater celebrate this move towards
respectability, but they make little mention of the range of popular
entertainments that emerged in the late 1840s to meet the needs of the male
audience growing dissatisfied with melodrama, particularly the safe
melodramas presented by Barnum; this audience sought the excitement of
the earlier styles of theater. Minstrelsy was one form that emerged in this
period to cater to an all-male audience. Like the saloon, the minstrel theater
became a place where men could affirm their manhood in a safe space and
in the company of other men. As minstrelsy emerged, saloons also began to
offer entertainment that, unlike minstrelsy, featured female performers who
appeared in a much broader range of roles than women in more respectable
forms of theater. These saloon entertainments, which came to be known as
variety and still later as vaudeville, were distinct from other forms of theater
in that they were not governed by the needs of even a flimsy narrative
structure. Variety consisted of a number of unconnected acts presented in
succession; these could be based around song or dance, or comedy
presented through song and sketches, or they could be feats of daring, or the
presentation of human oddities, or novelty acts performed by humans
and/or animals.20
Almost every kind of act presented on the variety stage, and particularly
those performed by women, defied middle class ideals of femininity. The
female singers in variety appeared dressed in alluring costumes, not unlike
those worn by women in burlesque, and like the women active in burlesque
they interacted directly with the men in their audience, making a mockery
of middle class ideals as they teased and joked with their audience on one
hand and feigned coyness on the other (see Figure 25.6). Female singers
most often sang serio-comic songs, which were sentimental or lightly
pleasing songs. They worked alone as a soloist, and occasionally singers
were paired to sing duets. When singers worked in pairs, it was not
uncommon for them to be billed as sisters regardless of whether they were
related, and for one woman (and very rarely both) to dress as men (see
Figure 25.7). It is easy to see the link to the principal boy of burlesque and
pantomime in this kind of pairing that allowed a woman to sing sentimental
love songs while dressed in male costume that did nothing to disguise the
curves of her body.
FIGURE 25.6 Anonymous serio comic singer in costume worn in variety. Cabinet card by Dana,
New York, ca. 1870s. Author’s collection
FIGURE 25.7 Howard and Satelle, Sister Act. Howard, on the left, is dressed in male costume
typical of burlesque performers. Carte de visite by unknown photographer, probably Sarony, ca.
1870s. Author’s collection.

Classically trained ballet dancers were also active in variety, and they
were the performers who adhered most closely to middle class standards.
Before the mid-1870s, a number of dancers based in New York City moved
freely between ballet corps attached to the opera company and Barnum’s
theater and variety halls (see Figure 25.8). Ballet dancers, who were
anonymous in the opera corps, performed as featured dancers in variety, and
all of the members of the small corps, comprising four to six women, in
variety theaters were named on the program. Ballet dancers were not the
only dancers active on the variety stage, however. Dancers who performed
jigs, folk dances, or other popular styles such as polkas also appeared in
variety, and like ballet dancers, they were named on the bill. In the 1870s,
dancers were increasingly called on to present sexualized dances associated
with sensational theater and extravaganzas, particularly the cancan, which
certainly defied middle class standards of decency. The cancan and other
forms of formation dancing became crucial in marking the divide between
sexualized and “decent” variety in the late 1870s and 1880s, and this
growing gap between these forms eventually led to the modern theatrical
forms of burlesque and vaudeville in the last decade of the nineteenth
century. By the end of the nineteenth century, managers had begun to
maintain that there was no link between the sexualized and decent forms of
variety, but as late as the first decade of the twentieth century performers
moved between these forms in order to maintain a full performance
schedule during the theatrical season.
FIGURE 25.8 Betty Rigl dressed in a devil-dancer costume worn in the Black Crook. Carte de
visite by J. Gurney, New York, 1868. Author’s collection.

Both men and women presented a wide range of novelty acts on the
variety stage. These varied from feats of daring and acrobatics, such as
those presented by Leona Dare (see Figure 25.9), Marietta Zanfretta, and
the Sanyeahs, to oddities such as players of the musical glasses or
ventriloquists such as Signor Blitz. Children also qualified as novelties,
particularly when they possessed exceptional skill. Baby Bindley, for
example, was a child musical prodigy who performed widely through the
1870s and 1880s, and eventually changed her name to Florence Bindley,
and took roles in musical comedies as she reached her teens. Early in her
career, when she was a very young child, her father, Professor Bindley,
presented her to the audience. Professor Bindley had been active in variety
as a musical performer before his daughter’s birth, but his career had been
eclipsed by that of his remarkable daughter by the time she was four or five
years old.

FIGURE 25.9 Leona Dare in costume for trapeze act. Carte de visite, J. Gurney, New York, ca.
1870s. Author’s collection.

Women who played instruments such as the banjo also qualified as

novelties because the act relied on playing an instrument more often
associated with the male entertainment form minstrelsy. There were a small
number of female multi-instrumentalists, including Lillian Western, who
was active in variety for a period of close to forty years and played a broad
range of musical instruments all commonly associated with men. In the
early twentieth century all-female orchestras were also incredibly popular
with vaudeville audiences, but were viewed as novelty acts, appearing on
the stage, rather than in the pit, which is where the theater musicians sat.
Singers, such as the “double-voiced vocalist” Dora Dawron, also fell into
this category. Dawron performed wearing a costume that was half male suit,
and half female gown, turning the appropriate half of her body to the
audience depending on the range in which she sang.
One of the fundamental challenges that women in variety presented was
that they were often depicted as being equally competent to their male
colleagues.21 They were more active and assertive than the female
characters in narrative drama, and this reflected working class gender
construction, which differed from hegemonic middle class models in a
number of ways. Working class women were more active and assertive in
the family, and even when they did not work outside the home after
marriage they were more likely to supplement the family income by doing
piece-work or laundry or some other paid work in their homes. While
working class men felt free to assert their superiority to women, sometimes
violently, working class women did not live in the largely gender-
segregated world of the middle class in which men dominated the public
sphere and women the domestic sphere. Working class women often had to
go out into the streets alone, either to go shopping or to get to work, which
meant that they were practiced at repelling unwanted advances from strange
men. This is the model of femininity that was most often represented on the
variety stage through songs lyrics, in sketches, and even in acrobatic and
dance acts. Women in variety acts took more active roles than most
actresses, but they did not seek to undermine working class masculinity—
the superiority of white men was the ruling assumption in this form as in
others. But these women also very clearly failed to conform to middle class
expectations, and the easy fraternization of young men and women, both in
the audience as well as on the stage, drew the ire of middle class moral
reform forces from the 1860s to the 1880s, who assumed that the women
present in public spaces such as theaters must be prostitutes.
Just as the acts of women active in variety reflected working class
models of gender, so too did the acts of men active in this form. Like
women of all classes, working class men were also marginalized in the
theatrical world and middle class gender construction viewed working class
men as lacking the discipline and self-control necessary to be viewed as
decent and respectable. Working class men could not construct themselves
as self-made, nor could they take pride in the self-control and self-denial
that brought them financial gain. Instead, working class men in the mid-
nineteenth century carved out gender-segregated spaces for themselves in
the saloon or in the theater, and defined themselves in terms of their
relationship to their social group. They took pride in their ability to defend
their honor and the honor of their friends, they prided themselves on their
ability to drink without getting drunk, they took part in social rituals such as
“treating” or buying a round of drinks for their friends, and they proved
themselves through feats of physical skill and strength. Many of the acts on
the variety stage reflected and validated this construction of manhood, as
well as celebrated the underdog.
A number of performers active in variety also represented middle class
men, and even upper class men of means; sometimes performers made fun
of wealthy men in their songs, suggesting that they failed to meet working
class standards of manhood. While men who sang comic songs that targeted
the middle and upper classes were popular, a number of women also sang
the same material, and were hugely popular with their audiences and among
the highest-paid performers of the period. In sharp contrast to the women
who played male roles in burlesque and other forms of theater, women
singing male character songs in variety were virtually indistinguishable
from their male counterparts, and they represented both a novelty act on one
hand—like acrobats and strong women they performed an apparently
magical act through their transformation into male character—while also
actively working to undermine the status of wealthy men.
Male Impersonators on the US Stage
When one sees images of male impersonators active in the mid-nineteenth
century, it is not always obvious that one is looking at the image of a
woman. Annie Hindle, who emigrated from England in 1868 where she had
performed in male character in regional music hall entertainment, was the
first male impersonator on the American variety stage. Hindle must have
been among the earliest male impersonators active in English music hall,
but there is little record of her career there. Advertising placed in the
theatrical trade newspaper, The Era, indicates that Hindle performed in
regional Music Hall in Manchester and surrounding towns and she may
have decided to move to the United States after failing to find bookings at
London Music Halls. Hindle was around twenty years old when she and her
mother arrived in the United States, and she performed in variety into the
first decade of the twentieth century. Ella Wesner, who was several years
older than Hindle, was her first serious rival on the American stage (see
Figure 25.10). Wesner had already worked as a ballet dancer for close to
twenty years when she decided to change specialty; she debuted as a male
impersonator in 1871 and continued to work in this specialty until 1903,
when she retired.
FIGURE 25.10 Ella Wesner in male impersonator costume. Carte de visite by Sarony, New York,
1872. Author’s collection.

While Hindle and Wesner pioneered this style in the early 1870s, they
were quickly joined by other women, a number of whom were older and
who used this specialty to extend their stage careers. There were almost a
dozen women performing in this specialty during the 1870s and 1880s, and
the singers who succeeded best in it were those who came closest to the
realism of Hindle and Wesner in their acts.22 Both women were fairly slim
in their build and paid minute attention to their costuming and gestures.
They sang in a mezzo-soprano or alto range, which added to their realism.
Hindle was so realistically masculine in her costume that she had been
detained in Michigan in the 1870s when police suspected her of being a
man traveling disguised as a woman. Given that farmers who opposed
government intervention sometimes traveled to meetings to organize
protests dressed in female clothing to avoid detection, the suspicion of the
police was justified. When they failed to find an Adam’s apple on Hindle’s
throat they had to let her go, but the incident was reported in the theatrical
newspaper, as was her marriage to a woman in the mid-1880s. In that case
Hindle was able to fool a Baptist minister in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who
married her to her female dresser, Annie Ryan, in 1886. The scandal of this
event briefly derailed her stage career and she and her wife lived together in
New Jersey until her wife’s death in 1891. Hindle then returned to the stage
as a male impersonator in small-time vaudeville, although she married
another woman about six months after Ryan’s death in 1892.23
Annie Hindle, Ella Wesner and the other early male impersonators active
in the United States during the early 1870s, including Blanche Selwyn,
Alicia Jourdan, and Augusta Lamoureaux, all shared repertoire with male
singers and all specialized in the same kinds of characters. Given their
realism, and given the number of women in sexually alluring costumes on
the stage around them and in other theatrical forms, we cannot assume that
the appeal of male impersonators was primarily sexual. Despite this, both
Hindle and Wesner were among a small number of the most highly paid
performers of the 1870s, able to earn as much as $150 or $200 a week in a
period when most performers were lucky to earn $50 a week. If the appeal
of these women was not sexual, then what made them such firm favorites
with the men in their audiences? An examination of their repertoire
suggests that their appeal for male audiences lay in the way their acts served
to shore up working class constructions of manhood, while also making fun
of middle and upper class manhood. Female performers were better able to
undermine the manhood of their social superiors because, unlike male
performers, they were able to use their audience’s knowledge that they were
really women to depict middle class men as being innately feminine and
therefore less than real men.24
The acts of male impersonators relied heavily on songs in which the
wealthy men they portrayed bragged about their accomplishments and their
irresistible charm to women. Male impersonators offered their male
audience members a guide to fine living and potentially also to upward
mobility; men who did not desire upward mobility could glory in the excess
of the swell, but could also take comfort in knowing that this swell was a
fake. Other songs were less gentle to the swell, holding him up for ridicule
and exposing him as an impotent fop, allowing those men in the audience
who had contempt for middle class men to find solace in the male
impersonator’s depiction of the man about town. All of the songs needed to
allow for multiple and contradictory readings in which praise and critique
co-existed, but at times the criticism could become more pointed, especially
when the audience knew that a woman’s body lay beneath a plausibly male
exterior.
Songs that sang the praise of alcohol were particularly popular with
male audiences of this period, and there are hundreds of songs that praise
specific alcoholic beverages. Champagne was one such beverage, and songs
in praise of this wine first appeared in England in the 1870s as Champagne
makers sought to attract a lower class audience to their product. These
songs quickly came to the United States and were equally popular in
variety. Songs such as Champagne Charlie, or Moët and Chandon for Me,
or Louis Renouf all referenced this beverage. Wesner had a number of songs
about alcohol and drinking in her repertoire, including one in praise of
Californian (not French) champagne.
Wesner and Hindle did not limit themselves to upper class swells; they
also depicted regular men, like those in their audience, through song. They
offered them advice on courting women and on keeping their marriages
happy. They encouraged the men in their audience to maintain a class
identity, even if they should manage to acquire wealth or success. Many of
their songs echo the kinds of articles and commentary found in men’s
sporting and sensational newspapers of the period. Men in variety, both on
the stage and in the audience, treated these women as honorary men, and
like the exceptional women in legitimate theater who took male roles, their
transgressions against the standards of working class femininity were
tolerated because of the service they provided to the men in their audience.
While it is difficult to know much about the off-stage lives of the
performers of this period, both Hindle and Wesner had their primary
emotional and most likely physical relationships with women. Hindle, who
had married two different men most likely for convenience during the
1870s, had had at least one relationship with a female dresser before she
married Annie Ryan, also her dresser, in 1886. Ryan was the only spouse
with whom Hindle co-habited. After Ryan’s death, Hindle married another
woman, Augusta Gerschner. Wesner’s one true love, as reported by the New
York Sun in 1891, was the notorious Josephine Mansfield who had been
involved in scandal and murder in the early 1870s. Wesner had run off to
Paris with Mansfield in the middle of the theatrical season and might have
ended her career then if not for the speedy intervention of her agent and the
variety manager Tony Pastor.
There is no evidence that any of the other male impersonators active in
variety had same-sex relationships, and it was not until the early twentieth
century that there was any suggestion that male impersonation was
unnatural. Unlike female impersonation, male impersonation was never
banned on the stage, and it appears that by the 1910s women were choosing
to not enter this specialty because of their own distaste for it. The most
prominent male impersonators active in America after 1900 were primarily
English imports who were protected by their status as foreigners, but all of
these women had been born in the nineteenth century; apparently even in
England few younger women took on this specialty. The last tour by a big
name male impersonator occurred in 1930, and after that date women were
rarely seen in male character, except in the context of Hollywood films.
It can be seen that in the nineteenth century, cross-dressed performance,
as well as performance that pushed the boundaries of middle class ideals of
gender, was much more widespread than it is today. In most cases cross-
dressing served to reinforce ideas about gender and class, and on occasions
it was also used to undermine hegemonic middle class constructions of
gender. When performed in the all-male context of minstrelsy and
burlesque, cross-dressing operated primarily to reinforce the idea of women
as being inferior to men. Women in the sexualized pants roles of burlesque
were there primarily to titillate men, and there are ties here to the use of
lesbian sex as a part of male pornography. It was only in the context of
variety that male impersonation was realistic and served to undermine
masculinity, but even then, these women performed a service first and
foremost for the men in their audience. Despite the fact that the leading
nineteenth-century performers may now be viewed as lesbian, their
sexuality was not the central issue in their acts. The concern with class
issues, and with constructing models of masculinity that supported the men
in their audience, is evident in the texts of the songs they sang.
 T -C D C
D US E

Both male and female impersonation became problematic in the twentieth

century because of a growing public awareness of homosexuality and also
the growing assumption that the acts of performers active in vaudeville
were based on their own personalities. In the case of some performers, this
may well have been true, and these were, no doubt, the earliest drag
performers in bars and clubs that catered to a gay clientele. Actresses active
in the early twentieth century who were lesbians could not afford to
publicize this if they wanted to pursue a career in show business. All
women in theater, and not just male impersonators, were threatened by
hostility to mannish women that emerged during the 1910s with the final
push for women’s suffrage. For these women, who were highly paid
professionals and were, in fact, the equal of their peers, the threat of being
labeled unfeminine and perverse was substantial. In order to protect their
hard-won autonomy and success, women—lesbian, straight, male
impersonators or not—all assumed more correct depictions of gender and
male impersonation as a performance genre all but disappeared from the
mainstream stage.
Men were affected differently than women as performance aesthetics
came to be shaped more by middle class sensibilities at the end of the
nineteenth century. Men were more able to trangress the bounds of middle
class masculinity, but they were constrained in their depictions. They could
depict a broader range of characters, which had also been true in the
nineteenth century, and, as long as they could conform to normative middle
class ideals in their off-stage behavior, they could perform non-normative
masculinity on the stage. Male-to-female cross-dressed performance
became much less common in mainstream entertainment and the glamorous
drag queen became more problematic in the early to mid-twentieth century;
when cross-dressing occurred, it was often for comic effect. The
grotesquely funny “dame” character lived on into the twentieth century,
working its way into film depictions. As long as the story showed the man’s
reluctance to cross-dress, as in I Was a Male War Bride, or revealed the
doubtful masculinity of characters for comedy and social critique, as in the
final scene in which a wealthy bachelor expresses his love for a cross-
dressed Jack Lemmon even as he is confronted with the fact that he is a
man in Some Like it Hot, the male stars could dress as women and escape
public censure. As with actresses, actors who were homosexual became less
likely to engage in cross-dressing and more likely to engage in public
displays of heteronormative behavior in order to keep their private life safe
from scrutiny.
N
1. Rice’s Evangeline, edited by Richard Jackson, was published as part of the Nineteenth-century
American Musical Theater series by Garland. The introductory essay by Jackson explains the
many topical references in the libretto that make it all but incomprehensible to a contemporary
audience. See Jackson, Nineteenth-Century American Musical Theater: Early Burlesque in
America (New York: Garland, 1994).
2. Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 277. A comment about
Leon printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, August 4, 1862 on his addition to the company at
Barnum’s Museum, noted that Leon had “danced at Ordwell Hall under the sobriquet of the
‘Ethiopian Cubas.’” (Local Matters: Amusements, p. 1). Isabella Cubas was a famous prima
ballerina of this period.
3. See Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), for an
extended discussion of the links between Blackface performance and various rituals of disorder,
including parading, riots, and rough music, that were features of the American landscape into
the mid-nineteenth century.
4. See Roy Rosenzweig Eight Hours for What We Will (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988) and particularly chapters 2 and 3, for a discussion of the commercialization of drinking
and leisure, and its importance in working class culture of the nineteenth century. Madelon
Powers also discusses the culture of the saloon in Faces Along the Bar (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), and notes the importance of social rituals for men in chapter 2.
5. George Chauncey provides a particularly useful discussion of late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth century gender construction, and the construction of homosexuality within working
class culture in chapter 3 of Gay New York (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 65–97.
6. “Eltinge in Musical Play,” New York Times, September 12, 1911: 11.
7. See, for example, Percy Hammond’s review “The ‘Crinoline Girl’ is a Cave Man” (Chicago
Tribune, February 15, 1915: 11), in which he describes Eltinge as “overblown, conspicuous,
blowsy, and his seedy voluptuousness is part of his successful game.” This critique is not only
based in the reviewer’s complaints that Eltinge is not realistic in his impersonation, but also a
sense of distate about his performance. He also compares Eltinge to a burlesque queen—in other
words, he finds the whole thing lacking in taste.
8. Senelick, The Changing Room, pp. 307–310.
9. Ibid., p. 315
10. “News of the Night,” New York Times, May 12, 1940: 134. “Julian Eltinge, Impersonator, 57,”
New York Times, March 8, 1941: 19, just notes his illness, while “Julian Eltinge Dies,” Chicago
Tribune, March 8, 1941: 20 refers to a kidney ailment, while the notice that ran in the El Paso,
TX, Herald-Post, which re-printed an item from the International News Service, cited the cause
of death as a cerebral hemorrage (“Man Who Portrayed Women’s Roles Dies,” El Paso Herald-
Post, March 7, 1941: 11).
11. See Gillian M. Rodger “Female Hamlets and Romeos: Cross-Dressing Actresses in Nineteenth-
Century Theater,” in Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American
 Variety Stage (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018), pp. 17–26
12. See, Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, “Acting between the Spheres: Charlotte Cushman as
Androgyne,” in Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), pp.185–230. Mullenix views breeches performance as having declined in the last
third of the nineteenth century, but I would argue that while this style of performance declined in
the highest class legitimate drama, it became more common in middle-brow and low-brow
entertainment forms that have only recently become the focus of scholars.
13. See, for example, a review originally published in the New York Clipper, of Lydia Thompson’s
earliest tour to the United States, quoted in Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 8, in which the reviewer notes that the appeal of
these actresses did not lie in the fairness of their faces. The feminist actress, Olive Logan,
protested the popularity of burlesque actresses, as well as other actresses in breeches roles,
referring to them in her various publications as “naked women.” See Olive Logan, “About
Nudity in Theatres,” in Apropos of Women and Theatres, with a Paper or Two on Parisian
Topics (New York: Carleton Publishers, 1869), pp. 123–153.
14. Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness, provides a good overview of the development of burlesque in
the United States, as does Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima, which considers
lower and less literary forms of burlesque as a sexualized strand of variety entertainment.
15. Logan, “Nudity in Theatres,” pp. 134–136.
16. In the first chapters of his book, Mazeppa: The Lives, Loves and Legend of Adah Isaacs Menken
(New York: Stein & Day, 1982), Wolf Mankowitz traces the various stories relating to Menken’s
early life in New Orleans and on the stage. Nothing about her early life is certain, but by the
1850s she had begun to claim Sephardic Jewish heritage. Once she left New Orleans and the
region, Menken built on the mystique of her early life, creating a public persona that refused to
take the morays of polite society seriously. This culminated in her career in Europe, and her
affair with the French author, Alexandre Dumas.
17. Peta Tait, “Cross-Dressing and Female Muscular Drag,” in Circus Bodies (London: Routledge,
2004), pp. 66–89, particularly pp. 66–77
18. Olive Logan, Apropos of Women and Theatres, pp. 118–120
19. Claudia D. Johnson “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American
Theaters,” in Victorian America, edite by Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of
Prennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 111–120
20. See “Novelty Acts in Concert Saloons,” in Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima, pp.
39–47
21. Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima, pp. 33–34
22. A longer and more detailed examination of male impersonation in variety that centers on the
careers and lives of Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner can be found in Rodger, Just One of the
Boys.
23. “Stranger than Fiction,” New York Sun, December 27, 1891: 13. This article includes an
interview with Hindle after her first wife’s death, as well as a discussion—mostly factually
correct—of her performing career and influence in variety. Hindle’s marriage to her second wife
was noted by the same newspaper. See “Hindle Weds Anew,” New York Sun, July 5, 1892: 1.
This article repeats a good portion of the earlier article, adding at the beginning details of
Hindle’s most recent marriage. For a more detailed discussion of Hindle’s off-stage life and
marriages, see Rodger, Just One of the Boys, particularly pp. 51–53, 139–143, 196 n15.
24. For a longer discussion of male impersonators and their repertoire, see “Champagne Charlie:
The Fantasy of Leisure for the Workingman,” in Rodger, Champagne Charlie and Pretty
Jemima, pp. 127–146 and Rodger, Just One of the Boys.
B
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Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, edited by Laurence Senelick,
26–45. Hanover, NH: Tufts University Press, 1992.
Senelick, Laurence, ed. Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing
Arts. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992.
Senelick, Laurence. “Boys and Girls Together: Subcultural Origins of Glamour Drag and Male
Impersonation on the Nineteenth-Century Stage.” In Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-
Dressing, edited by Lesley Ferris, 80–95. London: Routledge, 1993.
Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre. London: Routledge, 2000.
Slide, Anthony. The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers. Westport, CT: Arlington
House, 1981.
Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge, 2004.
Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974.
 CHAPTER 26

ANGLOPHONE SONGS ABOUT

HIV/AIDS
MAT T HE W J. JO NE S
 I

T soundscape of AIDS is vast, comprising popular song, musical theater,

symphony, choral works, hip-hop, and jazz as well as religious hymns,
country music, and children’s songs. The HIV/AIDS Music Project
(HAMP) database lists thousands of songs about AIDS from around the
world.1 No single essay could do justice to the myriad musical responses to
the epidemic; I limit this discussion to texted, English-language popular
songs. The reasons are varied and inevitably shaped by my own musical
proclivities, eccentricities, and habits. First, I love music with words. It is
the music I know best as listener, performer, and critic. Second, lyrics
imbue music about AIDS with meaning in ways that differ from purely
instrumental works. This isn’t to say that musical semiotics plays second
fiddle to the words. As a form of what Audre Lorde calls “revelatory
distillation of experience,” song poetry works in tandem with what Paul
Attinello calls our “ingrained musical habits” to produce complex lyrical-
musical statements.2 Finally, “in a culture in which few people make music
but everyone makes conversation, access to songs is primarily through their
words.”3 We read our experiences through lyrics; they become sticky (to
borrow Sara Amhed’s evocative term) with the affective residue of our
lives.4 Economical and impactful, poetic song texts can be written by
virtually anyone, and in that sense, they are truly popular. Song lyrics speak
with vernacular tongues to broad spectrums of listeners, and this is
especially important for AIDS-themed works.
Thirty years into the global AIDS pandemic, artworks are one tangible
remnant of the millions of men, women, and children who have died and of
the cultures that evaporated or went underground.5 They constitute what
Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of feelings.”6 As I turn to this archive as
an object of musicological analysis, my sensibilities are shaped by Douglas
Crimp’s assertions that art about AIDS can save lives; that a critical
investment in transcendent or enduring art is a luxury unavailable during
the AIDS crisis; and that gay promiscuity—so derided under the norms of
heteropatriarchy—offers a very real pathway to the end of the epidemic; as
well as by David Román’s notion of “critical generosity.”7 Being critically
generous does not mean turning off aesthetic evaluation. Some of these
songs are quite good; others, rather terrible. Generous reading demands,
however, that we move beyond values of transcendence or endurance, that
we pay attention to the immediate, the failed, and from the vantage point of
hindsight, the forgotten. It also requires sensitivity to the activist, rather
than the aesthetic, goals of an artwork: memorialization, elegy, working
through trauma, protest, dissemination of information, and the archiving of
the unseen (by the white, straight majority) realities of the epidemic.
Musical works about AIDS appeared more slowly than those from our
sister arts. Yet as Attinello notes, “[t]here were many by the late 1980s—
benefits; protest songs; the musicals March of the Falsettos and Zero
Patience; a previously publicized symphony by John Corigliano; the new
Lieder of The AIDS Quilt Songbook; a slew of works commissioned by
various gay men’s choruses; and a rude punk song called “Rimmin’ at the
Baths.”8 Between 1981 (the year the first reports of a new and deadly
disease appeared) and 1996 (the breakthrough year in which combination
therapies dramatically changed the prognoses of people with AIDS
[PWAs]), music about HIV/AIDS flourished. As the culture of the epidemic
changed in the West, the number of artworks about AIDS diminished
significantly.9 The AIDS epidemic impacts not only PWAs but also their
friends, families, allies, and the many communities or subcultural groups to
which they belong. In the arts and creative worlds, this meant that artists
with AIDS themselves created works about the epidemic; so, too, did the
HIV-negative. At the outset, it is important to clarify that serostatus plays
no necessary role in the creative decisions of songwriters, composers, and
performers. Some HIV-positive musicians such as Michael Callen (1955–
1993), Gil Scott Heron (1949–2011), and John Grant deal with experiences
of HIV/AIDS. Others, Freddie Mercury (1946–1991), Eazy-E (1963–1995),
Tom Fogerty (1941–1992), Sharon Redd (1945–1992), and Jerry Herman
make no explicit mention of AIDS at all. Likewise, HIV-negative musicians
including Tori Amos, Salt-N-Pepa, and Annie Lennox created important
songs about AIDS.
 U E M C
AIDS

At first, PWAs and their allies utilized extant music to express their feelings
and experiences, especially grief and loss. This is both personal and
pragmatic. Existing songs already carry an affective charge which gives
them a practical utility. Familiar songs with no specific AIDS content can
be incorporated into rituals of mourning, remembrance, protest, and even
fundraising. As a result, new AIDS-related meaning adheres to these songs.
For example, in Bette Midler’s “Friends” (1972), the singer describes
“some friends [who’ve] gone, something came and took them away,” but
ultimately she resolves to stay where she is until new friends arrive.
Already something of a gay anthem due to Midler’s career-making
performances at The Continental Baths, “Friends” assumed new meaning
for gay men who watched friends, lovers, and communities fall ill and die
as the government took no action to intervene. Likewise, The Gay Men’s
Chorus of Los Angeles performed an a cappella arrangement of “Family”
from Dreamgirls in a 1986 Pride Parade, offering the song as a tribute to the
dead and a statement of community solidarity. Finally, well-known hymns,
protest songs, Civil Rights anthems such as “We Shall Overcome,”
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” or “Amazing Grace” have been utilized in response
to AIDS. Their familiarity makes them ideal for communal singing, which
fosters a sense of solidarity. Existing songs provide “a moving tribute to the
deceased and serve as the soundtrack to people’s mourning [in order to
supply] ritualistic closure.”10 As a component of public political funerals,
marches, and private mourning, extant songs functioned in just these ways.
Existing music has also been used to great effect in media
representations of AIDS. In a memorable funeral scene in the 2003 HBO
adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, drag artist Flotilla
DeBarge (Kevin Joseph) interpolates Malcolm Speed’s gospel hymn “I’m
His Child” into a memorial service for one of “the great glitter queens” who
died of AIDS. The performance works on two levels. First, the hymn
expresses sentiments held by Christian LGBTQs, including many people of
color.11 Second, it harkens to Zella Jackson Price’s tour-de-force
performance of the hymn before an audience of gospel icons such as The
Barrett Sisters, The O’Neal Twins, Thomas A. Dorsey, and Willie May Ford
Smith in the documentary Say Amen, Somebody (1982). The funeral scene
turns Price’s performance on its head. Dressed in an afro and long gown
that recall the powerful Black womanhood of 1970s icons such as Roberta
Flack or Gloria Gaynor, Debarge performs, like Price, in a church sanctuary
accompanied by a gospel choir. The audience includes biological family
members, leather fetishists, genderqueers, professional Mediterranean
mourners, New York notables like Lypsinka (John Epperson), and a coterie
of drag queens dressed like Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, and
Mae West. These queer icons stand in for the gospel legends in the original
documentary, and the scene transforms an iconic moment in gospel music
history into a celebration of queerness that refuses to kowtow to the
demands of heteronormativity or dull the sparkle of one rhinestone for the
sake of straight mourners.
Extant music can also be used “to gather people into the space of
performance so that an AIDS intervention—educational, financial, political,
psychological—can materialize.”12 Album and concert ticket sales have
been especially effective in this capacity. In 1985, London-based industrial
rock outfit Coil recorded their version of Gloria Jones’s “Tainted Love”
(1965)—which had already been given a New Wave treatment by Soft Cell
in 1981—as a fundraiser for the Terrence Higgins Trust.13 Coil transformed
“Tainted Love” into a dirge by dramatically slowing the tempo, paring the
musical arrangement to the familiar bass riff played on eerie synth tubular
bells; clangorous orchestral and electric guitar hits; a ghostly choir; and
John Balance’s anguished, half-spoken vocals. This rearrangement of the
music draws attention to the ways that “‘night fever,’ ‘the boogie fever,’ the
‘tainted love,’ and the ‘love hangover’ all seemed to be passing into
literalism.”14 In the accompanying music video, Coil uses a strategy
Andrew Goodwin calls “amplification” to graft a visual AIDS narrative
onto the song.15 That same year, Dionne Warwick gathered her musical
friends Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, and Elton John to record a charity
single for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFar). “That’s
What Friends Are For” was originally written by Burt Bacharach and
Carole Bayer Sager and sung by Rod Stewart on the soundtrack of the 1982
romantic-comedy Night Shift. Its nondescript lyrics are sentimental and
bland, but in the context of AIDS, these reassuring banalities resound with
new significance when staged as a conversation between several friends,
gathered to bid farewell to someone who is dying. Such benefit singles have
raised millions of dollars, and “That’s What Friends Are For” has since
been used in conjunction with other charity causes.
Finally, a New York-based nonprofit, The Red Hot Organization, has
been committed to “fighting AIDS through pop culture” since its inception
in 1989.16 Red Hot released its first fundraising compilation in 1990. Red
Hot + Blue combined Cole Porter’s erudite love songs with new
arrangements by performers such as Annie Lennox, Bono, k. d. lang, David
Byrne, Iggy Pop, and Erasure. A 90-minute cable TV special featuring
music videos by famous directors and a variety of celebrity cameos was
broadcast around the world. The sale of albums and related merchandise
generated millions of dollars for AIDS charities. In her analysis of the
collection, Kathy Bergeron emphasizes the changes between Porter’s lyrical
and musical sensibilities and those of present-day pop idioms. Bergeron is
not particularly concerned with the activist goals of Red Hot + Blue, and it
is these issues that concern me most. Innovative music videos transform
Porter’s songs into songs about AIDS.17 Visual images illustrate, amplify,
or contradict the meaning of a given song.18 The most effective videos in
this collection rely on amplification of meaning through the juxtaposition of
images of activism, illness, and mourning with the song texts. David
Byrne’s “Don’t’ Fence Me In” personifies HIV, speaking from a diversity of
subject positions (young, old, white, non-white, men, women, ostensibly
straight and queer) using digital editing techniques to present “faces of
AIDS” which get torn into pieces then reassembled in a postmodern
bricolage. The titular refrain functions as a double-voiced warning. On one
hand, it cautions listeners that HIV/AIDS can impact anyone while on the
other, it portrays PWAs as more complex and complete human subjects, not
just carriers of disease. For k. d. lang’s glorious rendition of “So in Love,”
director Percy Adlon uses color and lighting to paint a beautiful portrait of
the unsung heroes of AIDS and the important issue of caregiver burnout.
Annie Lennox and director Ed Lachman offer a moving tribute to
filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–1994) in their video for “Ev’ry Time We
Say Goodbye.”19
While some preexisting music could be used in AIDS activism, the
epidemic required new songs that addressed the particulars of HIV/AIDS.
Original songs soon emerged to document, to comfort, to protest, to
educate, and to incite. Newly-composed works that dealt head-on with
HIV/AIDS appeared by the mid-1980s, although few musicians—especially
mainstream popular artists—were willing to name the epidemic in their
songs. Whether the result of pressure from industry executives, the whims
of individual artists, or AIDS phobia, HIV/AIDS remained the disease that
dare not sing its name. Songs that explicitly name HIV or AIDS appear
most often in musical theater, where the demands of the dramatic scenario
require this level of explicitness. In Rent (1996), perhaps the most famous
of several AIDS-themed musicals, Roger sings about “the virus” taking
hold in his body; Mimi and Roger stop, mid-seduction, for an “AZT break,”
and genderqueer character Angel dies of AIDS-related illness and is then
eulogized on stage. Among popular songs, those which explicitly mention
AIDS such as Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk about AIDS” (1990), Mary
Gauthier’s “Goddamn HIV” (1997), and Canibus’s “AIDS is Gold, HIV is
Platinum” (1998), remain outliers. Typically, songwriters rely on allusion,
metaphor, or suggestive puns. Tori Amos’s “Not the Red Baron” (1996) and
Rufus Wainwright’s “Barcelona” (1998) feature arcane symbolism that
listeners must decode; however, in most examples, the rhetorical veneer is
relatively easy to strip away. For instance, in “Sign ‘O’ the Times” (1987),
Prince sings of a man “who died of a big disease with a little name.”
Likewise, in “Waterfalls” (1994), TLC never sing the words HIV or AIDS,
but in the second verse, the “three letters” which take a male protagonist
with voracious sexual appetites “to his final resting place” clearly spell H-I-
V.
Whether extant or newly-composed, created by a PWA or someone who
is HIV-negative, songs about AIDS participate in the discursive
construction of beliefs, ideologies, and societal attitudes about the epidemic
and those impacted by it. They represent diverse agendas and politics, and
they incorporate a variety of musical idioms, other expressive practices, and
appear in many genres. In thinking about texted musical responses to
HIV/AIDS in popular music, I have found it helpful to distinguish between
five broad categories based on lyric content: elegies, protest songs,
pedagogical songs, confessional songs, and a small category of songs in bad
taste. Any topology is a political tool, and mine is no different. My focus on
lyrics widens the scope of each category beyond the usual generic suspects
and allows musically diverse and seemingly disparate examples to sit
alongside one another. Certain ideas, motivations, attitudes, and
interventions were aimed at different constituencies—the fans or audiences
of any given genre. Rather than produce a definitive taxonomy of songs
about AIDS, my more modest aims are to analyze lyrics and some relevant
musical details in order to highlight what I see as the important uses of
music as a part of the broad arts-based social justice movement that
emerged out of the health crisis and to (re)introduce songs about AIDS into
the history of the epidemic, as writers, critics, and scholars now seek to
preserve this history.
 E

The losses of the AIDS epidemic are staggering. Within a few years, the
number of cases grew exponentially from initial reports of a “Rare Cancer
Seen in 41 Homosexuals” and five cases of pneumocystis pneumonia in
1981 to “1,112 and Counting” in 1983.20 By 1990, there had been more
than 31,000 AIDS-related deaths, and these numbers continue to increase.
Globally, there have been millions of AIDS-related deaths. Enumerating the
dead became an important part of AIDS activism. For example, mourners
read lists of names during public presentations of the NAMES Project
AIDS Memorial Quilt. Loss, mourning, and memorialization are central to
art about AIDS, especially in elegiac forms of poetry and song. Melissa
Zeiger argues that unlike the speakers of traditional elegies, “the speakers in
AIDS elegies refuse to deny death by hiding that they are themselves at
risk, are already infected with the HIV virus, or are […] already dying. As
the line between the dead and survivors dissolves, so too does the
customary elegiac politics of subject and object.”21 Dagmawi Woubshet
finds among literary AIDS elegies by Paul Monette, Melvin Dixon, and
David Wojnarowicz a tendency to compound loss, to erase “the governing
binary of the [elegy] between the living poet and the lost object of
mourning” because the lost object is “not only external to the self, but also
includes the self;” the author is also living with AIDS.22 Melvin Dixon’s
poem “And these Are Just a Few…,” lists some of the author’s friends who
have died, and this attenuated list metonymically stands in all of the losses
in the lives of both the poet and his readers. In Larry Kramer’s The Normal
Heart, Tommy Boatwright keeps in his desk drawer a growing, rubber-
band-bound stack of Rolodex cards containing the contact information of
his dead friends, and in the 2011 Broadway revival, names of the dead were
literally scrawled onto the walls of the set.
Some musical AIDS elegies use a similar compounding/enumerating
technique. Tom Wilson Weinberg’s “Obituary” (Ten Percent Revue, 1987)
and “How We Get the News” (Get Used to It!, 1997) express this sense of
compounding loss in acts such as listening to the day’s answering machine
messages, opening the obituary page of a gay newspaper, or happening
upon a friend’s memorial AIDS Quilt panel. In both pieces, an individual
singer begins each verse by intoning the name of a friend or lover who has
died and telling listeners a bit about him. Each stanza of “How We Get the
News” climaxes as multiple singers repeat the titular refrain. The small
cadre of actors stands in for similar scenes around the globe. Lou Reed’s
“Halloween Parade” (1989) offers a variant on this type of elegy by
chronicling the characters and events that perdure after a number of beloved
friends, listed in the song, have died. Things will never be the same for the
singer, in part because of his own private grief, but also because similar
scenes play themselves out throughout the city, the nation, and the globe.
Finally, Tom Andersen’s “Yard Sale” (1998) features an encounter between
the singer and a dying PWA whose life is recounted not in the names of
dead friends but in his most treasured possessions, laden with affect and
memory but bargain-priced to sell and spread out on his San Francisco front
lawn. These elegies share with Dixon’s poem “One by One,” a terror of
“The singularity of death. The mounting thousands./ It begins with one and
grows by one/ and one and one and one/ until there’s no one left to
count.”23
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was not uncommon for obituaries—especially
those made by the straight families of PWAs—to omit AIDS-related illness
as the cause of death and to erase the queer sexuality of gay men. There are
stories of heterosexual families who refused to allow gay partners and
friends to attend funerals and memorial services, and inspiring tales of
brave individuals who disrupted those memorials by insisting that both the
sexuality and cause of death be acknowledged.24 Queer families of choice
also held their own alternative memorial services. In this context, it is
perhaps unsurprising that elegiac songs by pop artists tended to be more
bland and euphemistic, even when written or performed by gay men such as
George Michael (“Jesus to a Child,” 1996) and Elton John (“The Last
Song,” 1991). Sincere yet syrupy ballads such as Karla Bonoff’s “Goodbye
My Friend” (1988), Tiffany’s “Here in My Heart” (1990), and Michael
Jackson’s “Gone Too Soon” (1991) could be about people who died of
AIDS or just as effectively about those who died as a result of injuries
sustained in a car accident or cancer. Janet Jackson’s “Together Again” is
laden with banal reassurances: “Everywhere I go, every smile I see, I know
you are there smilin’ back at me, dancin’ in moonlight, I know you are
free…” The accompanying music video features Jackson and a coterie of
friends in the African savannah and other exotic locales, with no signifiers
that this is an AIDS memorial. The only indication that the song is about
AIDS comes not from the song but from a small red awareness ribbon
printed alongside the lyrics inside the CD booklet. Madonna’s elegy to
personal friends who died of AIDS (“In This Life,” 1993) is
uncharacteristically restrained for the controversial singer. After describing
a young friend who “died before his time […] without a warning” and an
older father figure who “taught [her] to respect [her]self” and that it
“shouldn’t matter who you choose to love,” the singer refuses to name
AIDS in the dramatic half-spoken final stanza. Instead, she refers only to
“this thing” and “it,” leaving listeners to fill in the gaps or ignore the AIDS
subtext. In live performances and interviews, however, she has made the
AIDS connection explicit. Still, many of these mainstream pop elegies
perpetuate the broader cultural tendency to omit, ignore, or otherwise paper
over HIV/AIDS.
 P S

From topical lyrics set to existing popular melodies in the Revolutionary

period to songs associated with Black Lives Matter, music disseminates
activist ideologies, sets agendas, rallies support, and incites people to
action. In the US, protest song is often imagined as acoustic, folk-based
music such as the songs of Woody Guthrie, early Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul
and Mary, and other folk revival artists, or alternately, as the socially
conscious rock/folk-rock of the 1960s. However, spirituals, gospel, blues,
R&B, and hip-hop have long served as the raw materials of musical
resistance among communities of color. For some gay communities, the
sounds of dance music, disco, and EDM animate the choreographies of
resistance while lesbian women sang for liberation using the acoustic
template of the singer-songwriter, jazz, and the avant-garde.25
Because the epidemic touches so many different communities and
cultures, AIDS protest songs exhibit great stylistic diversity. Folk-based
acoustic examples such as Joni Mitchell’s “Sex Kills” (1994) sit alongside
Prince’s funk-rock “Sign ‘O’ the Times” (1987) and Billy Joel’s rock-
influenced “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989). While these songs have little
in common musically, they share preoccupations lyrically. Each
contextualizes HIV/AIDS within larger sociopolitical, economic, and
environmental crises at the end of the twentieth century. Jimmy Somerville
used the tropes of dance music in “Read My Lips (Enough is Enough)”
(1990) to call for increased funding and action in the fight against AIDS,
messages he and director Steve McLean incorporated into the mise-en-
scène and special effects in a music video for Sommerville’s dance remake
of Cole Porter’s “From This Moment On” (Red, Hot + Blue, 1990). More
recently, Annie Lennox issued “a call for the national implementation of
mother-to-child transmission prevention programs in all maternity hospitals
in South Africa” with her benefit single “Sing” (2007).
Images of war and militancy were central to early AIDS activism.
“Fighting for Our Lives” served as a rallying call for activists, and
prominent figures like Douglas Crimp and Larry Kramer urged PWAs and
their allies to engage in more militant tactics. In an iconic 1988 speech, Vito
Russo (1946–1990) described HIV/AIDS as “a war which is happening
only for those people who happen to be in the trenches. Every time a shell
explodes, you look around and you discover that you’ve lost more of your
friends, but nobody else notices […] And it’s worse than a war, because
during a war people are united in a shared experience. This war has not
united us, it’s divided us.”26 Themes of war and conflict emerged in some
AIDS protest songs, including two by Michael Callen. “We’ve Had
Enough” (1996) likens the US government’s neglect of PWAs to genocide,
and “Living in Wartime” (1988) calls out the “conspiracy of silence,” the
“bigotry and greed,” and the “complacency and arrogance” of then-
President Reagan and other conservative leaders. Larry Kramer chose
“Living in Wartime” as the exit music to play in the lobby as patrons left
The Public Theater during the original Off-Broadway run of The Normal
Heart (1985).
 P S

While militant protest songs were one tool in the musical activists’ arsenal,
songs with a public health message served an equally important role. Music
is an important pedagogical tool. Programs such as Sesame Street, School
House Rock, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood use song to teach language,
mathematical, and social skills, and behaviors to children. Hymns make
religious principles easier to remember by setting them to a tune. Opera,
popular music, and music video perpetuate ideologies about race, gender,
and sexuality.27 Likewise, music serves a variety of pedagogical purposes
related to the AIDS epidemic. One of these is the popularization and
normalization of safe sex. Prior to the AIDS epidemic, condom use was
largely seen as a heterosexual issue, primarily about pregnancy prevention.
In 1983, AIDS activists Michael Callen, Richard Berkowitz, and Dr. Joseph
Sonnabend published How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, a
forty-page booklet widely recognized as one of the first safe-sex guides.
Among its novel suggestions was the notion that gay men should use
condoms to prevent the exchange of infectious bacteria or viruses. Although
HIV had yet to be discovered, this was a revolutionary idea and one that
gay men, according to Crimp, were more than ready to adopt, their
openness to sexual experimentation and innovation having already served to
expand the notion of the body’s polymorphous perversity beyond
reproductive or even genitally-oriented sex.28 Callen penned a campy safe-
sex jingle, “How to Have Sex (in an Epidemic),” to coincide with the
publication of the book. The song uses vernacular language and camp
humor to deliver a serious message, evidenced in one of Callen’s most
inspired couplets: “Find a lover, use a rubber. In time you will discover it’s
OK to get laid!”29
Social, political, and economic factors conspired to distort the picture of
AIDS in America, giving most people the lingering impression that it is a
“gay” disease.30 However, from the beginning, people of color, the poor,
and injection drug users were part of the epidemic. By the end of the 1980s,
people of color represented the highest number of new infections.
Basketball superstar Magic Johnson’s retirement followed the carefully
stage-managed revelation that he was HIV-positive in 1991, and this
inaugurated some discussion of HIV/AIDS among Black Americans,
especially heterosexuals.31 Hip-hop musicians 2 Live Crew, Wu Tang Clan,
Ice Cube, and Biz Markie contributed original works to a Red Hot
compilation called AIDS: America is Dying Slowly (1996).32 Although
intended to raise both awareness and money, the album excluded women
artists, and the disfiguringly phallocentric lyrics of songs like Sadat X, Fat
Joe, and Diamond D’s “Stay Away from the Nasty Hoes” reinscribe
misogynistic ideas of women as “the bearers of viral fruit,” playing off
existing sexist associations of women and sexually transmitted diseases.33
Rising infection and death rates among women inspired female artists,
especially non-white women, to respond to AIDS with updated versions of
girl-group “advice” songs that used community-specific vernaculars, irony,
and humor.34 In “Can’t Love You Tonight” (1988), dance diva Gwen
Guthrie dismisses a lover’s advances by acknowledging the dangers of
casual sex: “Can’t love you tonight; love is no longer free. The price is
much too high. Don’t want no AIDS or herpes.” The next year, raunchy
R&B queen Millie Jackson translated the official scientific discourse of
HIV/AIDS into her own idiom, a straight-talking “rap” session called “Sho
Nuf Danjus.”35 Over a funky instrumental vamp, she addresses Black
women directly: “Ladies! Over the years, I know I’ve told you bitches when
to fuck, how to fuck, who to fuck, how long to fuck, and everything.”
Although she admits that she is sometimes “scared to fuck nowadays,”
Jackson encourages Black women to embrace their sexuality and to educate
themselves: “Do you realize the Surgeon General says that the only way not
to get AIDS is not to fuck? Well FUCK THAT! I gotta fuck once a year.”
Recognizing the futility of an abstinence-only approach, Jackson follows
the Surgeon General’s suggestion to use condoms. “Fuck a condom,” she
insists. “Use rubbers! Good Year, steel-belted radials!” She also insists that
women purchase their own condoms and learn how to put them on their
male partners in a hilarious parody of sexologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
Finally, Jackson shatters myths about women as the sole carriers of disease
by insisting that men can and will give women HIV. “If he’s got one [a
penis],” she declares, “it’s dangerous…There’s no such thing as a little
AIDS…unless it’s welfare!”
Salt-N-Pepa continued the conversation about HIV/AIDS and sexuality
among women of color with the release of “Let’s Talk About Sex” (Blacks’
Magic, 1991). They rerecorded the song as a public service announcement
called “Let’s Talk about AIDS.” This version encourages women and other
listeners to get tested and to seek treatment if they test positive for HIV-
antibodies. Their emphasis on the impact of HIV/AIDS on women of color
continued on their next album. Very Necessary (1993) closes with “I Got
AIDS,” a spoken-word skit performed by Boston’s We’re Educators—With
a Touch of Class! (WETOC), a peer-education non-profit that targeted
young people. TLC made their auspicious debut in 1992 wearing brightly
colored hip-hop clothes festooned with condoms. The trio made safer sex
and HIV/AIDS information available at kiosks outside their concert
performances. By speaking to women of color in candid vernacular, these
artists effectively educated their listeners, empowering them to take control
of their sexual destines in order to prevent new HIV transmissions.
Pedagogical songs about AIDS for children also exist. Peter, Paul and
Mary’s recording of “Home is Where the Heart Is” (1995) encourages
compassion for an ailing neighbor whose lover has died and who now
“roams around his well-stocked kitchen. He knows that fate will soon be
coming.” Peter Alsop’s “Gotta Lotta Living To Do” (1990) models a way
for grown-ups to discuss the complex issues of HIV/AIDS with small
children. The song presents a series of questions posed by a child, whose
father responds with frank, honest, and age-appropriate answers (see
Example 26.1).
 Table 26.1 Example 26.1. Lyrics, “Gotta Lotta Livin’ to Do” (excerpt) What

What is AIDS? It’s a virus bug

What can you do? Well, I give’m a hug
You hug your friend? Sure, and he hugs me
But aren’t you scared? Well, I used to be
I’d be scared! You’d learn alot
What would I learn? What’s safe, what’s not
Could I get AIDS? That’s hard to do
But some kids have it Yes, that’s true
Where’s the AIDS? It’s in his blood
What if he bleeds? We patch him up
‘Cause AIDS won’t let his blood cells fight.
So I shouldn’t touch his blood? You got that right!36

Pedagogical songs educate listeners using familiar language and musical

idioms such as rap, pop, and folk. Like other archival documents of the
early years of the AIDS crisis, the information contained in some of their
lyrics may (or may not) be obsolete, as treatment options have changed
drastically since 1996. Regardless, they were created to reduce stigma and
to save lives.
 C S

The daily realities of sickness, treatments, hospitalizations, and other

specific medical conditions were central to the experiences of PWAs.
Although Attinello found a few examples in The AIDS Quilt Songbooks,
very few songs deal with these realities.37 Popular songs about AIDS
seldom explore the somatic, cognitive, or other bodily experiences of living
with HIV infection. Instead, most emphasize the existential crisis of
attenuated life/impending death. In spite of the familiar conventions of first-
person dramatic storytelling among singer-songwriters, country artists, and
others, there are few first-person confessional songs about HIV/AIDS.
Mary Gauthier’s “Goddamn HIV” (1997) is a quasi-fictional story about
Michael Joe Alexandre, who self-identifies as “a queer since the day I was
born.” A witness to the pre-AIDS era as well as the ravages of the
epidemic, Alexandre observes the devastation, singing “my friends are all
dying. My best friends are dead […] and I don’t know what’s happening to
me.” However, most confessional AIDS songs operate at a syntactical
distance carefully distinguishing between the singer and the PWA.38
Many third-person confessional songs participate in the economies of
sensationalism described by Crimp in his important essay on AIDS
photography.39 By focusing on the ways HIV/AIDS is written on the body
(lesions, wasting syndrome, and other physical symptoms), social isolation,
and the inevitability of death these aural portraits of the PWAs reiterate
damaging stereotypical narratives. Death was undeniably a part of the
experience of AIDS before 1996; however, these third-person portraits keep
PWAs in a separate space, objectifying their illnesses and deaths in
aesthetic terms while perpetuating fantasies of AIDS as someone else’s
problem. The title of Pierce Pettis’s “Stickman” (1993) denies a PWA’s
subjectivity, indeed his very humanity and continues this erasure through
comparisons between several non-human entities, including a praying
mantis and a broken music box. Stickman also refuses to eat his food and
cries often, behaviors that may have more to do with a specific
physiological condition, reaction to medication, or psychological state like
depression/anxiety. The song, however, denigrates these feelings as little
more than child-like (that is, immature) whining. Finally, “Stickman”
perpetuates the lie that PWAs were isolated and alone, distanced even from
themselves in a hospital ward where, Pettis sings, they “look the other way”
because “they’ve seen it all before.” This flies in the face of what we know
about early AIDS activists who created networks of care where there were
none and who mobilized on behalf of their rights to treatment, research, and
roles in decision making at the national level. In 1983, a group of PWAs
drafted the AIDS self-empowerment manifesto “The Denver Principles,”
and gravely ill PWAs, many in wheelchairs or walking with assistance,
marched in rallies, pride parades, and other acts of civil disobedience.
Solidarity was an important value among AIDS activists, and “Stickman”
overlooks this completely. By contrast, Susan Abod’s “Soliloquy” (2011)
emphasizes the feelings and anxieties of the singer, who pays a final visit to
a dying friend. She observes his skeletal frame and lesion-mottled skin and
like Pettis, reduces the PWA to a cluster of symptoms in a hospital bed.
More worried about what to say or the unintended suggestions behind her
words, Abod’s singer fidgets as she tries to make small talk with her friend.
In these songs, PWAs are treated as the ultimate Other, denizens of the
Kingdom of the Sick. They are kept at a distance. AIDS remains the
problem of someone other than the narrator, and it is the narrator, of course,
with whom listeners most often self-identify.
An important subcategory of confessional songs emphasizes the effects
of HIV/AIDS on families. Many gay men, long separated from their
homophobic biological families, returned home when they became gravely
ill. However, “going home to die [was] often a last resort, when insurance
has run out or disability benefits won’t cover the rent.”40 Problematic
scenes of reconciliation between a gay PWA and his family on the silver
and small screens have been discussed by McRuer and others, and these
tropes emerge in song lyrics.41 Both Elton John’s “The Last Song” (1991)
and Paula Cole’s “Hush Hush Hush” (1997) utilize a deathbed scene
between a young gay PWA and his father. In “The Last Song,” the
estranged pair experiences a moment of catharsis days before the younger
man dies. The music is elegiac, slow, and sentimental. John’s vocals and
piano are decorated with swelling synth-string chords. Elton John sings
about a dying PWA, and in the music video, visual editing and special
effects present the singer as a god-like figure at a white piano in the sky,
looking down at the pathetic scene of reconciliation between father and
dying son. There can be no mistake: the dying PWA is the passive object,
never the singing subject.
“Hush, Hush, Hush” offers a knot of poetic images that listeners must
disentangle.42 The song begins as a third-person portrait of a 20-year-old
man in hospital whose father keeps vigil by his side, offering what solace he
can and urging his son to “go in peace.” Gentle compound meter and lilting
rhythms suggest a cradlesong or lullaby while an eerie clarinet figure recurs
as a signifier of sighs, cries, and ultimately, a harbinger of death. The song
falls into four large sections: two verses each followed by a refrain (A), a
bridge that utilizes a truncated version of the refrain (B), and a coda (C).
Large formal sections coincide with changes in perspective or voice. In
each A section, Cole describes the protagonist’s struggles with his own
sexuality and illness in third-person. The B section casts the listener in the
role of the PWA by shifting the narrating position to that of the father, who
speaks directly to his son. Guest artist Peter Gabriel spins a fairy tale in
which the child lives again as Henry VIII and “may be given a chance.” The
key changes from moody D-minor to a hopeful G-major as the music swells
into a triumphant processional with drum rolls, expansive string figures,
and a heavy dose of reverb. Abruptly, the triumphant music drops out.
Agitated string tremolos evoke the shivers of a sudden fever as the father’s
close-miked voice penetrates the haze of reverb, illness, sleep, and dream to
offer a comforting, “hush, hush, hush.” Ethereal strings, distorted guitar
effects, percussion, and a modulation from G to A parallel the PWA’s death
and ascent into the heavens in the wordless coda. Spacey improvisations on
guitar and piano suggest something astral or spiritual and the release of
suffering. “Hush, Hush, Hush” avoids troublesome moralizing,
reconciliation narratives, and the assignation of blame. Rather, it
emphasizes the moment of death and the end of suffering that death brings
to the terminally ill. Beautiful and moving as such songs are, they still
perpetuate the associations of HIV/AIDS with homosexuality and death.
 S B T

Finally, there are some songs about HIV/AIDS that are frankly in bad taste,
whose lyrics espouse malicious attitudes toward the experiences of PWAs,
their loved ones, friends, families, and partners, or else turn the very real
illness and discomfort of PWAs into the butt of crude jokes. GG Allin’s “I
Kill Everything I Fuck” and Method of Destruction’s “Anal Inflicted Death
Sentence (A.I.D.S)” rank among the most offensive. However, the most
egregious example tiptoes through the two lips of Tiny Tim (1932–1996).
“Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year” is a novelty song, a spoof of
children’s Christmas favorites like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” or
“Jolly Old Saint Nicholas.” Sung over a fatigued drum loop with accents
from a synth ukulele, the strophic lyrics describe all the yuletide cheer,
presents, and general revelry Santa will not be bringing this year. Instead of
yelling out “Ho, ho, ho,” he’ll be screaming out, “No, no, no!” Surrounded
by doctors and nurses who look at him with pity, Santa tells the boys and
girls, “This is Santa Claus saying I won’t be here this year! I’m sick in bed
with the AIDS! Oh, but I’ll be back next year. Oh, don’t cry for me, a
doctor will cure me!” The song was recorded in the early 1980s but not
released until 1990, and Tiny Tim offered a weak defense of the highly
offensive lyrics. He claimed that the song referred to “Ayds,” a weight loss
product popular in the 1970s but whose homophonic name led to a dramatic
drop in sales and eventual bankruptcy in the first years of the US AIDS
crisis.
A less explicit and possibly more damaging portrait of a PWA comes
from Reba McEntire. “She Thinks His Name Was John” (1994) utilizes the
generic conventions of a country-pop ballad: triadic piano filigree over a
simple chord progression and orchestration that pull at listeners’
heartstrings. The song is an HIV/AIDS allegory that works on two levels.
First, it is a cautionary tale about the dangers of unsafe sex for young
women in the age of AIDS. Second, and more perniciously, it is another
entry in the pantheon of musical morality tales about the “undoing” of
women for transgressive behaviors.43 Songwriter Sandy Knox composed
the song after the AIDS-related death of her brother. “My brother was 29
years old when he died,” Knox said, “and I put myself in his position…I
wrote from the standpoint of all the things he would be missing—having a
child, getting married, all of those things.”44 However, Knox wrote the song
not about her brother but about a young, heterosexual woman. The lyrics
portray the titular “she” as fastidious and sentimental with slightly
obsessive tendencies. She “can account” for her past lovers, their past and
current whereabouts, and their romantic as well as their family lives with
one notable exception: a man she thinks was named John. The verb
“account” is rather odd. It often appears in criminal contexts. Suspects are
asked to account for their actions or whereabouts or to provide an alibi to
clear their names. Similarly, having a “past” is rarely seen as a positive
attribute for a woman by traditional social-sexual standards, and the use of
“John” (a common generic man’s name but also a prostitute’s customer)
subtly reinforces her violation of traditional gender and sexual norms.
The second verse fills in more details, noting that the pair met by chance
at a party. Caught up in his charm and good looks, and perhaps a bit tipsy,
“she let his smile just sweep her away” even though “in her heart, she knew
that it was wrong.” Together, the pair leaves the party. In the dim light of
morning, she cannot remember his name, though she thinks it was John.
The song seems to be about the dangers of drinking and letting an
intoxicating stranger take advantage of your emotions. The third verse
completes the morality tale.
Now, each day is one day that’s left in her life.
She won’t know love, having a marriage, or sing lullabies.
She lays all alone and cries herself to sleep
‘cause she let a stranger kill her hopes and her dreams.
And all her friends say, “What a pity. What a loss.”
And in the end, when she was barely hanging on,
all she could say was she thinks his name was John.

The equation of women, sex, alcohol, and life-changing consequences is the

standard fare of patriarchy. Transgressive women are undone for their
behaviors. In this case, a young woman’s friends and family abandon her,
and she can only pace the halls of memory alone. Even on her deathbed, she
is plagued by doubt: was his name really John?
 Certain musical features reflect this undoing. Susan McClary (1990)
notes that “the tonic is rather boring by itself, and that lingering on the sixth
degree can create a delicious tension.”45 An errant sixth scale degree in the
final verse (over the words “all she could say”) establishes just this sort of
tension by breaking out of the tonic triad in which the melody has been
trapped. It also anticipates a later deceptive cadence (at 3:33) on the name
“John.” Each previous iteration of his name occurred with an authentic
cadence and an accompanying 7–1 vocal slide. So, the move to the
submediant chord (vi) is particularly unsettling because it directs the
expected cadential resolution to a sad-sounding minor chord that functions
like a question mark, casting doubt on the unnamed woman’s memory and,
more importantly, her morality. By casting the person who gave her HIV as
a stranger, the song also reinforces sexist ideas about women, mobility, and
sociality. It clearly marks strangers—strange men, in particular—as a
danger to be avoided, perhaps by not going to drunken parties in the first
place. In reality, women face far greater danger from their male intimate
partners than a stranger or a one-night stand. Like many folk ballads and
country songs, “She Thinks His Name Was John” trades in archetypes. The
young woman is unnamed; in fact, she is almost completely unmarked. We
know nothing of her age, appearance, or even where she lived. Thus, she
can be every woman, and the story of her undoing is a tale for all women.
“John” appears in the song as a ghost, a haunting presence, which only
contributes to his mystique. In fact, the song seems willfully uninterested in
John’s real identity, whether he is living or dead, or his own health. It is
unclear if he has infected the young woman (or other women) knowingly.
His role in her fall from grace goes unquestioned, further emphasizing that
it is women who must scrub out the moral stain of pre- or extra-marital sex.
 C : H AIDS

In his travelogue of the soundscape of AIDS, Paul Attinello observes that

“all the genres of music seem less political than comparable productions in
the other arts [due to] commercially actuated censorship in the music
industry or adherence to the norms of social reserve in the classical
sphere.”46 My sense is that songs about AIDS are always-already
politicized given the historical climate of stigma, shame, and violence
toward gay communities, communities of color, women, injection drug
users, and the unwell and the intensification of these feelings in the wake of
HIV/AIDS. Richard Dyer once wrote that “culture never ‘gets’ life, but it’s
also the only means we have to make any kind of sense of living at all.”47
He also said that there was no starting point in the processes of cultural
production because all our representational practices build upon extant
techniques and traditions. We don’t invent our culture out of thin air, and
the same is true, of course, for musical representations of HIV/AIDS. They
emerge from broader practices in popular music, musical theater, and opera
as well as those of instrumental music. Musical representations of
HIV/AIDS also develop alongside those musics’ sister arts. Finally, artistic
renderings of HIV/AIDS are part of longer processes of representation of
illness and disease.48 Music, art, literature, or any other cultural form will
never “get” the reality of the epidemic. No single work of art could
shoulder that burden, and really, no single artistic field could either. Musical
representations of HIV/AIDS give us some audible and emotional traction
in the midst of overwhelming emotions. They help us make sense of
tremendous feelings of loss, grief, and hopelessness just as they invite us to
remember those we loved. For those who did not live through the crisis
years (1981–1996), this music offers one audible record of the experiences
and emotions that surged through society during that time. In short, they
allow us to hear AIDS.
N
1. http://www.hamponline.net/databasehamp.html.
2. Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York:
Crossing Press, 2007), 36–37; Paul Attinello, “Closeness and Distance: Songs About AIDS,” in
Queering the Popular Pitch, eds. Sheila Whitely and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge,
2006), 221–234.
3. Simon Frith, “Why Do Songs Have Words,” Contemporary Music Review 5/1 (1989): 77–96.
Frith argues that song lyrics “are more like plays than poems; song words work as speech and
speech acts, bearing meaning not just semantically, but also as structures of sound that are direct
signs of emotion and marks of character,” (90). Frith’s notion of poetry as a written art differs
remarkably from Lorde’s idea of poetry as a spoken art. My own belief is that song lyrics and
poems function both as written texts and as sung/performed speech act. The lyrics of Joni
Mitchell and Bob Dylan—to cite just two obvious examples—often read as poetry even as they
are sung as lyrics. The inclusion of lyric sheets in rock and pop albums encourages audiences to
engage with song lyrics in both forms.
4. Sarah Amhed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 29.
5. José E. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU
Press, 2009) and Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) each explore the utopic, ecstatic, and euphoric
possibilities of queer culture in the age of AIDS.
6. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). Two chapters in particular deal with memories of
AIDS activism. In “AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP’s Lesbians,”
Cvetkovich interviews lesbian women active in the Austin chapter of ACT UP. In “Legacies of
Trauma, Legacies of Activism: Mourning and Militancy Revisited,” she revisits the affective
terrain of AIDS activism. Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS
Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997)
and Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed’s If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the
Promise of the Queer Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011) each grapple with
issues of memory and politics in relation to HIV/AIDS.
7. Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis / Cultural Activism,” in Moralism and Melancholia:
Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27–42; David Román,
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998).
8. Paul Attinello, “Closeness and Distance: Songs about AIDS,” in Queering the Popular Pitch,
edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2006), 221–231.
9. The situation throughout Africa, South America, Central America, and Asia was, and remains,
different and has resulted in a different artistic, musical, and cultural set of responses.
Ethnomusicologists have produced exciting work about music and AIDS in African Contexts.
See Music and AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing Through the Arts, edited by Gregory Barz and
Judah Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
10. Román, Acts of Intervention, 22. Emphasis added.
11. Many of respondents and interviewees in E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea: Gay Black Men of the
South (Durham: University of North Carolina, 2011) describe the importance of the church in
their lives and the complex negotiations that Black communities enact to incorporate that gay
sons and daughters into the institutions of the church, which serve spiritual, social, and political
purposes.
12. Román, Acts of Intervention, 19.
13. Coil released their version of “Tainted Love” on a benefit single with two other songs, “Aqua
Regis” and “Panic.” Proceeds went to the UK-based Terrence Higgins Trust.
14. Walter Hughes, “In the Empire of the Beat,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth
Culture, edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 154.
15. Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1993). A young man appears early on, being wheeled into a hospital
room where he remains throughout. Images of religious icons, woodcarvings of demons, and
paintings of the Sacred Heart intersperse with shots of flies trapped in a drizzle of honey. The
video ends with Balance placing flowers on a tombstone to the sound of flies buzzing.
16. Since 1990, Red Hot has released twenty fundraising compilations including Red Hot + Dance
(1992), No Alternative (1993), Red Hot + Country (1994), America is Dying Slowly (1996), Red
Hot + Rhapsody (1998), Dark Was the Night (2009), Red Hot + Bach (2014), and Red Hot +
Arthur Russell (2014). The albums tend to focus on either a single genre like jazz (Red Hot +
Cool, 1994), music from a single geographic area (Red Hot + Latin, 1997), or the works of
single composers from George Gershwin and Duke Ellington to J. S. Bach and Arthur Russell.
Since 1990, the nonprofit has donated almost fifteen million dollars to AIDS organizations
around the world.
17. Kathy Bergeron, “Uncovering Cole,” Repercussions 4/2 (1995): 10–29. Also see Ethan
Mordden “Rock and Cole,” The New Yorker, 28 October, 1991.
18. Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 86.
19. Though originally slated to direct the video, Jarman was too ill to participate in the project, so
Lennox and Lachman projected home videos of Jarman’s childhood against the singer, who is
dressed in angelic white. The resulting video is a pastiche of past present, which was a hallmark
of Jarman’s directorial style.
20. Lawrence Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals,” The New York Times 3 July 1981
and Larry Kramer, “1,112 and Counting,” The New York Native 59, 14–27 March 1983,
reprinted in Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1989), 33–51.
21. Melissa Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), quoted in Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss:
Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2015), 31.
22. Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss, 31.
23. Melvin Dixon, “One by One,” Love’s Instruments (Chicago: The Chucha Press, 1995), 59–60.
24. For instance, Simon Watney begins his Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) with a story about his friend “Bruno” (a
pseudonym used at the request of Bruno’s parents to protect anonymity, even in death) whose
 funeral included gay men “who had been closer to Bruno than anyone except his parents” but
who were required to kowtow to the demands of “manly acceptability” and contain their grief
and bereavement (7). In Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS and Survival (New
York: Scribner, 2014) HIV/AIDS activist Sean Strub recalls his attempts to insist on
acknowledging the cause of death when discussing the life of friends who died of AIDS in the
early 1980s. Even among gay men, Strub found that the rules of propriety often held their
tongues, even among exclusively or mostly gay circles. In 1987, The AIDS Coalition of Unleash
Power (ACT UP) politicized funerals by holding public memorial services for PWAs in the
streets of New York and moving demonstrations such as tossing the ashes to PWAs onto the
White House lawn. For more, see Jim Hubbard’s excellent documentary United in Anger: A
History of Act Up (2012) and David France’s extraordinary film How to Survive a Plague
(2012) and the companion memoir of the same name.
25. For an excellent perspective on lesbian women of color and music, see Eileen Hayes, Songs in
Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 2010).
26. Vito Russo, “Why We Fight,” delivered Albany, NY, 9 May, 1988.
27. Sut Jhally’s Dreamworlds: Desire, Sex, and Power in Music Video (Northampton, MA: Media
Education Foundation, 2007) explores this aspect of popular culture in some detail. Jhally
cautions against a one-to-one causation argument, noting instead that popular culture teaches us
how to think about ourselves and reinforces extant structures of feeling about identity politics.
28. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43 (1987), reprinted in
Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), 43–82.
29. Safe sex was also a theme of other songs in the mid-1980s. In 1986, R&B singer Jermaine
Stewart told listeners that “we don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time” while B-
Art encouraged people to “Use the Rubber” in 1988. By the mid-1990s, hip-hop artists 2 Live
Crew were warning listeners to keep track of “Who’s Fucking Who?” and Biz Markie turned
away groupies with the admonition “No Rubber, No Backstage Pass” in 1996.
30. Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999). Evelynn Hammonds, “Missing Persons: African
American Women, AIDS, and the History of Disease” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of Black
Feminist Though, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 434–450.
31. Several high profile African Americans announced that they were HIV-positive or were known
to have died of AIDS. ABC News World Tonight anchor Max Robinson died of AIDS in 1988,
and innovative choreographer Alvin Ailey died the following year. After contracting HIV from a
blood transfusion in the 1980s, Tennis legend Arthur Ashe died of AIDS-related complications
in 1993. Rapper Eazy-E (Eric Wright) died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1995. See Philip
Brian Harper’s “Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Impulse in
Reaction to the Death of Max Robinson,” Social Text 28 (1991): 68–86 and Harper’s Private
Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (New York: NYU Press, 1999) for
more about Robinson.
32. For an historical overview of this album and comments on several of its tracks see Matthew Tift,
“Musical AIDS: Music, Musicians, and the Cultural Construction of HIV/AIDS in the United
States,” PhD dissertation. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007.
33. Nicky Baxter, “Hip-Hop Superstars Collaborate with a Purpose on America is Dying Slowly,”
Metro, September 12, 1996.
34. Jacqueline Warwick, Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (New
York: Routledge, 2007) and Kyra Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from
Double Dutch to Hip Hop (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
35. Jackson initially released this song on her album An Imitation of Love (1986). The recording
described here is a live performance from Back to the Shit (1989).
36. “Gotta Lotta Livin’ to Do,” written by Peter Alsop, ©Copyright 1989, Moose School Music
(BMI) Pluggin’ Away, Songs On Loss & Grief, and Ebenezer’s Make Over. See
www.peteralsop.com.
37. Paul Attinello, “Fever, Fragile, Fatigue…” in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music,
edited by Neil Lerner and Joseph Straus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 13–22.
38. Attinello makes this point using James Taylor’s “Never Die Young” and Tori Amos’s “Not the
Red Baron” in “Closeness and Distance: Songs About AIDS.”
39. Douglas Crimp, “Portraits of People with AIDS,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), reprinted in Crimp,
Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 83–108.
40. Crimp, “Portraits of People with AIDS,” 102.
41. Robert McRuer, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability
Studies,” in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey Cohen and Gail Weiss. (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2002), 145–166.
42. Critics noted that the song had a connection to the AIDS epidemic as early as 1996. See Robin
Rauzi, “Up and Coming Singer Knows the Score,” The Los Angeles Times 1 August 1996.
However, in a 2013 concert review, Jason LeRoy wrote that he had no idea that the song was
about AIDS despite having listened to Cole’s music for almost 20 years. Even veteran
performers have difficulty prizing open the song to get to its meaning. In 2006, Herbie Hancock
and Annie Lennox recorded it for Hancock’s Possibilities. They puzzled over the song’s oblique
text until Hancock proposed a teleconference with Cole, who revealed that the song was
composed in response to the death of a close, gay friend, and that its lyrics are intentionally
“complicated.” Cole admitted that she wanted to write a memorial for her friend but wondered,
“How do you do it in a way that isn’t morose or banal?” In an interview with Chicago Pride,
Cole said “I was living in San Francisco and had just graduated college. I was friends with a
man named Steven who got sick all of a sudden from AIDS and was just gone from us. I didn’t
know what to do. That’s how I express my feelings with writing songs. There is some poetic
licensing in the song because the man has been estranged from his father by being gay and
coming out. It is only when he is dying that the father comes back but at least they are loving
and reunited at the end. The father figure is portrayed by Peter Gabriel in the song.”
http://chicago.gopride.com/news/interview.cfm/articleid/212500,
http://www.thebinge.us/concert-review-paula-cole-at-yoshis-san-francisco-5913/,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX5Awfzvls4.
43. In her important book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Catherine Clement (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999, trans. Betsy Wing) unearths a history of such stories
spanning from Mozart to Richard Strauss. According to Clément’s central thesis, women are
routinely subject to various forms of capital punishment for transgressive behaviors in these
 musical works. Although Clément’s emphasis is on the operatic stage in Western Europe, this
trope is not limited to the world of opera. Numerous horror movies and television crime dramas
have plots in which a woman (often a prostitute, a pregnant teen, or a girl who simply engages
in sexual activity) dies shortly after committing a sexual act. The Bible advocates stoning
unmarried women who have sex (Deuteronomy 22:21), and in the twenty-first century, real life
“honor killings” have made national news headlines. The power of these examples lies in their
ability to perpetuate the notion that bad things happen to bad, that is morally flawed, people.
44. Knox’s brother received a blood transfusion while undergoing treatment for testicular cancer in
1979 and was infected with blood that contained HIV, although at the time no one knew HIV
existed. For more information, see Edward Morris, “Ten years Later, ‘John’ Remains Country’s
Prime Comment on AIDS,” CMT News, November 30, 2004.
45. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
46. Paul Attinello, “Closeness and Distance,” 223.
47. Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11.
48. For more on this, see Sander Gilman’s Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from
Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell U Press, 1988).
R
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by Shiela Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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Baxter, Nicky. “Hip-Hop Superstars Collaborate with a Purpose on America is Dying Slowly,” Metro,
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AIDS. New York: The New Press, 2014.
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Edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge, 1994.
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 CHAPTER 27

Q U E E R PAT R I O T I S M I N T H E
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
 I VAN RAYKOF F

“ ’ not gay, it’s European!” This slogan announced the launch of the
Eurovision-themed “Europhoria” party at Hardware Bar, a gay bar in New
York City, in December 2012.1 For uninitiated Americans who might never
have heard of the long-running annual televised popular music competition,
Time Out New York explained, “The Eurovision Song Contest is one of
those things—like soccer or Marmite—that people elsewhere in the world
seem to love, yet remains mostly a mystery on these shores.” This festive
party featured Eurovision music videos, drinking and dancing, “and a
crowd eager to wave the flags of their homeland (or whatever flag happens
to be available).”2 Host Gilad Mandelboim noted, “The bar is decorated
with all the colors of Europe. We provide our Europhorians flags to raise
and stickers to wear to get them in the Eurovision spirit.”3 A flexible kind
of patriotism plays out at this celebration, as revelers of all persuasions
demonstrate a devotion to their favorite campy songs and singers more than
their love for any particular country. “Europhoria” embraced both gay and
European identities, of course, but its ironic slogan points to a
conventionally heteronormative and particularly American perspective on
national identity and patriotic feeling. Eurovision seems different, strange,
even queer in this perspective because the song contest plays with notions
of the nation-state in ways that implicate deeply held cultural assumptions
about sexual identity too.
Despite its long history, its immense popularity, and its worldwide
audience of nearly 200 million viewers, the Eurovision Song Contest was
first broadcast live in the United States only in 2016, six decades after it
was established by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).4 Logo, the
American cable television channel owned by Viacom that initially featured
gay- and lesbian-themed programming, acquired the exclusive broadcast
rights for the contest in the United States that year, and aired the contest in
2017 and 2018 as well.5 Even with this easier accessibility, most Americans
remain unfamiliar with the song contest’s structure and intentions. “Why
are they all singing in English?” is a first-time viewer’s typical question.
“Singers don’t have to be from the country they are singing for?”6
“Australia, Israel, and Azerbaijan are not in Europe, so why are they in the
contest?” And perhaps the most frequent conundrum: “Is this music
supposed to be good?”7
Many critics tend to be dismissive of, or at least conflicted about, the
contest’s celebration of Europop music and camp aesthetics. Writing about
“The Olympics of Cheese” in the Village Voice in 2000, Elisabeth
Vincentelli asserts that “the contest shares with the European Union’s
governing body a taste for rules and guidelines shrouded in mysterious
agendas, then adds to the mix even more mysterious issues of regional taste
in crappy pop music. It’s a lethal combination that can only lead to trouble
—and fantastic, gripping live television.”8 Writing in the New Yorker in
2010, Anthony Lane praises “Waterloo” by ABBA, the winning song in
1974, as the show’s great triumph: “Somehow, they took all the ingredients
of classic Eurovision—meaningless English words, infuriating chugs in the
rhythm, outfits that made your eyeballs hurt—and cooked up something
both risible and delectable.”9 Explaining its political implications to
American viewers in 2014, comedian John Oliver notes how “European
countries sublimate thousands of years of ethnic and religious tensions into
a series of bizarre three-minute song-tastrophes.”10 Writing in GQ in 2015,
Freddie Campion (who, like Lane and Oliver, is British) recognizes its
underlying political tensions: “Eurovision was founded as a way to foster
peace and understanding between European nations, but mostly what it does
is breed competition, derision, and resentment.” Still, he admits, “the
cheesiest thing about the competition is the fact that it actually makes me
feel a kind of begrudging reverence for my European brethren.”11
The song contest is often considered a ridiculous “spectacle of
embarrassment,” Stephen Coleman asserts, not because of the quality of its
music or its performances, but because it still enacts a “ritualized
performance of nationhood” in an era of globalization, promoting a clichéd
and outmoded notion of national identity and “the insipid patriotism
through which it is filtered into middle-brow culture.” Meanwhile, the song
contest also promotes the ideal of a community of nations through a
peaceful music competition, but Coleman considers this an “amorphous
internationalism” and “a produced and contained image of universalism.”
He identifies the strategy of “ironic distancing” that critics (such as the ones
quoted above) frequently use to deal with these two Eurovision
anachronisms. Instead of the performative play of (inter)nationalism,
Coleman prefers a “cosmopolitan” dialectic of “simultaneous attachment
and detachment” to “the magnetic pull of parochial identities.” This
dialectic involves a constant negotiation between the local and the global to
engage with “the connecting spaces between places.” Crucially, he asserts,
“It is in these ‘spaces between’ that we present ourselves for the judgment
of others.”12
Considering such in-between identifications, the concept of “queer
patriotism” is helpful for understanding why the Eurovision Song Contest
provokes reactions ranging from fervent enthusiasm to critical disdain, and
why it took 60 years to reach American television audiences. “Patriotism,”
defined as love for one’s country and a sense of national loyalty, derives
from the Greek πατρίς (patris), or “fatherland.” This etymology reveals that
patriotic feeling is closely related to patriarchal figures, and that patriarchal
authority informs the historical and cultural traditions of the homeland to
create an abstraction of group affinity. In the United States, patriarchal
figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the “Founding
Fathers” and “Uncle Sam,” and iconic images such as Emanuel Leutze’s
Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) and Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the
Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) point to this masculinist representation of
patriotism.
“Nationalism” can be defined as a more aggressive expression of
patriotism: a culturally and politically motivated attachment to one’s own
country, fueled by a belief that it is superior to other countries in significant
ways, and usually predicated on the assumption of a particular ethnicity
and/or a shared common language.13 The traditional heterosexual family is
a major focus of nationalism, from the imagined “family” of the nation to
the domestic nuclear family that serves to reproduce the nation and its
values. According to Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “national
heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be
imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate
behavior, a space of pure citizenship.” Writing in the late 1990s, after the
passage of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (1993) and the Defense of
Marriage Act (1996), Berlant and Warner suggest that “the contemporary
United States is saturated by the project of constructing national
heterosexuality.”14 Queerness, on the other hand, embraces the various
“spaces between” identities as it blurs the boundaries of assumed binaries of
gender and sexuality, such as male/female and heterosexual/homosexual; on
the political side queerness can also destabilize the us/them of nationalism.
Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett assert in Queer in Europe (2011) that “the
notion of nation is bound up with the idea of identity, whereas queer
deliberately interpellates multiple identities. Precisely through this multiple
interpellation, though, queer makes it possible to re-imagine not only the
family and the nation, but also the institutions that support them.”15
The United States has had over two centuries to develop its patriotic
symbols and rituals, among them the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution with the Bill of Rights, the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the Capitol
and White House, the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore, the US flag,
the dollar bill, and the bald eagle. American patriotism also has a musical
repertoire ranging from the national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner” to
traditional songs like “Yankee Doodle” and “America the Beautiful” to
Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your
Land,” as well as other popular songs that have evolved into patriotic
standards, such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and Madonna’s
2000 cover of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”16 Josh Kun posits “a direct
relationship between musical performance and the formation of national
identity” in the United States, but this aurally informed nationalism has
always involved marginalizing voices of difference.17 Or, in a more
humorous formulation attributed to the American general and president
Ulysses S. Grant, “I know only two tunes: one of them is ‘Yankee Doodle,’
and the other isn’t.”18
Contemporary Europe, in contrast, has had only a few decades since the
end of World War II—and for some East European nations, only a few
years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and after joining the European Union
—to balance centuries-old histories of nationalism with a more
dispassionate feeling of pan-European belonging that attempts to bridge the
needs and desires of the continent’s diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and
religious constituencies. Despite the expanding social, political, and
material collaboration among its countries and regions, however, there is
hardly a comparable “Euro-patriotism” across the continent today. 19 This
ideal held some promise after World War II; in 1948, Winston Churchill
imagined “a Europe where men of every country will think as much of
being a European as of belonging to their native land, and that without
losing any of their love and loyalty of their birthplace.”20 More recently,
after the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum in June 2016, conductor-
pianist Daniel Barenboim wrote that “Europe consists of so many different
peoples, cultures, and languages that [it] requires a much more substantial
unifying idea than simply joint trade and a single currency.…Nationalism is
the opposite of true patriotism, and the further fostering of nationalist
sentiment would be the worst case-scenario for us all. Instead, we need a
unifying, European patriotism.”21
This ideal of unifying patriotism, however, does not have the same
cultural and historical resonance in Europe, or even in individual European
nations, as it does in the United States. The strong patriotic sentiments of
ethnic Estonians, for example, will be markedly different from the feelings
Belgians may have about their culture, heritage, language(s), and place
within the community of the continent’s other countries. In Europe today
the word “patriotism” is usually associated with conservative and right-
wing political movements, among them Pegida (Patriotische Europäer
gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans Against
the Islamization of the West), a populist party established in Germany in
2014. In June 2016, leaders of Europe’s largest far-right parties (Austria’s
Freedom Party, France’s Front Nationale, Germany’s Alternative für
Deutschland, Italy’s Northern League, and Holland’s Party for Freedom)
held a “Patriotic Spring” conference in Vienna to pursue their goals of
“cooperation for peace, security, and prosperity in Europe.” Reacting to the
ongoing refugee crisis, militant attacks, and economic challenges in Europe,
these Euro-skeptic anti-immigration parties frequently resort to the rhetoric
of patriarchal authority, proclaiming, “We want a Europe of fatherlands”
rather than the European Union.22
 There have been attempts to create new symbols and rituals of pan-
European identification, the most familiar being the European Union (EU)
flag of twelve gold stars on an azure background, its motto of “Unity in
Diversity,” and its instrumental anthem, the well-known “Ode to Joy”
melody from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In 1996, the
European Monetary Institute, the forerunner of the European Central Bank,
held a competition for the design of the new euro banknotes, choosing the
work of Robert Kalina of the Austrian National Bank.23 Since there were
twelve euro nations but only seven currency denominations, Kalina’s
drawings of bridges, windows, and gateways for the banknotes were
intentionally generic; instead of depicting nationally identifiable
architectural examples, his imaginary bridges represent different periods of
European cultural history from Greek and Roman antiquity to Gothic,
Renaissance, Baroque, and modern architecture. Commenting on these
“bridges with empty arches, empty doorways, and empty windows,” Emil
Tode realizes that “this is meant to symbolize openness and freedom; but an
identity meant to integrate societies cannot be founded on purely abstract
ideas—it requires real people and meaningful symbols.”24 A decade after
the new euros were released, Dutch designer Robin Stam wittily turned
Kalina’s archetypal bridges into real functional bridges for a new housing
development in Spijkenisse, a suburb of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
These replicas of the “euro bridges” match the shapes and colors of
Kalina’s designs, while Stam also brings a theatrical sensibility to the
project: “I wanted the illusion of a re-created stage set with a touch of Las
Vegas,” he explains.25 The generic pan-European monument, neutralized of
any specific national connotations, becomes a quasi-comic spectacle even
as it tries to inspire a sense of shared belonging that “bridges” the spaces
between nations.
With a comparable idealism, Eurovision strives to promote a
transnational bonding through an annual ritualized performance of new
popular songs. The competition was established in 1956 by the EBU, a
network of national television broadcasters, first with seven participating
West European nations (France, Italy, West Germany, Switzerland,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), along with three additional
countries (Britain, Denmark, and Austria) receiving the broadcast. The
show was modeled after Italy’s Sanremo music festival, established in
1951, and was conceived as a light-entertainment cultural program to be
shared among member stations through a simultaneous live transmission.26
Marcel Bezençon, the director of the EBU until 1970, considered the
Eurovision television network “an instrument…to build Europe.” But as
Dean Vuletic explains, “instrument” was meant more literally than
figuratively: “Rather than being ideological Europeanists, officials from the
EBU were practical internationalists” focused on the promise and viability
of this new technology of television, with their primary emphasis on the
network’s potential for technical interaction and cultural exchange rather
than some idealistic political European integration.27
Other historians and critics consider the inherent ideological
underpinnings of this international network and its programs. According to
Shannon Jones and Jelena Subotic, the contest reveals that “the process of
Europeanization is fundamentally a process of political imagination.” This
process involves a tension between inward and outward meanings of a
country’s song and stage presentation. “As they Europeanize, states choose
what messages about themselves to send abroad and which secrets to keep
at home.” Since viewers cannot vote for their own country’s song, they vote
for another country’s song in the spirit of a pan-European affiliation that is
supposed to transcend national borders. As a result, Eurovision becomes
“the site of a remarkable ‘hidden transcript’ of European fantasy, identity
contestation, and profound ontological insecurity on the European
periphery” as the contest aims to create “a shared community where people
feel like they belong.”28 Jeroen de Kloet and Edwin Jurriëns assert that in
popular-culture productions such as Eurovision, a “globalized or
cosmopolitan trope of patriotism provides a more displaced logic of social
organization” evident in performances that permit “a double articulation,
one related to locality, the other to sexuality.”29 As Heiko Motschenbacher
discusses, the song contest offers “an interface of the discursive negotiation
of national, European, and sexual identities.”30 This “double articulation,”
the productive tension between inward and outward meanings or fixed and
fluid identifications, is fundamental to the experience of queer patriotism.
Eurovision reifies national identifications as it holds up a queer mirror to
the performance of patriotism. The contest has increasingly provided an
arena for the recognition and the celebration of LGBTQ people, especially
after the establishment of the European Union in 1993 and the expansion of
Western economic and liberal democratic systems to postcommunist East
European nations. Robert Tobin parallels the rise of these supranational
structures with the establishment of rights for sexual minorities, noting that
“various pan-European political institutions have been a driving force in
whatever progress has been made in this situation of queer people in
Europe.”31 In Ireland, for example, the drive to decriminalize
homosexuality was taken up by the European Court of Human Rights,
which ruled against the Irish government in 1988 on the basis of the right to
privacy in personal affairs; the Irish laws were subsequently reformed in
1993. Meanwhile, the country enjoyed an unprecedented series of
Eurovision victories (in 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, and 1996) alongside these
legal victories for gays and lesbians, plus there was an emerging enjoyment
of the camp appeal of this ostensibly straight, family-oriented entertainment
show.32
This camp aesthetic could be interpreted as a reevaluation of an outsider
status, or marginality, whether it is the marginality of sexual minorities in
systems of national heterosexuality, or the marginality of the newly-
admitted countries on Europe’s shifting eastern borders.33 A number of
English-language plays and shows about Eurovision from the 1990s engage
these camp connotations. EuroVision (1992), by Tim Luscombe, is a play
about two men who find love at the song contest, and Boom Bang-a-Bang
(1995), by Jonathan Harvey, borrows the title of the United Kingdom’s
1969 entry for this farce about a gay Eurovision party night and the
fantasies of its heterosexual guests. In “My Lovely Horse,” a 1996 episode
of the Irish television series Father Ted, two men compose their own
Eurovision entry and fantasize about singing it together while they ride
through the woods on horseback. British camp attitudes toward the contest
came to the fore when the United Kingdom hosted Eurovision in
Birmingham in 1998. The contest’s first openly gay singer, Paul Oscar
(representing Iceland in 1997), appeared in the mockumentary A Song for
Eurotrash (1998), the openly gay Graham Norton hosted another televised
parody of the show titled Eurovision Masterclass (1998), and the BBC aired
Europigeon, featuring the song “Pigeons in Flight” as the hapless British
entry. This camp aesthetic offered a queerly alternative understanding of the
contest for the United Kingdom, a deeply patriotic and Euro-skeptical
nation grappling with the shifting power relations of post–Cold War
Europe.
Sexual and gender diversity became primary topics of discussion around
Eurovision in 1998, when Dana International, a trans woman representing
Israel, won the contest with the song “Diva.” Dana’s selection for the
contest provoked debates about national and religious values among secular
and Orthodox authorities in Israel, to which the singer responded, “I am
part of the Jewish nation.”34 Even before her Eurovision victory, Ted
Swedenburg writes, Dana’s Arab Jewish identity positioned her as an
outsider within Europeanized Israel, while in the conservative Egyptian
press in the mid-1990s, Dana’s “deviant” music and transsexuality were
considered dangerous to the values of the nation and to the virtue of its
youth, because a border-crossing figure such as Dana International
threatened “a nationalism that conceives of Egyptian society as
homogenous, unitary, and self-identical.”35 Yossi Maurey further discusses
how Dana challenged ideas of national and sexual identity within Israel.
The song “Diva” is about iconic women of history and mythology (the
Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Victoria, the Egyptian Cleopatra) from
cultures beyond the Jewish religious and cultural realm, but who also
represent the Jewish nation through Dana’s performance. “By encouraging
fragmentation, ambiguity, and multiplicities,” Maurey writes, “Dana
disputes and resists the ideology of the Nation which presupposes a single,
limited, structured way of seeing its history, present, and future.”36
With her Eurovision win, Dana International became an iconic unifying
figure for diverse constituencies within Israel. In Tel Aviv on the night of
the contest, one fan recalls, “it was the empowering experience to be in a
mixed crowd of gays celebrating Dana’s victory, patriotic heterosexuals
celebrating Israel’s victory, and fans of a local Israeli soccer team who had
just won the championship that same day. Colorful rainbow flags, blue and
white Israeli flags, and yellow soccer flags were all flapping together in
Rabin Square in an intense atmosphere bursting with pride and joy.”37
Amalia Ziv explains how Dana represented a range of contradictions
between what is “International” or universal/global in the Eurovision
perspective and what is patriotic or queer in terms of national and sexual
identity in Israel.38 Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s term, Alisa Solomon
describes Dana as an example of “Diva Citizenship,” a woman who “stages
a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege”
and “challenges her audience to identify with the enormity of the suffering
she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people
to change the social and institutional practices of citizenship to which they
currently consent.”39 In this way, Dana-as-Diva challenged “the prime
national ideal of heterosexual masculinity.”40
While Israel’s state-sponsored promotion of queer identity and rights as
patriotic values can be viewed through the critique of homonationalism,
Aeyal Gross considers Dana’s multiple border-crossings—male/female,
east/west, straight/gay/transsexual, Jewish/Arab, Israel/Middle
East/Europe/international—in a place “where borderlands are always
danger zones.” Gross discusses the image of Dana International on the
Amnesty International campaign poster “Gay Rights Are Human Rights,”
which came out soon after her Eurovision win in 1998. In this photograph
by Erwin Olaf, the singer is holding a candle and wearing a veil, an image
that could be read variously “as Christian, Jewish, or Arab religious
drag.”41 In multiple ways, Dana International embodies a border-crosser
provocatively blurring national, political, and religious identifications (see
Figure 27.1).
FIGURE 27.1 1998 Amnesty International poster with photograph of Dana International by Erwin
Olaf. Reproduced by permission of Erwin Olaf and Amnesty International Nederland.

In subsequent years, a number of contestants have highlighted queer

identity through gender-bending performances, especially with drag. In the
2002 contest, Slovenia was represented by Sestre (Sisters), a trio of male
singers dressed as female airline flight attendants. In the 2007 contest,
Ukraine’s representative was a character named Verka Serduchka, the drag
persona of Andriy Danilko. In both cases, drag enacted more than a blurring
of gender identity; it also demonstrated the intersections of national and
international identities in terms of how the act was understood by audiences
at home or abroad, or in the “spaces between” its local and global contexts.
 Sestre sang “Samo Ljubezen” (Only Love) in Slovenian, so contest
viewers who did not know the language likely did not know what the song’s
lyrics were about.42 Perhaps the trio in shiny red stewardess uniforms and
their backup singers dressed as airline pilots were offering some sort of
commentary on the joys of air travel or tourism? Slovenians, meanwhile,
understood Eurovision’s first “coming out” song (Le poslušaj kar srce ti
govori = “Just listen to what your heart says”; Kar želiš si to ni greh =
“What you want is not a sin”; To je ljubezen v očeh = “That’s love in your
eyes”), and they also knew about the controversy that had brought Sestre to
the Eurovision stage in Estonia. In the national preliminaries, the trio came
in second place to the popular favorite, a female singer named Karmen
Stavec, but a voting glitch resulted in the expert jury vote taking
precedence. This decision provoked antigay protests and parliamentary
debates on whether the song and the singers were suitable representatives of
the country. As a result, the European Parliament discussed sexual
minorities and rights in Slovenia, and one politician wondered if the
country was truly ready to be admitted to the European Union in 2004.43 In
terms of queer patriotism, this song and act could be interpreted as
Slovenia’s international “coming out” as a liberal and accepting nation.
Three years after joining the European Union, Slovenia adopted a nation-
branding slogan, “I Feel Slovenia,” capitalizing the letters “l-o-v-e,” and in
2013, it was still marketed as “the only country with LOVE in its name!”44
Danilko’s performance as Verka Serduchka for Ukraine in 2007 also
presents a complex intersection of sexual and national identities. To viewers
outside of Ukraine, the humorous song, “Dancing Lasha Tumbai,” and
over-the-top stage act could be read as a parodic type of drag, with Verka
wearing a shiny, silvery, uniformlike dress (is she a sadistic nurse? a lost
astronaut? a teammate with the number 69?) and a helmet topped with a
large silver star evoking the red star of Soviet communism (an ironic
commentary on military power and space-age progress?). The song’s mix of
languages (German, English, Ukrainian, and Russian) might recall a
children’s counting game (Sieben, sieben, ai lju-lju, sieben, sieben, ein, zwei
= “Seven, seven, bye-bye, seven, seven, one, two”) or perhaps as a
mockery of World War II German soldiers’ marching orders (Nur ein, zwei,
drei, tanzen! = “Now one, two, three, dance!”).45 For some critics, the last
two words of the song’s title sounded like “Russia, goodbye!” (commenting
on the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine?), while Danilko
claimed they were Mongolian words for “whipped cream,” “milkshake,” or
“churned butter.” Galina Miazhevich asserts that Danilko’s act could be
understood in one way by Ukrainian viewers as an ironic and parodic
commentary on the nation’s Soviet past, or in another way by audience
across Europe as a self-conscious contribution to the contest’s gay camp
aesthetic. “The Eurovision performances bring together rigid, official
conceptions of the national self and alternative non-mainstream identities,”
such as LGBTQ identity, she explains, and thus “the debates about the
language of the song, its aesthetics, the appeal to ethnic symbols and the
choice of sexual persona for the performance are all linked to
(re)conceptions of Euro-taste and the place of Ukraine in New Europe.”46
“Dancing Lasha Tumbai” took second place in the 2007 contest to the
Serbian entry, “Molitva” (Prayer), sung by Marija Šerifović in another
performance that illustrates the complex play of identities that informs
queer patriotism. Marijana Mitrović and Annamari Vänskä assert that
audiences in the Balkans could understand this song as an earnest prayer for
post-civil war social and political reconciliation through the metaphor of
romance, while other audiences wishing for a pro-European Serbia could
interpret the “lesbian camp” of the stage act as a sign that the nation was
embracing more liberal West European values.47 Šerifović and her female
backup singers delivered a formal and solemn performance, almost as if it
were a marriage ceremony, particularly when the women brought their
hands together to connect the two halves of a small red heart. The marriage
symbolism was even clearer in the opening act of the 2008 contest finals in
Belgrade, where Šerifović reprised her winning song while a woman in a
white wedding gown stood by her side and offered her a bouquet to throw
into the audience, after which a dozen female dancers in androgynous (half-
tuxedo, half-gown) costumes performed a ceremonial dance behind her.
These stagings of the song offered a counternarrative to Serbia’s new
constitution, adopted in 2006 after the secession of Montenegro, which
defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman (Article 62) even as it
mentions “minority rights and freedoms, and commitment to European
principles and values” (Article 1). Meanwhile, Šerifović recorded an
English-language version of “Molitva,” titled “Destiny,” for the
international market in 2007. (The music video for “Destiny” depicts a
scenario of a heterosexual couple having an argument before the man drives
off and dies in a tragic accident.) As Mitrović writes, “The notion of ‘the
new face of Serbia’ is supposed to gather and balance different, sometimes
even confronted cultural markers present in concurrent identity strategies.”
Through all these self-representations, “Serbia is rehearsing its own
multiplicity, trying to move on from the totalitarian and nationalist agenda,”
she explains, “in the process of endless transition.”48
Conchita Wurst’s 2014 win for Austria marks another high point for
queer patriotism in Eurovision, but it also demonstrates the perceived threat
of this notion of fluid and flexible belonging. As a tall, beautiful, bearded
woman, Conchita Wurst is the drag stage persona of the gay Austrian
singer, celebrity, and artist-activist Tom Neuwirth. Wurst was already a
recognized personality through appearances on televised music shows and
reality shows, but her contest victory made her a representative of
contemporary Austria, a nation constantly negotiating its celebrated cultural
legacy with its tormented political history. Even though she had been the
close runner-up in the 2012 Austrian national preliminaries, Wurst
experienced a strong homophobic backlash when ORF, Austria’s national
broadcaster, made an internal decision to choose her to represent the
country in the 2014 contest.
“NEIN zu Conchita Wurst beim Songcontest” (NO to Conchita Wurst in
the Song Contest) was a public Facebook page that eventually gained
38,000 members and featured harsh criticism of the singer and the ORF. A
petition on the Change.org website with nearly 5,000 signatures demanded
the ORF overturn its decision and hold a public or independent vote for a
contestant.49 Wurst’s participation in the song contest also led a few other
countries to consider her appearance as a threat to family values or morality.
In October 2013, the Belarus Ministry of Information asked BTRC, the
Belarusian national broadcaster, to edit her performance out of the televised
contest, claiming that it would turn Eurovision into “a hotbed of sodomy.”
In November, a politician from the right-wing Bulgarian National
Movement party declared that “the symbol of Europe must be Joan of Arc,
and not Conchita Wurst.”50 Leading up to the Hungarian elections for the
European Parliament in May 2014, the Hungarian right-wing party Jobbik
created posters depicting “Their Europe” (Az ő Európájuk, represented by
Wurst) as opposed to “Our Europe” (A mi Európánk, depicted in one poster
with an image of a traditional family dinner) (see Figure 27.2).

FIGURE 27.2 Az ő Európájuk (“Their Europe”) vs. A mi Európánk (“Our Europe”). Jobbik poster
for Hungary’s European Parliament elections in May 2014. Unidentified photographer.

When she won the contest, Wurst fervently proclaimed, “We are unity
and we are unstoppable!” She framed the contest win as “a victory for those
people who believe in a future that can function without discrimination and
is based on tolerance and respect.”51 Her proclamation of unity and
tolerance might also apply to the ideals of a united Europe, as Wurst
suggested at the Observer Ideas Festival in London in October 2014,
claiming that Europe represented democracy, diversity, the Enlightenment,
human rights, civil rights, and “the idea of a peaceful together.”52 Wurst’s
political message was further recognized by United Nations secretary-
general Ban Ki-Moon: “What made her win so meaningful was the way she
turned her victory in the song contest into an electrifying moment of human
rights education.” He praised her efforts to promote a respect for diversity, a
“core value” of the United Nations Charter.53 Back in her own country,
Austrian president Heinz Fischer considered her win “not just a victory for
Austria, but above all for diversity and tolerance in Europe.”
Cynthia Weber analyzes Tom Neuwirth’s creation of Conchita Wurst
through the lens of “the queer logic of statecraft,” considering
Neuwirth/Wurst as “a figure who defies traditional understandings of
integration across multiple axes” because she bridges sex and gender, but
also race and religion. Wurst’s early fictional biography describes her as a
child raised in the highlands of Colombia, so her origins are transnational,
transcultural, and transcontinental; this myth provides a parallel to her
integration across Europe’s national and cultural borders as well.54 Within
Austria, Wurst also signifies in the “spaces between” national culture and
gender identity. The photograph by Ellen von Unwerth of Conchita Wurst
posing as an adaptation of Gustav Klimt’s iconic 1907 portrait of Adele
Bloch-Bauer is an apt example of this border-crossing negotiation. This
image was commissioned for the Life Ball, an annual international charity
event to benefit organizations that support people living with HIV/AIDS, in
2015. Three years previously, the lyrics of the Austrian national anthem
“Land der Berge, Land am Strome” (Land of Mountains, Land by the
[Danube] River) were revised to accommodate a more gender-neutral
identification (from Heimat bist du großer Söhne = “home thou art to great
sons,” to Heimat großer Töchter und Söhne = “home to great daughters and
sons”). The poster plays on this alteration with the caption Heimat großer
Töchtersöhne, or “daughter-sons,” referring not only to Neuwirth/Wurst’s
queer identity, but also to the old-fashioned German word Töchtersöhne,
meaning male grandchildren through one’s daughter instead of through
one’s sons—a distinction that historically defined family lineage and
inheritance in terms of patriarchy. In this image, Wurst reframes an iconic
emblem of Austria’s cultural heritage while also redefining a contested
phrase from the Austrian national anthem (see Figure 27.3).
FIGURE 27.3 2015 Life Ball poster featuring photograph of Conchita Wurst by Ellen von
Unwerth. Reproduced by permission of Ellen von Unwerth.

The phenomenon of queer patriotism challenges normative structures of

nationalism and patriotism, so the Eurovision Song Contest—as an
institution founded on the assumption that the nation-state provides an
obvious and recognizable association of national identity—can find itself on
the defensive when confronted with evolving or alternative models of
patriotic identification. The EBU’s controversial attempt to institute a new
policy on flags in 2016 offers a case in point. As Catherine Baker writes,
“The flag is a basic unit of meaning in the grammar of international
politics,” symbolizing the nation-state and its territory, government, people,
history, and values. As a semiotically loaded symbol with a strong affective
charge, a flag carries a charged “politics of recognition”; thus disputes
about flags are “disputes about the legitimacy of the group that the flag
represents, that is, whether the nation or other collective represented by the
flag [such as the LGBTQ community represented by the rainbow flag] has
the right to belong in the space that the flag might be admitted to or
excluded from.”55
Shortly before the 2016 Eurovision contest, ticket holders were informed
of a new official flag policy that prohibited the display of any flags other
than those of the participating nations in the contest. Local, regional, or
provincial flags (representing Wales or the Basque Country, for example),
the flags of politically disputed territories (Crimea, Northern Cyprus,
Palestine, and Transnistria, for example), and the flag of the terrorist
organization Daesh (Islamic State) were banned in order to maintain the
“non-political” intentions of the contest; the flag of the European Union
flag and the rainbow flag would be tolerated as long as they were not
displayed to make some political point.56 This policy was relaxed after
outcry from fans and participating delegations: the Welsh flag was allowed
since one singer representing the United Kingdom, Joe Woodford, was from
Wales, and the Sami flag was also permitted in recognition of the Sami
heritage of Norway’s contestant, Agnete Johnsen.57
Baker notes the irony in assuming that the LGBTQ rainbow flag could
be displayed in a “non-political” manner, considering “the flag’s history as
a collective identity symbol for people whose very right to exist as queer
was always politicized already,” and the policy’s omission of the blue, pink,
and white trans flag. “Even though Eurovision owed its most iconic
performance of the decade to Conchita Wurst,” Baker writes, “and even
though Dana International’s victory in 1998 remained a landmark in
Eurovision history, the EBU’s failure to give guarantees about the trans flag
when pressed suggested it did not give trans political subjects the same
level of recognition it was prepared to afford to the rainbow flag.”
Furthermore, this debate reveals the “queer international politics of flags,”
as these polysemic symbols unify people across various boundaries of
identity and affiliation. “For movements that turn queer and trans
experiences into collective political identities, flags do the same work of
symbolizing, visualizing, and mobilizing a community as they do for
nations,” promoting a comparable range of rights and recognition.58 The
rainbow flag proved controversial again in the 2018 song contest, when the
EBU terminated its partnership with the Chinese broadcaster Mango TV
because the station censored Ireland’s performance (which showed two men
dancing together) and blurred a rainbow flag waving during Switzerland’s
song in the first semi-final. The announcement from the EBU explained,
“This is not in line with the EBU’s values of universality and inclusivity
and our proud tradition of celebrating diversity through music.”59
Eurovision imagines an idealized community of nations and people, a
social and political Euro-topia whose cultural and metaphorical borders and
the queer patriotism it inspires can embrace multiple and diverse identities.
Carl Stychin discusses how the contest engages “more contingent notions of
belonging, membership, and affiliation” by actively constructing and
simultaneously deconstructing identities and the borders that serve to
delineate them: “the ESC replicates queer in the way in which it oscillates
between a stable, collective sexual identity and a site for the transgression
and destabilization of identity.” In this sense, Stychin suggests, Europe
itself is a potentially queer phenomenon since it demonstrates “a complex
relationship to identity, proving to be both, in some moments, stable and
bounded, and in others, a shape shifting, indeterminate, ill-defined project.”
Membership in this pan-European project, for example, is a question that
the EU is still asking (include Turkey? Ukraine?), even if Eurovision has
usually already answered it (include Israel, Russia, Azerbaijan), since
“processes of Europeanization increasingly focus on convergence and
discipline beyond EU borders.”60 The contest provides a popular and
accessible stage for negotiations of diverse national and sexual
identifications across the continent and beyond (include Australia!),
especially for the evolving distinctions between heteronormative
national/cultural patriotism and the “queerness” of an emerging and as yet
undefined Europatriotism.
Considering another continent, could the Eurovision Song Contest
model also work well in the United States? In 2006, NBC licensed the
EBU’s contest format for development in North America as a potential
challenge to the popular, long-running American Idol show on the Fox
network.61 This show would involve singers representing each of the fifty
states competing to win the final national prize, somewhat like the annual
Miss America pageant that begins with individual state contests to select a
national winner. One obstacle might be the fact that there are few state-
specific popular musical styles or stars in the United States (Hawaii is an
exception), though there are regional musical centers like New Orleans,
Nashville, and Detroit. “Imagine the Montana cowboy, the Detroit Motown
star, the New Jersey alt band and the Tennessee crooner all going up against
one another,” one television executive suggested, but what criteria would be
able to differentiate the contest entry from North Dakota from the one from
South Dakota?62 Another commenter imagined this American-vision
contest having a title like “The CBS Interstate Musical Throwdown.”63
Following the inaugural broadcast of the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest
on an American television network, comedian Steven Colbert devoted a
segment on The Late Show to how the United States could win the contest
next year if it were allowed to compete. Dressed in a shiny tinsel jacket,
blond wig, and sunglasses, Colbert, as “Nórnaäs,” sang “The Living Life”
(“I love living the living life”) with a vaguely European accent, jogging on
a treadmill, as a backup group dressed like astronauts and aliens danced
together behind him.64 The Europop aesthetic of this spoof hearkens back to
the Swedish group ABBA, which many Americans would recognize, but
also to the globalized Eurodesign aesthetic of the Swedish furniture store
IKEA, which does in fact sell a chair called “Norrnäs” (named after a town
near Stockholm, Sweden).
Eurovision probably won’t make it big in the United States because it
does something subversive with the construct of national identity and the
corollary of national heterosexuality. Patriotism and nationalism based on
traditional structures of gender and sexuality are deep-seated ideological
foundations that most Americans, like plenty of Europeans, are not yet
ready to undermine for the sake of a more progressive and inclusive vision
of global belonging. In this perspective, what seems like just a silly song-
and-dance show offers insights into very current and critical questions
around identity and values for both Europeans and Americans today.
N
1. “Eurovision Night @ Hardware Bar NYC - Dec 10th 2012,” Gilad M, November 24, 2012,
YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB9AztSm2Yc. The slogan echoes the
refrain “Is he gay or European?” from the song “There! Right There!” in Legally Blonde: The
Musical (2007), music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin.
2. See http://www.timeout.com/newyork/gay-lesbian/europhoria-hardware, January 10–16, 2013.
3. Zach Kerr, “Interview with Gilad Mandelboim, co-founder of Europhoria,” ESCunited.com
(April 2, 2013), http://www.escunited.com/home/interview-with-gilad-mandelboim-co-founder-
of-europhoria.
4. The contest has been live-streamed via the official Eurovision website since 2000, and more
recently via the official Eurovision YouTube channel, but this access to the live-stream and
contest videos was blocked in the United States and Canada because of the Viacom licensing
deal.
5. Netflix now offers the 2019 and 2020 contest videos on-demand in the United States.
6. Most famously, the French-Canadian Céline Dion sang the winning song for Switzerland in
1988.
7. There are many &quot;Americans React to Eurovision&quot; videos posted on YouTube; for
example: “An American Watches Eurovision Song Contest Austria 2015,” Facts, May 28, 2015,
YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4vsfb8Mb6s, “Youtubers React: TV
Shows: Eurovision,” FBE, May 29, 2016, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=oAiAsGfWSr0;
8. Elisabeth Vincentelli, “The Olympics of Cheese: A Continent’s Best Bad Music Battles It Out at
Eurovision,” Village Voice 45, no. 19 (May 16, 2000): 125.
9. Anthony Lane, “Only Mr. God Knows Why,” New Yorker 86, no. 18 (June 28, 2010): 47.
10. “Eurovision and Crimea Coin: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO),” LastWeekTonight,
May 11, 2014, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We1IvUe6KLo.
11. Freddie Campion, “What the Hell Is Eurovision, and Why Is It Coming to America?” GQ (May
11, 2016), http://www.gq.com/story/eurovision-2016.
12. Stephen Coleman, “Why is the Eurovision Song Contest Ridiculous? Exploring a Spectacle of
Embarrassment, Irony and Identity,” Popular Communication 6 (2008): 127–140.
13. “A patriot loves his fatherland; a nationalist despises someone else’s fatherland.” (“Ein Patriot
ist jemand, der sein Vaterland liebt, ein Nationalist ist jemand, der die Vaterländer der anderen
verachtet.”). From a speech by Johannes Rau, former president of Germany (May 23, 1999).
14. Laurent Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998):
549, 553.
15. Introduction to Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies, ed. Lisa Downing and Robert
Gillett (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 6–7.
16. “Patriotic Melodies,” The Library of Congress Performing Arts Encyclopedia,
http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/patriotic/patriotic-home.html.
17. Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2005), 30.
18. Garson O’Toole, “I Only Know Two Tunes,” QuoteInvestigator.com (December 26, 2013),
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/26/two-tunes.
19. Since 1974, the European Commission has administered the Eurobarometer, a biannual public
opinion survey that seeks to quantify, for example, how much “people may feel different
degrees of attachment to their town or village, to their region, to their country or to Europe.” See
Special Eurobarometer 451 Report: “Future of Europe” (December 2016). Eurobarometer
surveys accessible at http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/PublicOpinion.
20. Winston S. Churchill, Europe Unite: Speeches (1947 and 1948) (London: Cassel & Co., 1950),
318–321.
21. Daniel Barenboim, “On Brexit” (July 2, 2016), http://danielbarenboim.com/on-brexit/.
22. “Europe’s Right-Wing Parties Meet Near Vienna,” Deutsche Welle.com (June 17, 2016),
http://www.dw.com/en/europes-right-wing-parties-meet-near-vienna-urge-brexit/a-19339474.
23. “Design Competition for the First Series of Euro Banknotes,”
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/banknotes/html/design.en.html. See also Oriane Calligaro,
Negotiating Europe: EU Promotion of Europeanness since the 1950s (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 144–166.
24. Emil Tode, “Europe, a Blot of Ink,” trans. Susanne Höbel, in Writing Europe: What Is European
About the Literatures of Europe? Essays from 33 European Countries, ed. Ursula Keller and
Ilma Rakuša (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 306–307.
25. Quote from “Eurobruggen, Spijkenisse, Netherlands—Bayferrox” brochure, accessible at
bayferrox.com/uploads/tx_lxsmatrix/70290_CaseStudy_Eurobruggen_EN.pdf. See also Alyn
Griffiths, “Fictional Bridges on Euro Banknotes Constructed in the Netherlands,” Dezeen.com
(June 5, 2013), https://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/05/the-bridges-of-europe-robin-stam-copied-
from-euro-banknotes/.
26. Jérôme Bourdon, “Unhappy Engineers of the European Soul: The EBU and the Woes of Pan-
European Television,” International Communication Gazette 69, no. 3 (2007): 263–280. See
also Jostein Gripsrud, “Television and the European Public Sphere,” European Journal of
Communication 22, no. 4 (2007): 479–492.
27. Andreas Fickers and Suzanne Lommers, “Eventing Europe: Broadcasting and the Mediated
Performances of Europe,” in Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the
Project of Europe, ed. Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 246. Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest
(London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 30, 33.
28. Shannon Jones and Jelena Subotic, “Fantasies of Power: Performing Europeanization on the
European Periphery,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 5 (October 2011): 543–544.
29. “Introduction,” Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belongings and Close Encounters, ed. Edwin
Jurriëns and Jeroen de Kloet (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 12.
30. Heiko Motschenbacher, “Negotiating Sexual Desire at the Eurovision Song Contest: On the
Verge of Homonormativity?” in Let’s Talk About (Texts About) Sex/Sexualität und Sprache/Sex
and Language, ed. Marietta Calderón and Georg Marko (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), 287, 297.
31. Robert Tobin, “Eurovision at 50: Post-Wall and Post-Stonewall,” in A Song for Europe, 31.
32. Brian Singleton, Karen Fricker, and Elena Moreo, “Performing the Queer Network: Fans and
Families at the Eurovision Song Contest,” SQS 2, no.2 (2007): 12–13, 15–16.
33. Ivan Raykoff, “Camping on the Borders of Europe,” in A Song for Europe, 1–12.
34. Jeffrey Hyman, “Dana International, the Most Famous Transsexual in the World” (April 4,
2011), http://www.israel21c.org/dana-international-the-most-famous-transsexual-in-the-world/.
See also Eve Barlow, “Viva la Diva! How Eurovision’s Dana International Made Trans Identity
Mainstream,” The Guardian (May 10, 2018),
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/10/viva-la-diva-how-eurovisions-dana-
international-made-trans-identity-mainstream.
35. Ted Swedenburg, “Saida Sultan/Danna International: Transgender Pop and Polysemiotics of
Sex, Nation, and Ethnicity on the Israeli-Egyptian Border,” in Mass Mediations: New
Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, ed. Walter Armbrust (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 105.
36. Yossi Maurey, “Dana International and the Politics of Nostalgia,” Popular Music 28, no. 1
(January 2009): 101.
37. Dafna Lemish, “Gay Brotherhood: Israeli Gay Men and the Eurovision Song Contest,” in A
Song for Europe, 132.
38. Amalia Ziv, “Diva Interventions: Dana International and Israeli Gender Culture,” in Queer
Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film and Television, ed. Thomas Peele (2007), 119–135.
39. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 223.
40. Alisa Solomon, “Viva la Diva Citizenship: Post-Zionism and Gay Rights,” in Queer Theory and
the Jewish Question, eds. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), 150.
41. Aeyal Gross, “Post/Colonial Queer Globalisation and International Human Rights: Images of
LGBT Rights,” Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 2 (November 2013): 107, 109, 112, 115.
42. Sestre was Miss Marlena (Tomaž Mihelič), Daphne (Srečko Blas), and Emperatrizz (Damjan
Levec). “Samo Ljubezen” (Only Love) was composed by Robert Pešut, with lyrics by Barbara
Pešut.
43. “Transvestite Sisters Stir Eurovision Storm,” BBC (March 5, 2002),
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1855726.stm. See also Carl F.
Stychin, “Queer/Euro Visions,” in What’s Queer About Europe? Productive Encounters and Re-
Enchanting Paradigms, ed. Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2014), 174.
44. Details about Slovenia’s nation-branding campaign are at http://ifeelslovenia.org/en/. See also
Gabriel Vivas, “Hannah: Slovenia is the Only Country in the World with ‘Love’ in the Name,”
ESCToday.com (April 13, 2013), http://esctoday.com/50308/hannah-slovenia-is-the-only-
country-in-the-world-with-love-in-the-name.
45. Peter Rehberg and Mikko Tuhkanen, “Danzing Time: Dissociative Camp and European
Synchrony,” SQS 2, no. 2 (2007): 43–59.
46. Galina Miazhevich, “Ukrainian Nation Branding Off-line and Online: Verka Serduchka at the
Eurovision Song Contest,” Europe-Asia Studies 64, no. 8 (October 2012): 1506–1507, 1512.
47. Marijana Mitrović, “‘New Face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: International Media
Spectacle and National Identity,” European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’Histoire
 17/2 (April 2010): 171–185. Annamari Vänskä, “Bespectacular and Over the Top: On the
Genealogy of Lesbian Camp,” SQS 2, no. 2 (2007): 66–80.
48. Mitrović, “New Face of Serbia,” 179–180.
49. Ivan Raykoff, “Austria, ORF, and Conchita Wurst,” in Texte 14: Public Service Media in Europe
(Vienna: ORF, 2015): 35–38, http://zukunft.orf.at/rte/upload/download/15i0002.pdf.
50. Benjamin Dodman, “Far-Right Leaders Vow to ‘Save Europe,’” France24.com (November 30,
2014), http://www.france24.com/en/20141130-france-national-front-europe-far-right-leaders-
marine-le-pen-wilders-russia.
51. Benjamin Dodman, “Far-Right Leaders Vow to ‘Save Europe,’” France24.com (Nov. 30, 2014),
http://www.france24.com/en/20141130-france-national-front-europe-far-right-leaders-marine-le-
pen-wilders-russia.
52. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXhiY8WcMWE.
53. Ban Ki-Moon, “Remarks at Meeting with Conchita Wurst” (November 3, 2014),
http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches/statments_full.asp?
statID=2422#.V6tDaqK50c4.
54. Cynthia Weber, Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to
Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 145, 179–185.
55. Catherine Baker, “‘If Love Was a Crime, We Would Be Criminals’: The Eurovision Song
Contest and the Queer International Politics of Flags,” in Eurovisions: Identity and the
International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1956, ed. Julie Kalman, Ben
Wellings, and Keshia Jacotine (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 175–176.
56. “Eurovision Song Contest Official Flag Policy” (2016), accessible at https://www.coc.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2016/04/EBU-Eurovision-Songcontest-Flag-Policy-249b3214e9.pdf
57. “Welsh Flag Will Fly After Eurovision’s U-Turn Decision,” BBC.com (May 6, 2016).
“Eurovision Fans can Fly the Sami Flag,” NewsinEnglish.no (May 6, 2016).
58. Baker, “‘If Love Was a Crime,’” 192, 195.
59. “EBU Terminates This Year’s Partnership with Mango TV,” Eurovision.tv (May 10, 2018),
https://eurovision.tv/snippet/ebu-terminates-this-year-s-partnership-with-mango-tv
60. Stychin, “Queer/Euro Visions,” 178, 184, 188.
61. Karen Fricker, “Crossover Appeal,” Variety 403, no. 1 (May 22–28, 2006): 18–19.
62. Josef Adalian, “NBC Turning On ‘Eurovision,’” Variety (February 9, 2006),
http://variety.com/2006/music/news/nbc-turning-on-eurovision-1117937807/.
63. Comment by Eric Graf to Samantha Ross, “An Open Letter to America About Eurovision,”
ESCinsight.com (April 23, 2012), http://escinsight.com/2012/04/19/an-open-letter-to-america/.
64. “America Is So Winning Eurovision Next Year,” The Late Show with Steven Colbert, May 17,
2016, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTP17rWuUMo.
R
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Revised ed. New York: Verso, 2006.
Baker, Catherine. “The ‘Gay Olympics’? The Eurovision Song Contest and the Politics of
LGBT/European Belonging.” European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 1 (2017): 97–
121.
Bohlman, Philip V. Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe. New York: Routledge,
2011.
Chua, J. Y. “Eurovision and the Making of Queer (Counter-)Cultural Diplomacy.” The Yale Review of
International Studies 6, no. 2 (2016): 85–101.
Fornäs, Johan. Signifying Europe. Bristol: Intellect Press, 2012.
Fricker, Karen, and Milija Gluhovic, eds. Performing the “New” Europe: Identities, Feelings, and
Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Moore, Tim. Nul Points. London: Vintage, 2006.
O’Connor, John Kennedy. The Eurovision Song Contest: The Official History. London: Carlton
Books, 2006.
Raykoff, Ivan, and Robert Deam Tobin, eds. A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the
Eurovision Song Contest. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
Rehberg, Peter. “Winning Failure: Queer Nationality at the Eurovision Song Contest.” SQS 2, no. 2
(2007): 60–65.
Tragaki, Dafni, ed. Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest. Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013.
Vuletic, Dean. Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. Gender and Nation. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Zwaan, Koos, and Joost de Bruin, eds. Adapting Idols: Authenticity, Identity, and Performance in a
Global Television Format. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.
 PA RT V I

C R O S S - C U LT U R A L Q U E E R N E S S
 CHAPTER 28

I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A RY
ENQUEERIES FROM INDIA
Moving Toward a Queer Ethnomusicology
 Z OE S H E RI N I AN

I there queer music in India? I have been asked this question by American
LGBTQ friends who know I am a lesbian who has done extensive
ethnomusicological fieldwork in South Asia. Needless to say, the question
and its implied universal constructs leave me troubled. Yet, what should
Western lesbians or queers, or others with minority sex/gender/sexuality
identities ask in order to discover whether there are people “like us” or who
have desires “like ours,” or who behave sort of “like us,” but maybe a little
different, in another culture—and if music has anything to do with the
construction or expression of their identity? Through decades of conducting
research in India my Western sex/gender/sexuality1 concepts have been
deconstructed and expanded, forcing me to realize the need to constantly
review my methodology and interrogate my positionality in order to
understand how Western categories and questions can be inadequate and
limiting. Thus, I begin from the stance that in the development of queer
theory for music, we should scrutinize the Western gaze that tends to
dominate queer scholarship in the West. We cannot assume that the Western
meanings of “queer” will match the ways of living and musicking that exist
throughout the world. The goal of this essay is to conceive of a cross-
cultural queer theory that allows for the consideration of the widest
diversity and inclusive conceptualization of the relationship of performing
arts to human desire, intimate behavior, and identity. Simultaneously, this
would be a theoretical lens that allows for local phenomena and their
potential to expand global understanding of not just difference, but of
human possibility.
 G E
E

As a concept in the West, “queer” attaches to notions of sexuality, pleasure

and its pursuit, eroticism, and same sex desire. It further has associations
with the body and its senses, as well as gender. In the mid-twentieth
century, “queer” was generally a derogatory word, while by the millennium
it had been reclaimed as positive by many activists, and its use spread to
movements in other parts of the world. Today, queer is often used as an
inclusive “umbrella term of coalition”2 for other sex/gender/sexuality
constructs: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, asexual,
pansexual, questioning or those who do not conform to heterosexual
(opposite sex) and cisgender identity or behavior. It is even a fluid term of
“anti-identity.” Indeed, many Western scholars and activists embrace this
broader descriptive understanding and further assert the need to consider
how the S/G/S ideology system intersects with race, class, ability, etc.
In contemporary Western literature, the verb “queering” relates to
behavior or radical action. In its adjectival or verbal form, modes of being
and doing, “queer” in the West can carry a more political, activist sense of
sexual and gender difference, gender non-conformity, non-normativity,
highly sexual, sexually subaltern, and critique of heteronormativity.
Furthermore it encompasses non-sexual forms of resistance or reversal
including opposition, radical, transformative, deviance, rebellion,
subversion, weird, counter-cultural, the unreal or unnatural, peripheral,
oppressed minorities, underground, hidden (closeted), ironic and humorous,
alternative, overblown, exaggeration, excess, independence, play and
fluidity. As a term that breaks the conflation of sex and gender and its
binary construction it embraces ideas of transgressiveness, transgressive
desire, polysemous perversity and sexual pleasure beyond the function of
reproduction3 or “pleasures and sites of pleasures beyond the usual ones.”4
In the hegemonic West, queer, when used in a more activist meaning, is an
anti-institutional category or a necessary other and should not be reduced to
a simple synonym for the identity categories of gay and lesbian.5
We should not assume that Western concepts of “queer,” descriptive or
activist, are adequate to illuminate S/G/S phenomenon and its musical
expression globally or even in subcultures in the West. We need to proceed
cautiously, with an ear toward the possibility of both broadly inclusive
application and local cultural relativity. In the rest of this section, I
encapsulate my recommendations for considering such cross-cultural
diversity in eight guidelines for queer ethnomusicology. The first three are
more negative—warning about possible mis-steps in cross-cultural
application. The remaining guidelines are more positive—directions of
enqueery and methodology that I suggest we consciously cultivate.

1. Queer ethnomusicology should not be tied to Western conceptions of

gender and sexuality, the two fundamental aspects of Western queer
identity. Both are rooted in the binary hierarchical constructions of
heterosexual/homosexual sexuality and male/female sex. Sue Ellen Case
argues that the categories of “lesbian and gay are limiting because they
reinscribe binary gender categories.” 6 I believe cross-cultural queer theory
should be broad enough to include cultures in which strictly dichotomized
gender and sexuality do not exist or exist differently.
2. Queer ethnomusicology should not assume that the basic object of
study will be LGBTQ-like subcultures. As scholars who use ethnographic
methods, we might first think in terms of queer music cultures, queer music
communities, queer musical relations, and queer music in social
movements. But, applying ideas from Mark Slobin’s (1993)7 work on
subcultural sounds and Tes Slominski’s chapter in this volume on queers in
Irish music groups, we might also consider queer subcultures within music
affinity groups or crossing from one subculture to another.
3. Relatedly, queer ethnomusiciology should not assume that queer or
queer-like behaviors are marginal or stigmatized in all cultures. We should
be alert to other possibilities—cultures in which queer culture is part of the
mainstream, not a subculture, and in which queer identity is widely
accepted and institutionalized through musical performance. Indeed, the
Indian case studies in this chapter will show that cultures exist in which
non-heterosexual sexualities or alternative gender expression is considered
to be normal and even religiously orthodox. Further, the stigmatization and
impact of a queer subculture in the West has also changed. Judith
Halberstam in her work on queer subculture in the United States and
Europe writes, “Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the
institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction, and queer
subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of
community.”8 With gay marriage and adoption making headlines in the
United States, this sense of oppositionality and lack of mainstream or
familial integration appear to be changing in Western settings.
4. Queer theory in ethnomusicology should respect if not prioritize and
forefront indigenous conceptualizations. In the South Asian context, our
process of ethnomusicological enqueery will inevitably lead to a discussion
of Western and South Asian categories of sexuality and homosocial
behavior, arranged marriage, pre-marriage separation of the sexes, qualities
of same-sex friendships, Western constructions of politicized queer identity,
colonial histories, and class and caste differences. By working from
localized categories we thereby avoid applying Western categories to
another context where this may limit or erase indigenous phenomena.
Western categories of sexuality and gender carry the baggage of Western
heterosexism, sexism, racism, classism, and, most significantly, naturalized
binary constructions, and that baggage can skew our analysis and block our
understandings.9 Yet it is important to recognize how local activists may
intentionally draw on Western or globalized categories for specific local and
global political purposes. Indeed, in some cases, Western terms may have
been indigenized to create distinct local meanings.10 We also need to be
alert to uninstitutionalized radical meanings that may not be widely
accepted within the culture.
5. Methodologically, I advocate a fieldwork praxis that takes into
consideration cultural transference and countertransference dynamics in the
process of interpreting the subject’s behaviors and identities to provide the
ethnomusicologist important perspectives on local or indigenous
constructions.11 This is an understanding I borrow from psychoanalysis,
that the subject of one’s ethnographic study will read the researcher (often a
cultural outsider) from their own cultural perspective (cultural
transference). In turn, the ethnographer should deconstruct the cultural
baggage or sex/gender/sexuality mindset that they bring with them to the
field (countertransference).
6. Queer ethnomusicology should also look for phenomena that expand
global understanding of human possibility.12 We should be alert to the
prospect that local case studies can contribute to broader, potentially
universal or cross-culturally applicable definitions of
“sex/gender/sexuality” in relation to music/sound. A queer
ethnomusicological theory should be founded on concepts that transcend
boundaries and borders, yet simultaneously prioritize the local.
Ethnomusicological queer theory should stay inclusively broad.
7. Queer ethnomusicology should be intersectional, considering
interactions with all observed identities and social stances. The first major
collection of musicological queer studies, Queering the Pitch, appeared in
1994. It was ground-breaking, but it was also narrow in significant ways.
Reflecting on the collection ten years later, Suzanne Cusick and Martha
Mockus pointed out the whiteness of the book’s topics and authors; Mockus
also emphasized that “queer,” in that collection, meant only “gay and
lesbian.”13 Queer musicology and ethnomusicology need to include the
LGBTQ umbrella as well as other intersectional differences such as race,
class, caste, and religion as expressed in the performing arts.
8. Music and sound are crucial objects of study for ethnomusicologists,
while the scope of our studies often includes dance, narrative, and other
intersectional aesthetics within a culture. We must “face the music”14 and
“engage the dance.” I advocate a listening strategy that turns our binary
frameworks of sexuality and gender inside/out “to expose their critical
operations and interior machinery.”15 Let us use these eight guidelines to
develop theory broadly and inclusively to evolve from and embrace as
much of human possibility as reasonable. Let us listen closely to and move
with the performative identities of relationships, of bodies, of spectators,
and of activists.16 Hear what the music can tell us about the noise on the
outside boundaries of some cultures and the love that may have dared to
speak or sound out its name17 as it exists on the inside of other cultures.
 E P S
A : H C

To do my “queer listening” I return to my familiar locale of India to

investigate indigenous constructions of South Asian “queer” identity and
behavior through music and performance. I shall examine two case studies
to show how a queer ethnomusicological analysis that begins from a place
of inclusivity of multiple sexuality and gender expressions and an
intersectionality of these identities with significant other social
constructions helps us understand the relationship between music and cross-
cultural “queerness.” That is how, through performance analysis that
includes or is focused on sound, we can move beyond Western identity
constructions; ambiguity in the direction of desire can be considered; music
can be a means to the fulfillment of homosocial attraction and emotional
bonding that simultaneously parallel heteronormative marriage contexts;
and Western sex/gender dualistic conflations can be dislodged to instead
express a broader complexity of these categories cross-culturally. Before
going into these cases, however, I want to introduce LGBTQ issues of
South Asia more generally.
South Asian “gays, lesbians, queers,” along with indigenous categories
of non-heteronormative people, exist and are publically asserting their
identities on the subcontinent and in the South Asian diasporas.18 Many
academic sources and non-academic media support this.19 My impression,
however, is that most Indians who have articulated a specifically “lesbian,
gay, or queer” identity are cosmopolitan, have been educated in English-
language medium institutions in South Asia, and are at least middle class.
Their identities do not reflect indigenous South Asian constructions, but
indigenized and often political identities created through exposure to
Western cultural frameworks and access to cosmopolitan “queer” spaces.20
It is essential to recognize the politicized use, appropriation, or
indigenization of Western constructions in both local and global queer
politics such as the contemporary ramifications of the colonial anti-sodomy
laws in India.21
But, while conservative and Hindu fundamentalist voices in India may
deny the indigeneity of same-sex erotic behavior, the search for indigenous
constructions bears much fruit in the Indian context.22 There is abundant
historical evidence of sexual practice beyond face-to-face intercourse
between a man and a woman as well as non-binary gender expression in
South Asia. Homosexuality in the Kama Sutra and Vedic period, the statues
at Khajuraho that depict oral sex between women, Shivaite androgynous
divinities, tantric ideas of universal bisexuality, and ancient female
queendoms provide clear historical evidence in diverse contexts that a
variety of indigenous sexual and gender behavior/desire as well as potential
identities (including what we might translate as gay males, asexuality,
bisexuality, lesbianism, female impersonation, and erotic friendships)23
existed in pre-Islamic and pre-Western Indian culture and were supported
by philosophy and religion.24 These phenomena, as well as the long
historical presence of hijras (a Perso-Arabic term)25 and kothis show that
modern westernization alone has not acted as a queer sexual missionary of
sorts, imposing its positions on the colonized, and that same-sex intimate
behavior is not a “foreign importation.”26
 H P

For my first case study, I turn to Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of
India (1990) by anthropologist Serena Nanda. Nanda presents an
ethnography of what she calls a “third gendered, homosexual” community
of ritual performers who play a vital life cycle role in the blessing of a baby
boy. Her analysis of sexuality and gender expands Western constructions,
dislodges Western sex/gender dualistic conflations, and shows the
complexity of these categories cross-culturally. Although Nanda falls short
of a complete musical analysis that could further reveal the simultaneous
multiplicity of sex/gender qualities in hijras, she provides two important
perspectives for queer ethnomusicological theory. First, she describes a
heterosexual wedding context in which hijras negotiate religious asceticism,
homosexuality, and economic relationships in identity formation through
performance. Second, she emphasizes the ambiguity of “third gendered
people” in this Indian context.27
Hijras are viewed with fear and respect as vehicles of the goddess.28
Most are born with primary male sexual characteristics, but later they
ideally renounce sexual desire and undergo castration, while those
considered the “most spiritually authentic” are intersexed.29 While the ideal
is to be an ascetic, some engage in sexuality with hetero-cis men called
pānthis30 as prostitutes and/or in the context of living as a social “wife”
with a male “husband.”31 The hijra’s special religious powers, derived from
their alternative gender role, legitimate their function as ritual performers
who bless or curse a baby boy’s life. Thus, it is believed that hijras, who do
not possess male privileges themselves, give boys the masculine power to
create life, have sons, and carry on the family (and caste) line. This vital
religious role of a person without masculine privilege or identity having the
right to endow another with masculine/male gender/sex characteristics
forms the core of hijra identity and positive collective self-image.32
Dressed in female clothing, hijras perform at weddings and baby
blessings, singing, clapping, dancing, and playing the dholak barrel drum in
an exaggerated feminine style to popular film songs and regional folk
music. Nanda leaves little doubt that performance is crucial to hijras’ ritual
identity formation. She fully describes the performance structure, lyrics,
and stylistic significance of the dholak drum and the way hijras clap. In a
context where musical performance is so important to inscribe their
accepted social function, an ethnomusicologist will want more analysis of
the music than Nanda provides. I wonder whether the hijra’s musical gender
is ambiguous or “third?” For example, is gender “play” heard in their vocal
range? Do hijras sing songs associated with women such as those drawn
from the genre of thumri33 or those that consciously use female ragas
(melodic modes) such as bhairavi?34 Do hijras change the lyrics of songs,
or use particular songs to define themselves as “neither man nor woman”?
Ethnomusicologist and filmmaker Jeff Roy’s recent work on hijras
provides answers for many questions about the hijra’s musical gender or
queer musicality.35 Roy analyzes the hijra anthem called “Asha Natoru” to
show the importance of unity and equality within the hijra community. As
Roy demonstrates, the music contributes to the hijra’s embrace of a
diversity of shifting and sometimes contradictory gender expressions in a
single performance. Roy sees this performance as a model of gender
inclusivity, totality, or multiplicity. While Nanda’s description of hijras
sex/gender/sexuality also shows an inclusive range of elements considered
masculine, feminine, and androgynous, I prefer Roy’s use of “inclusive” or
“multiple” as opposed to Nanda’s “third,” which reinforces categorical
distinctions instead of flow. According to Roy,
The beautiful ghazal singer in the Jalsa performance envelops and gets a rise out of all of the
ritual participants. She mixes and shifts gender codes. Her song is a female genre, or a
conversation between women. She wears a sari [appearing feminine], but her vocal range
does not push the boundaries of male cis-gender, instead it remains baritone. The idea is that
out of this inclusivity or “allness,” hijras get strength through unity and diversity.
Multiplicity brings that allegiance to an identity. The hijras’ intent is not to break the
[heteronormative] rules or legitimize the gender dichotomy. Hijras are not about subverting
or ignoring the rules, but positioning themselves in a space that comes before them. They
are there to make the rules. While some may have a particular reverence and joy, a longing
to participate in that binary [to pass] through being perceived as woman and having a
husband, the gurus and ascetics say, “You might have this longing but remember who you
are.” “You are holier than that. You come before that.” Longing is part of the material world
—what heteronormative people do. Through badi and gender performance hijras dictate
what works and what doesn’t [in heteronormativity].36
Thus, Roy’s musical and religious analysis helps us interpret hijras’
typically male baritone or tenor vocal range as part of an inclusive, holistic
package of multiple gendered performance elements that also includes
exaggerated as well as normative feminine expressions. This package
ascribes an original, holistic spiritual asceticism in hijras from which binary
heteronormativity derives.
Nanda also surveys other cultures with institutionalized “third genders”
where music plays a significant role in the process of identity construction.
Among people in Oman, the Native American Mohave, and the Mahu of
Tahiti she finds the similarity that music is performed either by the
community during rituals, or by the “third gendered” people who sing along
with women as accepted members in a gender segregated performance. The
Mojave sing “transvestite songs” during the ritual that determines whether a
boy will be confirmed as an alyha, which Nanda defines as a male
transvestite homosexual. One female or mother role they perform is to wail
as a woman would for her “ritual” stillborn child.37 The Mahu of Tahiti she
describes as a third gender role; they dress as women and dance and sing
with women.38 In Oman, the Xanith who have characteristics of both men
and women join the women in singing and dancing on festive occasions and
have access to women where men are not allowed.39 Further
ethnomusicological study of these cases of third or multiple gendered
phenomena through performance will help us understand the broader range
of sex/gender/sexuality, religious, and other identities.
 M

Sexuality as a defining characteristic of a love relationship may be a

contemporary, Western, and possibly male construct. Joyce Flueckiger’s
description of mahaprasad, or a ritual friendship practice in Phulijhar, India
presents a counter-example to this construct.40 Flueckiger details chosen
friendships between girls in which they sing songs to each other as a ritual
formation of ideally life-long emotional bonds across different castes.
Mahaprasad between pubescent girls are not considered as “serious” as
those established between married women because the girls soon marry
“out” of the village and sometimes cannot sustain the ritual kinship
obligations of the friendships. However, “they are based on true friendship
and emotional attraction, rather than some other external criteria.”41 In
other words, in a cultural system based on arranged marriage, these
potentially life-long emotional relationships are chosen. Furthermore, all
mahaprasad ritual friendships are formed across the hierarchy/difference
and pollution lines of caste, marking them as rituals that reverse difference.
In the context of a nine-night women’s festival in which bhojali plant
seedlings are sprouted, watered and planted, the unmarried female
participants serve the goddess and formalize friendships exchanging bhojali
plants and singing songs together. Flueckiger’s interpretation of the songs
focuses on the girls’ emerging heterosexuality (i.e., flirtation with boys) and
future marriages. However, from my queer ethnomusicological perspective
two lyrics stand out as ambiguous and possibly “queer.” The first describes
the preparation of the sprouting place for the plants.
Having plastered the floor and wall
having plastered the corner
having plastered the corner
We will gaze lovingly
At our bhojali dai

I suggested in correspondence with Dr. Flueckiger that this may mean the
girls are looking at each other lovingly. She responded that the bhojali plant
is equated with friend and goddess, so one could read homosocial attraction
into this gaze. But she did not feel that the participants, if asked, would give
homoerotic connotations to the songs or rituals.42 Whether we sexualize
this loving gaze or not, can we call it queer? The following lyric was even
more telling:
I sowed the field with mung lentils, my friend.
Seeing you, girl, I felt desire.
The mung crop will be good, my friend.
The mung crop will be good, my friend.

When I asked about this lyric, Flueckiger said “the ‘I’ implies a male voice,
even if sung between two girls—at least on the surface.” The word for
“desire,” “cahana,” means “to want” and definitely connotes sexual
desire.43 Did Flueckiger assume that because the word “desire” is sexual,
the subject had to be male?44 Does the performance context of the
friendship ritual not matter in the interpretation of meaning? I believe we
should consider the use of these lyrics in this ritual context as, at the least,
creating ambiguity in the direction of desire.
Flueckiger analyzes the interactive song forms used by the girls as
“give-and-take repetition between friends [which], reinforces the
relationships formalized through the ritual.”45 This homology of the value
of equality reflected in the music structure and social structure is key to my
queer ethnomusicological analysis, even if we do not interpret the lyrics as
homoerotic.46 In a society where kinship relationships are extremely
hierarchical, could a deep, homosocial friendship founded on equality
across the hierarchy of caste be considered “queer,” even if potentially
temporary and non-sexual? This practice seems to provide an important
fulfillment of homosocial attraction and emotional bonding for women, few
of whom expect physical and emotional fulfillment in heteronormative
Indian marriage.
In traditional South Asian cultures, one’s choice of marriage partner is
not ideally based on sexual desire for the spouse, but on his or her potential
as a parent and productive member of an extended family household. The
ideal in marriage is affectionate love, not sexual love. Although sexual
fulfillment in marriage is articulated in oral traditions and literature,
Flueckiger confirms that it is rare for village women to talk about this
expectation in “life on the ground.” If married women hold few
expectations of sexual and emotional fulfillment in their relationships,47
perhaps pre- and post-marriage friendships may be the only context in
which women, in particular, can expect to fulfill desire—emotional or
possibly physical. Thus, we can conclude that mahaprasad defines
institutionalized, ritualized homonormativity for women in rural Central
India. The only way to further understand these practices is to do
ethnomusicological fieldwork with a broader consciousness of the variety
of intimate sexual and emotional relationships possible in humanity. That is,
to queer our observations or carefully and openly attune ourselves to local
specificities through an aural lens that both acknowledges the
ethnographer’s (potentially) “queer” Western world view, while grounding
interpretations in local ethnographic knowledge and experience enough to
perceive and acknowledge such possibilities.
 C

On the broadest level this attempt to develop guidelines for a queer

ethnomusicological theory engages how music/sound creates meaning in
relation to a mix of elements potentially including the body and its
pleasures, behavior in intimate relationships that negotiate social structures
and power, S/G/S identity, and other intersectional identities. The South
Asian case studies of hijras and majaprasad ritual friendship encourage us
to explore a wider range of relationships, genders, and sexualities. These
include homo-emotional, deeply committed friendships that through
musical performance cross intersectional social identities like hierarchies of
caste, religion, ethnicity, and class. The studies of hijras further show the
importance of considering sex/gender/sexuality configurations that are
multiple or inclusive of a full range of expressions available in the
particular society, thus not conforming to a binary construction even as an
expression of trans identity. In relation to hijras, heteronormative sexuality
is believed to flow from an original source of multiplicity. While this
appears progressive, we must recognize the complexity of meanings in
hijra’s performance of alternative sexuality/gender to understand that it is
part of an orthodox Hindu, institutionalized belief system that confers
privileged masculinity on males and reinscribes the patriarchal caste
system.
These studies by scholars in and outside of ethnomusicology confirm the
importance of conducting a full ethnomusicological analysis of such
phenomena, as music and performance appear to be at the core of “queer”
identity formation in many cultures. Indeed, as Deborah Wong has written,
“music [is a] key performative means for defining the terms for pleasure
and desire.”48 My attempt is to find a theoretical lens through which to
recognize local phenomena and their potential to expand global
understanding of human possibility in all its diversity. The contribution
ethnomusicology can make to broaden the scope of queer theory is
invaluable and essential.
 So, does this turn your world inside/out? If so, you might agree that
there is much exciting ethnomusicological enqueering to be done.
N
1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge,
1993).
2. Martha Mockus, “A Historical and Political Comment,” in “Queering the Pitch Past Present and
Future.” GLSG Newsletter for the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological
Society 14, no. 1 (2004): 11.
3. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga, eds, Queering the Popular Pitch (New York, Routledge,
2006), xiii–xix.
4. Suzanne Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relation with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,”
in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Brett, Philip, Elizabeth
Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73.
5. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: NYU Press, 1997).
6. Sue Ellen Case, “There’s Something Queer Here,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer
Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke
University, 1995), 75.
7. Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1993).
8. Judith Halberstam, “What’s that Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives,” in
Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge,
2006), 3–26.
9. Timothy Rice, Modeling Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 35.
10. Monique M. Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe Sherinian, eds. Making
Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide (New York, Routledge,
2018).
11. Zoe Sherinian, “Sounding Out-Ethnomusicology: Theoretical Reflection on Queer Fieldnotes
and Performance,” in Queering the Field, ed. Greg Barz and Will Cheng (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2020), 31–52.
12. Slominsky argues for a perspective in which desires, behaviors, relationships, and identities
expand our understanding of the possibility of human relationships of intimacy, and pleasure
particularly formed around identities of gender, sex, and sexuality as well as “relationships
between music, selfhood, and social identities more generally.” See her chapter in this volume.
13. Martha Mockus, “A Historical and Political Comment,” in “Queering the Pitch Past Present and
Future” GLSG Newsletter for the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological
Society Newsletter 14, no. 1 (2004): 11.
14. This is a song written by Annie Dinerman (1975 Bluestocking/Sunslope Music), but made
famous by Women’s Music singer/guitarist Meg Christian. Its lyrics are about finding the
courage to come out. The music becomes a metaphor for lesbian identity, while the music draws
from the lonesome blues (African American) genre.
15. Diana Fuss, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1.
16. Fuss, Inside/Out. These are areas of inquiry in Diana Fuss’s queer theory text.
17. The phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” originates in a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas,
famous as Oscar Wilde’s lover. It is also the name of a 1960s lesbian pulp novel.
18. Studies by Narrain (2004), Reddy (2004), Khanna (2005), Sharma (2006), Shahani (2008), Vora
(2008), Holtzman (2010), and Khanna (2011) have all shown that same-sex behavior and a
variety of gendered expressions have a strong presence in South Asia.
19. For instance, the book A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and
Lesbian Experience edited by Rakesh Ratti (1993); the book Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance
about hereditary communities of female, transgender, and kothi erotic dancers (female
impersonators who embody through public performance a type of exaggerated and iconic female
role) by ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom (2014: 88, 96–97); the movie Fire produced by
Deepa Mehta (1996) about sexual love between two sister-in-laws; depictions of homosexuality
in Bollywood films, while not always positive (Dudrah 2008; Gopal and Moorti 2008); a study
of localization in the Delhi Queer Pride Parade by Adam Hall (2015); and the Queer Indian Arts
festival in Toronto.
20. Anna Morcom, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25.
21. Adam Hall, The Dhol As Identity Reinforcement and Sonic Empowerment In North Indian
Queer Protest, MMus Thesis (University of Oklahoma, 2015), 10–13.
22. Binnie and Simmons (2008: 162) in Hall, The Dhol, 21.
23. See Hall, The Dhol, 19–20, for detailed analysis of these corresponding indigenous terms. Hall
engages multiple sources (Hanson 2004, Petievich 2004, Vanita 2005, Chatterjee 2012, and
Farooqi 2012) that show historical evidence of the presence of “lost sexualities, or behaviors
and categories that were once allegedly accepted and historically present since before
colonialism and contact with the West, but are no longer practiced or widely known by the
general or queer public.
24. Rakesh Ratti, ed., A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian
Experience (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1993), 26–27.
25. See Jeff Roy, “From Jalsah to Jalsā: Music, Identity, and (Gender) Transitioning at a Hījrā Rite
of Initiation,” Ethnomusicology 61, no. 3 (2017), 389–418; and Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor
Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990).
26. Hall, The Dhol, 27. What is clear is that laws such as Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that
officially criminalize same-sex and heterosexual sex “against the order of nature,” particularly
sodomy, have had a significant historical and contemporary impact on Indians and the Indian
queer rights movement. The law’s presence in colonial and post-colonial India attests to
Victorian and contemporary fears of same-sex sexuality (and its prosecution) or indeed reaction
to its active presence in the colony (Hall 2015: 10).
27. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 20 and 23.
28. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 145.
29. This is the ideal of being ambiguously gendered but non-sexual as described by Gyatri Reddy
(2005).
30. Pānthi literally means husband. These are male sexual partners to hijras and kothis.
31. The majority of hijras were born with a male body. Their relationships with panthis are not
considered “gay” and hijras are not necessarily trying to pass as women. Jeff Roy reports that
men who have sex with men and take on a “gay” identity have become subsumed as part of the
 hijra community because there is often nothing else for them. Roy’s research shows that there is
also a growing movement among hijras to “transgenderize” their identity—adopting the English
word transgender as separate and distinct from “gay” and, in some cases, hijra. The words exist
alongside each other. If hijras defined themselves as involved in “homosexual acts,” it would be
contrary to their identities and politically problematic. This movement is partly instigated as a
way to negotiate colonial and post-colonial discourse as well as contemporary political funding
for NGOs (Jeff Roy, email to the author, September 3, 2016).
32. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 12.
33. Thumri is North Indian light classical genre associated with courtesans.
34. Bhairavi has all seven notes; re, ga, and da are flat, and it is considered a lighter (i.e., more
feminine) raga.
35. Jeff Roy, “From Jalsah to Jalsā: Music, Identity, and (Gender) Transitioning at a Hījrā Rite of
Initiation,” Ethnomusicology 61, no. 3 (2017): 389–418.
36. Jeff Roy, email to the author, September 3, 2016.
37. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 132–133.
38. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 134–135.
39. Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman, 130.
40. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and Genre in The Folklore of Middle India. (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University, 1996).
41. Flueckiger, e-mail to the author, October 9, 1997.
42. Flueckiger, e-mail to the author, October 9, 1997.
43. Flueckiger, e-mail to the author, October 13, 1997.
44. Song texts in the Qawwali genre in South Asia include accepted expressions of passionate love
from the male devote to male deity, thus I question why this could not be a possible
interpretation here.
45. Flueckiger, Gender and Genre, 32.
46. Steven Feld, “Sound Structure as Social Structure,” Ethnomusicology 28, no. 3 (1984): 383–
409.
47. Flueckiger, e-mail to the author, October 9, 1997.
48. Deborah Wong, “Ethnomusicology and Difference,” Ethnomusicology 50, no. 2 (2006): 266.
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Youngs, 159–171. New York: Continuum, 2008.
Brett, Philip, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and
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Chatterjee, Indrani. “When ‘Sexuality’ Floated Free of Histories in South Asia.” The Journal of
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Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 67–84. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Dinerman, Annie. “Face the Music.” Bluestocking/Sunslope Music, 1975.
Doty, Alexander. “There’s Something Queer Here.” In Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer
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Dudrah, Rajinder. “Queer a Desis: Secret Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in
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 CHAPTER 29

KUNQU CROSS-DRESSING AS
A RT I S T I C A N D / O R Q U E E R
PERFORMANCE
JOS E P H S . C. L AM
 K C -
C C

A centuries-old performance practice of Chinese opera, cross-dressing has

been rapidly reinventing itself since the 1990s,1 generating debates on its
meanings as performing art, cultural heritage, and a discourse of Chinese
gender and sex. Cross-dressing is nothing more or less than an artistic
pursuit of aestheticized manhood or womanhood on stage, self-serving
words that its performers, supporting critics, and appreciative audience
claim, and that historical and contemporary evidences do not totally
support. Some cross-dressing performances are clearly queer in the sense
that they performatively assert possibilities that transgress hegemonic and
heterosexual norms in traditional and contemporary China.2
In 2010, the Polo Arts company and the North Kunqu Opera Troupe
(Beifang kunqu juyuan) collaborated to present in Beijing Lianxiangban/A
Romance: Two Belles in Love (hereafter Two Belles),3 a seventeenth century
and atypical drama of heterosexual and lesbian love and marriage written
by Li Yu (1611–1680), a creative and controversial dramatist in Chinese
literature and theater history. Directed by Stanley Kwan (b. 1957), an
openly gay movie director from Hong Kong, Two Belles was performed
with mixed and all-male troupes of kunqu perfomers, highlighting the
genre’s cross-dressing practice and its association with same sex desires,
and winning recognition as the first lesbian (lala) kunqu opera in Chinese
cultural and social history. In the summer of 2016, Director Zhang Peng of
the same North Kunqu Opera Troupe produced a “connoisseurs’ version”
(zhiyin ban) of Two Belles,4 promoting historical images of female beauty at
the expense of the story’s lesbian significance. The contrast between the
2010 and 2016 productions indexes the elevated status of kunqu as not only
a classical and marketable cultural heritage of China but also a dynamic site
of Chinese gender performance and negotiation.
Kunqu first emerged in the late 1500s in the tri-city area of Kunshan-
Taicang-Suzhou that is about 40–70 miles away from present-day
Shanghai.5 Featuring dramatic speeches, literary lyrics, flowing vocal
melodies, exquisite acting-dancing (shenduan—choreographed bodily
gestures and movements), and visually stunning and gender specific
costumes and facial make-up patterns, kunqu is a mature genre of Chinese
opera. In 2001, UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible
Heritage of Humanity from China,6 an honor that helped promote its status
as a classical genre of Chinese opera, revived its popularity/marketability,
reinvigorated its tradition of amateur singers and elitist fans (quyou), and
raised artistic-commercial-social stakes in current performances and
debates.
As the “mother of all Chinese opera” (baixi zhimu), kunqu has for
centuries served as a tool, a site, and a process for negotiating Chinese
gender and sex.7 Since the 1990s, a number of contemporary Chinese
movie directors have appropriated the genre’s cross-dressing practice as a
source material for their movies on Chinese love and eroticism, generating
public debates. In 1993, Chen Kaige premiered his Farewell My Concubine,
a cinematic epic on twentieth-century Chinese culture and history told
through the lives of two male Beijing opera performers, one of whom was a
female impersonator (nandan; qiandan). The movie promoted extensive
and public debates on Chinese and theatrical cross-dressing. That the cross-
dressing character was played by Leslie Cheung (1956–2003), an openly
gay actor-singer, also rendered contemporary notions of cross-dressing and
homosexuality intimately interrelated.8 Since 2006, Li Yugang (b. 1978), a
female impersonator of contemporary Chinese popular music and theatre,
has built a successful career with his sensational performances, blending
artistic and erotic entertainments.9 In 2008, Chen Kaige produced Mei
Lanfang,10 a biopic of the legendary kunqu and Peking opera master
performer/female impersonator (1894–1961) of twentieth-century China.
By alluding to the fact that Mei emerged out of a theatrical tradition in
which young and cross-dressing actors served privileged male patrons as
companions/entertainers/sex workers,11 the biopic provoked heated debates
about not only Mei and his cross-dressing artistry, but also same-sex desires
and male prostitution in traditional and contemporary China. Mei’s official
biographers and fans vigorously declare that Mei’s cross-dressing artistry
was pure art, and has nothing to do with homosexual or any other sexual
desires. To substantiate their arguments, they repeatedly note that Mei had
wives and begot children.
The argument that Chinese cross-dressing is more a theatrical art and
less an erotic/gender/sexual expression is not without cultural and historical
grounds. Cross-dressing is a performing art found in many traditional Asian
societies,12 an internationally renowned example of which is Banto
Tamasaburo’s onnagata (female impersonator) performance in Japanese
kabuki.13 Tamasaburo is also a kunqu fan and female impersonator. Since
2008, Tamasaburo has played, in China and Japan, Du Liniang, the female
protagonist of Peony Pavilion (Mudanting), a drama about an elite lady
character who actively and atypically pursues marital and sexual happiness.
Tamasaburo’s expressive enactment of Du Liniang has mesmerized many
critics and audiences, and helped revive female impersonation in
contemporary China. Encouraged by Tamasaburo’s personal artistry and
international celebrity, a number of young male Chinese performers now
boldly pursue careers as female impersonators.
Their counterparts, young female performers who cross-dress as men
(nüxiaosheng; kunsheng), are actively and successfully developing their
artistry and claiming their market share of the kunqu stage. In 2011, Weng
Jiahui, a male impersonator, won the coveted role of Jia Baoyu, an icon of
young, romantic Chinese men, in a grand production of the Dream of the
Red Mansion (Hongloumeng).14 Currently, many amateur kunqu singers
practice musical cross-dressing in their “pure singing” (qingchang)
gatherings/rehearsals, a cultural and performance tradition that many
educated modern Chinese adopted after the 1920s. Wearing neither make-
up nor costume, and doing no theatrical acting-dancing (shenduan), they
sing kunqu operatic arias in gendered voices that do not align with their
bodily sex. For example, biological male amateurs singing arias of woman
characters would wear men’s clothing, and would do nothing to camouflage
their physically male bodies. Some would even deliberately dress and act
male to dispel any doubts about their sexualities.
As outlined above, twenty-first-century Chinese theatrical and musical
cross-dressing is artistically complex, discursively multivalent and rapidly
changing. It is a phenomenon that I have examined, since 2006, from the
position of a music scholar-kunqu fan and with data I have collected from
printed documents, website publications, and actual and virtual
conversations with kunqu performers, critics, fans, and scholars. Kunqu
cross-dressing is a dynamic performing art and a multivalent negotiation of
Chinese gender and sex. It might confirm, transgress, and mock hegemonic
gender and sex constructions in traditional and contemporary China; it
might or might not manifest individual performers’ erotic desires and
gender/sexual identities. Much of kunqu cross-dressing is defined by its
music, namely musical tones, rhythms, vocal textures, and timbres,
expressions that sonically index the staged genders that kunqu performers
and audiences negotiate on and off stages.
This chapter presents findings of my decade-long engagement with
kunqu and its cross-dressing as a performance/negotiation of Chinese
gender and sex. As observations and interpretations on a most complex
phenomenon, the findings are preliminary. Information on Chinese gender
and sex matters is for the most part opaque, if not illusive. Unlike LGBTQ
individuals in the West, few Chinese kunqu and cross-dressing participants
have the platforms to out themselves—social-political pressure on their
being closeted is intense and prevalent. However, they do occasionally
reveal themselves, or others expose them accidentally or deliberately.
During our conversations, several female impersonators have discretely
hinted to me their erotic interests in men. Several have confided their
homophobic and misogynistic thoughts. And a number of my research
partners have specified to me who among popular cross-dressing
performers have same-sex lovers.
 H K C -

Kunqu does not hold any monopoly on cross-gender impersonation in

China, but because of its longevity and prestige, the opera affords a
historically developed and culturally and socially sanctioned stage for the
public negotiation of Chinese gender and sex. Cherished by elitist patrons,
creative dramatists, virtuosic performers, and dedicated audiences since the
late 1500s when the genre first blossomed, kunqu operates with an aura of
cultural classicism, artistic sophistication, and social-political elitism, which
collectively legitimize the genre’s gendered stories, characters, performance
practices, and expressions as representatively Chinese.
With a large repertory, kunqu presents a diversity of dramatic characters
who positively or negatively project Chinese personhood, social roles, and
gender and sex identities. For example, Peony Pavilion realistically presents
Du Liniang as an elite young woman who actively pursues her erotic
desires, challenging circumscribed female roles in Confucian China.15 The
same drama also showcases Sister Stone (Shi daogu) as an example of a
desexed Chinese woman. Since she cannot physically have intercourse with
her husband, she is socially disqualified as a sexual or productive woman in
patrilineal China; she has to become a nun, and lives away from the family,
the nexus of heterosexual China.
Kunqu characters realistically personify gender attributes because their
dramatic projections are based on historical stories and figures, and because
the characters’ lyrics and dialogs are verbally communicative and specific.
Kunqu librettists are effective, sophisticated wordsmiths. For instance,
Palace of Everlasting Life (Changshendian), a kunqu masterpiece by Hong
Sheng (1645–1704), dramatizes the historically significant love story
between Emperor Xuanzong (685–762) of Tang China and his Imperial
Concubine, Yang Guifei (719–756), verbally constructing the former as an
icon of romantic and virile men, and the latter as a model of talented and
jealous beauties. Kunqu historical and staged characters are popular
because they personify what Chinese audiences remember and imagine for
their own lives.
 Kunqu cross-dressing is simultaneously a cultural-historical legacy and a
creative and expressive performing art. Since ancient times, young and
effeminate men and/or female impersonators served as theatrical actors,
social companions, and sex workers who entertained rulers, scholar-
officials, and other privileged men. Such homosocial/homosexual activities
became common—or sensationalized—among elite men in late Ming China
(1580–1644), a creative but social-politically turbulent time, when many
iconoclastic and passionate individuals boldly transgressed mainstream
gender and sex practices, and when erotic literature was popularly written,
printed, and read.16 Late Ming fiction/drama and popular songs, many of
which serve as models and/or sources for kunqu libretti, are distinguished
by their graphic descriptions of erotic/sexual practices, many of which
involve same-sex couples. Two prime examples of sexually explicit Ming
works are Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei) and Memories of Male Sex
Workers (Longyang yishi).17
From the 1720s, Qing China (1644–1911) repeatedly banned woman
performers from public stages,18 creating a situation that allowed male
performers to dominate public Chinese theatre and entertainment, and
nurturing distinctive homosocial and homosexual aesthetics and practices.
A fictional-historical account of kunqu female impersonators, male patrons,
and their artistic-erotic world in Qing China is Chen Shen’s (ca. 1797–ca.
1870) Pinhua baojian [Precious Mirrors of Boy Actresses].19 Allegedly, the
historical novel is a thinly disguised report of what the author actually saw
in mid-nineteenth-century Beijing. Fact or fiction, the book showcases a
distinctively Chinese homosocial and homosexual world that cannot be
simplistically explained with contemporary international theories on
homosexuality, lesbianism, transvestitism, and other queer phenomena.
Embracing Western culture, including its homophobic theories and
practices, early twentieth-century China dismissed theatrical female
impersonation as morally undesirable and culturally backward, while re-
opening public stages to female performers.20 One result of this lenient and
“unequal” policy was the national rise of Shanghai opera (yueju), a genre
distinctively performed by all-female casts. Between the mid-1950s and
mid-1990s, Socialist China suppressed the training of female
impersonators, while allowing the centuries-old but sketchily documented
tradition of male impersonators to thrive.
By the late 1990s, a number of male impersonators had achieved
legendary success and popularity with their distinguished and
individualized artistry. In kunqu, Yue Meiti (b. 1941) and Shi Xiaomei
(b.1949) mesmerized their audiences with cross-dressed performances of
scholarly, talented, young, romantic men (caizi).21 And in Cantonese opera
(yueju) and Shanghai opera, two male impersonators, Yam Kimfai/Ren
Jianhui (1913–1989) and Fan Ruijuan (b. 1935),22 dominated their
respective genres, establishing models of staged manhood for their disciples
and subsequent generations of straight and/or cross-dressing performers and
audiences.
Male impersonators of kunqu and other Chinese theatrical genres have
won many enthusiastic female fans, a development that invites many
aesthetic, historical, and practical questions. What do contemporary
Chinese female audiences find attractive, or satisfying, in staged men that
everyday and/or biological males lack? Why do contemporary Chinese
readily embrace male impersonation, but hesitantly accept its counterpart,
namely female impersonation, as a historical legacy and performance art? Is
impersonation practiced for nostalgic, or artistic, or queer reasons? Why is
it vigorously questioned? What is at stake?
 T K C -

In traditional and contemporary China, kunqu cross-dressing is promoted

for artistic and practical reasons. Male impersonation is often justified by
the physical beauty the cross-dressing performers display. To the best of my
knowledge, however, no theorist or practitioner of male impersonation has
publicly argued that it is an ideal enactment of Chinese manhood. By
contrast, supporters of kunqu female impersonation declare that it is an
ideal enactment of feminine beauty and other attributes. To elaborate, they
note that male performers have to work hard at enacting woman, designing,
learning, and performing every expression/attribute of an idealized
womanhood. The supporters assume that female performers can act as
women while being themselves, and that their acting is more instinctive
than artistic.
Most kunqu practitioners explain cross-dressing as a theatrical necessity
or career strategy. Novice kunqu performers are trained in a number of
female and male roles so that they can theatrically react to what their fellow
performers do on stage and in all kinds of dramatic situations. Not
infrequently, kunqu performers cross-dress to perform secondary roles that
cannot be otherwise enacted because of a lack of available gender-sex
aligned performers on site. Novice performers who show musical talents
and physical charms appropriate to the young man (xiaosheng) or “flower
lady” (huadan) roles are encouraged to specialize, even if they have to
cross-dress. To become successful in the competitive kunqu world,
performers need to take full advantage of what bodily and personal
attributes they have. Historically speaking, cross-dressing as a theatrical
practice was not critically challenged until the twentieth century. Criticisms
from strict and chauvinistic moralists did emerge from time to time.
What anchors various arguments for or against cross-dressing is the
native and critical dyad of se (physical appearance; erotic charm) and yi
(art; skill).23 Literally, se refers to color, which can be associatively
extended to mean physical charm/prettiness that sensually excites, and even
erotically pleasures. That se evokes aesthetics of beauty, charm, and
pleasure is clearly attested by everyday words like “yanse” (colors),
“mianse” (facial color) that reveal what one feels, and “zhise” (bodily,
kinetic, and sexual charm) that should not be publicly and licentiously
displayed. Conceptually, se can refer to performers’ own personal and
physical charm, or that of the enacted characters which must be
elocutionarily realized. Yi always refers to human artistry or expressiveness,
as witnessed by the terms “shouyi” (deftness of the hands) and “yishu”
(creative and expressive arts).
Se and yi are inseparably connected, a fact that kunqu role-types and
cross-dressing practice confirm. Only young and beautiful woman
performers and female impersonators play “flower lady” characters. Aged
male actors would only cross-dress to play comical, supporting, or negative
female characters, such as nurturing mother, contriving match-makers, evil
step-mothers, and other desexed females. Most young female performers
cross-dress to enact young, talented scholars, featuring pretty faces and
svelte figures that not all young male kunqu performers possess, and that
most skilled but middle-aged male actors would no longer have. Only a
handful of female kunqu performers would do martial and male characters.
Kunqu performers, and in particular impersonators, should have
abundant and coordinated se and yi elements that singularly and/or
collectively define their impersonation artistry and meanings. The
coordination of se and yi is delicate but dynamic, a condition that cross-
dressing poignantly underscores. Kunqu performers who do not have
appropriately corrdinated se and yi would cross-dress only occasionally,
serving “reversing and filling” (fanchuan) needs. For example, Liu Yilong
(b. 1941), the internationally renowned kunqu clown whose body does not
have female se regularly cross-dresses to play old woman roles. His
performances are virtuosic but are always received as secondary, comical,
or even caricatural; he is never called a female-impersonator. The same
applies to Li Hongniang (b. 1966), a master kunqu clown and the current
director of the Jiangsu Provincial Kunqu Troupe in Nanjing. He has
considerable yi of impersonating singing and acting skills, but he has
neither the pretty face nor the willowy soft body expected of a “flower
lady.” Reacting to his expressive cross-dressing performance, audience
always express surprise—that he can and would cross-dress.
 Se must be displayed with yi, a fact that codified kunqu performance
practices clearly demonstrate. All performance skills and expressions of
kunqu acting, speaking, singing, dancing, and wearing costumes and make-
up are historically and systematically developed to portray gendered
charms, gestures, and voices. Most are artistically designed to project
feminine attributes that historical male China deemed charming and
desirable. These performance features include, for instance, “orchid like”
(lanhua) finger and hand gestures, eye and facial expressions that project
desires, hip and waist movements that kinetically project unfulfilled urges
locked within bodies being burnt by desires (yuhuo fenshen), and above all
emotive utterances and pure singing, desirable like an oriole’s mesmerizing
chirping (qingge; yingsheng). Kunqu characters should look, act, speak,
think, and feel as though they have real flesh and blood. As connoisseurs
argue, when female impersonators bring the idealized women alive on
stage, their bodies and the characters they portray blend together, mixing
sex and gender realities and imaginations to generate theatrical beings that
cannot be categorically classified as either male or female (cixiong bufen).24
What do such theatrical beings signify? How does an impersonator
manipulate se and yi to perform his or her staged gender while exposing or
camouflaging his or her physical sex?
As a musicologist and kunqu fan, I find that music affords a key to trace
what is revealed or camouflaged in three registers.25 First, kunqu music,
essentially vocal music sung with literarily expressive lyrics, generates a
dramatic and narrative soundscape in which gender and sex facts and
imaginings can be contextualized and verbally, sonically, kinetically, and
emotively expressed and understood.26
Second, kunqu music that is creatively composed and expressively
performed brings out not only semantic meanings registered in the lyrics
but also emotions and subjectivities that its literary words evoke but can
hardly specify. Kunqu music sonically stimulates audiences to vicariously
experience characters’ changing emotions, which performers project with
clear diction, beautiful tones, intricate and flowing melodic turns, and
elastic shifts of rhythms and tempi in their singing. As audiences identify
with the characters and the emotions projected on stage, they become quiet
and focused, only to applaud thunderously when the shows conclude.
 Third, kunqu music operates as a culturally and historically constructed
and socially maintained set of sonic markers/symbols of gender and sex
attributes. Kunqu music sung with a voice clear and sweet like an oriole’s
chirping is heard as feminine and charming. Culturally and historically
speaking, the oriole is a euphemism for female courtesans/entertainers.
Kunqu music, and in particular the northern arias (beiqu) of the genre, sung
rhythmically and with a deep and rich voice, is deemed martial and
masculine (wu). Kunqu sonic markers of gender and sex become
unmistakable when they are positively or negatively reinforced by acting,
dancing, facial make-up designs, and gender-specific costumes. When sonic
and non-sonic expressions conflict with one another, their dissonances,
subtle or obvious, poignantly attract critics’ attentions. Dissonances noticed
during cross-dressed performances often lead to heated debates on the
performers’ se and yi, as well as the gender/sex meanings projected.
 Q K C -
P

To probe kunqu se and yi as performances of Chinese opera and

negotiations of gender and sex, I turn to three representative kunqu shows.
The first show, “Yearning for the Secular World” (“Sifan”; hereafter
“Yearning”), is a traditional favorite with a racy story.27 One day, a
charming sixteen-year-old woman, whose religious parents made her a nun
against her wishes, encounters a group of young monks playing outside her
nunnery built high on a mountain top. She briefly establishes eye contact
with one of the young men, and instantly falls for him, her female desires
awakened. As she reflects on the encounter and examines her feelings, she
not only complains about her meaningless routines of chanting sutras,
burning incense at the altar, and other daily chores, but also confesses that
were she to live with the man as his wife, she would gladly endure all kinds
of hellish tortures. Engaging with her true feelings, she walks to the hall
where sculptures of male arhat (luohan) line its walls. Gazing at the
sculptured monks, and commenting on their male bodies and expressions,
she believes that every one of them is looking at her and asking, “Who
would marry her once she gets old?” Then, she realizes that she is alone by
herself, as her abbess and fellow nuns have left the nunnery to take care of
official and personal affairs. Then and there, she surmises, is the perfect
chance for her to flee the nunnery, and join the secular world. She rushes
downhill to find the young monk, and become his wife.
Such a nun erotically transgresses Confucian and Buddhist morality in
historical China, confirming documented reports and fantasies that nuns are
sexually desirous. To dramatically portray the eroticized nun, a performer of
“Yearning” needs to sing, act, and dance non-stop and on stage for twenty-
five minutes or more, enacting a dramatic series of rapidly transforming
emotions and decisions, and projecting the character’s sensual and erotic
being. In terms of performance practice and expression that must be
realized with yi, he or she would musically execute all kinds of melodic
twists and rhythmic shifts, and kinetically do all kinds of pleasing and
suggestive acts and dances that enhance the meanings of the lyrics.
Whether a kunqu performer, cross-dressing or not, can successfully
bring the eroticized nun alive on stage, and elicit the desired responses from
his or her audiences depends on how the performer acts, dances, and sings.
This is particularly the case when the performer is a female impersonator.
How he projects the nun’s se with his yi defines his performance and its
meanings. “Sheep on the Hill” (“Shanboyang”), the main aria of the show,
will serve as illustration. Its lyrics and accompanying acting-dancing
movements are as follows:
At the height of my girlish beauty I am sixteen years of age. [The performer sits on a chair,
waving the feathery tip of her long brush, projecting a lonely and sexually awakening
woman.]
Pity me for all my hair was shaven off by my mistress. [She forcefully waves her brush to
suggest the cutting of her hair, a prominent marker of her womanhood and beauty.]
Burning incense and pouring sacred water at the altar are my chores from one year to the
other. [She walks and mimics her routines.]
Outside the nunnery gate the other morning I caught sight of some young monks. [She
acts like a girl stealing looks at the young men, smiles, and shows her desire.]
What do you know, one gave me the once-over when I cast him no more than a casual
glance! [She acts happy, playful, just like a girl falling in love.]
Mercy! I reckon this must be what they call “love at first sight.” [She acts like she is
flirting with her beloved.]
For now I know if he and I can make a pair. [She acts like a satisfied woman.]
I won’t care if we get sent to the King of Hell after death. [For this and the following
lines, she acts to symbolically project herself being tortured.]
And for punishment, let us in the netherworld be:
Pounded by hammers, severed by saws; crushed by grinding stones,
And fried in sizzling oil!
But when you think of it, have any of these punishments been witnessed?
All we see is the living, suffering terribly, but no ghosts in chains.
So why worry about it and not let tomorrow takes its own sorrow? [She throws out her
hands and sleeves, as if she is dumping those worries away]
Whatever we can enjoy right now, we should—and I’m ready for that.28

By contemporary standards, the above lyrics and staged acts are hardly
bawdy. Nevertheless, if one listens to a talented performer singing
sensually, exquisitely accompanied by a small orchestra of flute, strings,
mouth-organ, wood clapper, drum, and gongs, one can see and hear why
“Yearning” is racy. The relatively simple and balanced texture and timbre of
the music renders unmistakable every erotic nuance, the verbal, visual, and
kinetic suggestions of which need sonic confirmation—and vice versa!
Melodies flow sensually, and rhythms shift suggestively. Key words and
acts are highlighted by melodic or rhythmic ornaments, long melismas, and
other musical and performance clues.
Comparing “Yearning” performances by biologically female and male
performers, one readily notices subtle differences. For example, Liu Cheng
and Zhou Xianggeng,29 two currently active young, good-looking kunqu
female impersonators, offer split-second flashes of their biological
maleness, such as angular or heavy bodily gestures, abrupt shifts between
natural and falsetto registers, and affected melodic phrasing and
articulations that invite attention. These flashes do not appear in
performances of “Yearning” by female kunqu master performers, such as
Liang Guyin (b. 1942), Shen Shihua (b. 1941), or young, beautiful
actresses, such as Shen Guofang of the Suzhou Kunqu Troupe of Jiangsu
Province (Jiangsu sheng Suzhou kunju tuan).30
These flashes are dissonances attesting incongruities between the female
impersonators’ yi and the se of their biological selves and enacted
characters. Most critics would promptly dismiss the dissonances as
problems that the young cross-dressers will solve as they become more
experienced and skilled. This conventional dismissal is simplistic and
problematic. It confirms male, heterosexual, and hegemonic views of
womanhood in traditional and contemporary China by assuming that no real
woman would display such manly flashes. Furthermore, it glosses over
queer possibilities and meanings of the cross-dressed performances. When
performed, or allowed to occur, the dissonances can be interpreted as queer
expressions of difference: they constitute expressions that challenge
conventional gender stereotypes, and deliver what some cross-dressing
kunqu performers and appreciative audiences would find elocutionarily
pleasurable and/or erotically desirable. The dissonances are what makes the
performances distinctive and meaningful.
Pleasure in queer difference is readily noticeable at informal kunqu
gatherings (quhui) where amateur singers musically cross-dress. Singing
arias of their idealized woman or man, the participants construct for
themselves a pleasurable soundscape in which they become, or can identify
with, something other than what their sexual bodies are—a fact that I have
observed in my fieldwork trips and personally experienced in my own
limited attempts to sing kunqu.31 When this difference and pleasure assert
the performers’ desire and rights to become what mainstream society does
not condone, they are artistically and sociopolitically subversive.
The subversive potential of kunqu impersonation is noticeable in many
shows. A prime example is “Flee by Night” (“Yeben”). Originally a scene
from the Precious Sword (Baojianji), a Ming drama derived from All Men
Are Brothers (Shuihuizhuan), “Flee by Night” is a perennial favorite. Its
protagonist, Lin Chong, is an icon of traditional Chinese masculinity.32 A
wronged hero, he flees at night, chased by murderers. On the road, far from
the home where his old mother has recently passed away and where his
young wife stays by herself, he finds a temple and decides to rest inside. He
falls asleep, only to be wakened and frightened by a nightmare of his
enemies finding him in the temple. Fleeing again, he tells how he was once
an ambitious, virile military commander, and expresses how he now feels as
a hunted man. Rushing to his destination, the Liang Mountain where a gang
of heroic bandits and male friends have gathered, he vows revenge, and
finally kills the villain who has masterminded his miseries.
Verbally, visually, kinetically, and sonically, the scene projects
traditional Chinese masculinity—with a twist, if one queers it. With a long
soliloquy, and eight arias separated by short exclamatory lines, the scene
takes about twenty-eight minutes of performance time, and affords a stage
for a single man or male-impersonating performer to sing and dance,
enacting the fleeing Lin Chong’s physical appearance and internal
emotions: fright that he is not supposed to feel as a hero, filial longings for
his deceased mother, husbandly desires for the wife whom he has to leave
behind, and the deadly vow to revenge. To kinetically project such a Lin
Chong, performers do a series of atypically extended and strenuous solo
dances while singing, making a spectacle of maleness with acrobatic jumps
and forceful stretching of arms and legs. Unlike the stereotypical Chinese
martial hero, however, Lin Chong also sheds tears publicly, exposing his
vulnerability. This complex but atypical masculinity becomes poignantly
apparent at the scene’s fifth aria, namely the “The Geese’s Descent”
(“Yan’er luo”), the lyrics and illustrative dances/ acts of which unfold as
follows:33
Looking from afar at the road homeward, which winds further and further away. [He looks
at the distant land, and makes hand gestures that symbolizes his traveling over mountains
and hills.]
I ask on whom my mother and wife now depend. [He makes a physical gesture that a
traditional man asking questions would make.]
Here, I do not know if I would live or die. There, there is no telling whether they are alive
or dead. [He pats his own torso.]
Oh! Alarmed, I am soaked with sweat, which burns my body like scalding soup. It also
fries my heart like fire. [He raises his hands high and then pulls them down, as if the hot
liquid is pouring down on his body; he kicks high.]
Where is my own wife? [He makes the manly gesture of questioning and answering for
this and the following lines.]
My old mother, I am afraid, has passed away. I can no longer show gratitude to my
parents, who labored to raise me; I can only sadly and loudly cry! [He makes the gesture of
crying and wiping his tears.]
I lament and ask how I can quench the heroic anger in me? [He acts like he is emotionally
agitated; then he performs a spatially extensive series of energetic jumps, stretching his limbs
high and far, and ending with a martial pose.]

If the lyrics of the aria expose a crying, scared person, and if its acting-
dancing kinetically project a martial warrior, its music reveals a complex
and atypically sensitive man. Indeed, it is the performer’s yi manipulation
of pitch, melody, rhythm and tempo in the aria that sonically defines who he
is, integrating how he looks, acts, and feels. For instance, the high-pitched
fermata sung in the second part of the aria sonically substantiates the
character’s agitated emotions. The contrasts between steady and elastic
rhythms in the aria dramatize Lin Chong’s back and forth thoughts,
anchoring the character’s larger-than-life male se.
Music also tells how individual performers, cross-dressing or not,
exercise their own se and yi to construct the hero they enact on stage. A
comparison of the Lin Chong enacted by Hou Shaokui (b. 1939), a male
specialist of the martial and male role (wusheng), and Fei Yanling (b. 1947),
a male-impersonator of the same role, will illustrate. Both have earned
uncontested admiration for their performances of “Flee by Night.”34 Hou is
nevertheless noted for his resonant voice, large physique, artistic talents,
and familial tradition of performing the Lin Chong character, while Fei is
celebrated for her dramatic and kinetic projection of the wronged man as a
grand and forceful (haofang) male.35 As a matter of fact, her Lin Chong
acts and looks so martial that some casual audiences are shocked to learn
that Fei is a woman. Her critics and fans, however, know that her staged
manhood is more than a show: she also exhibits socially recognized male
attributes and mannerisms in her daily life. She perfectly matches
contemporary Chinese notions of a masculine woman (nühanzi; literally,
woman-tough/good man).
Comparing “Flee by Night” performances by Hou and Fei, one finds
telling differences. Whereas Hou’s biological and dramatic se are totally
supported/delivered by his virtuosic yi, Fei’s rendition shows nuances that
invites alternative readings. Her Lin Chong does not cry as much as Hou’s,
and her singing is sonically less resonant and powerful. As a result, her Lin
Chong strikes some critics as not fully realistic, and her grand and forceful
masculinity appear exaggerated and hollow—there are clear dissonances,
and/or gaps, in the se and yi of her performance. Not all critics and audience
would agree with such an aesthetic assessment, which might or might not
be affected by the public knowledge that Fei is a woman. Debates about
Fei’s se and yi promptly lead to negotiations of Chinese gender and sex. Is
Fei’s grand, forceful Lin Chong an authentic, fake, or queer manifestation
of Chinese masculinity?
There are no simple answers. A kunqu show can be dramatically
androgynous or queer by itself. One such show is “Zither Seductions”
(Qintiao), a favorite scene taken from Jade Hairpin by Gao Lian (1573–
1620).36 The show tells the love story between Chen Miaochang and Pan
Bizheng, two dramatic characters based on historical persons. Chen is a
young woman and war refugee who survives by becoming a reluctant nun.
Pan, a young scholar who has failed his examinations, comes to the same
nunnery, which is supervised by his aunt; he gets permission to stay there
while preparing himself for the next round of tests. Chen and Pan find one
another, fall in love, meet secretly, flirt playfully, and make love
passionately, breaking religious and social taboos. Once their affair is
exposed, Pan has to leave immediately, only to return later as a successful
scholar-official and a faithful lover who embraces Chen as his wife.
In the “Zither Seductions” scene, Pan and Chen accidentally meet in a
moonlit garden and take turns playing the seven-string zither (qin), singing
out their romantic desires and testing their partner’s true intentions. The
scene is an operatic masterpiece of erotic negotiations and gender
performance. As Pan and Chen take turns singing arias and variations
articulated by short utterances, Pan makes bold moves. Bawdily he pushes
the zither table to touch Chen vicariously; calling her indifference to him a
bluff, he taps the table with a fan, making a macho sound that demands that
she confess, or submit.
Caught off guard by Pan’s manly advances, Chen coyly acts out a
womanly protest, rebuking or encouraging his flirting with demure gestures
and seductive exclamations, such as semantically ambiguous words (xuzi)
like “oh, no” (cui), emotive words that Chinese women would say to their
lovers. Knowing that he has transgressed, Pan apologizes, begs mercy, and
leaves somewhat puzzled. As soon as Chen thinks he has left the garden,
however, she confesses her genuine affections for him. Trying to find out
what she really thinks, Pan lingers by the garden exit, hearing every word of
her soliloquy. Finally, he coughs tactfully to announce his eavesdropping.
Their romantic intentions thus exposed, they declare their love, and
privately become husband and wife.
Superficially, the scene confirms traditional Chinese gender practices
with “normative” male or female words and acts. But the soundscape of
“Zither Seductions” is sonically androgynous and conceptually queer, a
condition that cross-dressed performance highlights. Pan and Chen sing
structurally the same arias—the ten arias in the scene are composed
according to three pre-existing tunes, and divide into three sets, with,
respectively, four, two, and four variations. Kunqu arias are composed with
reference to preexisting tunes called qupai, preexisting prescriptive patterns
of musical and linguistic tones and formal structures. Chinese is a tonal
language; to be intelligible, each Chinese word in aria lyrics must be
pronounced with the proper linguistic tones. As literary and musical
compositions/variations, kunqu arias composed according to the same qupai
are largely the results of adjusting and/or developing preexisting melodies
to newly written lyrics/verbal expressions, the constituent words of which
have specific linguistic tones. Connoisseurs are supposed to recognize
superficial and underlying features of specific qupai and their aria
realizations.
 Kunqu arias are composed for singers in specific role types played by
man or woman singer-actors/actresses; kunqu melodies are not created with
specific attention to timbre, range, and other differences between the
biological and trained voices of male and female singers. In terms of
timbre, register, vocal ornamentation, and other vocal qualities, kunqu arias
composed for the young male and female characters are similar. Except for
unusually high or low tones, young male and female voices in kunqu share
a basic range of about two octaves, ranging from the G below middle C to
the one an octave and a half above. To sing arias with wide ranges and high
tones, male performers of the young male role have to shift frequently
between regular and falsetto registers. Female performers singing as male
or female characters have to strive to produce the low sounds and timbres
required. Readily audible and recognizable, the performers’ singing efforts
and skills are heard and assessed as revealing indications of their se and yi.
Such singing efforts and skills take on alternative meanings with
impersonators: male impersonators do not need to shift between natural and
falsetto registers so frequently because they can use their biological and
womanly voices to sing high notes; female impersonators can readily go to
the low tones with their biological and manly voices.
Listening to the arias of “Zither Seductions” as se and yi negotiations of
gender and sex bodies, desires, and identities, one confronts a theatrical
soundscape that transgresses against the everyday sound world of China. As
Chen and Pan take turns singing, they create a continuously developing
musical-dramatic soundscape in which they negotiate their love as equal
partners and with essentially the same tunes and tones. Traditional Chinese
women are not supposed to sing like their men; even in contemporary
China, not all women can negotiate with their men as equal partners.
In other words, the erotic soundscape of “Zither Seductions” is sonically
androgynous, sociopolitically egalitarian, and potentially transgressive. The
artificiality or queerness of such a soundscape becomes tantalizing when
the male character is performed by a male impersonator. A prime example
is performance by Yue Meiti, arguably the most senior and celebrated
master performer among current male impersonators; she coaches young
man and woman performers of the young male role.37 As kunqu
connoisseurs enjoy her performances, they would ask what kind of male se
she projects with her virtuoso yi and svelte body, and how she does it like a
man. Hearing a relative lack of deep male sounds in her singing, some
would ask whether her Pan is sonically male enough, and whether the lack
creates a dissonance between her se and yi. The lack becomes poignantly
clear if one compares her performance with those by her mentor, Yu
Zhenfei (1902–1993), and other esteemed male performers, such as Wang
Shiyu (b. 1941). As preserved in audio-visual recordings,38 Yu’s singing
features characteristic shifts between his natural and falsetto registers, while
Wang’s high falsetto tones sparkle. Listening to these sounds that everyday
Chinese men do not and could not make, one confronts a sonic kunqu
reality where genders are more performed than born, and where the
hegemonic heterosexual norms and beliefs of traditional and contemporary
China are being challenged.
 C R

The challenge is timely because centuries-old kunqu and its theatrical and
musical cross-dressing tradition are rapidly transforming. Presently the art
of female impersonation is struggling, while that of male impersonation is
thriving, a reversal of fortunes for the two groups of performers. And the
gendered voices of kunqu are changing substantively, a fact to which
comparison of current performance with those preserved in historical audio-
recordings made in the 1920s and 1930s attests. Kunqu performers of
contemporary China do not sing with the high, tight voices that their
predecessors cherished—and that some contemporary audiences hear as
“atypically” womanly. Such changes index not only the genre’s
transformations, but also Chinese theories and practices of gender and sex.
Judging from current performances and debates, kunqu cross-dressing
will continue to serve as a tool, a site, and a process for performing and
queering Chinese gender and sex negotiations. It might also serve as a
comparative reference for other traditions of cross-dressing. If so, kunqu
cross-dressing demands to be examined both comprehensively and in
specific contexts. Toward that goal, this chapter offers two provisos. First,
in contemporary China, theatrical and musical cross-dressing acts are
personal, artistic, and cultural-social-political shows with multivalent
meanings. While the native dyad of se and yi offers an effective tool to
probe the acts, their negotiation of particularized and personalized
meanings of gender, sex, and identity needs to be assessed in context and
case by case. Much hides under the genre’s centuries-old theory and
practice: what is intellectually and publicly said might not perfectly match
what is actually performed and privately communicated; and what was/is
true might not be applicable then/now. Facts and imaginings of kunqu
cross-dressing need to be identified, verified, and coordinated. Second, by
comparing contemporary kunqu cross-dressing with its Asian and Western
counterparts, and by noting their similarities and differences, cross-cultural
perspectives might be developed for future studies on musical cross-
dressing and queerness. Would the Chinese dyad of se and yi offer tools for
musicologists to delve into complex manifests of Western and queer
performance/negotiation of music, gender and sex, as Western theories have
prompted Chinese musicologists to examine cross-dressing beyond native
rhetoric? Is it possible that musical cross-dressing is more a yi performance
of opera and gender and less a se matter of sex?
N
1. This chapter cites mostly publications that general and English speaking readers can readily
access; most publications on kunqu cross-dressing and its relevance to gender and sex in China
are, however, written in Chinese. For a richly illustrated survey of the genre, see Li Xiao,
Chinese Kunqu Opera ( San Francisco: Long River Press, 2005); for an interpretive history, see
Joseph S. C.Lam, Kunqu, the Classical Opera of 21st Century China (forthcoming). For further
bibliographic information, see the booklists appended in the monographs and articles cited here.
To access a wealth of formal and informal writings that kunqu participants publish on Chinese
language websites, blogs, and social networks, search the internet using the Chinese and
romanized words cited in this essay.
2. For a general introduction to queer theories in the West, see Alexander Doty, Making Things
Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
For a Chinese take on queer theory, see Yang Jie, Hao’er lilun yu piping shijian [Queer theory
and cultural criticism] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanse, 2011). For two
representative works that examine Chinese theatre/screen arts with queer/homosexual
perspectives, see Chen Weizhen, Bawang bieji: tongzhi yuedu yu kua wenhua duihua [Farewell
My Concubine: Gay Reading and Cross-Cultural Dialogs] (Taiwan Jaiyi xian dalin zhen:
Nanhua University, 2004), and Siu Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 2003).
3. For a performance report on Two Belles of 2010, see Xing Daiqi, “Two Belles in Love,”
People’s Daily Online, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90782/90873/6976242.html;
posted May 7, 2010. For a scholarly review, see Sarah E. Kile, “Sensational Kunqu: The April
2010 Beijing Production of Lianxiang ban (Women in Love),” Chinoperl 30 (2011), pp. 215–
222.
4. For a review of the 2016 production, see Song Guan, “Lianxiangban reying Zhenyisi, sanda
guandian guanfu qunju chuanqi” [Hot performance of Lianxiangban at the Zhengyisi Theatre,
Beijing: Three attractions of a historical opera about women],
http://www.ifuun.com/a20165143526/, posted April, 2016.
5. For an informative and representative video introduction to the genre and its history, with
English narration, see “600 Years of Kunqu Opera,”
http://english.cntv.cn/english/special/kunqu/01/index.shtml, posted June 7, 2010.
6. For UNESCO descriptions of kunqu, see “Kun Qu Opera,” “https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/kun-
qu-oper-00004”, accessed December 12, 2012.
7. For representative scholarly studies on Chinese drama/opera as history and performance of
Chinese gender and sex, see Sophie Volpp, “The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-
Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 3 (2002): 949–984; David Der-wei Wang,
“Impersonating China,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 25 (2003): 133–
163; Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture,
1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Judith Zeitlin, “‘Notes of Flesh’
and the Courtesan’s Song in Seventeenth-Century China,” in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-
Cultural Perspectives, edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon (New York: Oxford
 University Press, 2006), 75–102; Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the
Re-Creation of Peking Opera 1887–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007), and Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing,
1770–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). For a description of twentieth century
kunqu as a gender performance and discourse, see Joseph S. C. Lam, “Escorting Lady Jing
Home: A Journey of Chinese Opera, Gender, and Politics,” Yearbook for Traditional Music, 46
(2014): 114–139.
8. Public attention to Cheung’s personal life, already significant, increased after his suicide. See
“Hong Kong Actor Leslie Cheung Dies,” http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/71723/hong-
kong-actor-leslie-cheung-dies, posted April 2, 2003. To access a wealth of Chinese website data
on the actor-singer, google “Leslie Cheung/Zhang Guorong.”
9. For website information about Li Yugang, his cross-dressing performances, and links, visit
http://www.kuwo.cn/mingxing/%E6%9D%8E%E7%8E%89%E5%88%9A/mv.htm, posted July
30, 2016.
10. The English title of Chen’s 2008 movie is Forever Enthralled. Many video clips and discussions
about the movie are available on YouTube and other websites. There are many Chinese and
English books and online writings on Mei Lanfang; see, for example, the recent publication by
Min Tan, Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Staged
and Displaced (New York: Palgrave, 2011).
11. On Mei’s role in twentieth-century Chinese theatre culture and gender negotiations, see Joshua
Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera 1870–1937
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); see also Min Tan, “Male
Dan: The Paradox of Sex, Acting, and Perception of Female Impersonation in Traditional
Chinese Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 17, no. 1 (2000): 78–97.
12. Representative performers of these traditions include, for example, ladyboys (katoeys) of
Thailand, the bissu of the Bugis people in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and female impersonators in
different genres of regional Indian theatres.
13. Ryoko M. Nakamura, “Bando Tamasaburo Revives Tradition of Men Playing Women in China.”
Japan Times, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ft20090313a1.html; posted March 13, 2009.
14. For a formal announcement of the show and its selection of performers by the National Centre
for the Performing Arts, Beijing, China, see “Liubainian kunqu shouci qianshou Hongloumeng”
[Six hundred years old kunqu performs Dream of Red Mansion with a collaborative team],
http://www.chncpa.org/NewsSearchAct/zxxqAct.jspx?id=86226&yc_zx=yczx, posted March
28, 2011.
15. The standard translation of the drama is Cyril Birch, trans., The Peony Pavilion/Mudanting
(Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company, 1994). For an insightful analysis of the drama and its
protagonists, see Tina Lu, Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach
Blossom Fan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For a performance history of Peony
Pavilion, see Catherine C. Swatek, Peony Pavilion Onstage: Four Centuries in the Career of a
Chinese Drama (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002).
16. Two representative monographs on late Ming eroticism are Cuncun Wu, Homoerotic
Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2004), and Giovanni Vitiello, The
Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011). For a discussion on music and eroticism in late Ming China, see Joseph
S. C. Lam, “Reading Music and Eroticism in Late Ming Texts,” Nannü 12 (2010): 215–254.
 The standard translation for the first work is David Roy, Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P’ing
17.
Mei, vols. 1–3 (Princeton: Princeton University, 1997–2006). There is no published English
translation for the second work, a modern edition of which is: Jingjiang zuizhu jushi, editor,
Longyang yishi (Taibei: Shuangdi guoji chuban, 1996).
18. For a listing of Qing edicts banning female entertainers, see Wang Liqi, compiler,
YuanMingQing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1981), 18–86.
19. See Lindy Li Mark, “Kunju and Theatre in the Transvestite Novel Pinhua baojin,” Chinoperl
Papers 15 (1990): 95–114. See also Keith MacMahon, “Sublime Love and the Ethics of
Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the Nineteenth Century: Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses,”
Nannü 4, no. 1 (2002): 79–109.
20. For a representative survey of historical changes in Chinese gender practices and theories from
the late Qing to late-twentieth-century China, see Susan Brownell and Jeffery N. Wasserstrom,
eds., Chinese Femininities Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2002).
21. For an autobiographical account of her male impersonating artistry, see Yue Meiti, Jinsheng
jinshi: Yue Meiti Kunqu Wushinian (Beijing: Wenhuayishu chubanshe, 2008). For Shi’s
biographic details, see http://baike.baidu.com/view/1398267.htm.
22. See “Yam Kim-fai,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yam:Kim-fai, posted. For a translation and
introduction to Ren Jianhui’s most famous and important work, see Bell Yung, The Flower
Princess: A Cantonese Opera (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2010). There are no
informative articles in English on Fan Ruijuan, but a number of video clips of her performances
are available on YouTube and Chinese websites.
23. The dyad regularly appears as “seyi shuangquan,” an aphorism that historical and contemporary
authors regularly use to praise entertainers. For an insightful discussion of the dyad, see Siu
Leung Li, Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera, 173–189.
24. Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Leslie Cheung’s performance as the female
impersonator have generated many website postings on the differences and blending of the
female (ci) and the male (xiong). To access the postings, search the internet using the title of the
movie and Leslie Cheung/Zhang Guorong.
25. On music/sound as performance of gender, see Zoe C. Sherinian, “K.D. Lang and Gender
Performance,” in Ellen Koskoff, ed., The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3, The
United States and Canada (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001): 107–110. See also Wayne
Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New
York: Poseidon Press, 1993), in particular, pp. 154–175.
26. See Jill Dolan, Theatre and Sexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2010), in particular, pp. 3–5 and 13–
19; see also Judith Lynne Hanna, Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance,
Defiance, and Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
27. This analysis of “Yearning” is based on a representative performance by Madame Liang Guyin,
accessible at http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTQwNzU5NDEy.html, posted 2010, accessed
December 31, 2012. See also A. C. Scott, Traditional Chinese Plays, vol, 2, Longing for Worldly
Pleasures/Ssu Fan; Fifteen String of Cash/Shih Wu Kuan, (Madison: University of Wisconsin,
1969): 14–39; Andrea Goldman, “The Nun Who Wouldn’t Be: Representations of Female
Desire in Two Performance Genres of Si Fan,” Late Imperial China 22, no. 1 (2001): 71–138,
and Joseph S. C. Lam, “Musical Seductresses, Chauvinistic Men, and Their Erotic Kunqu
Discourse,” in Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres,
 Subversions and Traditions edited by Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun (Leiden/Boston: Brill,
2017): 81–104.
28. The lyric translation is derived from Bin Wang, trans., Laughter and Tears: Translation of
Selected Kunqu Drama (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2009): 225–227. In the video clip
cited in note 27, the aria starts at 6’32” and lasts until 14’16.”
29. A video clip of Liu Zheng’s cross-dressed performance is accessible at:
http://tieba.baidu.com/p/943735862, posted March 27, 2010, accessed December 31, 2012.
Zhou Xianggeng’s performance of “Yearning” is accessible at:
www.tudou.com/.../3JDEXxE5Zck/-China, accessed October 11, 2012.
30. For an audio-visual recording of a performance of “Yearning” by Shen Shihua, see “Sifan Shen
shihua,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm7Lq5fi_zo, posted October 26, 2012, accessed
July 28, 2016. Shen Guofang performed “Yearning” on June 3, 2016.
31. In May 2018, I attended in Wujiang, Jiangsu Province, China, a recital performance of “Zither
Seductions” sung by a female impersonator and a male impersonator. The performers did not
put on any role-specific costumes or facial-makeup, but wore formal Chinese garments
appropriate to the performance occasion and to their physical sex. They sang with musical
“dissonances” discernible only to kunqu connoisseurs. Most of the audience, who were
obviously no connoisseurs, appeared to have been “shocked” by the dissonant performance;
they neither sat quietly to listen to the music sung, nor refrained from making small talks and
bodily movements that revealed their being artistically and sexually challenged. As a kunqu
scholar-fan, I found the performance musically expressive and intellectually—and even
erotically—stimulating. After the performance, I asked the female impersonator, a Taiwanese
man in his early forties, how and why he chose to sing as a woman. His answer was
straightforward: he did not choose to become a musical female impersonator; in fact, he started
his kunqu career learning to sing in the old-male role; his mentor, nevertheless, wanted him to
sing in the young female voice; he learned well and now professionally sings as a “flower lady.”
32. In addition to kunqu, “Flee by Night” has been staged in a number of regional Chinese operas,
movies, and TV shows, each a distinctive imagining of the character and Chinese masculinities.
For further discussions of “Flee by Night,” see Joseph S. C. Lam, “Impulsive Scholars and
Sentimental Heroes,” in Gender in Chinese Music, ed. Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Er
Tan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), in particular, pp. 100–103.
33. The version analyzed here is by Hou Shaokui, accessible at
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTQ1OTY2NTI=.html; posted 2008, accessed October 15,
2012. The aria analyzed here lasts from 23’53” through 25’50.”
34. For Hou’s biography, see Hou Shaokui and Hu Mingming, Dawusheng: Hou Shaokui kunqu
wushinian (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006). This publication also includes detailed
descriptions of the music and acting for “Flee by Night” (pp. 157–192).
35. For an audio-visual recording of Fei’s performance, see “Lin Chong Ye Ben Fei Yanling,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shUSePSviN0, posted September 21, 2012, accessed July
26, 2016.
36. For an anthology of articles introducing the drama as it was produced in 2009, see Bai
Xianyong, ed., Sedan baotian yuzanji (Taibei: Tianxia yuanjian, 2009).
37. An audio-video recording of Yue performance is available at
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzk5MDk5OTY=.html, posted March 24, 2009.
38. An audio-visual recording of Yu’s performance of “Zither Seductions” is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AAqgtn4G4g, posted November 16, 2008.
R
Birch, Cyril, trans. The Peony Pavilion/Mudanting. Boston: Cheng & Tsui Company, 1994.
Brownell, Susan, and Jeffery N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities Chinese Masculinities: A
Reader. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Chen Weizhen. Bawang bieji: tongzhi yuedu yu kua wenhua duihua [Farewell My Concubine: Gay
Reading and Cross-Cultural Dialogues]. Taiwan Jaiyi xian dalin zhen: Nanhua University, 2004.
Dolan, Jill. Theatre and Sexuality. New York: Palgrave, 2010.
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Goldman, Andrea S. Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012.
Goldman, Andrea. “The Nun Who Wouldn’t Be: Representations of Female Desire in Two
Performance Genres of Si Fan.” Late Imperial China 22, no. 1 (2001): 71–138.
Goldstein, Joshua. Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera 1887–
1937. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
Hanna, Judith Lynne. Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Jingjiang zuizhu jushi ed., Longyang yishi (Memories of Male Sex Workers). Taibei: Shuangdi guoji
chuban, 1996.
Kile, Sarah E. “Sensational Kunqu: The April 2010 Beijing Production of Lianxiang ban (Women in
Love).” Performance Review in CHINOPERL Papers (Chinese Oral and Performing Literatures
Papers) 30 (December 2011): 215–222.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New
York: Poseidon Press, 1993.
Lam, Joseph S. C. “Reading Music and Eroticism in Late Ming Texts.” Nannü 12 (2010): 215–254.
Lam, Joseph S. C. “Impulsive Scholars and Sentimental Heroes.” In Gender in Chinese Music, edited
by Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Er Tan, and Shzr Tan, 86–106. Rochester, NY:
University of Rochester Press, 2013.
Lam, Joseph S.C. “Escorting Lady Jing Home: A Journey of Chinese Opera, Gender, and Politics.”
Yearbook for Traditional Music, 46 (2014): 114–139.
Lam, Joseph S. C. “Musical Seductresses, Chauvinistic Men, and Their Erotic Kunqu Discourse.” In
Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Gneres, Subversions and Traditions,
edited by Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun, 81–104. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2017.
Lam, Joseph S. C. Kunqu, the Classical Opera of Twenty-first Century China, forthcoming.
Li, Siu Leung. Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Li Xiao. Chinese Kunqu Opera. San Francisco: Long River Press, 2005.
MacMahon, Keith. “Sublime Love and the Ethics of Equality in a Homoerotic Novel of the
Nineteenth Century: Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses.” Nannü 4, no. 1 (2002): 79–109.
Mark, Lindy Li. “Kunju and Theatre in the Transvestite Novel Pinhua baojin,” Chinoperl Papers 15
(1990): 95–114.
Roy, David. Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P’ing Mei, vols. 1–3. Princeton: Princeton University,
1997–2006.
Scott, A. C. Traditional Chinese Plays, vol. 2, Longing for Worldly Pleasures/Ssu Fan; Fifteen String
of Cash/Shih Wu Kuan. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1969.
Sherinian, Zoe C. “K.D. Lang and Gender Performance.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World
Music, vol. 3, The United States and Canada, edited by Ellen Koskoff, 107–110. New York:
Garland Publishing, 2001.
Swatek, Catherine C. Peony Pavilion Onstage: Four Centuries in the Career of a Chinese Drama.
Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.
Tan, Min Tan. Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Staged
and Displaced. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
Tan, Min. “Male Dan: The Paradox of Sex, Acting, and Perception of Female Impersonation in
Traditional Chinese Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 17, no. 1 (2000): 78–97.
Vitiello, Giovanni. The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Volpp, Sophie. “The Literary Circulation of Actors in Seventeenth-Century China.” Journal of Asian
Studies, 61, no. 3 (2002): 949–984.
Wang, Bin, trans. Laughter and Tears: Translation of Selected Kunqu Drama. Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 2009.
Wang, David Der-wei. “Impersonating China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
(CLEAR) 25 (2003): 133–163.
Wang Liqi, compiler. YuanMingQing sandai jinhui xiaoshuo xiqu shiliao. Shanghai: Guji chubanshe,
1981.
Wu, Cuncun. Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Yang Jie, Hao’er lilun yu piping shijian [Queer theory and cultural criticism]. Beijing: Zhongguo
shehui kexue chubanse, 2011.
Yeh, Catherine. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.
Yue Meiti. Jinsheng jinshi: Yue Meiti Kunqu Wushinian. Beijing: Wenhuayishu chubanshe, 2008.
Zeitlin, Judith. “‘Notes of Flesh’ and the Courtesan’s Song in Seventeenth-Century China.” In The
Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon,
75–102. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
 CHAPTER 30

N O N - O R D I N A RY G E N D E R A N D
SEXUALITY IN INDONESIAN
PERFORMANCE
 HE NRY S P I L L E R

S the early decades of the twentieth century, Western visitors to the

Dutch East Indies, later renamed Indonesia, gave reports of beautiful brown
bodies, liberal attitudes about sexual practices, and rituals involving gender-
atypical dress. These were of great interest to an emerging homosexual elite
in Europe and North America, who found that such performance traditions
resonated with their own non-normative, stigmatized gender roles and
sexualities. Indonesian expressive arts thus provided inspiration for those
seeking alternatives to rigidly binary Western gender and sexual identities.
Indeed, a profusion of gender roles and sexualities—some of which
thrived in the twentieth century in the face of modernity, nationalism, and
increasing Islamic orthodoxy, while others disappeared or morphed into
something else—have played important roles for centuries in the many
localized cultures that united to form modern Indonesia. However,
Annamarie Jagose’s definition of queer—“gestures or analytical models
which dramatise [sic] incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations
between chromosomal sex, gender, and sexual desire”1—applies to most
Indonesian genres only when reinterpreted by Western audiences.
The case studies included in this chapter are provocative from a Western
point of view and challenge Western notions of normal, legitimate, and
dominant. From indigenous points of view, however, for the most part they
articulate quite comfortably with the dominant values of the societies that
fostered them, and often serve conservative, rather than transgressive,
purposes. Any queerness in these case studies is, in essence, a side effect of
other factors. Examining the indigenous gender ideologies of such forms
tempers any claims of universality in queer analytics, interrogates queer
theory’s applicability outside of global modern contexts, and invites queer
theorists to refine their analyses to decouple sexual desire from gender
identities and biological sex in ways that will illuminate human identities.
In interrogating the term “queer,” this chapter necessarily also grapples
with a proliferation of terms—both in English and in indigenous Indonesian
languages—to designate different approaches to gender and sexual practices
and identities. In this chapter, I attempt to translate indigenous terms as
precisely as possible, and use them without translation in the text where
they make sense; these indigenous terms are often polysemic themselves. I
use the bland adjectives “non-ordinary,” “non-conventional,” and “non-
normative” to circumvent the connotations, often irrelevant or misleading in
cross-cultural description, that attach to specific Western-origin terms such
as “homosexual,” “transvestite,” “hermaphrodite,” and “transgender.” With
“non-ordinary” and similar terms, I mean to mark a contrast within the
culture under discussion, not a contrast with Western norms. Some English
terms, such as male/masculine, female/feminine, “cross-dressing” and
“same-sex” (as an adjective), may be similarly problematic, but they are
well-understood, and I use them carefully. In direct quotes and in historical
gender/sexuality identifications from older ethnographies, I have retained
the authors’ word-choices, though they would now be considered
inappropriate. Terminology for discussions of gender and sexuality is
constantly shifting as scholars and other people identify and analyze the
nuances of human identities as practices.2
 I P
W I

Indonesian performing arts have figured significantly in the queer

imaginary of Europe and the Americas. Foremost among stories about sex
and desire were tales of the island of Bali. Although the Dutch ruled Java
and other islands in the archipelago with an iron fist beginning in the
sixteenth century, they gained control of Bali only in 1906. In contrast to
Java, with its haughty aristocrats and Islamic beliefs, not to mention long-
standing Calvinist Dutch colonial control, Bali seemed more egalitarian and
its Hindu-based religion less hostile to Westerners. Between the wars, the
Dutch marketed the island as a tropical paradise, replete with matchless
physical beauty and colorful local cultural traditions, and made it a tourist
destination.
The proclivity of the Balinese to wear scant clothing did not go
unnoticed by potential visitors. The bare-breasted Balinese actresses in the
1932 “documentary” Virgins of Bali doubtlessly attracted the keen interest
of Western viewers. Some travelers, including notable long-term
homosexual residents such as the composer Colin McPhee, the musician
and painter Walter Spies, and the linguist Roelof Goris, also spread tales of
beautiful men and boys with liberal attitudes about casual same-sex
relations, and Bali acquired a supplementary reputation as a “paradise for
homosexuals” and a “heaven of tolerance in an anti-homosexual world.”3
Although the Dutch squelched this reputation to a certain extent with
widespread persecution of foreign homosexuals in Bali in 1938, it persists,
nevertheless, to a certain extent into the present day.
The performing arts of the Indies became celebrated abroad through
more direct exposures as well. Several of the grand colonial expositions in
Europe (Amsterdam 1883, Paris 1889, 1900, 1931) and North America
(Chicago 1893, San Francisco 1939) included performing arts troupes from
Java and Bali, introducing fairgoers to the sights and sounds of gamelan
(ensembles consisting primarily of bronze gongs, chimes, and keyed
metallophones). Curious Westerners could find information about practices
of gender and sexuality in other parts of the Dutch East Indies, including
performance traditions that confounded Western heteronormative
conventions. Claire Holt, an intrepid student and scholar of dance,
published accounts of bissu (non-binary priests in South Sulawesi) and
langendriyan (Central Javanese dance dramas with all-female casts) in the
late 1930s.4 The dancer and painter Hubert Stowitts, himself inspired by
earlier accounts of same-sex sexual activities and spectacular dancing in
Java and Bali, traveled to Java in 1927–1928. He exhibited his magnificent
portraits of Javanese dancers painted with his characteristic homoerotic
attention to masculine physiques throughout the United States.5 Some of his
paintings portrayed cross-dressed dancers.6
There is little doubt that the Dutch East Indies and, after independence
in 1949, the Republic of Indonesia, provided a rich source for orientalist
fantasies of alternative desires for Westerners. The musicologist Philip Brett
argued that the exoticism of the sound of gamelan music—recognizable
from frequent exposure, though hardly familiar, to Western ears—provided
a powerful means for Western composers to index homosexual desires in
their compositions.7 Brett explained that Benjamin Britten’s “musical
orientalisms,” such as “heterophonic pseudogamelan sonority,” imitations
of gamelan music’s bell-like sounds, and even “literal transcription of
gamelan,” might “betoken either some kind of presymbolic world or an
idealized mixture of pacifism and love,” or even serve as a kind of camp
—“a strategy which confronts un-queer ontology and homophobia…[and]
…may also signal the possibility of the overturn of that ontology.”8
Certainly, gamelan sounds play an important role in the oeuvres of several
prominent gay composers, including Britten, Colin McPhee, and Lou
Harrison. It is certainly plausible, although perhaps hyperbolic, to say, as
Alessandra Lopez y Royo has, that “in contemporary American art music
the gamelan sound is queer.”9 For most Indonesians, however, such gestures
are not especially exotic and carry no subversive connotations.
 I P I
N G R
S

The Republic of Indonesia, established in 1945, is a profoundly

multicultural nation. It is superimposed on a large section of a massive
archipelago (shared with Malaysia, the Philippines, Timor-Leste, and Papua
New Guinea) that stretches for thousands of miles along the equator,
sandwiched between the Indochina peninsula and Australia. Indonesia’s
boundaries—indeed, its very existence as a single entity—are artifacts of
Dutch colonialism in the region. The area’s precolonial history is
characterized by constant international trade and the ebb and flow of an
overlapping series of powerful empires, whose influence reached some of
the remotest corners of the archipelago. Local cultures in Indonesia often
show traces of indigenous animist belief systems, as well as Hindu and
Buddhist notions of cosmology and kingship. Islam, brought by traders
from the Middle East, had already taken root in many parts of the
archipelago by the time that Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century.
Looking for spices and other commercially viable products, British,
Portuguese, and Dutch traders established pockets of colonial political
control.
The Dutch—first the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC—
Dutch East Indies Company), and then the Dutch government—were
especially successful in their economic pursuits on the island of Java, where
they established profitable coffee and tea plantations; Sumatra, with its
valuable rubber resources; and the Maluku Islands (the so-called spice
islands) in the eastern part of the archipelago. Other islands (Borneo, New
Guinea, and Celebes, aka Sulawesi) also yielded their share of profits. The
Dutch were never particularly concerned with educating or proselytizing
their colonial subjects, so the indigenous peoples of the Dutch East Indies
maintained several hundred different languages and a variety of religious
beliefs, dominated in many places by syncretized versions of Islam. A
twentieth-century nationalist movement sought to create an independent
nation out of the Dutch-controlled parts of the archipelago. Faced with the
prospect of unifying literally hundreds of different ethnic groups, each with
its own language and traditions, nationalists promoted a common language
—bahasa Indonesia (a variant of Malay, widely used as a trade language)—
which is called “Indonesian” in English.
Performances associated with traditional rituals and dramatic
productions have involved various forms of cross-dressing and specialized
sexual practices for centuries, including bissu from South Sulawesi, whose
ritual duties require them to maintain an ambiguous gender identity; basir
from Kalimantan, whose activities create a representation of a cosmic
balance between male and female; gemblak from east Java, boys who
assume feminine characteristics to service older male patrons and perform
with them in Reyog Ponorogo performances; and dalang topeng from
Java’s north coast, who perform the same gendered dances regardless of
whether they are male or female. Recent decades have witnessed the rise of
more cosmopolitan kinds of gender-transgressive performance, including a
variety of staged dances with marked gender ambiguities or reversals. It
would be a leap to regard these performing arts as unproblematically queer,
however, despite their incorporation of a variety of cross-dressing, non-
ordinary gender identities, and same-sex sexual acts. An understanding of
the indigenous logic that drives these expressions challenges the
universality of queer analytics. Here, I consider two such logics in
traditional forms: ritual specialists and theatrical performers.
 R S

Cross-dressing and/or androgynous performers have been characteristic of

rituals and forms of entertainment in the islands and regions that comprise
modern Indonesia for centuries. The anthropologist Michael G. Peletz
applies a general term—“transgendered [sic] ritual specialists”—to describe
such performers.10 The anthropologist Tom Boellstorff prefers the more
unwieldy “ethnolocalized professional homosexual [sic] and transvestite
[sic] subject positions,” which he abbreviates as ETPs, to assert that, in
most cases, these sexual identifications are “secondary to a specialized
ritual or artistic activity; they are first and foremost professions, not sexual
or gendered subject positions.”11
In a 1954 article titled “Transvestism [sic] and the Religious
Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” Justus M. van der Kroef introduced what may
have been a startling notion to his readers: that cross-dressing was not
universally “the result of individual homosexual motivations probably
latent in all men.”12 Using a variety of Indonesian case studies, he
hypothesized four possible explanations for specialized gender and sexual
identities in religious rituals. In role-playing, males who are physically or
constitutionally unable to fulfill typical masculine roles assume feminine
ones (e. g. a shaman, though usually shamans are female), and must adopt
appropriate dress to succeed. The protective explanation puts forward cross-
dressing as a strategy to deceive evil spirits and protect the specialist.13
When cosmological beliefs are based on a dualist balance between
masculine and feminine powers, religious rites generally value bisexuality,
and a ritual specialist “portrays the fusion within himself of the far-reaching
and sacred antithesis which operates in his environment.” This fusion is
characterized by van der Kroef as functional, in the sense that it serves to
mediate between the world of humans and the divine. His impositional
explanation postulates an older, female-dominated cosmology, upon which
a new, male-dominated cosmology has been imposed.14 Male priests take
over, but there is a period of adaptation during which priests combine the
old feminine qualities with the new masculine qualities.15
Other Indonesianists subscribe to van der Kroef’s functional
explanation, although they typically employ different terminology. Peletz
makes the case that in previous centuries, many cultures in Indonesia were
characterized by what he calls “gender pluralism”; that is, identity practices
in which multiple approaches to gender and sexuality were not only
tolerated, but accorded legitimacy under some circumstances.16 Early-
modern Southeast Asian religious systems, he argues, were often
“profoundly dualistic.”17 Shelley Errington explains that dualistic
cosmologies typically posit a spirit world in which the masculine and
feminine are fused into an “undifferentiated wholeness”—“at the level of
gods, male and female are fused into one; but in merely human practice,
men and women must be separated for the purpose of exchange.”18 Such
cosmological considerations explain why “many communities of Southeast
Asians accorded enormous prestige to male-bodied individuals who dressed
in female attire while performing certain rituals.”19 At times, the practices
of these ritual specialists extended to sexual intercourse with both men and
women.20 Evelyn Blackwood characterizes this approach as “sacred
gender”—specialized gender roles and sexualities “constituted through
sacred beliefs about the nature of the cosmos and the origins of humanity,”
the value of which lies in these roles’ unification of genders to reflect the
spirit world.21 Peletz is careful to point out, however, that for such early-
modern religious systems, it is unknown whether cross-dressing was
eroticized.22
Bissu
The ritual specialists of the Bugis ethnic group of South Sulawesi known as
bissu, gendered neither as masculine nor feminine, have received the most
scholarly attention of any such custom in Indonesia. It is believed that as
early as the fourteenth century, they were the source of the orally
transmitted Bugis epic I La Galigo, which includes mentions of individual
bissu and rituals.23 The Dutch ethnologist G. A. Wilken published an
account of bissu in 1887; other early reports include those published by W.
A. Kaudern and Claire Holt.24
In the past, a bissu’s primary function was to conduct rituals that protect
sacred heirlooms (objects such as swords, shields, pottery, jewels, inlaid
boxes, gongs, etc.) that provide legitimacy to the region’s traditional rulers
and were mobilized to ensure agricultural success.25 Each heirloom object
was assumed to have a male or female identity, which the bissu was
supposed to complement with their own. To enable them to interact with
objects of unknown gender, bissu priests expressed both masculine and
feminine characteristics, both in their view that they embody both genders
and their wearing of a combination of men’s and women’s clothing.26 For
example, the face of one bissu interviewed by Sharyn Graham Davies had
whiskers growing on only one side, and attempting to pluck or remove the
hairs would make the bissu ill.27 Another of Graham Davies’s bissu
consultants was born with self-described “ambiguous genitalia,” and
asserted that only hermaphroditic individuals can become bissu.28 For ritual
purposes, bissu wear feminine jackets, pieces of ritual white cloth, and
adornments, along with distinctly male kris (short sword) and head cloths.29
Bissu rituals involve songs and dances whose general function is to
chase evil spirits away.30 Their musical performance involves chanting to
the accompaniment of tumba (cylindrical drum), kancing (cymbals), and
ana’ baccing (metal rhythm sticks).31 The rituals that Graham Davies
observed since the late 1990s typically involve several bissu, who chant
together in order to call the spirits (dewata) to possess them. As the music
grows faster and louder, the bissu become entranced and began to dance.32
To demonstrate that their rituals have been effective, bissu perform another
ritual called ma’agiri, during which they force their knives into their own
throats; if the knives do not penetrate or cut them, it is a sign that the rituals
have succeeded.33
The case of the bissu has provided much fodder for contemporary non-
Indonesian queer theorists concerned with gender ideologies. Leonard
Andaya characterizes the bissu as a “third gender,” while Graham Davies
speculates that Bugis society recognizes five distinct genders.34 Errington,
however, is reluctant to see bissu as having a distinct gender in Bugis
gender ideology, alongside masculine and feminine genders. She points
instead to the bissu’s representation of the gender unity of the cosmos:
“Beings that are sexually ambiguous, I think, are considered potent not so
much because they combine or conflate the duality of sexes but because
they are as yet pre-difference, they embody an unbroken unity.”35
Ngaju Dayak
Various Dayak groups in Kalimantan (the Indonesian part of Borneo) are
celebrated for their elaborate cosmologies and extravagant funerary rituals,
which are led by ritual specialists called “basir,” who guide the spirits of the
dead through the complex geographies of the upper worlds and underworlds
with sophisticated chants.36 Chants employ a special ritual language, basa
sangiang, and contain stanzas with two parallel, synonymous phrases—first
the hatue (male) version, and then the bawi (female) version. The pair of
gendered phrases provides a sonic metaphor for the dualist cosmos and
builds that gendered dualism into the sonic maps that the chanting charts.
Such chanting, accompanied by drums, is called balian.37
Modern authors have widely drawn on the work of the German
ethnographer Hans Schärer, which was published in Dutch in 1946 and in
an English translation in 1963.38 Schärer represents a complex dualist
cosmology with two opposite deities: the male Mahatala, god of the upper
world, represented by a hornbill; and the female Jata, goddess of the
underworld, represented by a snake. Schärer also reported that the male
ritual specialists regularly dress in women’s characteristic styles and “try to
act as women in every way, also sexually,” as van der Kroef paraphrased
him,39 referring to “same-sex sexual relations in the context of ceremonies
that were sometimes characterized by sacred prostitution and strong
orgiastic overtones.”40
More recent studies suggest that cross-dressing ritual specialists are less
common now than they might have been in the past, and even that Schärer
may have exaggerated the importance of cross-dressing in rituals. Anne
Schiller’s Ngaju Dayak consultants acknowledged that basir may be male,
female, or something else, but asserted that cross-dressing specialists have
always been relatively uncommon.41 Furthermore, both Schiller and Jani
Kuhnt-Saptodewo use a term that Schärer applied to female specialists who
transgressed conventional gender roles—balian—only to refer to the dualist
chanting, not to the ritual specialists who perform it, suggesting that Schärer
may have misunderstood ritual terminology and practices.42
Ritual Same-sex Sexual Activities in Papua
Indonesia’s easternmost province is Papua (formerly known as Irian Jaya),
the western half of the large island of New Guinea. Straddling the border
between the Indonesian province of Papua and the nation of Papua New
Guinea are the homelands of a variety of ethnic groups that practice what
Gilbert Herdt has termed “ritual[ized] homosexuality.”43 In more recent
years, recognizing that these groups “lack the category ‘homosexual,’”
Herdt advocates the term “boy-inseminating rites.”44 One such group, the
Sambia (as described by Herdt), holds that boys transform into fully grown
men only by ingesting semen. Young boys acquire semen by fellating
young bachelors; eventually most bachelors grow up, get married, and
assume a heterosexual lifestyle. The men keep their ritual fellatio practices
secret from the women.
Central to the system is a complex symbolism attached to the flute and
its performance. Playing the flute is considered a masculine activity,
reserved for grown men. Boys, however, learn how to fellate the bachelors
first by sucking on (rather than blowing into) flutes, which are equated with
penises.45 Women are taught to be frightened of the sound of the flute.
Other groups in the vicinity have similar practices, although the reception
of semen may be via anal intercourse, by rubbing the older man’s semen on
the body of the initiate, or even symbolically, with no actual semen
involved.46
Reyog Ponorogo
In direct contrast with Papuan notions, it is the conservation of semen as a
means to acquire spiritual power that appears to be at the root of the cross-
dressing and same-sex sexual activities associated with the Reyog
Ponorogo. This elaborate dance drama is iconic of the Ponorogo regency of
East Java and is associated with a class of powerful men, called “warok,”
who perpetuate a centuries-old tantric tradition. In accordance with the
tantric equation of spiritual strength with the negation of physical desires,
the warok avoid sexual relations with women and maintain relationships
with pubescent boys, called “gemblak,” instead. The warok provide their
gemblak with room and board, and the gemblak perform chores for the
warok in exchange. Warok recruit the gemblak from local communities, and
“propose” to the boy’s parents using protocols similar to those used for
marriage proposals. There are economic and social benefits for the families
of the gemblak in the transaction.47
Gemblak act as surrogate wives in other respects as well, including
providing a beautiful feminine presence, which the warok encourage their
gemblak to cultivate. The gemblak provide (in theory, at least) feminine
company for the masculine warok’s enjoyment. Petting and kissing between
warok and gemblak provide a measure of sexual satisfaction, but with less
risk of spilling semen and compromising the warok’s power.48 In practice,
however, relationships become sexual as well.49 Some gemblak are lifelong
practitioners of same-sex sexual activities, while others transition to a more
heteronormative married life, often with their warok’s blessing.50
Ian Wilson relates one historical account that places the warok’s origins
in a fifteenth-century rebellion against the weakening kingdom of
Majapahit. A disenfranchised noble taught tantric disciplines in which
strength proceeded from the negation of physical desire. Gemblak were
substitutes for women to assist in consolidating the warok’s power. In an
effort to spread the message of rebellion, the warok and their gemblak
mounted an elaborate drama. The effeminate gemblak were enlisted to
portray the Majapahit soldiers as weaklings, in contrast to the powerful
characters played by the warok, by riding hobbyhorses and wearing
feminine clothing.51 The first historical mention, in a poem called the
“Serat Cabolan,” dating from the late eighteenth century, recounts a
circumcision ceremony with warok and cross-dressing boys.52
Most analyses of Reyog Ponorogo and the warok/gemblak relationship
suggest that the same-sex sexual and cross-dressing elements of the drama
are rooted in a dualistic understanding of the universe. In times past,
gemblak were invited to share the bed of a newly married heterosexual
couple during their consummation, where their embodiment of both
masculine and feminine essences might enhance fertility.53
Margaret Kartomi describes the musical accompaniment for a 1971
performance, which involved a shawm called “slomprèt,” bronze kettles
called “kenong,” suspended gongs called “kempul,” a small drum called
“tipung,” several three-tube bamboo rattles called “angklung,” and a large
drum called “kendang Ponorogo.” The repetitive parts played on most of
the instruments set up a background over which two instruments—slomprèt
and kendang Ponorogo—play parts that are extremely variable
rhythmically, metrically, ornamentally, melodically, and intonationally. This
musical dualism—the contrast of the fixed, repetitive parts with variable
parts—she suggests, is a sonic manifestation of the gender dualism of the
cosmos.54
Both the Indonesian government, with its interest in modernization, and
conservative Islamic groups, concerned with a different approach to
morality, have sought to cast a negative light on the warok/gemblak
relationship and influenced contemporary performances of Reyog Ponorogo
to minimize their participation. Thus, modern performances often feature
young girls in the roles historically played by gemblak.55
 T G -B

There is often only a fine line between ritual and theater. In most
Indonesian contexts, theater almost always involves a seamless melding of
music, poetry, and dance. Many popular forms of entertainment in
Indonesia that involve displays of non-ordinary genders and sexualities
have clear roots in ritual activities. While some have shed almost all
vestiges of their ritual roots, others continue to function as both ritual and
theater.
Topeng Cirebon
One of Java’s richest dance traditions—topeng from the north-coast region
of Cirebon—still exhibits elements of both ritual and entertainment. A
variety of village-specific variants in the area share many common features:
a single male or female performer, called a “dalang topeng,” dominates an
all-day performance, usually as part of a celebration of a life-cycle
ceremony or a community ritual, in which he or she dances four or five
masked characters (depending on the village) to the accompaniment of a
gamelan ensemble.56 Other performers, including dance protégés making
their debuts and buffoons amusing the crowd, give the solo dancer
occasional breaks, as do the various sponsors and hosts, who present the
long-winded speeches that characterize many events in Indonesia. But it is
the dalang topeng’s performance that is the focus of the occasion.
Historically, a dalang topeng was much more than a performer, fulfilling
roles as a teacher, a wise person, and a shaman.57 Male and female dalang
topeng wear the same costume and present the same sequence of characters,
each with a different mask and a different movement vocabulary.58 Some of
the characters are clearly masculine, some feminine, and some
androgynous. The gender symbolism goes beyond the sex of the performer.
The mask of the most refined character (Panji) for example, is white, a
color associated with semen. The final character (Klana or Rahwana) wears
a red mask, denoting menstrual blood, and performs the coarsest and most
passionate dance.59
These gendered associations—white/refined/male/semen and
red/coarse/female/menses—point to a gender ideology that is predicated on
an understanding of male-female complementarity, in which ideal
masculinity is refined and ideal femininity is emotional.60 However, the fact
that a single performer, who can be either male or female, performs all the
dances drives home the dualist notion that masculine and feminine energies
dwell inside everybody, regardless of sex, and perhaps sends the message
that a balance between them is desirable. The insertion of an androgynous
character (Rumyang) into the middle (or end) of the performance, whose
pink mask blends Panji’s white and Klana’s red, strengthens this
understanding.
The relationship of the different character dances to their accompanying
music amplifies topeng’s gender ideology. As in most gamelan music, a
repeating time cycle, demarcated by interlocking patterns of strokes on
gong-type instruments with different timbre, is topeng music’s basic
organizing principle. A stroke on the largest hanging gong marks the end of
the most important cycles. As a general principle, dance choreographies
coordinate their cadences with these gong strokes. Each of the topeng
characters negotiates these cycles in a way that is consistent with its gender
identity.
The Panji character can actually alter the very long musical cycles of the
pieces that accompany his dance—if the dalang performs particular
movements associated with a different part of the cycle, then the musicians
must follow by deleting whole sections of the tune. One interpretation: the
masculine Panji is so powerful that he can alter the cosmic order. In
contrast, Klana exerts very little control over the cycles that govern him nor
over their inexorable acceleration; the dancer can only react to the music’s
unrelenting acceleration, appearing to become more and more out of
control.
Wayang
Gender ambiguity abounds in wayang (Javanese theatrical forms based
primarily on the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata) as well.
Perhaps one of the most compelling illustrations of van der Kroef’s theory
of imposition (in which traces of an older world view persist visibly in
newer forms) is the clown-servant Semar, who appears in wayang kulit
(shadow puppet theater) in central Java and Cirebon, as well as in
Sundanese wayang golek (doll puppet theater) in West Java. Semar is quite
literally an old Javanese god, who, displaced by the deities who populate
the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata stories, is now their humble
servant.61 Javanese consider his physical appearance, with pendulous
breasts and round rear end, to be hermaphroditic, hearkening to the kinds of
dualist cosmologies served by bissu and basir on neighboring islands.62
The character Srikandhi, male in the Indian version of the Mahabharata,
appears in Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese wayang as a woman—a
beautiful wife to the hero Arjuna, but also an aggressive warrior who takes
the form of a man to engage in battle.63 Of course, in wayang kulit and
wayang golek, inanimate objects—puppets—represent the gender-
ambiguous characters. A single individual, called a “dhalang” (puppet
master, also spelled “dalang”), who is almost always a man, has the
responsibility to make the puppets come alive. To do so, he must understand
the motivations and embody the behaviors (voices, speech patterns, and
gestures) of a variety of gender and sexuality subject positions.64
Javanese Court Dance
In theatrical dance performances called wayang wong (“wong” is a
Javanese word for “person”), actual people portray the same characters that
appear as puppets in wayang kulit and wayang golek. Such theatrical
productions have been among the core repertories of the royal courts of
Central Java for centuries, indeed, one of the primary tools for establishing
the legitimacy to rule, especially in the royal court Kraton Ngayogyakarta
Hadiningrat.65 In Yogyakarta, it was the convention to have all-male casts
(composed mostly of members of the extended royal family), with all the
female roles taken by men dressed as female characters and affecting
feminine mannerisms. It appears that the primary motivation for the all-
male casts was to avoid an improper contact between the genders in the
formal palace setting. Artists in the Mangkunegaran palace in Solo
innovated a narrative performance genre called “langendriyan,” which
featured all-female casts who portrayed male and female roles through
costume, dialogue, song, and movement.
Javanese dancers’ physical builds determine the kinds of characters they
play.66 Soedarsono states, for example, that the “aesthetic impression of
refined masculinity, the ideal for a Javanese hero,” is best danced by a
performer “of medium height…, rather thin, and with delicate features.”67
Note that Soedarsono does not specify the dancer’s sex, only their body
type. In contemporary Javanese classical dance, female dancers who match
this ideal frequently portray refined male characters. The flexibility of
which sex plays which gender on stage appears to be a reflection, once
again, of a deep-seated dualism in Javanese cosmology that decouples the
concepts of masculine and feminine, in some contexts, from sexed bodies.
At the same time, in modern Java, the casting of female dancers in refined
male roles reflects a gradual feminization of the image of dancers. It also
evinces a change in masculine ideals from the slight, genteel, and spiritually
powerful halus (“refined”) man of Javanese court culture to the more
athletic, physically powerful masculinities of contemporary Indonesian
culture, as exemplified by Indonesia’s first two presidents, Sukarno and
Soeharto.
East Java
Indeed, the legacies of Indonesia’s first two modern presidents and their
administrations have had far-reaching effects on contemporary gender
ideologies in Indonesia. In East Java, there are a variety of dances that
portray masculine and feminine character types that may be performed by
both men and women in genres called “ngremo,” “beskalan,” and “topeng”
(masked dance). Such dances typically serve as opening acts for other kinds
of performances.68 In an examination of these dances, Christina Sunardi
maps changes in concepts of masculine and feminine and their mappings to
male and female bodies, in East Javanese dance. She identifies differences
over three generations, which correspond roughly to the three
postindependence governments of Indonesia: the Sukarno era of “guided
democracy” (1945–1965), the Soeharto “New Order” government (1965–
1998), and the post-Soeharto reformasi (“reformation”) period (1998-
present).
In preindependence Indonesia, cross-dressing dancers are reputed to
have continued their cross-dressing habits off-stage. Under Sukarno,
government ideology promoted rigid ideas of masculinity and femininity,
possibly influenced by both Western and Islamic notions of gender roles,
and dancers modified their approach to performance accordingly: male
dancers enhanced the realism of their cross-dressed performances with
elaborate makeup, padded bodysuits, and plastic masks that smoothed the
appearance of their skin, to conform to the refined and polite ideals of Old
Order feminine beauty, while living as normative men in real life to
conform to masculine ideals. In post-Soeharto Indonesia, in which space for
multiple gender and sexuality subject positions has opened up, Sunardi’s
teachers criticized younger performers’ renditions, which exhibited more
obvious signs of each dancer’s own sex. The younger women’s
performances of ngremo tayub, a male-character dance, were too coquettish
and feminine, they said, and they faulted younger men for presenting
ngremo putri (a female-character dance) with rhythmic/gestural accents that
were too sharp, and thus too masculine.69 Sunardi concludes that each
generation has incorporated the normative gender ideologies promulgated
by the regime in power into their cross-gender performances, and that the
details and significance of gender in performance change with the times.
Bali
Modern Balinese discourses about gender characterization in performing
dances recognize three basic categories: male, bebancihan (androgynous),
and female.70 Since the 1940s, Balinese choreographers have created cross-
gendered dances for men portraying women.71 Catherine Diamond
documents a shift in Bali from the performance of female roles by men
dressed as women to modern performances in which women often assume
male roles.72 In more recent decades, choreographers have created a variety
of dances portraying male characters intended for performance by female
dancers. Among the most popular of these is “Teruna Jaya” (“Victorious
Youth”), choreographed in the 1950s, which draws inspiration from a young
male in the throes of puberty but is performed by a female dancer. Another
popular bebancihan dance, “Kebyar Duduk,” is a dramatic solo performed
by both male and female dancers.
Over the past several decades, inspired by government policies of
women’s emansipasi (emancipation) and modernist movements promoting
the empowerment of women, female Balinese performers have transgressed
long-standing gender boundaries to perform a variety of formerly all-male
music genres, including gong kebyar, arja, and beleganjur, as well.73
Although all-women musical groups, often called gamelan ibu-ibu (“ladies’
gamelan”), have been popular in many parts of Java since the 1950s, for the
most part such groups pursued music as a social activity and often spent
more effort on their appearance than on the sophistication of their musical
performance.74 As a result, they did little to challenge hegemonic notions of
masculinity.
Balinese girls’ and women’s groups, however, in recent years have
attained levels of musicianship that confront traditional ideas about
masculinity and femininity. According to Sonja Downing, modern girls and
women are forging a new kind of gender identity in pursuing high levels of
performance and “take pride in being strong and solid female gamelan
players in style and musicality, not flirtatious and tempestuous androgynes
as depicted in bebancihan dances.”75 These Balinese developments invite a
couple of questions: What does it mean when women performers assume
the qualities hitherto associated with hegemonic masculinity? Do such
activities challenge the gender status quo by empowering women to equal
status, or reify patriarchal notions of masculine and feminine by
overvaluing so-called masculine characteristics? The answer is a work in
progress in modern Indonesia.
West Java
Some contemporary Sundanese76 choreographers probe such questions by
challenging their audiences to confront their gendered assumptions about
dance. In my 2010 book, Erotic Triangles, I described the lukewarm
reception received by a dance that choreographed men (who are
conventionally admired for their individuality and freedom of choice in
dance gestures) to dance in unison (which is valued in group female dances;
e.g., “Tari Baksa”).77 I concluded that such experiments might eventually
foster “significant changes,” despite the initial reception.78 I baldly asserted
in 2010 that “a female kendang [drum] player would wreak serious havoc”
on Sundanese gender ideology,79 yet in the intervening years, I have seen
quite a few all-female versions of a choreographed dance in which the
participants play kendang—often virtuosically—called “rampak kendang.”
The very existence of such works suggests that the landscape of gender
ideology is remarkably fluid in modern Indonesia, and that performing arts
is an important arena for imagining and normalizing changing norms.
 M G S
P

The preceding discussion is not meant to imply that specialized or minority

gender roles and sexualities are the exclusive province of religion, music, or
theater. History records only scant details of the appearance and actions of
ritual specialists of the past and their performances. Peletz states that there
is “no information on the subjectivities, desires, passions, or pleasures” of
the individual ritual specialists or their audiences, a sentiment echoed by
Blackwood.80 Hughes-Freedland points out that the performance of gender
on stage is quite different from the ongoing performative creation of gender
in real life, a distinction to which scholars don’t always attend.81 In many
cases, performances portraying non-normative gender identities do not
correlate to the performers’ sexual desires and behaviors.
A variety of words in the modern Indonesian vocabulary describe
subjectivities and activities that resist and challenge normative categories of
gender and sexuality. Despite the fact that many of these Indonesian terms
are obvious loan-words from global queer/LGBT discourse (e.g., “gay,”
“homo,” “lesbi,” “lesbian,” and “tomboi”), the term “queer” has no real
meaning in Indonesia—at least not yet.82 Furthermore, as scholars
including Evelyn Blackwood and Tom Boellstorff have compellingly
argued, even Indonesian terms that sound familiar to Anglophones, such as
“gay,” “lesbi,” and “tomboi,” often are false cognates that carry different
connotations from their English equivalents.83
Going beyond religious contexts, Peletz invokes Benedict Anderson’s
oft-cited exegesis of the “Serat Centhini” (a poem at least 400 years old that
provides vivid descriptions of life in a Javanese palace, including the
omnipresence of the performing arts in everyday life),84 which provides
“detailed descriptions of [male-to-male] sodomy, fellatio, mutual
masturbation, multiple-partner intercourse, and transvestism” as evidence
that such practices were perhaps unremarkable in early-modern Java.85 Tom
Boellstorff points out, however, that other documents from the courts of
central Java condemn same-sex sexual acts.86
Waria
Men who dress and act as women, either part or full time, outside of the
prescripted roles of ritual specialists or theatrical performers, are an integral
part of many Indonesian cultures. An indigenous, and usually derogatory,
term, “banci,” along with a commonly accepted slang version of the word,
“béncong,” are in common usage to describe them. A more recently coined
term—“waria,” a combination of the Indonesian words for female (WAnita)
and male (pRIA), has gained considerable currency in recent decades. Waria
sometimes find a calling as ritual specialists, and waria have long been
linked to theatrical performing traditions as well. There is documentation of
such individuals in a variety of Indonesian cultures from the early
nineteenth century.87 Waria tend to regard themselves as authentically
feminine, despite their physical sex, and their identity is not necessarily
linked to sexual desire for other males; Boellstorff characterizes the waria’s
subject position as a “male femininity.”88 For waria, looking feminine
involves a self-conscious and complicated performance—prosthetic
devices, permanent body modifications, body hair removal, wigs, clothes,
makeup, and feminine behavior—called “déndong.”89 Because of their
expertise with makeup, modern waria often find work in beauty salons and
as wedding consultants.
Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities
A gay subject position for men who do not consider themselves feminine
but have a sexual attraction to men emerged in Indonesia in the 1970s.90
Comparable subject positions for women who are attracted to other women
(tomboi, lesbi) emerged in the late twentieth century as well. Those who
espouse these identities understand them as novel, nontraditional subject
positions, “linked to national and transnational conceptions of sexuality.”91
Didik Nini Thowok
The works of the dancer and choreographer Didik Nini Thowok (born Didik
Hadiprayitno in 1954) cast a potentially queer light on many of the strands
of traditional and modern Indonesian approaches to gender and sexuality
that have been touched upon in this chapter. He is among the few
performing artists in Indonesia who earn a living through their art—all the
more remarkable because his works always involve some sort of
transgression of contemporary Indonesian gender norms.92 Drawing upon a
variety of cross-gender performing traditions from Indonesia and other parts
of Asia and a theoretical engagement with current scholarship in gender and
sexualities, his work “disrupts and interrogates the strict gender
differentiation that has increased with Westernization and modernization.”93
It is Didik’s intention to remind modern Indonesians that gender
ambiguity has a long history by referencing the traditional gender roles of
ritual specialists in new ways in his dances.94 He uses masks, which conceal
the identity of the dancer and which are an important prop in many of the
performance traditions associated with cross-gender performance,
extensively in his work. In one piece, “Dwi Muka” (Two Faces), he wears
two masks—an ugly one over his face and a beautiful one on the back of his
head. The audience is enchanted by the beautiful character but senses that
something is amiss as they watch it: Didik’s gestures are severely limited
because he dances backward. When he turns around to reveal the ugly
character, however, his movements are freer. The audience is left to
consider which is the more authentic character—the beautiful but backward
one or the ugly but graceful one.
Didik sees the transformations empowered by masks and by variously
gendered performances as mystical, and not necessarily tied to the dancer’s
own identity and desires. It is the danced character, rather than the dancer’s
own subjectivity, that is significant.95 Hughes-Freedland clarifies Didik’s
notion of “mystical gender” as “a performative androgyny which is
disconnected from personal sexuality.”96 Indeed, Didik makes no public
pronouncements about his own sexual identity. Off stage, he dresses as a so-
called normal man, and he does not reveal much about his personal life. As
Hughes-Freeland explains it, he prefers to define his own subjectivity
through “his skills as a performer and not through his sexuality.”97
Although he is a transnational, cosmopolitan individual, Didik’s focus
on the performance rather than the performer—decoupling the performed
character from the performer’s own predilections—enables him to deliver a
postmodern reading of the traditional position of ritual specialists and cross-
gender performers in premodern times throughout the Indonesian
archipelago. Those interested in queer theory and the decentering of
Western hegemonic masculinity can find compelling counternarratives in
both Didik’s oeuvre and the various performing traditions on which his
dances are based.
 C

This chapter has provided an overview of a variety of performing arts in

Indonesia that feature non-ordinary gender identities and sexualities. Some
themes emerge. For one, these gender performances are consistent with
long-standing and persistent cosmological ideas of duality,
complementarity, and the reconciliation of opposites. Duality manifests in
the performing arts as an aesthetic valuation of combinations of dissimilar
expressions (e.g., the music for Reyog Ponorogo and Ngaju Dayak
chanting), as the combination of masculine and feminine qualities in dance
gestures (e.g., in Cirebonese topeng), and in the bodies of gender-
ambiguous ritual specialists (e.g., bissu). For another, ritual formats
reinforce the idea that the accumulation of power is connected to sexual
relations (as in Papua), or in separating the genders (as in wayang wong) or
refraining from sexual relations (e.g., Reyog Ponorogo). In these forms,
cross-gender performances are a necessary side effect of conventional
gender ideology.
Whether to label these performance traditions “queer” or not, therefore,
remains a fraught question. According to David Halperin, “Queer is by
definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the
dominant.”98 These case studies indeed challenge Western notions of
normal, legitimate, and dominant, but they do not typically challenge the
central values of the Indonesian societies that fostered them; on the
contrary, as conservative ritual and performance traditions, they affirm
those values.
On the other hand, modern Indonesian performers grapple with changing
understandings of gender and sexuality every day. East Javanese dancers,
for example, modulate their styles to conform to current gender ideologies.
Female Balinese gamelan musicians work within existing structures to
remodel Balinese understandings of music and gender. Didik Nini Thowok
conjures modern and postmodern Indonesian notions of gender and
sexuality by channeling traditional, conservative sexual subjectivities into
choreographies informed by global notions of gender and sexual identity.
 Indonesia’s complicated history, along with its national commitment to a
globalized modernity, have created an environment in which the roles of
gender and sexuality in ritual, and other traditional forms of gender and
sexual identities, have been called into question on their home turf. At the
same time, attention from Western theorists to issues of “erotic
ethnocentrism,” in which Western ethnographers emphasize the
characteristic prurient concerns of Western sexual controversies over
cosmological, sociostructural, and symbolic matters,99 have sensitized some
scholars to the dangers of the label of “queer.” Nevertheless, these
Indonesian examples present welcome correctives to oversimplified
Western understandings of compulsory heterosexuality and binary
gender/sexuality identities, and also provide entry points for nuanced
understandings of the relationship of performing arts with “queerness.”
N
1. Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press,
1996), 3.
2. The language in this chapter is consistent with the useful style guide by GLAAD, “GLAAD
Media Reference Guide—Transgender,” https://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender
3. David Shavit, Bali and the Tourist Industry: A History 1906–1942 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Co, 2003), 180; Tessel Pollman, “Margaret Mead’s Bali: The Fitting Symbols of the American
Dream.” Indonesia 49 (1990): 13.
4. Claire Holt. “The Dance in Java,” Asia 37 (December 1939a), 943–946; Claire Holt, Dance
Quest in Celebes (Paris: Archives internationales de la danse, 1939b).
5. Anne Holliday, Hubert Stowitts: Biography. Queer Arts Resource, 1998, http://www.queer-
arts.org/archive/jan_98/stowitts/biography.html; Anne Holliday, “Stowitts: His Life and Art,” in
Mandalas of the Hidden Wisdom, ed. J. Joseph Dunaway (Pacific Grove, CA: Stowitts Museum
and Library, 2000); Henry Spiller, Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and
Dance (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015), 88–123.
6. Herbert Julian Stowitts, “Java: The Home of Orchestral Drama,” Theatre Arts Monthly 13, no. 3
(1929), 187–193; Herbert Julian Stowitts, “Where Prime Ministers Dance,” Asia 30 no. 10
(1931), 699–703; Herbert Julian Stowitts, “Where Prime Ministers Dance,” The Dancing Times
(May 1928), 145–146.
7. Philip Brett, “Eros and Orientalism in Britten’s Operas,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay
and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (London:
Routledge, 1994), 235–256.
8. Philip Brett and Nadine Hubbs, “Queer Musical Orientalism,” Echo 9, no. 1 (2009).
http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume9-Issue1/brett/brett1.html.
9. Alessandra Lopez y Royo, “The Prince of the Pagodas, Gong and Tabuh-Tabuhan: Balinese
Music and Dance, Classical Ballet and Euro-American Composers and Choreographers,”
Indonesia and the Malay World 35, no. 101 (2007), 58.
10. Michael G. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia Since Early
Modern Times,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 2 (2006), 312.
11. Tom Boellstorff, “Playing Back the Nation: Waria, Indonesian Transvestites,” Cultural
Anthropology 19, no. 2 (2004): 162–163.
12. Justus M. van der Kroef, “Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” Journal
of East Asiatic Studies 3 (1954b): 257.
13. He cites James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough Part IV, vol. 2 (London: MacMillan and Co.,
1922), pp. 260–264, for this explanation.
14. He cites G. J. A. Terra, “Some Sociological Aspects of Agrigulture in S.E. Asia,” Indonesie, vol.
6 (1953), 297–316.
15. van der Kroef, “Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” 257–258)
16. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 310.
17. Ibid., 312.
18. Shelly Errington, “Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power: A Theoretical and Regional Overview,”
in Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, ed. Jane Monnig Atkinson and
Shelly Errington(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 51.
19. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 312.
20. Ibid., 313; Errington, “Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power,” 52.
21. Evelyn Blackwood, “Gender Transgression in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia,” Journal of
Asian Studies 64, no. 4 (2005a), 857.
22. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 313.
23. Umar Umar, Dancing with Spirits: Negotiating Bissu Subjectivity Through Adat (MA Thesis,
University of Colorado, 2008), 9.
24. G. A. Wilken, “Het Shamanisme bij de volken van den Indischen archipel,” Bijdragen tot de
Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië 36, no. 3 (1887): 427–497; W. A.
Kaudern, Ethnographical Studies in Celebes: Results of the Author’s Expedition to Celebes,
1917–1920 (Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag, 1927); Holt, “The Dance in Java.”
25. van der Kroef, “Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” 261.
26. Umar, Dancing with Spirits, 13.
27. Sharyn Graham, “It’s Like One of Those Puzzles: Conceptualising Gender Among Bugis,”
Journal of Gender Studies 13, no. 2 (2001), 108.
28. Sharyn Graham Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia: Sexuality, Islam, and Queer Selves
(New York: Routledge, 2010), 177.
29. Gilbert Hamonic, “Travestissement et bisexualite chez les ‘Bissu’ du pay Bugis,” Archipel 10
(1975), 131; van der Kroef, “Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” 190.
30. Harald Beyer Broch. “‘Crazy Women Are Performing in Sombali’: A Possession-Trance Ritual
on Bonerate, Indonesia,” Ethos 13, no. 3 (1985), 274.
31. Graham, “It’s Like One of Those Puzzles.”
32. Graham Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 192.
33. Graham, “It’s Like One of Those Puzzles.”
34. Leonard Andaya, “The Bissu: Study of a Third Gender in Indonesia,” in Other Pasts: Women,
Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia, ed. Barbara Andaya (Honolulu: Hawai’i
University Press, 2000), 27–46; Graham Davies (2001).
35. Shelly Errington, Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 124.
36. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Cosmography in Southeast Asia,” in The History of Cartography,
Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B.
Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 709.
37. Jani Sri Kuhnt-Saptodewo, “A Bridge to the Upper World: Sacred Language of the Ngaju,”
Borneo Research Bulletin 30 (1999), 16.
38. Hans Schärer, Die Gottesidee der Ngadju Dajak in Süd-Borneo (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill,
1963).
39. van der Kroef, “Transvestism and the Religious Hermaphrodite in Indonesia,” 259.
40. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 312.
41. Anne Schiller, Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity Among the Ngaju of
Indonesia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
42. Kuhnt-Saptodewo, “A Bridge to the Upper World,” 16.
43. Gilbert H. Herdt, ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1984).
44. Gilbert H. Herdt, Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 17.
45. Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1981), 233, 283–284; Herdt, Sambia Sexual Culture, passim.
46. Shirley Lindenbaum, “Variations on a Sociosexual Theme in Melanesia,” in Ritualized
Homosexuality in Melanesia, ed. Gilbert H. Herdt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984), 341.
47. Ian Douglas Wilson, Reog Ponorogo: Spirituality, Sexuality, and Power in a Javanese
Performance Tradition (May 1999). Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asian
Context, www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue2/Warok.html), 6.
48. Josko Petkovic, “Waiting for Karila: Bending Time, Theory, and Gender in Java and Bali (with
Reflections for a Documentary Treatment),” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the
Asian Context 2 (1999b). http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue2/Josko.html.
49. Boellstorff, “Playing Back the Nation,” 163; Josko Petkovic, “Oetomo, Dédé Talks on Reyog
Ponorogo,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 2 (1999a).
http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue2/Oetomo.html.
50. Margaret J. Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,” Indonesia 22
(1976), 107.
51. Wilson, Reog Ponorogo, 2; Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,”
86–87.
52. Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,” 106.
53. Wilson, Reog Ponorogo, 14.
54. Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,” 98.
55. Wilson, Reog Ponorogo, 9; Christina Sunardi, “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Body: Cultural
Politics and Cross-Gender Dance in East Java,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde
165 no. 4 (2009): 472; Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,” 117.
56. Endo Suanda, “Cirebonese Topeng and Wayang of the Present Day,” Asian Music 16, no. 1
(1985).
57. Margot Laurie Ross, Journeying, Adaptation, and Translation: Topeng Cirebon at the Margins
(PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 227.
58. Margot Laurie Ross has observed, however, that in recent years, some dalang topeng have
adjusted their practices to observe Muslim conventions of gender (see Journeying, Adaptation,
and Translation, 1).
59. Endo Suanda, “Dancing in Cirebonese Topèng,” Balungan 3, no. 3 (1988): 7–15; Pamela
Rogers-Aguiniga, Topeng Cirebon: The Masked Dance Theatre of West Java as Performed in
the Village of Slangit (MA Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1986).
60. See also Sarah Weiss, Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of
Wayang in Central Java (Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2006); Michael G. Peletz, Reason
 and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (Berkeley: University of California,
1996).
61. Helen Pausacker, “Presidents as Punakawan: Portrayal of National Leaders as Clown-Servants
in Central Javanese Wayang,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2004), 218.
62. Marshall Clark, “Indonesia’s Jemek Supardi: From Pickpocket to Mime Artist.” Bijdragen tot
de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 167, no. 2/3 (2011), 218; Kartomi, “Performance, Music, and
Meaning of Réyog Ponorogo,” 108; Justus M. van der Kroef, “The Roots of the Javanese
Drama,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 12, no. 3 (1954a): 318–327.
63. Astri Wright, “Javanese Mysticism and Art: A Case of Iconography and Healing.” Indonesia 52
(October 1991), 90n27); Blackwood, “Gender Transgression in Colonial and Postcolonial
Indonesia,” 856.
64. Sarah Weiss, “Gender and Gender Redux: Rethinking Binaries and the Aesthetics of Javanese
Wayang,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12 (2008), 38.
65. See Soedarsono, Wayang Wong: The State Ritual Dance Drama in the Court of Yogyakarta
(Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1984), 54. The four closely interrelated
royal courts in Central Java, called kraton, are artifacts of the legacies of medieval Hindu-
Javanese kingdoms, the great Islamic Mataram empire that supplanted them, and European
colonial powers’ political manipulations. The oldest, Kraton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat in
Yogyakarta, is ruled by the sultan; the next oldest, Kraton Surakarta Hadiningrat, is in Solo and
is ruled by the Susuhunan (emperor). There is a smaller court in each of the two royal cities,
ruled by pangeran (princes): the Puro Mangkunegaran in Solo and the Puro Pakualaman in
Yogyakarta.
66. Clara Brakel-Papenhuyzen, Classical Javanese Dance, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk
Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 155 (Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press, 1995), 48;
Soedarsono 1984:219.
67. Soedarsono, Wayang Wong, 225; see also Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and
Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 159.
68. Sunardi, “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Body,” 461.
69. Ibid., 460.
70. I Made Sidia and I Made Widana, Om Swastyastu: Gender in Balinese Performing Arts
(Denpasar: Insitut Seni Indonesia, 2012).
71. Catherine Diamond, “Fire in the Banana’s Belly: Bali’s Female Performers Essay the Masculine
Arts,” Asian Theatre Journal 25, no 2 (2008): 231–271.
72. Ibid., 263.
73. Sonja Lynn Downing, “Agency, Leadership, and Gender Negotiation in Balinese Girls’
Gamelans,” Ethnomusicology 54, no. 1 (2010): 54–80; Diamond, “Fire in the Banana’s Belly”;
Michael B. Bakan, “From Oxymoron to Reality: Agendas of Gender and the Rise of Balinese
Women’s “Gamelan Beleganjur” in Bali, Indonesia,” Asian Music 29, no. 1 (1997): 37–85.
74. Sean Williams, “Constructing Gender in Sundanese Music,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 30
(1998): 79; Rachel Swindells, Klasik, Kawih, Kreasi: Musical Transformation and the Gamelan
Degung of Bandung, West Java, Indonesia (PhD Dissertation, City University, London, 2004),
31–32; Ernst L. Heins, Goong Renteng: Aspects of Orchestral Music in a Sundanese Village
(PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1977), 66.
75. Downing, “Agency, Leadership, and Gender Negotiation in Balinese Girls’ Gamelans,” 74.
76. Sundanese are the dominant ethnic group in West Java.
77. Henry Spiller, Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 199–203.
78. Ibid., 209.
79. Ibid., 176.
80. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 313; Blackwood, “Gender
Transgression in Colonial and Postcolonial Indonesia,” 850.
81. Felicia Hughes-Freeland, “Cross-Dressing Across Cultures: Genre and Gender in the Dances of
Didik Nini Thowok,” Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series, No. 108 (Singapore: Asia
Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 2008), 19.
82. Evelyn Blackwood, “Transnational Discourses and Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia,”
GLQ 14, no. 4 (2008): 483; Tom Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer
Studies, Indonesia (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2007), 20.
83. Tom Boellstorff, “Dubbing Culture: Indonesian ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbi’ Subjectivities and
Ethnography in an Already Globalized World,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 225–
242; Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires, 8; Blackwood, “Transnational Discourses and
Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia.”
84. Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia,” 314.
85. Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 278; see also William G. Clarence-Smith, “Same-
Sex Relations and Transgender Identities in Islamic Southeast Asia from the Fifteenth Century,”
in Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600–1950, ed. Raquel A. G. Reyes and William G. Clarence-
Smith (New York: Routledge, 2012), 74–75.
86. Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005), 46.
87. Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires, 85.
88. Ibid., 48.
89. Boellstorff, “Playing Back the Nation,” 169.
90. Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires, 41.
91. Evelyn Blackwood, “Tombois in West Sumatra: Constructing Masculinity and Erotic Desire,” in
Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Jennifer Robertson (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005b), 247.
92. Hughes-Freeland, “Cross-Dressing Across Cultures,” 6.
93. Margot Laurie Ross and Didik Nini Thowok, “Mask, Gender, and Performance in Indonesia: An
Interview with Didik Nini Thowok,” Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 2 (2005): 215.
94. Ibid., 225.
95. Ibid., 226.
96. Hughes-Freeland, “Cross-Dressing Across Cultures,” 32.
97. Ibid., 29.
98. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 62.
99. Deborah A. Elliston, “Erotic Anthropology: ‘Ritualized Homosexuality’ in Melanesia and
Beyond.” In Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Jennifer Robertson
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 108.
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 CHAPTER 31

OUT IN THE UNDERCURRENTS

Queer Politics in Hong Kong Popular Music
YI U FAI CH OW AND JE RO E N DE KL OE T
 I

T MAXX music festival that took place in Beijing on May 1, 2012, felt
even more regulated than other music festivals in the capital city, such as
the Strawberry Festival. There were multiple mills barriers surrounding the
stage, where we and other audience stood, and the gongan (police) presence
was palpable. Anthony Wong was the closing act of the day. When the
Hong Kong–based pop star entered the stage, rainbow flags, large and
small, here and there, were hoisted, waving and celebrating a sense of
queerness in the Chinese capital (Figure 31.1).1 The performance was just a
few days after Anthony Wong’s coming out, also on stage, in Hong Kong.
Whereas lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities
and practices have been increasingly active in Beijing for the past decade,
they remain by and large invisible to the public eye. Gay and lesbian film
festivals are held discreetly and sometimes are disrupted, while a number of
bars and discos have rapidly opened, closed, or changed location to
survive.2 Destination, a gay club north of the Workers’ Stadium, partied to
celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2015, suggesting a generally more relaxed
atmosphere. Nevertheless, rainbow flags in a public space, at an event not
linked to queer culture, with all the police officers around—that moment in
2012 felt as if mainland China had entered a new phase. It is indicative of
the queer possibilities of popular music. And it is also striking that it takes a
pop singer from another locality, Hong Kong, to facilitate that queer
expression in public space. Moreover, Hong Kong is not and has never been
the queer center of East Asia. In the Sinophone world, Taipei has been
considered the capital of queer politics and pink money. Hong Kong, a
British colony for more than 150 years, is haunted by a disturbing mixture
of Victorian and Confucian values that has for a long time limited sexual
expression.
FIGURE 31.1 Rainbow flags at the MAXX music festival, Beijing.
(Photo by Jeroen de Kloet)

Indeed, before the public coming-out of Anthony Wong and other

celebrities in 2012, queer culture in Hong Kong was characterized by a
playful politics of invisibility, opacity, and ambivalence, which several
scholars have proposed as a queer alternative to the confrontational,
identity-based politics often advocated in the West. Helen Hok-sze Leung,
for example, claims that the queer undercurrent of Hong Kong ran against
the grain of “the ‘global gay’ narrative that assimilates non-Western queer
expressions into its own trajectory and image.”3 We witness here a curious
and productive alliance between postcolonial Hong Kong and queer theory.
Sudeep Dasgupta aptly describes the theoretical zeal of the latter, saying
that “the discursive production of the homosexual subject, queer theory
argues, is marked by incompleteness, ambivalence, and instability precisely
because of the inability of representation either to adequate the object it
refers to, or to control the discourse-effect it engenders.”4
With hindsight, queer theory’s poststructuralist mistrust in identity and
representation corresponded neatly with Hong Kong’s ambivalent and
multivocal queer politics. This is what Leung refers to as Hong Kong’s
queer undercurrent, inspired by the pop lyrics written by Lin Xi (“In this
city/It is not possible/To love without undercurrents”).5
But then, as an unexpected blast that cracks open the undercurrents of
queer invisibility and unrepresentability, reality overtook theory, and
surprised and challenged it, in the year 2012. The coming out of Anthony
Wong during a live performance marked the turning point. This act was
soon followed by similar acts of coming out of other pop stars. Taking
Hong Kong and this particular year as a lens, this chapter investigates the
articulation between sexuality and popular music in the context of China. In
doing so, we will trace the emergence of a Chinese movement to find
indigenous ways of understanding sexual diversity. Interwoven with such
resistance against dominant Western theories and practices, particularly the
politics of visibility, is a local cultivation of ambivalence and invisibility,
itself a complex manifestation of the ongoing interaction between queer
identity and Hong Kong identity. Finally, we will come back to—and try to
make sense of—the disruptive surprise of public figures coming out,
apparently in accordance with Western models and in contrast to earlier
local sexual politics of ambivalence and invisibility.
In short, this chapter presents an inquiry into global queer theory and
local popular music cultures and aims to show how the latter holds the
potential to upset, or at least surprise, the conceptual premises of the former.
Before going there, let us revisit briefly the queer history of Hong Kong,
particularly the city’s intersection with its “colonizers” and the intersection
of queer politics with popular culture and pop music.
 O T K ’

Hong Kong occupies a special place in the recent history of China. Once
part of the British Empire, Hong Kong lives on with a legacy of morality
and laws deeply influenced by Victorian values that, in their validation of
family, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, sit comfortably with hegemonic
understandings of Confucian values. The postcolonial condition of Hong
Kong is highly ambivalent. Not only does Hong Kong lack a strong
precolonial history—it was a small fishing village rather than a city—its
“return” to the mainland was and is still severely contested. Every year on
July 1, to commemorate the handover that took place in 1997, thousands of
people go to the streets to join a march for democracy. The massive and
enduring occupation of strategic downtown areas in 2014, known as the
Umbrella Movement, was another example of Hong Kong’s discontent with
its political integration with the mainland. Hong Kong seems to be caught
forever between colonizers.6 Rather than branding it as the place where East
meets West, as the local authorities do,7 it makes more sense to read it as a
place that is always already in-between, impure and incomplete—a place
where neither East nor West suffice, where both constructs are characterized
by a lack rather than substance. In the wake of the handover, Hong Kong
eagerly started to reinvent itself. In the words of Abbas, Hong Kong culture
“appeared at the moment when something was disappearing: [it was] a case
of love at last sight, a culture of disappearance.”8 Popular culture, including
music, provided one crucial site for the construction of a Hong Kong
identity that seemed to be on the verge of disappearance.
For most of the time during British rule, male homosexual acts were
illegal in Hong Kong, subject to the maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
In 1980, the police inspector John MacLennan was found dead under
suspicious circumstances in his apartment after charges of gross indecency.
The controversial incident and an ensuing official inquiry stirred up heated
debate in Hong Kong, leading to the subsequent decriminalization of sexual
acts between men in 1991.9 With the forthcoming return of Hong Kong to
Chinese sovereignty, the British colonizers demonstrated a slow but
perceptible change of attitude and policies, arguing for more freedom,
democracy, and individual (including sexual) rights. Such a turn provoked
skepticism and downright criticism, attributing the outgoing
administration’s change to geopolitical agendas (namely, imposing
“Western” notions of democracy and human rights upon Chinese territory),
rather than genuine concerns. Regardless of the colonizers’ intentions, the
result was that it allowed more legal, discursive, and performative space for
sexual rights. The years surrounding the handover—the 1990s—were also
the years when processes of globalization went into full swing, allowing a
global proliferation of discourse on LGBT rights.
The reappearance of Hong Kong culture hence came with a surfacing of
sexual cultures that had remained until then largely hidden and censored.
One key moment in this proliferation of emerging sexual cultures in Hong
Kong was the organization of a recurring gay and lesbian film festival, the
first of its kind in the Sinophone world, beginning in 1989. Remarkably,
this festival appropriated an important communist term, “tongzhi” (meaning
“comrade”), as a label for gay and lesbian. The fact that it takes a film
festival to claim a new category attests to the importance of cultural
productions for the negotiation of sexuality.
Since then, the term “tongzhi” has circulated widely among Chinese-
speaking communities with reference to gay and lesbian people and
cultures. Some authors have pointed at a friction between these labels,
arguing that tongzhi stands for a Chinese articulation of “homosexuality”
that is decidedly different from the Anglophone term “gay.” One important
advocate of the assumed virtues of tongzhi is Chou Wah-shan. In two book-
length treatises, On Tongzhi and Postcolonial Tongzhi, Chou argues that the
Chinese attitude toward sexuality, including same-sex acts, has always been
tolerant, nonstigmatized, and nonstigmatizing.10 He mobilizes essentialist
notions of Chinese culture to make his point, claiming that so long as
family obligations (including reproduction) are fulfilled, sexual enjoyments
of all kinds are permitted in traditional Chinese culture. For Chou, Chinese
culture is “a crystallization of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, all of
which do not consider sex shameful, nor is homosexuality treated as a
perverted, sinful act.”11 He consequently argues for a model that is
nonconfrontational, nonverbal, and nonsex-oriented, thrusting forward
tongzhi as a rejection of Western nomenclature and his model as a
postcolonial one transcending the categories imposed upon China by the
West. In other words, calling oneself tongzhi is a political act that radically
reroutes homosexual practices and identifications from the gender and the
sexual—as prescribed by dominant Western forms of gay politics—to the
more tolerant, if only discreet, Chinese culture of sexual enjoyment and
beyond. Being tongzhi underlines solidarity, community, and politics of a
certain kind—a comrade of an unannounced revolution. According to
Chou’s theorization, “‘tongzhi’ is not defined by the gender of one’s object
of sexual desire. It represents the political choice of one’s (sexual)
identity.”12
The problems with such an argument are manifold; not the least of these
is the reification of a monolithic reading of Chinese culture and the
potential conservative implications. The nonconfrontational, nonverbal, and
nonsex-oriented model that Chou proposes corresponds, for instance, to a
conservative preference for harmony, for the status quo, which continues to
privilege certain classes. After all, those who were allowed to enjoy their
sexual freedom so long as they did not disturb the familial, patriarchal
system were men with good backgrounds. Nevertheless, Chou’s gesturing
toward the possibility of an articulation of sexuality that does not rely on
fixed identity positions like “gay” or “lesbian,” and one that integrates local
traditions into globalized narratives, remains valuable. We witness here a
friction between the postcolonial desire to resist the disciplinary hegemonic
workings of labels that have a specific history in the West, thus pointing at
the need to provincialize notions like “gay,” “homosexual,” and “queer,”
and the critical urgency to resist any form of cultural essentialism, as can be
traced in a call for indigenous theory with culturally specific labels. This
requires walking on a conceptual tightrope. Others, including Chris Berry,
Lucetta Kam, Travis Kong, Helen Hok-sze Leung, Song Hwee Lim, Fran
Martin, and Audrey Yue, have pursued that postcolonial direction, but in
more critical and promising ways,13 as we will show later when reflecting
upon the work of Leung.
Before we move on to discuss Leung’s mobilization of another term, we
want to underline the circulation and mutation of tongzhi in the Sinophone
world, the amplification of its meanings and associations that often
contradict and contest Chou’s conceptualization. Indeed, the popularity of
the term tongzhi has helped to shape the gay community in the Sinophone
world over the 1990s and 2000s. It provides a tongue-in-cheek twist to
communist jargon, making fun of a political system that has for a long time
denied the existence of homosexuality. However, while the term continues
to offer an indigenous, ambivalent alternative to homosexual people, it has
also paradoxically lent itself as a postcolonial label to the pursuit of an
LGBT identity politics not unlike its counterpart under the Western model.
Leung observes how the notion of ku’er (literally “cool child”)
proliferated in Taiwan in the 1990s. She argues that “[k]u’er was
conceptualized in explicit contrast to tongzhi: while the former
approximates the theoretical and deconstructive stance of ‘queer,’ the latter
is associated with LGBT identity politics.”14 Leung argues against the
universality and linear progression of gay and lesbian liberation that she
aptly labels “the global gay narrative.”15 To steer away from that narrative,
she proposes to “look for stories half-heard and dimly remembered that
circulate in the nooks and crannies of daily life.”16 Postcolonial Hong
Kong, to Leung, is a city whose story is difficult to tell, a city whose claims
for sovereignty are difficult to make; it is a city that borders on the
unrepresentable while being on the verge of disappearance. This, in her
view, is what makes it so suitable for queer stories, as these are the stories
that cannot quite get told. For her, “it is perhaps no coincidence that some
of the most creative tales about the postcolonial city, and the most visionary
stories of survival under its crisis-ridden milieu, are told through a queer
lens.”17
A queer lens hints at the importance of queer cinema, which has
received considerable scholarly attention18—but what about queer sounds?
Few scholars have probed the connection between sexuality and Chinese
popular music. This is striking, as numerous pop stars in the Sinophone
world, among them Faye Wong, Anita Mui, Leslie Cheung, and Anthony
Wong, have transgressed gendered and sexual boundaries for decades. They
did so not in an open and loud voice; on the contrary, like the queer
undercurrents that Leung claims to be emblematic for Hong Kong cinema,
their voices whisper, giving an almost inaudible twist to the
heteronormative flows and sounds of the city.
 De Kloet shows in his work on Chinese popular music how Anthony
Wong, in his music, lyrics, and imagery, plays a multivocal game with
gender and sexuality.19 For instance, for one of his album cover images,
Wong, striking a reptilian, narcissistic pose, adorned his face and his hands,
the only exposed and readily gendered parts of his body, with thousands of
crystal beads (Figure 31.2). During the concert that became the occasion for
his coming out, Wong wore heavy mascara, a thick moustache, a phallic
hat, and an outfit with protruding flashlights circling and flickering at
himself, a comment on celebrity and paparazzi culture (Figure 31.3). On the
huge screen behind him played a video of Wong acting as a man and a
woman flirting with, chasing, and finally embracing each other. His campy
outfits, the ambivalent and at times sexually provocative lyrics, his
audacious stage performances, and the electronic soundscape all evoke
sexual ambiguity and fluidity. This can be read not so much as a hidden
claim on identity, but rather as a resistance to surrendering to fixed identity
categories.
Anthony Wong’s choice not to come out, nor to align himself to labels
such as tongzhi or ku’er until 2012 can be read as an act to remain
deliberately ambivalent, as a queer escape route out of fixed identity
politics. In Daniel Williford’s words, Wong can be read as practicing a
politics of invisibility, given that “the visible, sayable, and doable, are the
possible aesthetic enunciations that circulate in a social world which is
already the realm of the political, and every aesthetic gesture is either
allowed or must insist upon its legibility.”20 Hence, a politics of the
invisible, of the undercurrents, may constitute a stronger vantage point for
queer cultures, particularly in the postcolonial context of Hong Kong.
Wong’s choice to remain silent, of course, can also be read as a marketing
choice, driven by a desire not to alienate Wong’s female fan base and
possibly lose money-making opportunities.
FIGURE 31.2 Anthony Wong posing for one of his album cover photos.
(Courtesy of Wing Shya)
FIGURE 31.3 Anthony Wong in his “coming out” concert.
(Courtesy of Dan Ho)

In many ways, what Wong did was not unlike the ambivalence that some
Western performers cultivated; Neil Tennant, Michael Stipe, Boy George,
and George Michael, for instance, all evaded questions about their sexual
identity until, starting in the mid-1990s, they explicitly came out as gay or
queer, invariably after their music careers had reached their peaks. Some
celebrities of the younger generation still go through a period of unclarity
before coming out, such as Mika and Sean Hayes. What differentiates
Wong’s performance and politics from his Western counterparts, however,
is precisely the distinctly local context—the postcolonial underpinnings of
the reluctance or refusal to do the same as the West, which is always there.
And his coming out in 2012 was also embedded in another local condition
—that of paparazzi culture.
We will discuss that point later in this chapter. For now, it suffices to
note that Anthony Wong’s music resonates clearly with a queer aesthetics,
whether in terms of lyrical content or musical style—for instance, in one of
his songs, “How Great Thou Art,” Anthony Wong twisted the Christian
hymn of the same title into a critique of Chinese patriarchy, releasing a
version in a remix of tango and house styles subtitled “Tango in My
Father’s House.” And the duo Tat Ming Pair, to which he belonged prior to
his solo career, has often been compared to the Pet Shop Boys, both for
their common roots in electronic music and their penchant for satirical
commentaries on heteronormative society and culture. Nevertheless,
Wong’s opaque identity politics rendered impossible a clear-cut articulation
between the star and his sexuality.
Among the few studies on queerness and pop music in the Chinese
context, Helen Hok-sze Leung has devoted one chapter to Leslie Cheung,
the singer and actor who committed suicide on April 1, 2003, in her book
focusing on cinema. In the chapter, titled “In Queer Memory,” Leung
explicates the ambivalence of Cheung’s sexuality that, in her view,
precisely constitutes his queerness. His refusal to come out, like the pre-
2012 Anthony Wong, and his reference to his partner as a good friend, are
indicative of another kind of sexual politics—the opaque, the playful, the
ambiguous kind. After his death, the gay movement in Hong Kong hailed
him eagerly as their icon; yet in Leung’s view, “Cheung’s life and work tell
a story that is much less about pride and courage, as the eulogies
emphasized, than about negotiation and foreclosure.”21 The ambivalence of
Cheung’s sexuality allows for multiple readings and identifications; it
encourages a queer audience to look for queer meanings, and as such
engage in a hidden, secret play of queer decoding. For Leung, it “seems
fitting to honour his life’s work not with what we think we know of him but
precisely with what he so persistently compelled us to not know about
him.”22 In short, as with Anthony Wong, it is a politics of invisibility and
opacity that, in the context of postcolonial Hong Kong, allows for queer
undercurrents in popular music culture.
In her book-length study on Leslie Cheung’s “artistic image,” including
a chapter on his gender representation in Hong Kong pop music, Natalia
Chan rebukes the media in Hong Kong for its negative coverage of
Cheung’s suicide and obsession with his sexuality.23 On the other hand, as
Leung argues convincingly in her book chapter, the queer undercurrents of
popular music may also be enabled, if not amplified, by Hong Kong’s
gossip and paparazzi culture. Cheung’s assumed “gender insubordination”
was not so much a lone battle, as Chan claims, but rather “part of a
local/global trend whereby artists’ gender experimentation on stage could
be widely accepted in the mainstream, while their sexual preference off
stage remained ambivalent.”24
Gossip, in this sense, can be considered constitutive for self-making and
queer culture rather than oppositional or antagonistic—in particular, for a
dialectical politics of invisibility and (spectacular) visibility, which is what
keeps Hong Kong’s queer undercurrents going. According to Leung,
gossips are ambivalent, as they are always haunted by the possibility of
dishonesty, deceit, or fabrication. In other words, they may “disclose” a pop
star, be it Leslie Cheung or Anthony Wong, to be gay, but such disclosure,
given its gossipy nature, is never totally trusted. It is in this representational
insecurity and eternal deferral of meaning that the potential for self-making
and queer culture lies. As such, Hong Kong queer culture can serve as a
salient case of the unrepresentableness of queer identity, as a possible
alternative to LGBT identity politics, and ultimately as an alternative to the
Western way of coming out and claiming a sexual self. In other words, the
case of Hong Kong pop stars in such a reading corresponds closely with the
poststructuralist theoretical zeal of queer theory. But then, in 2012, this
queer ambivalence was suddenly interrupted by Wong’s public coming out
on stage.
 O Y C O

If, following Leung, ambiguity, the playfulness of not knowing and of

ignorance, has been the legacy of Hong Kong’s queer icon Leslie Cheung,
and “undercurrents” the running theme of the city’s queerness and music,
we saw breaking waves in the year 2012. During the last concert staged by
his electronic duo Tat Ming Pair, on April 23, Anthony Wong announced to
an audience of almost 10,000 in the Hong Kong Coliseum: “I am a geilo.”
“Geilo” is a Cantonese term circulated in local vernacular. Used initially
and derisively by the larger society against gay men, the term is now
appropriated by gay men themselves, sometimes defiantly, sometimes
jokingly. “Gei” is the sound translation of the English “gay,” and “lo”
denotes “man” or “guy.”
Almost half a year later, during the closing performance of the annual
Hong Kong Pride Parade on November 11, another pop star, Denise Ho
Wan-see, came out, proclaiming: “I am a tongzhi.” These two pop music
celebrities were not the only ones who came out in this historical year. In
September, politician Raymond Chan Chi-chuen came out after he was
elected to the city’s legislative body, becoming the first publicly gay
political figure not only in Hong Kong, but also in the Chinese-speaking
region as a whole. In the same month, Gigi Chao Sik-chi, a businessperson
and daughter of a local tycoon, “admitted” to the press that she and her
female friend were married in France earlier that year. Her father, Cecil
Chao, in a gesture evoking both patriarchy and global capitalism, made a
public offer of $65 million to any man who could woo and marry Gigi.25
Surfing on these waves of coming out, a number of Chinese-language
LGBT websites ran feature articles listing public figures who came out and
the ways that they did it.26 Then, as soon as January, 2013, Wong, Ho,
Chan, Chao, and some of the other public figures concerned established a
group called Big Love Alliance to pursue LGBT rights in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong–based gender studies scholar Lucetta Kam calls 2012 “the
year of coming out.”27 Time Out Hong Kong writes that “this year has seen
gay issues placed firmly on the table in our generally conservative city.”28
Another highlight was the February 2013 issue of the local signature
lifestyle and intellectual magazine City. Displaying the words “Gay &
Proud” prominently, in English and depicted in rainbow colors, the cover
featured the four public figures mentioned previously, as well as Joey
Leung Cho-yiu, another dramatic actor who had staged several gay-themed
performances. City’s chief editor, Tieh Chang, in his editorial commentary,
foregrounded the disenfranchised position of people with alternative
sexualities: “Even though they have come out of the closet, even though
they are high-profile political figure, stars and celebrities, they still do not
enjoy the same rights as heterosexuals.”29 In conclusion, he said, “‘We are
tongzhi’—yes, in the campaign for equal rights, no matter you are
heterosexuals or homosexuals, no matter Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland
China, walking hand in hand, we are tongzhi.”30 Here, Chang used
“tongzhi,” a term that is indigenous, ambivalent, nonsex-oriented, and more
inclusive than the Western “gay” or “queer,” to rally support for the politics
that he and his magazine were championing. Put differently, Chang’s
reference to heterosexuals and homosexuals in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or
mainland China underlines the discursive space opened up by the linguistic
shift from “gay” or “queer” to “tongzhi.”
What does the year 2012 tell us? If the metaphor of undercurrents was
useful in helping us understand, to repeat Leung’s words, “the story that
cannot quite get told,”31 or the queer story of Hong Kong, what was going
on that seemed to have broken the undercurrents into high-profile waves, to
have told the not-quite-told? More specific to our purposes, how can we
make sense of these waves of coming out when we continue our thinking on
pop music and queerness in Hong Kong? In the following discussion, we
offer an initial attempt, by mobilizing three themes: stardom and gossip
culture, queerness, and Hong Kong, to revisit finally the central issue of
knowledge production in queer studies in general.
First comes stardom and gossip culture. When asked subsequently if he
had contemplated his action at length before his coming out, Anthony Wong
replied that it was more like a decision made at the spur of the moment. “I
only told my manager minutes before the concert started and he said ok,”
Wong explained during a private conversation with Yiu Fai Chow, one of
the authors and a long-time collaborator with Wong. In particular, Wong
was fed up with all the stalking and interrogation by the local paparazzi.
When Denise Ho came out, she offered a similar line of thought.
Their statements, while not necessarily undermining their politics of
resistance to the heteronormative order, underscore a personal act against
infringement of their privacy by radically going public. That very act itself
was queer. The argument that we want to make here is: While Wong and
Ho, not unlike Leslie Cheung, had long been performing with ambiguity
and playfulness, literally and figuratively, what compelled them to assume a
different practice, tactic, and politics of their queer identity was violence of
a different order: that of the tabloid press. In other words, it took another
popular medium—popular at least in the sense of its correspondence to
democratic fantasies and capitalistic logic—that evoked the limits of the
politics of ambiguity. Whereas gossip can be productive for self-making,
the public gossip culture of Hong Kong apparently reached its limits for
these stars and required a whole different act of self-making. In fact, the
doggedness of the local paparazzi and the popularity of tabloid press in
Hong Kong earned this group of entertainment journalists the name of
“doggies.” Recall Wong’s outfit with flashlights during the “coming out
concert”?
Shelving the moral issues brought forward by the tabloid press and
paparazzi practices, what we want to contend is this: Insofar as these
coming out stories were embedded in multiple intersections among the
celebrity, entertainment, music, and queer cultures, the Hong Kong
experience reminds us that it is not enough to investigate the music and the
extramusical styles of Wong and Ho, for example, as queer pop stars. In a
local context like that of Hong Kong, we argue, the study of queer practices
in pop music must also be situated in the fields of celebrity and
entertainment culture, which themselves are situated in related and larger
issues of capitalism and democracy.
Second comes queerness. Allow us to continue the narrative—or one
version of the narrative—about the tabloid and paparazzi culture in Hong
Kong. While Anthony Wong and Denise Ho reacted against these
voyeuristic attempts by coming out themselves, it should also be noted that
the same media seemed to be reporting their coming out rather kindly,
sometimes even positively. According to Hong Kong–based music scholar
Paris Lau, it is the same logic of gossip fabrication that drives these media
to expose, scandalize, and ultimately silence queer existence, and at the
same time to report the coming out moments as “another hot gossip of
popular culture.” In his paper on media representation and coming-out
politics, Lau continues to compare the situation of Hong Kong to the much
harsher media representation of sexual minorities in mainland China, and
finally to “rethink gender politics and the progress of democracy in Chinese
societies.”32 It is the reference to Chinese politics that this particular queer
experience in postcolonial, or some would say renationalized or
recolonized, Hong Kong seems to continue to insert.
Lucetta Kam also connects the stories about the coming out (of Anthony
Wong and the others) and the coming home (of Hong Kong to Beijing rule,
at least in dominant official discourse), and reflects on the connection.33
Unlike Lau, Kam is not comparing mainland China to Hong Kong; instead,
she alludes to the imbrication of the local to the national and contemplates
identity politics, both as a queer person and a Hong Kong–Chinese. While
coming out may be an act to actualize the agency of sexual minorities,
coming home or the assumption of a fixed national Chinese identity, Kam
argues, should not become the hegemonic interpellation among the people
living in the postcolonial city. Quite aside from Kam and Lau’s arguments,
what we want to foreground is that discussions of local queer politics in the
current historical conjuncture always already interact with national,
postcolonial politics. As Kam writes at the very beginning of her piece,
“This essay was written in a chaotic time in Hong Kong. Or, to put it more
accurately, it was written in one of the chaotic times in Hong Kong.”34
It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to give a detailed account
of the “chaotic time” in Hong Kong, not only in the year of 2012, but also
beyond. It suffices to quote one example, where a presumably top-down
initiative to introduce “national education” caused widespread opposition,
leading to massive demonstrations and finally forcing the local
administration to withdraw. To many an opponent, the initiative was
imposed by Beijing to brainwash Hong Kongers into becoming Chinese
nationals. Similar dynamics drove huge populations to occupy the streets in
Hong Kong, culminating in the historic Umbrella Movement.
 Indeed, interviews and commentaries on Anthony Wong’s coming out
are similarly embedded in the postcolonial context. Speaking to a reporter
from a mainland Chinese website, Wong gestured to the increasing Beijing
domination of local affairs and said, “My coming out represents Hong
Kong’s tolerance and freedom.”35 To another mainland Chinese magazine,
he said, “Hong Kong always cherishes this: freedom. This city has many
valuable things, like its openness and tolerance. But at the same time, it is
always confused about its identity.”36 Wong’s utterance led the interviewer
to comment:
For many Hong Kongers, Wong’s coming out is not only his coming out. He is coming out
for Hong Kong. His identity confusion is just like Hong Kong’s identity confusion now. He
is speaking on behalf of Hong Kong. Anthony Wong = Hong Kong.37

In another interview with Radio Television Hong Kong, Wong pointed

more specifically to a thorny political issue between Hong Kong and
Beijing: direct election. Connecting the issue of LGBT rights to direct
election, he said, “To me, they are the same. If we don’t have a
representative legislature, no one will fight for our rights. Our current
administration doesn’t have the mandate to represent the people.”38
If Wong’s personal identity confusion is thus conflated with the city’s
identity confusion, queer politics as manifested in Hong Kong in the year
2012 must be understood via its intersection with the city’s other politics,
postcolonial and national. Queerness, in that sense, is not “only” about
sexual minorities of any locality, but about that locality being a minority as
well. Queer studies of pop music should also be informed accordingly.
Following this line of thought, the coming-out narratives of these Hong
Kong pop stars should be seen as a counternarrative to Hong Kong’s
political and economic marginalization. Right after Anthony Wong’s
coming out, news immediately circulated in and dominated the media and
queer space in mainland China. As we already mentioned, rainbow flags
were waving at a music festival in Beijing, presumably the first time in a
public space in mainland China.39 To quote Aaron Lecklider’s introduction
to a special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies dedicated to
queer studies of popular music, the fundamental question is “how ‘queer’ is
defined by performers, audiences, and the academics writing about them.”40
The Hong Kong experience defines “queer” as a practical and analytic
category always and already enmeshed in the matrix of the local, national,
and postcolonial.
Finally, let’s turn to Hong Kong. Following her critique of subcultural
theories, Judith Halberstam spells out four considerations that need to be
taken into account when studying queer subcultures. One of these is to
rethink the relationship between theorists and subcultural participants.41
While we do not necessarily subscribe to the notion of subculture, we align
ourselves with such a call to rethink, particularly now that so much
happened in 2012 in Hong Kong.
Before this “year of coming out,” as we have shown earlier, theorists on
queer culture in Hong Kong, like many other colleagues operating in fields
dominated by “Western” nomenclature, concepts, and practices, have made
many attempts to oscillate and reconcile between Western theories and what
was happening locally. Queer politics in Hong Kong, as noted by Cheuk
Yin Li, is historically different from its European and American versions.
Citing three major disciplinary discourses on sexual cultures in “Hong
Kong as an East Asian locale”—residual Chinese ethics, the British colonial
legacy, and the growing influence of rightist Christian influences and
nongovernmental organizations—Li predicted a continuous “absence of
voices demanding institutional and confrontational queer politics.”42 What
took place in the year of Li’s publication, 2012, rather, was precisely the
emergence of such voices. If the relationship between theorists and queer
subjects in Hong Kong has been characterized by understanding (i.e., the
theorists trying to understand their subjects), 2012 witnessed a shift toward
surprising (i.e., the subjects surprising their theorists), toward a need to
reunderstand after the surprise.
This obviously engenders a series of questions and attempts: What is the
“new” queer politics in Hong Kong, in the larger Chinese cultural context,
and even in the East Asian locales? While ambiguity is not sufficient to
understand local queer practices and politics, how should the coming out of
these local pop stars be understood? Instead of coming out, would it be
more meaningful and productive to talk of “breaking open,” as some
commentaries have done?43 Amid the earnestness to reunderstand, we
believe that we need to refer to Halberstam’s plea again, not to reunderstand
the queer subjects per se, but to rethink the relationship between them and
their theorists. It is, in other words, about production of queer knowledge as
much as about queer production of knowledge. If “the bizarre, the unusual,
or the transgressive” is the vernacular expression of queer,44 we want to add
“the surprising.” As informed by the Hong Kong experience, we who work
on queerness and popular music queerness and film, or queerness and
whatever, either in the West or elsewhere, must allow ourselves to be
surprised. If queer studies, like any other mode of knowledge production,
will become normative and thus expected, then such surprising moments
are the moments that the queer subjects are queering the queer studies that
we are doing.
 A S

As some form of postscript to the plea for surprise, we would like to outline
two intertwining strands of queer politics and practices in Hong Kong that
we have observed after the “year of coming out.” First, almost as expected
as it was once surprising, the pop stars who came out in 2012 have
capitalized on the surge of public attention that followed and transformed
rather smoothly and swiftly from queer celebrities to queer activists. As
mentioned, in 2013, Anthony Wong and Denise Ho joined with Gigi Chao,
Raymond Chan, and some other sympathizers to form a new organization
called Big Love Alliance. Their objective, according to their website, is “to
promote the equality of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and queers
and their liberation from all forms of discrimination.” Most of the activities
organized by Big Love can be characterized under the kind of identity-
driven politics known in the West, such as lobbying and fighting for
antidiscrimination and gay marriage legislation.
Given the high profile of these pop stars and Big Love, the post-2012
queer landscape of Hong Kong saw an increasing alliance between this
group and other organizations already active in the city. Wong and Ho have
become indispensable rallying figures for such campaigning events as the
Gay Pride, Pink Dot, Pink Season and IDAHOT HK, attracting thousands
of participants, claiming a new visibility for queer people and issues in the
community at large.
Second, the past few years have also witnessed an increasing and
increasingly visible participation of queer activists, as well as an insertion
of queer politics in the “larger” struggle for democracy and freedom in
Hong Kong. Following his long-term engagement with issues concerning
the future of Hong Kong and the city’s relationship with Beijing, Anthony
Wong became a logical ally for prodemocracy and antiestablishment forces,
especially in his capacity as one of the figureheads of Big Love. It was
hardly surprising, then, that he placed himself at the center of the Umbrella
Movement in 2014. Slightly less expected was Denise Ho’s involvement, as
her music has never really dealt with political issues like Wong’s.
Nonetheless, as visibly as they joined hands in queer events, they occupied
the streets with the Umbrella supporters, stood on the main podium to speak
to them, and disseminated messages on their social media platforms—to the
extent that both Wong and Ho were put on a blacklist compiled by
authorities in mainland China.
While Beijing would not confirm the existence of such a blacklist, it
became apparent that both artists stopped receiving invitations to perform in
mainland China (for some reason). Wong told the authors how his contract
negotiation with a Beijing-based record label came to a suspiciously abrupt
end when he took a high-profile position with the Umbrella Movement. In
2016, Ho found her concert sponsor, L’Oreal, retreating from the Hong
Kong project, as mainland consumers were reported to be angered by the
French cosmetic concern’s support of such an anti-Beijing artist,
threatening to boycott L’Oreal. The intricate overlapping of queer and
prodemocratic politics and activism became one of the “chapters” in Evans
Chan’s documentary Raise the Umbrellas (2016).
Thus, in short, has been the development of queer politics in post-2012
Hong Kong. Turning to queer scholarship, not much has been published
except a review of activist practices in Hong Kong, which marks the post-
2012 years tentatively as a new wave of tongzhi movement; the piece
concluded that “[i]ncreasing queer visibility in the political arena may pose
new challenges for Hong Kong and the tongzhi movement.”45
Interestingly, in tandem with the Big Love Alliance, several teachers and
academics concerned with gender and sexuality issues (including one of the
authors of this chapter) set up a new group called the Hong Kong Scholars
Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, in 2013, “to work towards a
more open and progressive society.”46 We have yet to see how these queer
scholars may further theorize on what has been going on in addition to their
community engagement—perhaps it is too soon, or perhaps they would
rather redo the relationship between queer theories and their subjects before
hastening to reunderstand it. We don’t know.47
N
1. Y. S. Lo, “Anthony Wong: Rainbow in Beijing” [黄耀明北京見彩虹], Apple Daily (2012), E8.
2. Kong (2015).
3. H. H. S. Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Toronto: UBC
Press, 2008), 4.
4. Sudeep Dasgupta, “Words, Bodies, Times: Queer Theory Before and After Itself,” Borderlands
8, no. 2 (2009): 3.
5. Leung, Undercurrents.
6. R. Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,”
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 151–170.
7. S. Y. W. Chu, “Brand Hong Kong: Asia’s World City as Method?” Visual Anthropology 24
(2011): 46–58.
8. A. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong.” Public Culture 12, no. 3
(2000): 777.
9. P. S. Y. Ho and A. K. T. Tsang, “Negotiating anal intercourse in inter-racial gay relationships in
Hong Kong,” Sexualities 3, no. 3 (2000): 299–323.
10. W. S. Chou, On Tongzhi [ 同志論 ] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Tongzhi Study Centre, 1995); W.
後殖民同志
S. Chou, Postcolonial Tongzhi [ ] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Tongzhi Study Centre,
1997).
11. Chou, Postcolonial Tongzhi, 322.
12. Chou, On Tongzhi, 363; see also J. De Kloet, “Gendering China Studies: Peripheral
Perspectives, Central Questions.” China Information XXII, no. 2 (2008): 202.
13. C. Berry, “Asian Values, Family Values—Film, Video, and Lesbian and Gay Identities.” Journal
of Homosexuality 40, nos. 3–4 (2008): 211–231; Kam (2013b); T. S. K. Kong, “A fading
Tongzhi Heterotopia: Hong Kong Older Gay Men’s Use of Spaces,” Sexualities 15, no. 8
(2012), 896–916; H. H. S. Leung, Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong
(Toronto: UBC Press, 2008); S. H. Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male
Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2006); F. Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and
Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003); A. Yue (2000), “What’s So
Queer About Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer (N) Asian: Interface, Community, Belonging.”
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2000): 251–264.
14. Leung, Undercurrents, 3.
15. Ibid., 3–4.
16. H. H. S. Leung, “No Wardrobe in Broad Daylight,” [光天化日無衣櫃], Singtao Daily, May 8,
2012. Retrieved from http://news.singtao.ca/calgary/2012-05-
08/canada1336470551d3852285.html.
17. Leung, Undercurrents, 6.
18. Ibid.; Lim, Celluloid Comrades.
19. J. De Kloet, China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth, and Popular Music (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
20. D. Williford, “Queer Aesthetics.” Borderlands 8, no. 2 (2009), 13.
21. Leung, Undercurrents, 88.
22. Ibid., 105 (author’s emphasis).
23. N. Chan, Butterfly of Forbidden Colors: The Artistic Image of Leslie Cheung [ 禁色的蝴蝶: 張
國榮的藝術形象 ] (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2008)
24. Leung, Undercurrents, 90.
25. “Hong Kong Tycoon Recruits Husband for Lesbian Daughter.” BBC News Asia, September 26,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19733003.
26. For instance, see M. A. King, “Hong Kong: The Come-out Hong Kong Celebrities” [香港: 香港
出 櫃 同 志 名 人 系 列 ], TT1069, January 15, 2013. Retrieved from
http://www.tt1069.com/bbs/thread-1657981-1-1.html.
27. Kam (2013a).
28. A. Tam, “Queer HK—HOCC,” Time Out Hong Kong, December 17, 2012;
http://www.timeout.com.hk/gay-lesbian/features/55079/hocc.html.
29. T. Chang, “We Are Tongzhis.” [我們是同志]. City Magazine 437 (2013, February): 24.
30. Ibid.
31. Leung, Undercurrents, 6.
32. P. Lau, Media Representation and Coming-out Politics in Hong Kong and China (forthcoming).
33. Kam (2013a).
34. Ibid.
35. Anthony Wong, “My Coming Out Represents Hong Kong’s Tolerance and Freedom” [黄耀明:
出 櫃 代 表 香 港 的 包 容 與 自 由 ], May 14, 2012. Netease [ 網易 ]. Retrieved from
http://ent.163.com/special/attitudehym/.
36. L. Lee and H. Y. R. Wu, “Anthony Wong: Let’s Say No to Fear, Thank You.” [黃耀明: 一起向
恐懼說不，多謝.] Rewu [ 人物 ] 13, no. 6 (2012).
37. Ibid.
38. Radio Television Hong Kong. “Friday Host,” [ 星 期 五 主 場 ], August 2, 2013;
http://programme.rthk.hk/rthk/tv/programme.php?d=2013-08-02&p=5929&m=episode#.
39. Lo, “Anthony Wong: Rainbow in Beijing.”
40. A. Lecklider, ed., “Queer Studies of Popular Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no.
2 (2006): 120.
41. J. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York:
New York University Press, 2005).
42. C. Y. Li, “The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC)
in Hong Kong,” Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (2012);
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/325/286.
43. See, for instance, Kam, 2013; Leung, “No Wardrobe in Broad Daylight.”
44. Lecklider, “Queer Studies of Popular Music”: 120.
45. Kong, T. S. K., S. H. L. Lau, and E. C. Y. Li. “The Fourth Wave? A Critical Reflection on the
Tongzhi Movement in Hong Kong.” In Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia,
edited by M. McLelland and V. Mackie, 200. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
46. Retrieved from their facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Scholars-Alliance-for-Sexual-
and-Gender-Diversity-
%E5%AD%B8%E4%BA%BA%E6%80%A7%E8%81%AF%E7%9B%9F-139780342877818/.
47. This work was supported by the European Research Council – ERC Consolidator grant under
grant number 616882 (ChinaCreative).
R
Abbas, A. “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong.” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000):
769–786.
Berry, C. “Asian Values, Family Values—Film, Video, and Lesbian and Gay Identities.” Journal of
Homosexuality 40, nos. 3–4 (2008): 211–231.
Chan, N. Butterfly of Forbidden Colors: The Artistic Image of Leslie Cheung [ 禁色的蝴蝶 張國榮 :
的藝術形象 ]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2008.
Chang, T. “We Are Tongzhis.” [我們是同志]. City Magazine, 437 (2013, February): 24.
Chou, W. S. On Tongzhi [ 同志論 ]. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Tongzhi Study Centre, 1995.
Chou, W. S. Postcolonial Tongzhi [ 後殖民同志 ]. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Tongzhi Study Centre,
1997.
Chow, R. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora: A
Journal of Transnational Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 151–170.
Chu, S. Y. W. “Brand Hong Kong: Asia’s World City as Method?” Visual Anthropology 24 (2011):
46–58.
Dasgupta, S. “Words, Bodies, Times: Queer Theory Before and After Itself.” Borderlands 8, no. 2
(2009): 1–20.
De Kloet, J. China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth, and Popular Music. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
De Kloet, J. “Gendering China Studies: Peripheral Perspectives, Central Questions.” China
Information XXII, no. 2 (2008): 195–219.
Halberstam, J. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New
York University Press, 2005.
Ho, P. S. Y., and A. K. T. Tsang. “Negotiating anal intercourse in inter-racial gay relationships in
Hong Kong.” Sexualities 3, no. 3 (2000): 299–323.
Hong Kong Scholars Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity. Retrieved from
https://www.facebook.com/Scholars-Alliance-for-Sexual-and-Gender-Diversity-
%E5%AD%B8%E4%BA%BA%E6%80%A7%E8%81%AF%E7%9B%9F-139780342877818/
“Hong Kong Tycoon Recruits Husband for Lesbian Daughter.” BBC News Asia, September 26, 2012.
Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19733003.
Kam, L. Y. L. “Return. Come Out” [ 回 歸 ， 出 櫃 ]. Journal of Local Discourse 2012: New Class
Struggle in Hong Kong. Taiwan and Hong Kong: Azoth Books Co. Ltd., 2013a.
Kam, L. Y. L. Shanghai Lalas: Female “Tongzhi” Communities and Politics in Urban China. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013b.
King, M. A. “Hong Kong: The Come-out Hong Kong Celebrities” [香港: 香港出櫃同志名人系列].
TT1069, January 15, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.tt1069.com/bbs/thread-1657981-1-1.html.
Kong, T. S. K. “A Fading Tongzhi Heterotopia: Hong Kong Older Gay Men’s Use of Spaces.”
Sexualities 15, no. 8 (2012): 896–916.
Kong, T. S. K., S. H. L. Lau, and E. C. Y. Li. “The Fourth Wave? A Critical Reflection on the
Tongzhi Movement in Hong Kong.” In Routledge Handbook of Sexuality Studies in East Asia,
 edited by M. McLelland and V. Mackie, 188–201. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
Lau, P. Media Representation and Coming-out Politics in Hong Kong and China, forthcoming.
Lee, L., and H. Y. R. Wu. “Anthony Wong: Let’s Say No to Fear, Thank You.” [黃耀明: 一起向恐懼
說不，多謝.] Renwu [ 人物 ] 13, no. 6, 42–47 (2012).
Lecklider, A. (ed.). “Queer Studies of Popular Music.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 2
(2006): 117–250.
Leung, H. H. S. Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong. Toronto: UBC Press,
2008.
Leung, H. H. S. “No Wardrobe in Broad Daylight.” [光天化日無衣櫃.] Singtao Daily, May 8, 2012.
Retrieved from http://news.singtao.ca/calgary/2012-05-08/canada1336470551d3852285.html.
Li, C. Y. “The Absence of Fan Activism in the Queer Fandom of Ho Denise Wan See (HOCC) in
Hong Kong.” Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (2012). Retrieved from
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/325/286.
Lim, S. H. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese
Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Lo, Y. S. “Anthony Wong: Rainbow in Beijing.” [黄耀明北京見彩虹.] Apple Daily, May 12, 2012,
E8.
Martin, F. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public
Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003.
Radio Television Hong Kong. “Friday Host.” [ 星 期 五 主 場 .] August 2, 2013. Retrieved from
http://programme.rthk.hk/rthk/tv/programme.php?d=2013-08-02&p=5929&m=episode#.
Song, H. L. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese
Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
Tam, A. “Queer HK—HOCC.” Time Out Hong Kong, December 17, 2012. Retrieved from
http://www.timeout.com.hk/gay-lesbian/features/55079/hocc.html.
Taylor, J. “Scenes and Sexualities: Queerly Reframing the Music Scenes Perspective.” Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2012), 143–156.
Williford, D. “Queer Aesthetics.” Borderlands 8, no. 2 (2009), 1–15.
Wong, Anthony. “My Coming Out Represents Hong Kong’s Tolerance and Freedom.” [黄耀明: 出櫃
代 表 香 港 的 包 容 與 自 由 .] May 14, 2012. Netease [ 網易 ]. Retrieved from
http://ent.163.com/special/attitudehym/.
Yue, A. “What’s So Queer About Happy Together? a.k.a. Queer (N) Asian: Interface, Community,
Belonging.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2000): 251–264.
 CHAPTER 32

H O W TO D O T H I N G S W I T H
T H E O RY
Cultural “Transcription,” “Queerness,” and
Ukrainian Pop
 S T E P HE N AMI CO

If the stimulus is a product of the particular music tradition that we carry, we perceive it as
such. If it is a product of a tradition we do not carry, we perceive it as we would a product of
the one we do carry, making such changes as we are accustomed to.1
In the future, there won’t be a conception of “relevant-irrelevant,” in fashion or in music…
people will become stronger and stop conforming to someone else.2

I May 2007, an argent, polyglot whirlwind, glittering with disco-ball

splendor, burst onto the Eurovision scene. Joined onstage by her co-
performers—two quicksilver-clad fabulously fey manboy dancers, and three
gold-sequined musicians (male baian player; zaftig female singers)—Verka
Serdiuchka’s performance rendered her one of the most talked-about
Ukrainian entrants in the history of the contest, missing replicating her
compatriot Ruslana’s 2004 victory by only thirty-three points. The giddy
auditory mélange offered by her song, “Dancing Lasha Tumbai”—a
combination of contemporary club music, Russian shanson, and a pan-
European schlager style, the text ricocheting from English, to German, to
Russian, to the untranslatable language of the song’s title—had its visual
correlate in the riotous salmagundi of her outfit, which deftly combined
support hose, signature gradient sunglasses, mirrored/tessellated cravat, and
a stainless-steel-colored trench coat, back emblazoned, jersey-like, with
player name and the sexually suggestive number “69.” It may have seemed
that the jutting cantilever of Verka’s ample bosom, juxtaposed against the
spindly circumferences of both her stilettos and calves, was a corporeal
analog to the giddy precariousness offered by this performance, one that
highlighted the precariousness of gender itself; Verka was, of course, the
onstage identity of (male) actor, singer, songwriter, satirist, and media
celebrity Andrei Danilko. In the context of the (Western) critical, academic
attention afforded Eurovision over the past several years, employing
specific types of theoretical constructs to which the academy had turned,3
performances such as Verka’s—rife with border crossings and fluidities
encompassing the musical, the visual, the textual, the corporeal—could
easily (productively, joyfully) be explored via theories of queerness.
And if queerness was to be found in Ukrainian popular music,
Serdiuchka/Danilko was hardly a one-off. Judging by numerous artists who
have appeared in Ukraine in the years following her international
performance, one might even posit a thread of queerness connecting them,
and permeating the popular music landscape, on multiple levels: group
Paiushchie trusy (The Singing Panties) and their wittily crude postfeminist
lampooning of contemporary culture; singer Onuka’s audiovisual
explorations of the porosity between nature and technology; The Quest
Pistols’ Technicolor house-cum-indie rock celebrations of the dancing
(alternative) body; Maks Barskikh’s liminal and generally half-
undressed/glistening-wet metrosexuality; the alternately Marvel-comics/alt-
rock/dystopian visual aesthetics of the band The Hardkiss; the
satirical/cultural-political songs of the pseudonymous YouTube star (turned
live performer) Valentin Strykalo;4 and the stiletto-clad, unabashed, and
celebratory objectification of the male body by “boy band” Kazaky.
While there is much to explore in the works of these artists, all currently
active at time of writing (save Kazaky, disbanded in 2016), in this chapter I
focus on a duo grouped, in one media account,5 along with Serdiuchka,
Strykalo, and the Quest Pistols, as examples of contemporary “trash”
culture: the now-defunct (but recently semi-resurrected) Kamon!!!, whose
products and practices may be seen as having queered and critiqued both
cultural and musical hierarchies. That the duo’s moniker itself is open to
several interpretations or associations (a Japanese heraldic symbol; a city in
Israel; a phonetic spelling of the English “come on”),6 and that the two
women operated on stage and in the press only via pseudonyms, suggest
performers and performances concerned not simply with “entertainment,”
but a performative, liberating interrogation of both meaning and identity.
Moreover, Kamon!!! was noted in the Russian-language online and print
media as representatives of a type of virtually/digitally spawned popular
music artist threatening nothing less than a “revolution” or “upheaval”
(perevorot) in the ossified, capital-driven world of Russian and Ukrainian
show business.7 Such artists were remarkable for their status as independent
outsiders (“they are not paid for by daddy, do not follow the rules”), and
also for the DIY (or “khendmeid,” “handmade”) ethos with which they
approach their work.8 In reference to Kamon!!! in particular, one journalist
noted that the group is not the product of a producer (neprodiuserskaia),9
but that the two women are involved in all aspects of their songs and
videos, from writing to performing to production—perhaps somewhat
related to the multiple agencies exhibited by many in the riot grrrl
movement.10
But if comparing a phenomenon of distinctly Western provenance (riot
grrrl) to one far removed from that site of genesis suggests difficulties and
dissonances, what happens when an entire theoretical apparatus of that
same provenance is brought to bear upon products and practices in locales
with significantly different histories, politics, and/or cultural practices?
Returning for a moment to Serdiuchka, and focusing on one part of her
attire, it is clear that the large, three-dimensional Soviet star atop her head
(for several years a trademark of sorts) signified numerous things to
numerous audiences, past and present—each point, perhaps, radiating out a
unique frequency to various receivers. These frequencies likely included
Ukraine’s geopolitical and historical location vis-à-vis the former USSR,
Verka’s status as a household name (arguably a superstar) in the Russian-
speaking realm, and the incisive and humorous critique of celebrity (star)
culture in contemporary Ukrainian and Russian society that informs and
drives much of Danilko’s performance as Verka. Indeed, one might argue
that Verka’s performances—for many Ukrainians—resonated due to their
highlighting of tensions revolving around historically situated questions of
class and/or language,11 an understanding that could at least raise the
possibility of questioning whether or not queerness, understood as a
generalized cross-cultural phenomenon, clarifies or obscures Verka’s
effects, with their distinctly local sources.12
With this in mind, in this chapter I explore several issues regarding
Kamon!!! and queerness, although this overarching central concern will
radiate outwards (like the points on Verka’s star) to additional and
interrelated frequencies—in particular, the potentials and perils of reading
queerness in cultural locations outside the site of the theory’s (or theories’)
production(s). I begin by examining closely the “stylistic” attributes of
several of Kamon!!!’s songs and videos in relation to transgressive and
iconoclastic dynamics, although not in a tacit attempt to fix practice in
product, to hyper-value the textual. To the contrary, with reference to
symbolist poet Valerii Briusov’s discussion of the “mysteries” of “art,”
Shank’s attention to musical beauty, and Panagia’s exploration of
sensation’s connection to the political, my aim is to highlight the value of
attention to the specific workings of “expressive cultural production.” This
move to the broadly conceived political, and its relation to queerness, will
lead me away from a focus on Kamon!!!’s productions, and toward the
question of geopolitical/geocultural location, necessitating a double split: a
discussion of queer politics versus the politics of queering, where the first
avenue, queer politics, leads, via contemporary critical literatures, to
explorations of the transcultural/transhistorical—even utopian—
understanding of queerness. The second avenue, queering, however, raises
concerns regarding a type of intellectual colonialism which, despite the best
of intentions, may occlude the possibility of hearing divergent viewpoints,
and unintentionally contribute to the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes
(here, an Eastern European other that is always only “catching up” to the
West). I will also highlight the performative and asymmetrical powers of
both theory and of theoretical literature, which have arguably been
instrumental in the international dissemination of conceptions of queer, both
in terms of rarified audiences and “trickle-up/down/sideways” movement.
The attention to performativity will engender yet another splitting (of the
split), whereby the performative action/utterance is viewed in relation not
only to the speaker/actor/subject, but also to the arbiters and constructors of
the criteria deemed necessary for the success of any performative—a move
which I enrich through an analogy to the practice of musical transcription
and notation, and the hegemonic potential inhering in certain types of
“cultural transcription.” Does the understanding that there may exist a
“‘notational hegemony’ owned by those in positions of power to define
what counts as music” signal a responsibility to explore how other types of
“notational” practices may be implicated in the hierarchical valuation of
identities, or even the very access to the term itself?13 What sorts of
asymmetries are revealed in the examination of transcultural queering? And
what can a musicological (in the most inclusive sense of the term) view,
toward both products and practices, reveal about these extremely complex
interactions and—at worst—impositions?
 I , C -L
A : K !!!’ A
P -P

A regular (normal’nyi) person—who is that? Have you met such people? Say where, and
we’ll go and have a look.14

If queerness may be understood as existing in an oppositional relationship

to often mythologized, romanticized, or universalized foundational
narratives, constructs, artifacts, and/or act(ion)s—a foil of destabilization to
the coercively normative—the expressive/creative (audiovisual) and
discursive realms surrounding and created by the group Kamon!!! serve as
sites for the examination of the queer in Ukrainian popular music. From
images, timbres, and melodies to numerous textual expressions—
interviews, lyrics, harmonic “languages”—the group subversively and
performatively questions both aesthetic and commercial hierarchies in
popular music (including the deconstruction of identities such as
“musician” or “star”); critiques and at the same time sardonically celebrates
fashion, style, and consumer/club culture; and often implicitly or explicitly
highlights the insufficiency of supposedly stable constructions of gender. In
the words of the Koskos sisters themselves, their work is “sincere and
spontaneous,” their imaginations “turbulent,” their creativity a “stream of
consciousness, which cannot be stopped”; perhaps above all, they are “not
guided by rules and frameworks.”15
Founded in 2007 in Kiev, and signed to Ukraine’s Lavina music the
following year,16 Kamon!!! comprises two female
singers/songwriters/artists, “sisters” Alisa and Ksiusha “Kosmos” who—
according to the “biography” section of the group’s website17—may not be
sisters at all, but rather “two disguised Chinese boys, Lun’ and Sun’, who
wound up in Ukraine in a box underneath contraband sneakers.” In other
interviews they make constant reference to earthlings, defining themselves,
in contrast, as aliens or cyborgs—drawing unavoidable connections to both
Soviet-era singers (Zhanna Aguzarova) and Soviet-era children’s literature
(Alisa v kosmose).18 The main goal of these extraterrestrials may not be to
perform songs as entertainment, to simply “bring couplets and choruses to
the masses,” but rather to perform a type of “sound therapy”
(zvukoterapiia), to “turn the tide of history, to influence the development of
[this] generation, of the country, and somehow to help old lady Earth, poor
thing, who is enduring these unhappy times.”19 Over the course of three
years, the group performed in clubs and on Ukrainian television,20 and
produced eleven tracks (ultimately compiled into an album, Kably,
Kamon!!! [2010]), as well as four extremely popular videos.21 The duo has
noted a wide-ranging set of foreign and domestic audiovisual/literary
influences including Peaches, The White Stripes, TOP (TNT), Edward
Scissorhands, Dimna Sumish (Smoky Mix), Gareth Pugh, and Nabokov,
among others,22 and various media have highlighted not only the extent to
which the women arrived as “outsiders”—part of the new “digital”
interlopers, threatening the hierarchies of Russian/Ukrainian “show
business”23—but also the high level of control they maintain over both
creative and technological aspects of their production. In interviews, the
women themselves have stated that “[we] do everything ourselves”—
eschewing the visions of others, and despite a lack of “training”—in order
to avoid becoming like the denouement of a game of “corrupted telephone”
(isporchennyi telefon).24
The duo’s first single, “Kably, Kamon!!!” (“High Heels, Kamon!!!
[Come On?]”) (2008), voted the “Stupidest Song of 2008” (samaia tuplaia
pesnia) by Gala Radio within one month of its release (gloss.ua)—an
accolade which the women enthusiastically accepted25—is an example of
the ways in which Kamon!!! highlights the dynamics of destabilization of
convention, as well as fluidity of identity, two of the hallmarks of
queerness. The video (directed by Alisa), which makes use of a stark,
limited color palette (black, white, red, and electric blue), and makes
aesthetic references to both US/UK 1960s mod and 1980s new wave,
introduces both singers via cropped shots of discrete body parts—eyes, lips
(one set black, one set bright red)—later revealing them in
editorial/couture-like poses in checkerboard tights, latex tops and skirts,
outfits resembling 80s-era aerobics garb, and perilously high stiletto mules.
Camera angles, editing (full shots alternated with body parts; shots inserted
upside down), and two oversized props (a tube of lipstick that appears to be
over two meters tall, a necklace that hangs from Ksiusha’s neck to the floor,
with beads the size of soccer balls) disorient the viewer regarding scale and
location.
At the level of the auditory, there are likewise disorienting and
subversive gestures. While the harmonic structure is largely built upon a
cycle of i–III–iv (tonic, submediant, subdominant), with interpolations of
the subtonic (VII)—common harmonic progressions in, if not “pop proper,”
then certainly in numerous dance music genres—one of its most striking
structural figures is the unusual chromatic harmonic and melodic descent
from scale degrees 5 to flat-3 (five half steps) on the first line of each
chorus. Their voices in unison on the descending line, both women straddle
the line between singing and speaking, approximating the pitches—as they
do elsewhere in the track as well. In a style combining electro-clash, synth-
pop, and/or neo-new wave, with relatively non-syncopated, angular
rhythms, and the foregrounding of highly artificial and often harsh
synthesizer sounds, the song is also notable for its musique concrète-like
use of their sampled voices as compositional devices: a gasp (tweaked to
become the minor third of the scale) opens the song, and rapid-fire
reiterations of the syllable “ka-” also serve as a riff of sorts. The materiality
of the language itself—in a Barthian or Kristevan sense,26 its presence qua
sound, via voice—is foregrounded here, in the “ka-ka-kably” of the chorus,
as well as the iterations of successive plosives. Indeed, making use of
Russian-language club argot,27 the song dispenses with narrative or
“meaning,” offering instead an inventory of sartorial accoutrements one
might wear when clubbing, seemingly chosen as much for their sound as
their semiotic functions (see Example 32.1).28 This prevalence of rarified
youth slang, moreover, challenges the primacy and immutability of
“official” language in the context of a language-centered realm influenced
by both Soviet ideology and Russia’s often-vaunted literary supremacy. (In
the following section of the lyrics (Example 32.1), the Russian words in
bold italics are slang.)
 Example 32.1 Lyrics, “Kably, Kamon!!!” (excerpt)

Перчи, шторы, браслеты, узкачи,
и трубы
Мы поймаем грача и поедем в
клубы
Припев:
Пенж, панама, пудра, помада,
Ка-ка-каблы, камон, ка-каблы,
камон!!!30
Gloves, glasses, bracelets, tight jeans, and
baggy jeans
We’ll catch a taxi driver and go to the clubs
Chorus:
Jacket, hat, powder, lipstick
Hi-hi-heels, kamon, hi-heels, kamon

Such “queerly” destabilizing attributes are present, in various

manifestations, in the group’s creative output as a whole. At the level of
text, numerous songs apparently dispense with “meaning” in exchange for
the pleasure(s) of sound(s). The lyrics to the song “Al’bert” (“Albert”), for
example, feature verses in which each new line is a man’s name followed
by what might be seen as either a random or defining characteristic (“Pasha
does not like oatmeal,” “Kolia is pale, and sick it seems,” “Danil imagined
himself as something”) that also contains a sonic relationship to the proper
name.29 The chorus follows the same pattern, the entire text made up of
four repetitions of one name/characteristic pair, featuring a strong rhyme:
“Al’bert/Prines mol’bert” (“Albert/Brought the easel”). (In Russian, the
pronunciation of Al’bert and mol’bert, due to the stress on the second
syllable, is identical save for the initial consonant.) In a similar vein, the
song “Khlop’ia kukuruznye” (“Cornflakes”; see Example 32.2) comprises a
list of places and constellations in which one might eat the titular food
(“Could be strolling in the park,” “Could be with your neighbor Katia,” “In
a foursome”), the chorus likewise offering neither a love story nor
characters which the pop listener might cathect, but instead a sales slogan
and a celebration of a clicking, unvoiced plosive (again the letter k, as in the
song “Kably, Kamon!!!”).
Destabilizations are also present in numerous instances on specifically
musical/sonic levels—and indeed the “sisters” have even eschewed the
mantle of “musician,” saying “…music is what you find in the
conservatory; we are in show business.”31 At a macro level, the group’s
arrangements largely dispense with reliance upon traditional instruments (or
even timbres); there is no sense of “guitar” or “piano,” the production
makes no attempt to produce percussion sounds that approximate those of
acoustic instruments, and the bass lines are generally sequenced and
synthetic-sounding.32 Technology rather than “natural” acoustics is
foregrounded, celebrated as technology and possibly artifice, and perhaps,
as Peraino suggests, a way of queering the human/machine binary. None of
the duo’s songs comport with the type of instrumentation or timbres
typically found in the highly popular genre of Russian shanson (which often
relies upon acoustic instruments), or even with commercial Russian or
Ukrainian popsa (roughly analogous to Western pop) or tantseval’naia
muzyka (dance music), both of which make regular use of electronic
instruments but with rather “conservative” timbral consequences. The
women themselves distinguish their output from that of the commercial and
contemporary pop “tradition,” calling it “the music of the future, [in which]
there are no guitar solos, only rhythm and a combination of high and low
frequencies. Everything is on the level of feeling….”33
The melodies of several songs dispense with a typical “grammatical”
structuring often found in popular song, opting instead for an almost fractal
strategy. “Khlop’ia kukuruznye” features a vocal line and hook built up of
only three repeating notes throughout the entirety of the song—the tonic,
and its upper and lower neighbors (both whole steps)—producing an
undulating, almost hypnotic effect; similarly, the melody for the song
“Kibergoty” (“Cybergoths”) comprises only two notes (tonic and minor
third above). Moreover, the harmonic structures in many of the songs are
entirely different from those found in much Russian and Ukrainian pop,
generally rejecting a stress on tonic–dominant relationships and
foregrounded leading tones (and concomitant ensuing resolutions).34 The
women’s voices, when singing together—as previously noted in regard to
“Kably, Kamon!!!”—often produce unusual melodic-harmonic
relationships. In this regard, the song “Metroseksual” (“Metrosexual”) is
also exemplary, its chorus featuring a harmony between Ksuisha and Alisa
that is unusual for ears accustomed to a commercial pop vocabulary: the
singers harmonize in open fourths, the bottom voice moving between the
tonic and, alternately, the supertonic and the flatted supertonic, while the
upper voice moves between the fourth and the flatted fifth scale tones,
producing a string of parallel perfect fourths, interrupted by one diminished
fourth; the dissonances occur not only between the voices, but between the
intervallic relationships produced by the voices and the underlying
harmonic progression of tonic–subtonic–subdominant (i–VII–IV/iv).

Example 32.2 Lyrics, “Khlop’ia kukuruznye” (excerpt)

Хлопья кукурузные Cornflakes

Они такие вкусные They are so delicious
Хлопья кукурузные Cornflakes
Они такие They are like that

While queerness need not always be linked to non-heterosexual

sexualities, the text and visuals of the song/video “Metroseksual” implicitly
question a binary (female/male; homosexual/heterosexual) gender/sex
system. To the extent that the metrosexual stands as a figure repudiating
appropriate (hegemonic) masculine characteristics and behaviors (“plucked
eyebrows and a shaved chest/and also need to polish the nails to glowing”),
his overwhelmingly negative (if satirical) treatment in the lyrics may seem
to indicate a censuring of gender transgression; the heterosexual man who
embraces any feminine characteristics is one deserving of deprecation.
However, this critique of the metrosexual is not focused on his
contravention (suggesting homosexuality?) of gender norms per se, but
specifically on his vanity, self-involvement, privilege, and hyper-
consumerist mindset—this, in the context of Putin’s Russia, where
obsessive self-styling and “glamour” have become associated with sites of
elite power among “new Russians” (Goscilo).35 Perpetually before the
mirror, running from the waxer to the tanning salon to the fitness center
(“the meaning of life is to always keep in shape”) the metrosexual (marked
by a “very languid voice and a Moscow accent”) is at heart a vain and
ineffectual user, one who must “get money from mommy” and “borrow
daddy’s Lexus.” Yet the excoriation is tempered by an palpable
humorousness, including one of the best couplets in the history of popular
music: “kachaesh’ bedrami milo/pochti kak Jovovich, Milla” (“you shake
your hips so cute/almost like Milla Jovovich”). The visuals of the video
include rapid-cut shots of numerous men displaying myriad forms of
“(non-)masculinity,” playful and almost cartoonish (due, in part, to the
bright, saturated colors of the backdrops);36 images suggesting fetish
practices (ropes; stiletto thigh-high boots); “alternative” body modifications
(tattoos, facial and body piercings, gaugings); faceless, pumped-up “muscle
boys,” backs to the camera, buttocks highlighted by hot pink bikinis; a male
table dancer working for tips from the women surrounding him (including
drag artist Monro); sexualized interactions between voluptuous
singer/performer Super Peach and gender-bending choreographer/“artist-
showman” Richard Gorn. These indicate not a censuring but a celebration
of freeplay, a polymorphous (perverse) sexuality that is constrained by
neither (sexual-identity) category nor capital. In an arguably queer fashion,
the intent here is not to lionize an “alternative” (sexual) identity, but to
celebrate the multifariousness of (sexual) identity.
This questioning of a fixed identity is an integral audiovisualized
component of the song/video “Briunetka” (“Brunette [Woman]”). While the
voice may be theorized as the marker of a specific subjectivity, a “sonic
fingerprint,” a “part object” of great affective depth, the use of voices here
leads to suggestions of identity as inherently fluid. Contrary to Giddens’
assertions regarding the self-narrative-based continuity of identity,37 Alisa
and Ksuisha (the “Kosmos” “sisters”) inhabit and perform myriad
identities, often within the span of a few seconds, the auditory and the
visual both implicated in a performative de-coupling of signifier from
signified. While Kamon!!! comprises two “people,” there are four or five
distinct vocal timbres within the song, and five or six visual “characters.”38
The alignment of the auditory and visual “characters”—to say nothing of
voices aligning with the “real” Alisa or Ksiusha—is thwarted by the
editing, which at times produces one voice alternately emanating from
(digital images of) two distinct physiognomies. This indeterminacy is
further supported in numerous ways: by scenes in which both women sing
to the camera, in unison, while the overdubbing of the track seems to
suggest multiple voices; via rapid-cut editing which juxtaposes images of
the same performer in entirely different guises and presentations—clothing,
hair, accessories, make-up, stances, lighting, etc.; or through shots which
present discrete body parts rather than fully integrated, “post-mirror stage”
subjects. In “Briunetka” (see Example 32.3) schizophonic voices, serial
guises, and digital manipulation all combine to give audiovisual support to
lyrics that suggest that one’s identity, rather than stable or essential, may be
changed via the alteration of one’s hair color.

Example 32.3 Lyrics, “Briunetka” (excerpt)

Раньше я была натуральной Before, I was a natural blonde

блондинкой
Розовое платьице, домик и
машинка…
…Но захотелось перемен
Купила краски пачку
Хей детка, я теперь брюнетка,
Бежать бессмысленно, я стреляю
метко
Little pink dress, little [pink] house, little
[pink] car…
…But I wanted a change
Bought a package of hair dye
Hey girl, now I’m a brunette,
It’s senseless to run, I shoot straight

The narrators, in the course of a few minutes, change from a blond

“bimbo” enamored of all that is pink (the visuals obliquely satirize
Madonna’s “Girl Gone Wild”),39 to fair-haired, dowdy housewife and
schoolteacher (“dressed tastelessly”), to red-haired prostitute(s) (?) (“bold
and brazen”), to latex-clad, bat-wielding, bob-sporting, straight-shooting
brunettes—their changes in hair color ultimately transporting them to
positions of agency. The uncertainty of the relationship between and
identities of the singers/“sisters” in “real life” (they are joined by a family
name that is clearly fictitious), coupled with their well-known agency
regarding control of their audiovisual productions—termed by one
journalist a “slap in the face to the fashionistas of the fraternal peoples”
(“poshchechina vsem modnikam bratskikh narodov”)40—underscores the
power accrued by the queer liminality of identity, both onstage and off.
One of the most striking instances of a freeplay of (mis)alignments is in
Kamon!!!’s “Fotoapparat” (“Camera”), a song and video featuring Richard
Gorn (who, as noted, also appears in “Metroseksual”).41 The lyrics,
ostensibly about a fashion photoshoot, operate on the level of double
entendre, with suggestions of male genitalia and oral sex; with reference to
the “fotoapparat,” the male voice delivers such lines as “ia voz’mu ego
rukami/Skazhesh’ ty, ‘takoi bol’shoi” (“I take it in my hands/You’ll say
‘what a big one’”) and “priotkroi krasivo rot/ia k tebe ego pridvinu/èto
budet megashot” (“Open your mouth a bit, beautifully/I bring it closer to
you/this will be the megashot”), conjoining sexuality and visuality.42 In the
video, male voices (Gorn’s) come from female images, female voices are
parodically high-pitched (on the phrase “takoi bol’shoi”) suggesting little
girls rather than grown women, the “sisters’” interaction is highly erotic,
signifying that they are perhaps lovers (and thus not sisters after all, or
breaking the taboo of incest),43 Gorn wears pants on which are printed the
lower half of the human skeleton (thus inside becomes outside), and all
three via clothing and hairstyle appear to lie halfway between human and
animal. Finally, while the women, clad at one point in flesh-colored
leotards, each have their nipples and crotches marked by two black dots and
a black triangle (thus converting sexualized zones to mere icons), Gorn’s
mouth, against a black background, is lit red from within; his oral cavity,
fiery (with desire), illicit (a “red light”), glowing, becomes hypersexualized,
even vaginal. While several of the group’s songs and videos exhibit a
“sociopolitical” critique (inferred by the viewer/listener, or averred by the
group members themselves)—from capitalism to plastic surgery to cigarette
smoking44—it is arguable that the highly processed voices and images
found in “Fotoapparat,” and in numerous other songs, are even more
radical. Alluding to breakdowns between the human and non-human
(summoning associations with Haraway’s [1991; 2003] theorizations of the
cyborg and of human relationships with companion species; see also
Giffney and Hird),45 they may be read as material instances of not only
queer aesthetics, but also queer performances, a “doing” of queer, a
queerness that does not/cannot exist solely at the level of stylistic attributes.
My reading of queerness via sustained attention to and close readings of
“aesthetic” or stylistic criteria is not meant, as I have noted from the outset,
to posit any sort of “autonomous” “work of art” in which “meaning” is to
be found (or the Hanslickian idea that extramusical meaning is a chimera);
rather, I have attempted to highlight how specific manipulations and
juxtapositions of auditory and visual materials, within a cultural
context/language (for example, one in which concepts such as
“tonic/dominant” or “guitar solo” have specific hierarchical implications)
may have subversive, and thus potentially transformative, potentials.
Numerous theorists from diverse realms and geographical-historical
locations have explored the ways in which the attributes of (expressive)
cultural production are intimately bound up with the production of culture.
Symbolist poet Valerii Briusov, for example, within the context of a critique
of what he views as highly reductive theories of art, argues that such
cultural productions should not be examined in reference to the merely
functional, representational, or rational aspects (among others), but rather
must be understood as nothing less than “doors half-opened to Eternity,”
“the world’s cognition beyond rational forms, beyond thinking about
causality.”46 Understanding symbolism’s move toward signification and
away from mimesis, and the ways in which this is expressed in the
manipulation of the “material” components of works of art (whether
language, color, form, or sound), as well as the extent to which Briusov’s
critique indicts not only intellectual theorization but also bourgeois society,
his contention that “art” “has never reproduced but always changed reality”
highlights the transformative potential of expressive-aesthetic production.47
This understanding of the relationship between formal characteristics
and transformative potential is even more explicit in Shank’s exploration of
musical beauty (“the locus of music’s power”), wherein he posits the
indissoluble links between sensuous/sonic relationships and not only a
recognition of complex social relationships, but also the (perhaps utopian)
ability to envisage alternative relationships, “the way things could be, the
way things should be.”48 Panagia similarly explores links between the
aesthetic/expressive/sensual and the political; foregrounding sensation, he
extends his purview beyond “art proper” to encompass cultural production
and action with foci ranging from the geographic to the gastronomic. For
Panagia, politics and aesthetics are inextricably linked, insofar as “a
partitioning of sensation that divides the body and its organs of sense
perception…assigns to them corresponding capacities for the making of
sense.”49 In those instances where, via sensation, our “organoleptic”
hierarchies are challenged—for example, the alignment of the optic with a
“narratocracy”—we meet with the potentially transformative dynamics of
unrepresentability, interruption, disarticulation, and/or disfiguration which
“invite occasions and actions for reconfiguring our associational lives.”50
Taken in this context, attention to Kamon!!!’s sonic and visual dissonances,
their cornflake-o-philia, to say nothing of their unverifiable sorority, is not a
fetishization of/fascination with the formal, but an attempt to move analysis
past a cognitivist or idealist understanding of “musical politics.” It is, I
argue, essential to understand that the very materiality of the production, its
sensuous and affective variables, its distributions of both sonic and visual
frequencies (tones; hues), and the often-resulting tensions, are inherently
transformative, thus “political.”51
 S , D ,
H “T ”

While there may be a reluctance to say what queer “is,” there are assuredly assumptions
circulating about what queer “does.” These concern genealogies, aims, priorities,
interconnections with activism and other theories and fields, and the thorny issue of who
gets to decide all of this.52

I have been discussing the possible transformative, political potentials of

expressive cultural production and performance that highlight dissonances,
potentialities, and possibilities beyond the stifling strictures of normative
power structures. This discussion can most certainly be linked to the idea of
queerness, understood as “resistance imbued with anti-assimilationist and
deconstructionist rhetoric that aggressively opposes hegemonic
identificatory and behavioral norms,” suggesting a political engagement at
the level of both discourse and style (the latter of which should not be
construed as inferior to the former).53 In an interview, one of Kamon!!!’s
members characterized her relationship to her work as follows:
If earlier all the ideas and thoughts were born in my head, and did not have the opportunity
to go outside, if it was necessary to pretend to be “normal people” and live like everyone
else, now we have a unique possibility to do all kinds of stupidities and oddities, yes and
even to please others around us with them. We have something to say, and what you see
now, it’s the little flowers, the tip of the iceberg.54

Reading her assessment, it may indeed seem that queerness—as understood

in the West—is operative. However, insofar as queerness is indissolubly
linked to the cultural context and history of the Western, Anglo-American
academy, and thus embedded within cultural, political, and intellectual
power structures, the question arises: does the reading of cultural
production in the “new East” via a theoretical structure (a form of
discourse) of different provenance assist in the formation of an intercultural
dialogue, or does it simply continue the type of cultural colonialization that
has been remarked upon for decades?55 Yet we might also ask: is the
positing of an inviolable “cultural specificity,” vis-à-vis the Other implicit
in the construction of a radical alterity that forever relegates certain subjects
to a “location” of mysterious inscrutability?
Such questions are in line with recent theorization of difference, often
undertaken in relation to the political realm. Both Panagia and Shank stress,
in what appears at times to be an almost utopian gesture (a concept to which
I will return), the need to attend to the relationship between the part and the
whole. For Shank, our experiences of auditory relationships within the
musically beautiful “model the experience of belonging to a community not
of unity but of difference,” allowing for “an instantaneous judgment about
the right form of relations of difference.”56 And in the context of his wide-
ranging analyses of diverse cultural phenomena and practices, Panagia
posits that “one could go so far as to suggest that heterology is the
ontological condition of democratic politics”—a sentiment that resonates,
as I will note shortly, with other contemporary philosophical inquiries
which, like queer theory, explore the complex relationships of individuals to
groups, and the liberating potentials of the anti-normative.57
This attention to difference has also been a site of inquiry in
musicological research, as evidenced perhaps most visibly in two edited
volumes published two decades apart: Solie’s Musicology and Difference:
Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship and Bloechl, Kallberg, and
Lowe’s Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship.58 As can be inferred
from a comparison of the titles and tables of contents of both volumes, the
sites of inquiry shifted during this time span, the later volume expanding its
purview beyond “Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship”—a move
with obvious connections to the move, in the same time frame, from a
“lesbian and gay” studies to a “queer theory” model. While both
publications explore the hazards and obligations of attention to both sides of
the “saming”/“differing” impulse—a risk of essentialization, or construction
of absolute otherness on the one hand; the suggestion of universalization
and the erasure of alternative voices on the other—it is Tomlinson’s
contribution to the more recent volume that signals a move away from an
erstwhile postmodern stance in which, arguably, only attention to difference
could do justice to a cultural diversity threatened by universalizing
narratives undergirded by power structures. Daring to vaunt both the
universal and the biological, Tomlinson suggests that “the scholarship of
difference, carefully distinguishing one tree from the next, has not attended
to larger groves, let alone the forest”; viewed from a biocultural standpoint,
one may indeed find universals in humans’ adaptations to diverse material-
cultural locations and situations.59 This shared and innate heritage does not,
however, eradicate difference; on the contrary, the universally shared
potential of human beings, according to Tomlinson, “is the capacity to
respond flexibly to circumstances and so to produce difference through
complex social, cultural, and environmental interaction,” a “flexibility…
unprecedented in the history of life on earth.”60
This reconciliation of the many with the one in explicitly political terms
—implicit in figurations of queerness—is an underlying theme of Bosteels’
discussion of the concept of “the” or “a” “people.” Beginning with a
discussion of a basic problem in Rousseau’s idea of the social contract61—a
relationship which implicitly questions the very ontology of “a/the”
“people”—and with reference to several contemporary French theorists
(among them Rancière, Badiou, and Didi-Huberman), Bosteels suggests
internal difference is not an impediment to, but a necessity for political
effectiveness; a “people,” in this understanding of the term, is not an
essential, discrete entity defined by its physical/biological characteristics, or
its geohistorical location, but rather a name given to “the political process
that produces its own subject.”62 This concept of a politically efficacious
subject defined in relation to act rather than matter (or circumstances rather
than genetics) is likewise an important component of Badiou’s formulations
of the Event and inconsistent multiplicity—the latter only becoming visible
in relation to the former, which may be conceived as a rupture in the social
“order,” the rule-bound systems, the sites in which being is corralled into
the “count-as-one.” Indeed for Badiou, the true revolutionary
transformation of the social sphere can occur only in relation to an Event
that allows for the “un-counted,” the inconsistent become visible, and not
via any type of “identity politics.” In his estimation, the formulation
“adjective + people” “is either an inert category of the state…or a category
of wars and political processes associated with situations of so-called
national liberation.”63
In numerous ways the discourses of contemporary theorists such as
Bosteels and Badiou (among others) exhibit a relationship to tenets of
contemporary queer theory—unsurprising in view of their gestation within
a similar geographic, temporal, and intellectual space. The highlighting of
heterogeneity and alterity as the necessary agents for sociopolitical change,
and the skepticism regarding the value of an adjectivally defined subject (a
difference turned state-sanctioned entity) undergird, to various degrees, the
lines of thought discussed thus far. Queer theory, in part a reaction against
what many viewed as the insalubrious solidification of a narrowly-defined
“lesbian/gay identity,” “undermines the binary logic that constructs
identities as oppositional and exclusionary, and seeks as its primary strategy
the denaturalization of identity categories.”64 The suspicion that greets the
labels “gay” or “lesbian” is due, in part, to the supposition that these
identities have been coopted by the neoliberal state, and that a privileged
group of “homonormative” sexual citizens have abandoned the hope of
utopian revolution; they have, rather, settled for obtaining the rights of the
heteronormative majority (thus reproducing their “reproductive futurity”),
which is taken as the marker of “liberation.” Indeed, Muñoz, contrasting a
“pragmatic” homosexual “present” with an “ecstatic” queer “futurity,” sees
the abandonment of an antediluvian (gay/lesbian) identity politics and the
“self-naturalizing linearity” of “straight time” and the embracing of
“Queerness’s ecstatic and horizonal temporality” as a “path and a
movement to a greater openness to the world”—one in which, perhaps,
adjective (Ukrainian; Western; gay) + people (or music) would be rendered,
thankfully, obsolete.65
Voices such as Muñoz’s, gesturing toward hope and equality, are not
only welcome but necessary. At the same time, such gestures, if they are to
do justice to the complexity of the lived (not simply ideational) social, must
also grapple with dynamics based upon prestige, privilege, and, ultimately,
power, in order to engender “a more historicized, political and critical
delineation of ‘queerness’ and globalization, without romanticizing the
Non-West or blindly accepting the discourses of the West.”66 As Ulbricht
and colleagues note, the West’s discourse about LGBT rights is imbricated
within the creation of a discourse contrasting a Western (liberal)
exceptionalism to the backward Otherness of Eastern Europeans.67 Indeed,
the fact that some activists in Eastern Europe focus energies upon the
achievement of “equal rights” by working within the structures erected by
the juridical and legislative bodies of the European Union and the State,68
or support the promulgation of “acceptance” campaigns featuring what Puar
might refer to as “homonationalized” subjects69 may at best appear to
Western theorists as an unfortunate “pragmatic” recourse to a non-fluid,
archaic, ultimately deleterious formulation of “sexual identity” which must
be enacted and protected via the State (the very body that, according to
Badiou, must be overthrown in order for any true revolutionary force to
obtain). While numerous commentators evince an awareness of the
asymmetrical arrangement of power in relation to the theorization of sexual
identity (Kitlinski and Lockard, for example, note that “Eastern Europe is
perceived as a recipient of aid, discipline, and limited empowerment”70),
with activists often requesting respect from the international “queer”
community regarding local communities’ right to decide upon the best ways
to support, fight for, and theorize sexual (minority) subjects,71 the
realization of possible colonialization often coexists with an acceptance of
the colonialist apparatus. Leszkowicz and Kitlinski, for example, bemoan
the critiques of local activists “by the critical ideas produced within the
national academic context of American queer theory,” yet also, perhaps
unintentionally, reinscribe a hierarchy of worth by highlighting “simple”
local actions in relation to a “sophisticated” Western, queer agenda.72
Eastern Europeans—Ukrainians, Poles, Russians—are often trapped in a
hierarchical construction wherein their “pragmatic” clinging to a putatively
“antiquated” sense of “identity” is placed in teleological relation to the
Western queer’s transcendence of both terms (namely, pragmatism and
identity).
How have such hierarchies been erected? Considering the overwhelming
amount of attention given to performativity’s relationship to queerness and
queer politics (it seems almost impossible to read an article about queerness
wherein the term is not invoked—at least in a seemingly self-evident
fashion), it is startling to realize that the same sort of scrutiny has not
occurred in relation to the performative aspects of the politics of queerness
—especially in regard to one of the major promulgators of queerness,
academic theoretical texts and writing. Indeed, the production of academic
queer theory—disseminated via the written text—may be seen as an act
with rhetorical power, nothing less than a performative “utterance” that
changes something, brings something into being. The theoretical text on
“[the] queerness of/[and] X” does not simply “describe” or bring to light a
pre-existing, ontological/metaphysical reality, but rather, brings into being
not only a concept but a queer(ed) object pre-constructed via Western
optics. Moreover, the power of the performative inheres not only in the
specific act of queering, but in the entire context in which the performative
is uttered. The viability of an efficacious performative—here, what gets
queered, and on whose terms—is likewise constructed by the utterer. In the
same way that heteronormative discourse sets the rules for the
consequences (its “felicitousness”) of the generic “I do” by (de)legitimating
specific types of contexts and subjects (one cannot, of course, “have a
marriage with a monkey”73), queer theory, however inadvertently, risks an
assimilationist agenda by which both subjects and the rules of the game are
defined unilaterally, from a position of privileged power.
Here I turn to a procedure of inquiry that I find rewarding: the use of
models from music-related activities.74 Attention to specifically musical
parameters of cultural production and practice (in relation to
product/practice that may or may not be manifestly “musical”) can expose
dynamics that remain hidden when approached by strategies favoring a
generically constructed “discursive” register (often tacitly occurring at the
level of the cognitive, the ideational, and/or the textual). Such attention
need not only be confined to the contemporary practice/producer; it may
also productively encompass the historical and the theoretical, including
attention to historiography, theory, and method. Following this procedure,
and with reference to seminal works by Seeger and Treitler, we may
provisionally approach academic explorations of queerness (regardless of
geocultural/temporal location) as acts of notation or transcription. Seeger’s
highlighting of the need to guard against “the assumption that the full
auditory parameter of music is or can be represented by a partial visual
parameter” may likewise highlight the inherent insufficiency of any sort of
linguistic “transcription” of complex sociocultural phenomena (perhaps
especially a rarified and culturally situated type of linguistic-discursive
system).75 The disconnect, however, takes place not simply or primarily at
the level of incommensurable “systems”; there is, additionally, an
implication of the dangers of distortion via culturally specific modes of
analysis, representation, and comprehension. Seeger notes two “thoroughly
unscientific” consequences of incommensurability at the level of cultural
location and tradition, and also at the level of the primary objective
(prescriptive versus descriptive): the transcriber distorts by attending to
structures in the “other” music that resemble those in “one’s own”
(“ignoring everything else for which we have no symbols,” and also
“[expects] the resulting notation to be read by people who do not carry the
tradition of the other music.”76 We might see similar types of distortion
operating in the historiography of past musical traditions, on numerous
levels; as Treitler has persuasively argued, the rise of Western musical
notation must be viewed in the context of “the mutations in the
constellation of relations among composition, writing, and performance”
(where, of course, no neat dividing lines—including between prescriptive
and descriptive—could be drawn), rather than taken as the beginning of a
teleological narrative of musical practice that is retroactively fashioned in
service of the creation of a history functioning as “a medium of proud self-
portraiture, as the ritual of a culture in narcissistic self-contemplation.”77 If
the mechanical rejoinder to the foregoing might appear along the lines of
“we twenty-first-century subjects, with postmodern/post-structuralist
pedigree, are all too aware of such myopias, and have progressed well past
them,” we exhibit a tacit belief in (intellectual) teleology (“we’ve learned
X; we can move on”), all but ensuring a repetition of past asymmetries by
consigning asymmetry to the past.
Trietler suggests that the “dualistic strategy” of the (music) historian,
creating a self/other split, rather than understanding the interdependence of
the two terms, results in a “disqualification of the scholar from judgement
about what is cast off as ‘other,’” thus “[guaranteeing] that the scholarly
discourse will be a monologue,” one in which “the scholar is set up from
the start to make false judgments.”78 With this danger in mind, we might
view the inclusiveness of queerness—unfettered by “adjectives” or
geographical, even temporal borders—as a refusal to construct either selves
or others, to opt out of the pointless and perilous games predicated upon the
false pair “us/them.” However, returning to Treitler’s attention to the
teleological, the ascription of queerness in Eastern Europe is often bound
up, either implicitly or explicitly, with the aforementioned, equally pointless
and perilous propagation of the eternal stereotype: the Eastern European
(the Ukrainian, the Russian) perpetually and unsuccessfully attempting to
“catch up” to the more fully evolved West.79 Here, in sites where basic
human rights are not protected, where homophobia is rampant80 (and, in a
double insult, taken as evidence of backwardness), the belief in the
importance or stability of sexual identity may—as noted—often be viewed
as simply “pragmatic,” “utilitarian,” a developmental stage occasioned by
political efficacy, and one to be transcended (perhaps via the tutelage of the
queered West). And while the self/other duality may have been
conceptually bridged, still others—pragmatic/utopian; stable/fluid;
obsolete/modern; reactionary/liberal; acceptable/unacceptable—often
appear in relation to identity, with the Eastern/Western mapped upon pairs
marked by negative/positive polarities. The foundations of power
implicated in these moves, moreover, set the rules for engagement and
definition not only in regards to queerness, but implicitly the ontology of
identity itself. Jones suggests that an embrace of a “queer negativity”
(evidenced in the work of both Bersani and Edelman), rather than the
“queer utopian” “ignores at worst and neglects at best the necessity of
emancipatory politics for many queers whose material conditions make
embracing the negative a political privilege or luxury.”81 And yet isn’t it
possible that embracing queerness, understood as a refusal of identity
(including one defined by sexuality), is likewise a luxury for those whose
political and material circumstances have afforded them the option of
refusal—in part due to the construction of the premodern subject (here: the
East European), the “native” as “incapable of identity, only of practices,
while the modern Western subject has identity”?82 Only if one denies the
mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of queerness
and identity as concepts, within a specific time and place, and conversely
embraces a belief in “identity” as some sort of metaphysical a priori, can
there be an unproblematic suggestion of the universal translatability and
requisiteness of both terms. If Kamon!!! is indeed critiquing something
called “identity,” we might ask “whose concept of identity” and “to what
ends”?
This is not to suggest the erection of barriers between eternally mutually
unintelligible subjects. Both Treitler and Meyer suggest that the arrival of
musical transcription cannot be viewed solely as an imposition of
unidirectional power—that notation can indeed be productive, can lead to
new musical products and practices. Similarly, a queer “transcription” may
engender the possibility of innovative understandings (of subversion, of
community, of identity) if the author is likewise open to the possibility of
being (auto-)transcribed via the (theoretical) language of another (rather
than an Other). In this regard, Kamon!!!’s status as a steb-gruppa or
stebnyi-proekt83 suggests an invitation for a non-post-Soviet subject to
understand the untranslatable steb (стёб)84 as an alternate, equally valid
construction to explore the complex interaction of subject (identity) and
culture (practice). Rather than the queer celebration of undiluted
subversion, steb—a parodic late-Soviet-era stance defined by Yurchak as
“[requiring] such a degree of over-identification with the object, person, or
idea at which [it] was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it
was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the
two”85—arguably adds complexity to the conceptualization of subversion,
highlighting the degree to which it is bound up with desire.86 If one might
argue that concepts used to explore responses of subjects in Eastern Europe
to a specific set of political, economic, and cultural circumstances would
offer little utility in the examination of the “modern” Western (and
capitalist) subject, then the undeniable bookend would be the requirement
that queer theory stay within its own geocultural boundaries. While such
arguments appear rickety on several levels (and lead, ultimately, to
intellectual sterility), restrictive cordons may sadly be preferable to a
performative theorization and transcription that remains resolutely
unidirectional.
 I , S D 2016

In 2014, Kamon!!! reappeared—according to Ksiusha, via their

“Kosmosmobil”87—although (queerly) in a new guise: the duo had
expanded to a trio with a new name, Japanda. The stylistic audiovisual and
textual elements of their only video/track to date, “Tamagotchi”—the titular
animal/machine (arguably gesturing toward embodied female sexuality), the
distorted and psychedelic visuals, the staccato, machine-like body
movements, the eerily blank and artificial eyes—all recalled the duo’s
earlier self-definition as a “cyborg,” and suggested, perhaps, that the new
member’s appearance had been the result of some sort of genetic-
mechanical engineering. Such fantastically queer ideas might have seemed
bolstered by the fact that a completely new visage appeared in the third slot
when the trio next appeared, somewhat improbably, at Ukraine’s national
finals for the 2016 Eurovision competition; viewing their performance of
“Anime,” marked by synchronized robotic choreography, lyrics which
could easily have been spit out randomly by a computer (“Little girl anime/I
lo- I love you/You just tell me meow-meow/Li-la-la-lu”),88 and all the
human “authenticity” of vocaloid, one could imagine #3 1.0 standing in a
closet, in sleep mode, while 2.0 took to the stage.
But while both Verka and Japanda may radiate some very queer
possibilities through the Ukrainian soundscape, it was the singer Jamala
who was chosen to represent Ukraine in 2016, and who ultimately went on
to win the contest. In the context of the country having not participated in
2015 due to financial instability in connection with the ideological and
military clashes with Russia (and the latter’s demotion to persona non grata
in the contest, as well as the international [Western] community), Jamala’s
victory was not entirely surprising. The song “1944,” written by the singer,
appeared not to subvert (ethnic) identity, but rather to enlist it at the level of
history, politics, and language,89 to affectively highlight the past and present
existence of the Crimean Tatar people, from their mass deportations by
Stalin, to their current precarious position in territory annexed by the
Russian state. Jamala’s claim that the song was not political90 was certainly
both disingenuous and tactical, in the context of a contest that bans material
with political content (and yet is marked by blatantly politicized voting);
that viewers/listeners responded at the level of politics and identity was
apparent in the comments of at least some voters.91
It would be a mistake, however—Eurovision statutes notwithstanding—
to feel uneasy about Jamala’s politics, to view her victory, her, song, and the
surrounding discourses as a lamentable “strategic” recourse to “adjective +
people,” a step backward for a Ukraine on the road to Western
enlightenment, with all the queer utopian possibilities afforded by such a
trajectory. Even Alisa, with the apparent/possible dissolution of both
Kamon!!! and Japanda, has reinvented herself as a “singer-songwriter,” her
two online music videos poetically highlighting themes of love (via texts as
well as slow-motion/gauzy shots of nature and heterosexual pairings),
acoustic instruments, and pretty melodies. Of no small importance is her
choice to sing not in Russian, but Ukrainian—this in the context of a
politically charged contemporary Ukraine, where questions of language use
are frequently imbricated within dynamics and debates about self-
sovereignty, cultural hegemony, and national identity.92 But perhaps what
queerness can remind us of is the reductiveness of binary thinking. Jamala,
Kamon!!!/Japanda, Verka, and countless other Ukrainian performers are
examples of the myriad ways that identity may be expressed and
experienced in musical products and practices, in specific times and places.
While a theoretical master narrative of (one group’s understanding and
valuation of) “subversion” and “fluidity,” and its adjunct teleologies may
aspire to the status of what Briusov termed “the keys to the mysteries,” it is
arguably only with the advent of a dialogue—with attention to context,
materiality, stylistic attributes—that queerness can fulfill its potential not as
the but a theoretical intervention capable of performatively enacting
countless variegated frequencies of independence.
N
1. Seeger, 194.
2. Kamon!!!, quoted in Fionik.
3. Stychin; Tuhkanen and Vänskä; Weber.
4. Valentin Strykalo is the stage name of musician/songwriter Iurii Kaplan. The name is also used
for the band in which Strykalo/Kaplan performs.
5. Efimov.
6. The artists themselves note the multiple possible meanings of the name; see obozrevatel.com,
2008.
7. Efimov; radiostar.ua. Although in this chapter I will be treating Kamon!!! as a Ukrainian group,
it is difficult—in both theoretical and practical terms—to draw strict dividing lines between
Russian and Ukrainian spheres in the realm of popular culture. Although the members of
Kamon!!! are Ukrainian citizens, and lived in Kiev at the time of the group’s zenith, they sing
and speak/write (in interviews, on social media) in Russian (the primary language of a large
percentage of Ukrainians, although not the majority). See, for example, Alisa’s V Kontakte page
(https://vk.com/alisa.kosmos), as well as interviews on Ukraine’s Radio RTI
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwLwKtaGANg); the show Chekhovskie rasskazy
(Chekhov Stories) on channel O-TV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnZuum5pf3k and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUtzWkFczPM); and the show POPkonveèr (POPconveyer)
on channel M1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLZHViV1pKc). They are, moreover,
featured in not only Russian-language, but Russian media outlets as well. The complexity of this
issue, however, exceeds the concerns and space of this chapter.
8. Che.
9. Efimov.
10. See Kearney.
11. Yekelchyk, for example, examines the work of Serdiuchka in part via a focus on language—
specifically, Surzhyk, “the ungrammatical mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, widely employed
by less educated Ukrainians”—and related dynamics of nationality, class, and “folk” culture;
Yekelchyk, 218. See also Morris.
12. See, for example, Bohlman and Polychronakis who, in a discussion of Serbian entry Marija
Šerifović—winner of the 2007 competition—cite one informant as having found the singer’s
performance more indicative of an anticosmopolitan/anti-EU politics than any sort of
“queerness” (the latter often remarked upon in the Western popular press); Bohlman and
Polychronakis.
13. Green. Green here is both referencing and critiquing Shepherd and Wishart for what is, in her
estimation, a naïve and perhaps romantic bifurcation between the relationships of literate and
“pre-literate” peoples to music—alienated and/or distanced, versus direct, respectively (see
Shepherd and Wishart). I agree with Green’s perspective regarding the fragility of such a
proposal, but nonetheless support the other authors’ contention that specific forms of writing, in
specific locations, can indeed exert a hegemonic influence.
14. Kamon!!!, quoted in Fionik.
15. obozrevatel.com 2008.
16. According to one source, the sisters sent their first demo to Ukraine’s Lavina music as a joke (“v
shutku”), only to have founder and CEO Eduard Klim sign them immediately (Che). Lavina is
currently the largest music holding company in Ukraine, comprising several divisions (Lavina
Music, Distribution, Concert, Promotion, and Digital).
17. The group’s website (http://kamon.com.ua/) has been down since approximately mid-2015.
Currently (as of August 2017) there remains only a somewhat cryptic message and a hyperlink,
directing visitors to a belly dancing school in Kiev (http://laftia.com/). A portion of the
biographical material from the group’s original website could be found at http://forum.hd-
kino.net/index.php?threads/kamon.30753/ until early 2017; as of 20 August 2017, however, the
link is no longer active. The group—now as Japanda—maintains both V Kontakte and Facebook
pages at https://vk.com/kamonband and https://www.facebook.com/KAMONband, respectively.
18. See Fionik; obozrevatel.com 2008; Pavlova 2010b. Russian singer Zhanna Aguzarova was a
seminal performer in the late- and post-Soviet rock ‘n’ roll scenes, and is well known for her
claims to be in contact with aliens (or an alien herself) (see Amico 2014a). Pavlova notes that
early in their careers, information circulated on the internet that the “sisters” were Aguzarova’s
“illegitimate children from communication with the cosmic mind,” and that the duo had planned
to attend one of singer’s concerts in order to present one of their videos—a meeting which never
occurred due to cancellations and touring schedules; Pavlova 2010b. On the connection to
Aguzarova, see also Efirmov and Fionik.
The names Alisa and Kosmos most probably reference the series of children’s science fiction
books, Prikliucheniia Alisy (The Adventures of Alisa) written by Russian author Kir Bulychev
between 1965 and 2003. The series follows main character, Alisa Igorevna Selezneva, and her
adventures in the cosmos (v kosmose).
19. Fionik.
20. The duo’s live performances included appearances both in Ukraine and abroad (Russia, the
Baltic countries, and Turkey). The artists note, additionally, that their work, from the beginning
of their career, had been broadcast on “all the leading radio stations and TV channels not only in
Ukraine, but also far beyond its borders,” and “actively supported” by (and placed in rotation
on) media outlets including MTV Ukraine, MTV Russia, and MUZ-TV Moldova (Pavlova
2010b).
21. The group’s videos for the songs “Briunetka,” “Kably, Kamon!!!,” and “Metroseksual” have
approximately 1.4 million, 500,000, and 400,000 views (respectively) as of 20 August 2017.
22. Pavlova 2010b; Shaukerova.
23. Che; Efimov.
24. Shaukerova. In another interview, Alisa again invokes the image of the game of “telephone,”
noting that “we directly transfer all of our most horrible erotic fantasies ‘from hand to hand’ to
the viewer, without loss of quality” (Pavlova 2010b). Alisa also notes that within the group there
is a “clear distribution of responsibilities”; Ksiusha coordinates the costumes and “gives an idea
for a song, all sorts of bright little phrases and little words,” while she herself “figures out how
to rhyme and sing everything,” and directs the videos. Alisa has also worked as a songwriter
and/or video director for several other Ukrainian artists including Masha Fokina, Milosskaia,
and Iuliia Groznaia.
25. In an interview, the women noted that they were “very proud of this victory! If it was simply
‘the best song,’ we would have to reflect upon the failure of our mission” (obozrevatel.com
2008).
26. Barthes, 1977; Kristeva, 1984.
27. As noted, the group sing the majority of their songs in Russian; see notes 2 and 50.
28. Asked by an interviewer about the genesis of the song’s text by an interviewer—whether it was
a “stiob about modern youth, or just a set of funny [veselykh] phrases”—the women explained
that it was the outcome of “random typing”: “We had only just gotten acquainted with the
mobile telephone, and so were writing each other little SMSs. That’s how the song was formed”
(obozravetel.com 2008).
29. The pairs, in Russian, are as follows: Pasha/kasha (kashu), Kolia/bolen, Danil/vozomnil.
30. Perchi (перчи) is short for perchatki, gloves; shtory (шторы), literally “curtains,” means
sunglasses; uzkachi (узкачи) is taken from the adjective uzkii, meaning tight, and truby (трубы)
comes from the word truba, meaning pipe—respectively, slang for tight (“skinny”) and wide-
legged (“baggy”) jeans. Penzh (пенж) is an alteration of pidzhak (пиджак) (coat, clearly from
the English “pea jacket”), panama (панама) is argot for bucket hat, and kably (каблы) is a
shortening of the word for heels, kabluki (каблуки).
31. Mishkoriz.
32. In an early interview, it appears (according to the journalist) that the duo were searching for a
third member to join the band—specifically, a bass player (obozrevatel.com 2008). Several
months later, it was announced (in the same publication) that Kamon!!! had put out an internet
“casting call,” and had found two men to “officially join the group” (“ofitsial’no vol’iutsia v
gruppu”)—Ukrainian performers D1AMOND and Cybergrits, the former of whom was said to
have been cloned from a piece of Marilyn Manson’s leg, bitten off by a fan (obozrevatel.com
2009). The “official” members, however, do not appear in any of the group’s videos, and in an
interview appearing more than a year after the announcement of the group’s expansion, it seems
that Kamon!!! remained a duo. When asked by the interviewer whether or not they would
consider adding a “more saturated sound” to their music (“namely, to add an electric guitar and
percussion, and maybe use 8-bit samples”), both responded in a joking manner; Alisa replied
“Ksiusha! How many times have I said, stop playing that unplugged electric guitar!,” while
Ksiusha added (in order to highlight the stereotypical nature of “rock” music), “of course, I want
to have pumped-up men (muzhchiny nakachannye) standing on the stage, swinging around their
wet hair…” (Pavlova 2010a).
33. Fionik.
34. The song “Ralli” (“Rally”), for example, is arguably built upon only one chord, the minor tonic.
While “Kibergoty” is built upon an alternation between two chords, the tonic and dominant,
both are minor, thus not in line with the typical tonic-dominant relationship in much of Russian
popular music that stresses the resolution of leading tone to tonic.
35. In one interview the duo is quoted as saying “metrosexuals are NOT GAY, but they love
themselves so much, that they won’t have children with anyone. Metrosexuals are excited only
by their reflection in the mirror, not noticing anything or anyone around them, including us, that
is, the fair sex [prekrasnyi pol]” (radiostar.com; emphasis in original). In another interview, the
women suggest that all of the men who appeared in the video were required to go through the
“casting couch” (proiti cherez postel’) in order to prove that they were, indeed, heterosexual
(Pavlova 2010a).
36. The women note that the men appearing in the video were chosen via an open casting and vote
(Pavlova 2010a). In addition to the men chosen in this manner, the video also features Ukrainian
television host (and, at the time of the video’s release, editor of the Russian-language men’s
magazine XXL) Igor’ Posypaiko, likely chosen to serve as an example of a “real” Ukrainian
metrosexual.
37. Giddens, 1991.
38. The song “Kibergoty” (“Cybergoths”) also makes use of numerous contrasting vocal timbres,
suggesting different personages.
39. Specifically, the Kamon!!! video—like Madonna’s “Girl Gone Wild”—features the blondinka
(blond), at times, in a box-like room in which orientation (top/bottom) appears indeterminate.
However, while Madonna’s video is marked by high production levels and an expert use of
(high) technology, Kamon!!!’s video deliberately highlights DIY/khendmeid aesthetics, a
parodic gesture toward the original. It is probably not a coincidence that Madonna’s video
features dancers from another Ukrainian pop group, the now-disbanded Kazaky.
40. The term “fraternal peoples” (bratskii narod) is, according to political scientist Petro Oleshchuk,
“an invention of Soviet agitprop,” one with the purpose of allowing the “[recognition of]
Ukrainians as a people…but one that ‘cannot be separated from the Russians’”
(https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?
story_fbid=1108766449151392&id=100000541433652). The article from which the quote is
taken appears on the now-defunct Russian (not Ukrainian) “lifestyle”/culture site lookatme.ru,
owned by Moscow-based digital media company Look at Media (who publish several other
similar websites such as furfur.me and the-village.ru). It is not clear if the term is meant to
highlight a specifically Ukrainian–Russian tension, or simply to invoke the dynamic of affronts
to authority.
41. The music to the song was written by Alisa, who also directed the video
(radio.obozravatel.com).
42. According to one media source, the song was written “spontaneously,” the outcome of a phone
discussion about photographic equipment, between Alisa and Gorn. The duo is quoted as saying
that there is no hidden meaning in the song, but that everyone has the right to introduce her/his
own ideas, in line with one’s own “licentiousness” (raspushchennosti) (radio.obozrevatel.com).
43. Although the singers claim to be sisters, there are others who have suggested they are lovers—a
claim which they deny (Mishkoriz); they neither confirmed nor denied, however, implications
that they had previously worked in the Dutch pornography industry (Fionik; moskva.fm).
Although the women exhibit a type of eroticism toward one another in the video, in an earlier
interview, asked if they would be giving one another “juicy kisses” in the manner of t.A.T.u,
they replied with a definitive “no,” offering “frankly speaking, this pseudo-sexuality on display
in all the media spaces is already boring. There won’t be any slobbery kisses” (Shaukerova).
44. For example, the song “Narasti sebe mozg” (“Grow Your Brain”) is a commentary on plastic
surgery, and “Briunetka” (according to the duo) is at least partially designed to give a non-
smoking message (Mishkoriz; moskva.fm).
45. Photographs from the Kiev dance club Форсаж (transliterated as Forsage on the official
website: http://www.forsageclub.com.ua/, where Gorn has appeared as a DJ, also feature female
dancers attired as hybrid animal/humans (with muscles on the “outside” rather than the
“inside”). See the photographs on Gorn’s V Kontakte page at https://vk.com/richardgorn?
z=photo-77854128_351841498%2Fphotos-77854128.
46. Briusov: 63.
47. Ibid., 53–54.
48. Shank, 3.
49. Panagia, 9.
50. Ibid., 3.
51. On the close relationships among sound, music, and politics see, for example (among many
others), Feiereisen and Hill; Gilbert and Pearson; and Stoever.
52. Giffney; my emphasis.
53. Taylor, 14.
54. Pavlova, 2010b.
55. See Wagnleitner.
56. Shank, 1, 21.
57. Panagia, 3.
58. Solie, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship; Bloechl,
Kallberg, and Lowe, Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship.
59. Tomlinson, 368.
60. Ibid., 371, 372.
61. Bosteels notes, for example, that contrary to most other forms of contractual relationships,
where the parties exist prior to the negotiation, in the relationship between individual and
“people,” the latter comes into being as a result of the contact. There is thus a question of where
the contractual obligations lie. Bosteels also highlights the tensions arising from “fidelity both to
the sovereign body of the new collective and to each of its individual members—that is
immediately repressed and covered up by the repetition of a single name” (Bosteels, 8).
62. Ibid., 20.
63. Badiou, 24.
64. Taylor: 34. Taylor also quotes Phelan, who even more forcefully highlights the connection
between queer theory and the fluidity—indeed, dissolution—of identity. In Phelan’s estimation
“queer theory [has] pointed to the fundamental indeterminacy of identities—of inside/outside
communities, of masculine/feminine, of homo/hetero/bi, of male/female, and of racial and
ethnic categories. Ultimately queer theory’s target is identity itself—the assumption of unity or
harmony or transparency within persons or groups” (quoted in ibid.).
65. Muñoz, 25. See also Jones who, in line with Muñoz, and contra Bersani’s and Edelman’s “anti-
futurity” embrace of queer negativity, sees an aspiration toward a queer utopia as not a search
for perfection but—drawing upon the word’s root meanings—a move toward a space in which
oppressed subjects can “breathe” (Jones, 3).
66. Tellis and Bala, 19.
67. Ulbricht et al., 158.
68. See Martsenyuk.
69. See Leszkowicz and Kitlinski.
70. To quote the authors in full: “The rites of passage for eastern Europe require a great deal of
preparation, meeting of criteria, schooling, and proper cultural dress. Under the paternal
instruction of Westerners, Easterners are expected to mature into their Foucauldian ‘docile
 bodies’…Eastern Europe is perceived as a recipient of aid, discipline, and limited
empowerment” (Kitlinski and Lockard, 128).
71. Page and Daniel quote Ukrainian activist/journalist Maxim Eristavi as saying “We should
provide full solidarity for developing countries but also be more considerate of what’s
happening inside without sounding patronizing of neocolonial” (Page and Daniel). See also
Alekseev: “‘The international community would be much more effective if it listened to the
activists on the ground, and brought to justice those who are directly involved in stirring up
homophobic hysteria in Russia,’ rather than deciding unilaterally on their advocacy tactics,
which can inadvertently harm the people and causes they intend to support” (quoted in Rivkin-
Fish and Hartblay: 108).
72. Leszkowicz and Kitlinski, 181.
73. Austin, 24.
74. See, for example, my discussion of repetition and music, and their relation to identity formation
(Amico 2014b: chapter 6).
75. Seeger, 184.
76. Ibid., 186: emphasis original.
77. Treitler, 78, 211.
78. Ibid., 221.
79. See M. Mälksoo; and Pilkington et al.; for Russian (and anti-Western) views see also Solovei
and Davydov.
80. See, for example, Martsenyuk, who notes that homophobia—expressed from the highest levels
of government, on downward—has been increasing in Ukraine in the past several years, even
among younger people; Martsenyuk. See also Eristavi’s assessment of Ukrainian homophobia in
Page and Daniel.
81. Jones, 4.
82. Tellis and Bala, 13. The authors here are critiquing Altman’s work on the internationalization of
“gay identities.” See Altman 1996, 1997.
83. megogo.com; obozrevatel.com 2008. The reference to steb also appears in the group’s entry on
the Russian-language Wikipedia site, the author(s) noting that “the group was thought up as a
‘steb-y’ internet project by the sisters, working without a producer.” As is somewhat common
with the Russian-language, online popular “press,” the same text is found on other websites (for
example, gl5.ru), making it difficult to identify the “original” source. The same Wikipedia text
also appears on a V Kontakte page—notably, that of a user with the name LGBT-Muzyka
(LGBT-Music) (https://vk.com/wall-8854300)—and references to steb appear in discussions on
other V Kontakte pages as well. For example, in one discussion thread titled “The Stupidest
Lines in Pop [Music]” (Samye tupye strochki v popse), one user offers an example of
Kamon!!!’s “Ralli,” to which another replies that that “‘KAMON’ like the group ‘pAiushchie
trusy’ [The Singing Panties] is steb, they from the beginning invented it this way, anti-glamor
and with insane lyrics” (https://vk.com/topic-20650061_23413580?post=2487).
84. Due to its pronunciation, the word steb is often also transliterated as stiob (as in Yurchak’s
book).
85. Yurchak, 249: emphasis original. According to Yurchak, steb is an “ironic aesthetic,” but a
“peculiar form of irony that differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more
familiar genres of absurd humor.” Of particular note is the fact that stiob, combining both
 support and ridicule, “produced an incredible combination of seriousness and irony, with no
suggestive signs of whether it should be interpreted as the former or the latter, refusing the very
dichotomy between the two” (ibid.).
86. See also Boyer and Yurchak; Malykhina (especially chapter 10, “Transgressive Language: Stiob
and Stylization”).
87. The statement was made during an interview with on Ukrainian radio station RTI, at which point
Ksiusha also noted that Kamon!!!’s demise had been due in part to Alisa having had a serious
illness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwLwKtaGANg&feature=youtu.be).
88. The group notes that the song was written in great haste, in order to meet the deadlines for
submission to the contest (esckaz.com).
89. The song, sung in both English and the Crimean Tatar language, also features a melody taken
from a folk song of the same people, “Ey, güzel Qırım.”
90. See Burridge; Roslyakov and Berry; and Stern.
91. Stern notes “For many Ukrainians, then, Jamala’s song is unquestionably political, and this they
say is exactly why they voted for her in the national competition.”
92. See, for example, Bilaniuk 2005, 2010; Shumlianskyi; and Sinovets. It is notable that when the
“sisters” were asked whether or not they were planning to sing in Ukrainian, Alisa responded,
“We’re planning to. Maybe some time…Our country isn’t ready yet to receive us in the
Ukrainian language. The generation that studies the Primer (Bukvar’) still hasn’t matured…”
The Bukvar’ is a primer ostensibly for the instruction of the Russian language, but also a
resource for inculcating specific types of cultural discourses and narratives in schoolchildren
from an early age. The prohibition in 1769 on the printing of the Ukrainian Primer, and the
appearance of the Russian Primer in Ukrainian schools is part and parcel of a centuries-long
attempted Russification of the country (including at the level of language), one that arguably
continues to the present day. On the cultural/political uses of literacy primers in Ukraine, see
Mead.
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Ulbricht, Alexej, Indraneel Sircar, and Koen Slootmaeckers. “Queer to Be Kind: Exploring Western
Media Discourses about the ‘Eastern Bloc’ during the 2007 and 2014 Eurovision Song Contests.”
Contemporary Southeastern Europe 2, no. 1 (2015): 155–172.
Weber, Cynthia. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge.
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Yekelchyk, Serhy. “What is Ukrainian about Ukraine’s Pop Culture?: The Strange Case of Verka
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Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.
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 I

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t”, “f”, and notes are indicated by “n.” following
the page number.
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

ABBA 504, 516

Abbas, A. 587
Abdelli-Beruh, Nassima B. 247–248
Abelard, Peter 147–148
abject 406–408
abject music 407–408, 413
Abod, Susan 491–492
Abrams, Lee 39
Abrams, M. H. 220
academia, “queer” used in 2–3. See also queer studies
aca-fan 186
acid-house music 40–42
acrobats, female 464–465
actualization 332
ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) 2, 151, 497n.24
Adams, Maude 462–463
adaptation
change of medium and 169
meanings of 167–168
non-normative sexualities in 168
treatment of sexuality in 181–182
types of 167–168
Addams, Calpernia 240, 258–259
Adelaide Fringe Festival 319
Adidi—The Untold Story (Walidah) 136
Adiseshiah, Siân 109–110
Adlon, Percy 484
Adorno, Theodor 224n.18, 281
Aelred of Rievaulx 425
Aesthetic Music Therapy (AeMT) 355, 363
aesthetics
dissident 103
history of 212, 218
 intersectional 528
politics and 612–613
See also queer aesthetic
African Americans. See Black people
Africanism, musical discourse on 175
Afrofuturism 384–385
cyborg and alien drag in 388
defamiliarizing root and location 392–393
defined 384–385
imagery of 387
origins of 384–385
quare practice of, as alien drag 386
sonic 392
spaceship image in 385–387
women cyborgs in 388
See also alien abduction
Afrofuturist science fiction 390
Afro-pessimism 229
Age of Consent (hip hop group) 121, 123, 127–130
agnosia 371–372
Aguzarova, Zhanna 606–607
Ahmed, Sara 16, 304–305, 327, 367, 481
AIDS
activism for, war and military images in 488
activists mobilizing care networks 491–492
art about, function of 481–482
crisis of, portrayals of 73
deaths from 485–486
distorted popular view of 354, 489
extant music used in context of 482–484
female artists responding to 489
gay men’s responses to 353–354
media representations of, extant music in 483
musical works about, appearing more slowly 482
music database for 481
music therapy for 353–354. See also HIV/AIDS: music therapy and
music videos on, innovative 484
as palliative condition 353
photography on 491–492
Plague Mass as response to 150–151
politicized 495
songs about, diversity of 485–495
victims’ musical memorials 486–487
 See also HIV/AIDS; PWAs
AIDS: America Is Dying Slowly 482, 489
AIDS Song Quilt 482
Ailey, Alvin 498n.31
Ain’t We Brothers (Gleaves) 109
Akomfrah, John 387
alcohol, songs in praise of 474
Aletti, Vince 38
Ali, Muhammad 126–127
alien abduction 385–386
alien technologies, linked to flight from racism 387
Alisa v kosmose 606–607
Allen, Valerie 433–435
Allen, Woody 462
All about Eve (dir. Mankiewicz) 72–73
all-female orchestras 471
All Men Are Brothers (Shuihuizhuan) 548
Allsorts Youth Project (Brighton) 318
Alsop, Peter 490
alterity, as agent for sociopolitical change 615
Althaus-Reid, Marcella 145, 151–152, 156–157
Altizer, Thomas 154–155
Amateur: The Work of Nao Bustamante (Muñoz) 224n.22
amateurism, in queer performance 215–216
ambivalence, cultivation of 586–587
Americana, identities related to 111
American Boychoir School (Princeton, NJ), child molestation at 405–406, 409–411. See also
Columbus Boychoir School
American Dad (Fox/TBS) 239
American Foundation for AIDS Research 483–484
American Idol (Fox) 516
American Musicological Society 6–8, 10, 327
Gay and Lesbian Study Group 12
Program Committee of 7
queer music scholarship in 4–5
AmFar. See American Foundation for AIDS Research
Amico, Stephen 10, 21
Amnesty International 509
Amos, Tori 482, 484–485
amplification, as video technique 483–484
Ampu, Ralowe Trinitrotulene 135
AMS. See American Musicological Society
Amsterdam, The (Brighton) 316
anal references, in marginalia 430, 433–436
Andaya, Leonard 564–565
Andersen, Tom 486
Anderson, Benedict 572
Andrews, Julie 71
Angels in America (Kushner) 483
Angus, John 42
Anne, Melanie 240–241, 248, 258
Anohni 369, 375
Anthology of Rap (ed. Bradley and DuBois) 135
AntiClub (Los Angeles) 128
antiessentialism 369–370
anti-identity, queer as term of 526–527
AntiPop Consortium 136
Anzieu, Didier 371–372
Applause (Comden and Green) 72–73
archive of feelings 481–482
Arendt, Hannah 155–156
Argyle Hotel (Brighton) 312–313
Aristotle 299
Arkestra, the 384, 389, 391–392, 395–399
See also collective improvisation; Sun Ra
“Army of Me” (Bjork) 199
ars erotica (erotic art) 280
Arthur, Bea 63–64, 66
articulation 242–244, 243t, 248
artistic expression, commodification of 281
artwork, goals of 481–482
Ashe, Arthur 498n.31
Asian Americans, feminization of 266
Asian music, Euro-American males exploiting sounds of 9–10
assemblage 398–399
asymmetries, repeating those of the past 617
Astaire, Fred 72
Astor Place Theater (NYC), riot at 458–459
Atkins, Juan 41
Attinello, Paul 7–8, 481, 491, 495
audio-eroticism 278
audio porn 277, 282, 286–287
auditory sphere, sexual potential of 278
auditory stimulation, sexual potency and 278
aural arousal 278
aural fetishism 278, 281, 287
auralism 17–18, 278, 282–287
aural sex 277–278, 282
aural voyeurism 277
Austria
cultural heritage of 513–514
Eurovision and 512
authenticity 174
Black 390–392, 394
country music and 109
definitions of 124
for a gay therapist 354
girl groups and 256–257
racial, in hip hop 123
in rock 262–263
autobiographical writing, sincerity in 110
Autobiography (Douglass) 229–230
Aviance, Kevin 44

Baby Bindley 470–471

Babyface 235
Bach, J. S. 350
Bacharach, Burt 483–484
Bacon-Smith, Camille 186–187
Bad Girls (ITV) 196
fandom of 11
Nikki/Helen relationship in, conflictual and dangerous 201
vidding based on 186, 195–202
nonverbal elements of Nikki/Helen relationship in 197–198
vid of Nikki/Helen relationship 197–199
Badham, John 38
Badiou, Alain 615–616
“Bad Reputation” (Jett) 242, 261–263, 262f
Baez, Joan 107–108
bagpipes 428, 437
bahasa Indonesia 562
Bailey, J. Michael 241
Bailey, Pearl 175
Baitz, Dana 13, 20
Baker, Catherine 514–515
Baker, Josephine 12, 315–316
Baker, Paul 315–316
Balance, John 483–484
Baldwin, James 88–89, 130
Bali
culture of 560–561
dance and gender characterization in 570–571
girls’ and women’s performing groups in 571
ball culture 43–44
ballet dancers, on variety stages 468–470, 469f
ballroom scene 43–44
Baltimore, sounds of 298
Balzac, Honoré de 444–446
Bambaataa, Afrika 127–128
Ban Ki-moon 512–513
Banks, Azealia 121–122, 137
Barad, Karen 374
Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) 393–394
Barbieturix 47
Barenboim, Daniel 505–506
Barker, Victor 319
Barnum, P. T. 466–470
Baron (Kobe) 212–213
Barrett Sisters, the 483
Barthes, Roland 168, 444–446
Bartlett, Neil 19
Barz, Gregory 5, 13–14
Bayer Sager, Carole 483–484
B-Boy Blues (Hardy) 131
BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism) 278, 286–288
Bean, Carl 233–234
Bechdel, Alison 73
Bee Gees, the 38
Beethoven, Ludwig von 342, 350, 355, 506–507
Beghelli, Marco 443
Behzadi, Olivier 254–255
Beijing
LGBT community in 585–586
music festivals in 585
rainbow flags in 596
“Being-as-Playing-a-Role,” 68
Belafonte, Harry 174
Belleville Three 41
belonging 368
Benatar, Pat 262–263
Benjamin, Walter 412
Bennett, Alan 313–314
Bent, Tessa 241
Berg, Alban 355
Bergeron, Kathy 484
Berghain (Berlin) 47–48
Berkowitz, Richard 488–489
Berlant, Lauren 222, 505, 509
Berlin
EDM in 35–36, 47–48
house music scene in 36
queer scene in 35
rave scene, implosion of 36
Berlin, Irving 505
Berlin (Chicago) 43
Bernhardt, Sarah 240, 462–463
Bernstein, Leonard 12
Berry, Chris 589
Berry, Cicely 253–254
Berry, Fred 126–127
Bersani, Leo 9, 618
Between Men (Sedgwick) 221–222
Bezençon, Marcel 507
Bible 17, 145
belief in 147
Deuteronomic History in 149–150
disrupting heterosexist norms 149
engagement with 147
gay-affirmative engagement with 147–148
ideological tensions in 155–156
Levitical prohibition in 149–150, 154. See also Plague Mass (Galas)
moral authority claims of, undercut 151
musical queering of 145, 157–158
Priestly Tradition in 149–150
reinterpretation of, ongoing 155
secularizing of 152
biblical faith, perspectivalism in 145
Bicep 36
Big Bank Hank (Henry “Hank” Jackson) 125–127
Big Freedia 369–370, 373, 376
Big Love Alliance (Hong Kong) 593, 597–599
Bikini Kill 306
Bindley, Florence 470–471
biography, focus on 9
Birmingham School 17
bisexuality
invisibility of 97–98
in queer music studies 13
bisexual musicians, challenges for 97–98
bisexual women, speech of 261
bissu, rituals of 564–565
Bitter (Ndegeocello) 230–231
Bizet, George 167, 170
Biz Markie 489
Bjork 199
Black Atlantic 124–125, 388–389, 391–392, 394
Black Atlantic Futurism 393
Black authenticity 390–392
Black churches 16
children’s choirs in 86–87
condemning homosexuality 89–90
costuming in 87, 89
gay people incorporated into 496n.11
gender nonconformity in 85
queer expression in 86–87
silence in, around sexuality 82
theatricality in 88
Black Elvis (Kool Keith) 387–388
Black emancipation 389, 393–394
Blackface minstrelsy 457–458
Black feminism, in the 1970s 230
“Black Folks Guide to Black Folks” (Walidah) 136
Black gospel performance, gay men and 16
Black male performers, masculinity and 125–127
Black masculinity
negative form of 390
queer as threatening to 130
Black men, veneration of, in hip hop 135
Black Messiah (D’Angelo) 232
Black musicians
in the Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12
research on queer topics and 13
Black Nationalism 388, 393–394
Blackness
authenticity and 124–125
future for 388, 393
new forms of 399
Black Panthers 394
Black people
concerned about others’ perceptions of the race 84
culture of, gospel music in 81
dehumanization of 393
heteromasculinity of 127
inhabiting a sci-fi nightmare 385
male performers, masculinity and 125–127
masculinization of 266
media representations of 124–125
meta-communication of, affective nature of 397
music utopias for 387
as myths 393–394
as pimps, stereotype of 390–391
popular music of, serving gay liberation 128–129
relationality among, wreck of 234
Black performance 229
Black pride 393–394
Black Queer Studies (ed. Johnson and Henderson) 2–3
Black redaction 235
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 387
Black subjectivity 397
Black subjects, self-made 229–230
Blackwood, Evelyn 563–564, 572
Blaize, Earl 136
Blanco, Mykki 121–122, 137, 369–370, 373, 377
Blatter, Alfred 241, 245–246
blaxploitation 389–391, 395–396
Bloch, Ernest 50
Bloch-Bauer, Adele 513–514, 514f
Block, Adrienne Fried 329
Bloom, Harold 220
Bloomfield, Mike 111
Blow, Kurtis 127–128
bodies
emerging through time 373
importance of, to identity 372
manipulation of 428
production of 367
of PWAs 491–492
reality of 373
role of, in shaping experience 371–372
as site for perception and feeling of sound 437
wholeness of, ego coherence and 371–372
bodily sex, role of, in determining experience 371–372
body language, for musicians 256–257, 262–263
body-spirit dualism 156
Boellstorff, Tom 563, 572–573
Bogarde, Dirk 177
Bona Drag (Morissey) 315–316
Bones, Frankie 42
Bono 484
Bonoff, Karla 486–487
Bontempi, Giovanni Angelini 451n.20
Boom Bang-a-Bang (Harvey) 508
Boonin, Joan 248–251
Boris (DJ) 36
Bortolotti, Gary 167–168
“Bossy” (Chaud) 199–201
Bosteels, Bruno 615, 625n.60
“Both Sides Now” (Mitchell), in Fong’s Star Trek vid 188–191
Boulton, Ernest 311
bounce music 369–370
Bourdieu, Pierre 113–114
Bowers, Jane 327
Boyer, Clarence 82
Boy George 266, 318, 591–592
Boys Will Be Girls (E4) 254–257
B.Q.E. 132–133
bracketing 367
Braden, Edwin 315
Braidotti, Rosi 373–374
breakbeat genres 42
breathiness, gender and 247–248
breeches roles 463, 477n.12, 477n.13
Brennan, Jay 461–462
Brett, Philip 6–11, 18–19, 328, 369–370, 409, 422, 561
Brett (Philip) Award (American Musicological Society) 4–5, 10
Brexit 505–506
Brighton (UK)
alternative culture of 311–316
drag in 313–314
history of 311–312
queer culture in 316
queer scene in 315–316, 318–319
Brighton Dome 318
Brighton Fringe 319
Brighton Hippodrome 312
Brighton and Hove LGBT switchboard 318
Brighton Pride 318
British accent, considered effeminate 253–254
Britten, Benjamin 6–8, 12, 148–149, 167, 176–177, 179–180, 405–406, 408–409, 413, 561
“Briunetka” (“Brunette [Woman]”) (Kamon!!!) 610–611, 611t
Briusov, Valerii 605, 612, 620
Broadnax, William (Big Ax) 85
Broadnax, Willmer (Little Ax) 85
Brooklyn Funk Essentials 136
Brooks, Avery 286
Brooks, Garth 114
Brown, Jeree (JBRap) 135
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick 6–7
Browne, Coral 319
Brummel, Beau 311
Brundage, James A. 423–424
Buckland, Fiona 56n.42
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon) 195
Bugis society (Indonesia) 564–565
Bulldog, The (Brighton) 316
bullying 100–102
Bunzl, Matti 9–10
Burkhart, Kent 39
burlesque 455–457, 463–470, 468f, 475
“Burlington Bertie from Bow” (Shields; Norris) 242, 251–254, 253f, 254f
Burston, Paul 319
Bustamante, Nao 215–216
Butler, Judith 2–3, 17, 43–44, 126, 192, 326, 370
Butler, Neil 318
Butler, Patricia 318
“Buttons” (Pussycat Dolls) 198–199, 201
Byers, R. K. 131
Byng, Dougie 312–314, 319
Byrd E. Bath 242, 257–261
Byrens, Robert (Bobby) 409–414
Byrne, David 484

Cage, John 12, 18

Cagney and Lacey (CBS) 193–194
California Crew 193
Callahan, John 127–128, 130
Callen, Michael 482, 488–489
Calvin Klein 315–316
Cameron, Rhona 318
Camille, Michael 426
camp 296
aesthetic of 88, 109
AIDS and 488–489
appeal of 109
attached to straight culture’s discards 109–110
central lesson of 68
critiquing cowboy culture 312–313
in Eurovision 508, 511
in female impersonators’ acts 461
femininity and 68–69
gamelan sounds and 561
multiple forms of 109–110
Polari and 317
sincerity and 109–110
subcultural language and 315–316
theatre 315–316
Campbell, David 146
Campion, Freddie 504
cancan 468–470
Candelabra (dir. Soderbergh) 315–316
Canibus 484–485
canon law 422–424
Cantate Domino (Psalm 97) 428
Caputo, Virginia 7–8
Cara Moto 47
Caravans, the 83
cardinal functions 168
Cardini, Jennifer 47
Carmen (Bizet) 167, 170–175, 172–173f, 181–182
Carmen (Mérrimée) 167, 170–175, 181–182
Carmen Jones (Bizet and Hammerstein) 167, 170, 181–182
Carmen Jones (dir. Preminger) 170, 174–176
conservative sexuality in 174
musical changes in 175–176
musical decisions in 174–176
narrative checkpoint adjusted in 175
racial contrast lacking in 175
signifying potential of 175–176
Carmen narratives 168, 170–176
Carpenter, Edward 311–312
Carter, Betty 393
Casarino, Cesare 385–386
Case, Sue-Ellen 17, 526–527
Cassata, Ryan 369–370, 375–377
caste system, patriarchy and 533–534
castrati 12, 456–457
attraction to 447–449
decline of 444, 463
defined 442–444
distinct from trans 447–448
erotic ideal of 447
gendered presentation of 441–442
marriage for, validity of 447
physical makeup of 443
polyphony and 442
popularity of 444–445, 449
portrayals of 444–446
queer history and 442
queerness of 442, 446–449
reception of 20, 441, 444–446, 449
recordings of 443
scholarship around 441–442
sexual ambiguity of 441–442, 445–446
 sexual behaviors of 441
teachers of 443
usage of, in Italian music 443–444
voices of 443–444
voluntary 448
castration
anxiety about 444
consent and 447–448
decline of 444
among hijras 530
joys of 376
as medical cure 442
prepubescent, for musical purposes 441–443
significance of 444–445
slavery symbolic of 390–391
catalytic functions (catalyses) 168
Catholic Church 421–424
causality, reinstatement of 374
celibacy 436–437
Césaire, Aimé 386
Chaiken, Ilene 195
Chan, Evans 598
Chan, Natalia 592
Chan Chi-chuen, Raymond 593
Chang, Jeff 124
Channing, Carol 68
Chao, Cecil 593
Chao Sik-chi, Gigi 593, 597–598
Charisse, Cyd 73
Chaser 133
Chaud, Tres 199
Cheng, William 13–14
Chen Kaige 540
Chen Shen 543
Chessmate (Detroit) 41
chest resonance 66
Cheuk Yin Li 597
Cheung, Leslie 540, 590, 592–595
chiaroscuro 246–247
Chic 125
Chicago 40–41
as birthplace of contemporary gospel music 81–82
Disco Demolition Night in 39–40
 disco going underground in 40
house music in 40–42
hypersegregation in 42–43
Jai Ho dance night in 49
nightlife in, urban segregation and 43
postdisco scene in 40
queer Black scenes in 37
rave scene in 42–43
child molesters 408–409
children, sexualizing, for artistic purposes 406–407
China (contemporary)
cross-dressing in, as theatrical art 540–541
culture of, monolithic reading of 589
female impersonation in 540–541, 543–544, 552
gender practices in, traditional 550–551
gender and sex information elusive in 541
hegemonic and heterosexual norms in 539
LGBT rights in 596
male impersonation in 541, 543–544, 552
masculine women in 549–550
masculinity in 548–550
rainbow flags in 585–586, 586f
remaining closeted in 541
sexuality in, attitude toward 588–589
sexuality and popular music in 586–587
sexual minorities in, media representations of 595
women’s secondary status in 551
See also Beijing; Hong Kong; kunqu
China (Ming dynasty), homosocial/homosexual activities common in 542
China (Qing dynasty), banning women performers 543
Chinese opera 540. See also kunqu
Chion, Michel 300
Chloé 47
Chopin, Frederic 340–341, 350
apotheosis in works of 345–346
Barcarolle 345–346
B-Minor Sonata 346
Etude in C# Minor (Op. 25 no. 7) 348
Fantasy 346
“Heroic” Polonaise 346
Nocturnes in C# Minor and Db Major (Op. 27) 348
personal idiosyncrasies of 345
Polonaise-Fantasy 346
 queerness in music of 340–341, 347–348
tenderness in music of 346, 350–351
violent conclusions in works of 346
Waltz in A Minor (Op. 34 no. 2) 347–348
Chorus Line, A (Kirkwood and Dante) 73
Chou Wah-shan 588–589
Chow, Yiu-Fai 21
Christ, queer 157
Christian, Meg 155
Christian narratives, linked with homoeroticism and pacifism 148–149
Christian symbols, queer practices fused with 157
Christy, George 457–458
church butches 86
Churcher, Mel 247–248
Church of God in Christ 85–86
Churchill, Winston 505–506
church sissies 82, 86, 88
cinema. See film
circuit parties 35, 45–46
cisgender heteronormative, passing as 263–266
cisgender heterosexuals
gendered vocalisms in 263–266
passing as cisgender heterosexuals 242
cissexuals, gender performances of 241–242
City of Refuge Community Church UCC (San Francisco) 85–86
Clapton, Nicholas 441–442
Clary, Julian 318
class anger 253–254
classical music forms, queer and feminist critiques of 287–288
Clément, Catherine 146, 499n.43
clerical identity 436–437
Cleveland, James 83–84, 88–89
Clinton, Arthur 311
Clinton, George 387–388
“Closer” (Nine Inch Nails) 191
closet, the
epistemology of 331
sound of 302
Cloud, Robin 134
clubbing, retiring from 41
Club Freaky (San Francisco) 133
Club Shame (Brighton) 318
Clum, John 66, 74
COGIC. See Church of God in Christ
Cohan, Steven 71–72
Cohen, Cathy J. 3, 123, 126–127
Coil 483–484
Colbert, Stephen 516
Cole, Paula 492–493
Coleman, Stephen 504
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 222
CollarMe 284–285
collective improvisation 397–399
Collins, Judy 189–190
Collins, Michelle 318
Collis, Rose 312, 319
Color Purple, The (Walker) 73
Colton, Lisa 20
Columbus Boychoir School 409–415
Comden, Betty 72–73
coming out 96
audiences’ expecting songs about 111
geographical and cultural contexts for 98
through music 340
in trad scene 96–99
See also Wong, Anthony
commodity fetishism 281
community, difference as asset in 93
Company (Sondheim) 74–75
Comstock, Gary David 150
Coney, John 384, 389
confessional songs about AIDS 485, 491–493
“Confessions of a Gay Rapper” (Jamal X) 130–131
Connell, Jane 67
Constansis, Alexandros 369, 371, 373, 375
constructivism 370, 374–376
contact, karaoke and 217–218
Continental Baths (NYC) 482–483
convergence culture 195
Cook, Susan 327
Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape (Ndegeocello) 231
Coole, Diana 374
Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture
(Hale) 13–14
Copland, Aaron 12, 18–19
Coppa, Francesca 185–191, 193, 201–202
Coppola, Sofia 219
copying, karaoke and 212
Coral, Fany 47
Corbett, John 282–283, 387
Corbin, Carolyn 256–257
core narrative ideas 167–168
Cornerstone Institutional Baptist Church (Los Angeles) 83
Corps vs. Machine 47
cosmic sound 398
Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Sun Ra) 397
cosmologies, dualistic 563–565, 567, 569–570
cosmopolitanism 504, 529
counterpublics 35
countertransference 527–528
country music
appeal of, to queer or transgender participants 108–109
associated with masculinized, rural, working-class culture 264
attitudes associated with 108–109
authenticity and 109
heteronormativity in 263
identities related to 111
nostalgia in 263–266
performance of, by transgender and queer musicians 108–109, 111–113
queer artists’ use of 17
sincerity in 110
as teaching medium for knowledge about gays 107–108
Cowell, Henry 12
Cowell, Simon 312
Cowgill, Rachel 14
Craig, Carl 41
Crawford, Ruth 327–328
CrazySexyCool (Ndegeocello) 235
Crenshaw, Kimberlé 2
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 314
Crimp, Douglas 481–482, 488, 491–492
critical fabulation 229
critical generosity 481–482
critical musicology 4
criticism
central to queering and vidding 191–192
reconsigned to the same form 221
vocality of 221–222
cross-dressing
 in Chinese opera 539. See also kunqu cross-dressing
found across Asian societies 540–541
history of 455. See also drag entries
homosexuality and 539–540
in Indonesia 563
musical 541, 548
crossgender behavior, conflated with deviant sexuality 441–442
crossgender identification, realization of 368
crossgender vocal performance 251–266
Crouch, Andre 89–90
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Muñoz) 2–3, 396–397, 416n.5, 496n.5,
615–616
Crutchley, Sena 249–250
cult of male personality 232
cultural borrowing 111
cultural context, ideas operating in relation to 167–168
cultural hybridity 124
cultural production, attributes of 612
cultural selection 167–168
cultural specificity 613–614
cultural transcription 605–606
cultural transference 527–528
Culture-Court (website) 390
culture essentialism, resistance to 589
Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12–13
Cunningham, Valerie 409
Current Musicology 13
Currie, Cherrie 260–261
cursing, gender and 249–250
Cushman, Charlotte 462–463
Cusick, Suzanne G. 8, 12, 16, 18–19, 146, 287, 327, 448, 528
Cvetkovich, Ann 481–482
Cybergrits 623n.31
Cyborgasm (various artists) 277, 282
Cyrus 131–132

Dacakis, Georgia 248

Dahl, Steve 39
dalang topeng 567–568
dame, as drag type 455–459, 456f, 462–464, 476
Dame, Joke 445
Damn Yankees (Abbott and Wallop) 65–66
Damon, Matt 315–316
Dana International 508–509, 510f, 515
Dance Big Top 318
dance clubs, social dynamics of, influence on music 370
dance culture, drag balls’ influence on 43–44
dance music, as music of resistance 487
dancers, increasing popularity of, in 19th century US 468–470
dancing, gender-transgressive nature of, pop music and 375–376
Dandridge, Dorothy 174–175
D’Angelo 232
Daniel, Drew 18
Danilko, Andriy (Andrei) 509–511, 603–605. See also Serduchka, Verka
Dante 430
Dare, Leona 470–471, 470f
Dark Night of the Soul, The (Harkness) 154
Darwin, Charles 279
Dasgupta, Sudeep 586
Davey D 130–131
David and Jonathan story (Hebrew Bible) 145, 147–149, 153–154
See also “Mourning Scene” (Rorem)
Davidson, Charles 411
Davis, Angela 231, 393
Davis, Murray 282
Dawron, Dora 471
D/DC. See Deep Dickcollective
Deadlee 133
Dean, Hazel 319
Death in Venice (Britten and Piper) 167, 176, 179–182, 181f, 409
Death in Venice (Mann) 167, 179–182
Death in Venice narratives 176–182
DeBarge, Flotilla (Kevin Joseph) 483
Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Girard) 221–222
de Certeau, Michel 186
Decretum 422–423
Deep Dickcollective 132–135
deep house music/scene 35–36, 44–45
defamiliarization 219
de Kloet, Jeroen 21, 507–508, 590–591
Delany, Samuel R. 217–218, 394
de la Oliva, Josefa (Pepita) 311–312
de La Palude, Pierre 423–424
De La Soul 136
Deleuze, Gilles 332–333, 398
Del Rosario, Roberto 223n.6
Dennis, Patrick 68–69
DeNora, Tia 279
“Denver Principles, The,” 491–492
Derrida, Jacques 17
Dery, Mark 384–385
descriptive details, adaptations and 168–169, 175
desire, sublimation of 408
Desire/Love (Berlant) 222
Desprez, Fabrice 47
destabilization 368
Destination (Beijing) 585–586
Detroit
techno’s development in 40–41
house music in 392
Devientside 284–285
DeVoe, Bell Biv 235
devotional manuscripts, marginal images in 426–436, 429f, 431f
dholak barrel drum 530
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V; American Psychiatric
Association) 278
D1AMOND 623n.31
Diamond, Beverley 327
Diamond, Catherine 570–571
Diamond, Darcy 128–129
Diamond D 489
Diamond Horseshoe (NYC) 462
diaspora, progressive perspective of 388–389
Dibango, Manu 38
Didi-Huberman, Georges 615
Didik Nini Thowok 573–575
Dietrich, Marlene 315–316
difference
active recognition of 103–104
internal, as necessary for political effectiveness 615
scholarship of 614
theorization of 614
thinking of, as an asset 93
digital recording, as inscription itself 300
Dillon, Emma 430
Dinah Shore Weekend 260–261
dirty talk 286–287
disco 16
backlash to 39–40
 early years of 35
as foundational element of rap 127
gay male identity formation and 9
history of 37–38
linked popularly with gay men 39
as music of resistance 487
origins of 37–38
resurgence in 36
rising popularity of 38–39
transitioning to other genres outside the US 39–40
utopianism of early scenes in 50
discotheques 37–39
disidentification 119n.46
dissident aesthetic 103
dissidents, self-identifying as queer 1–2
Ditto, Beth 319
Diva Citizenship 509
divas 71
fans of 68
gay fans’ association with 68–69, 71–72
power of 67–68
presenting bodies as sites for identification 68–69
satisfying roles for 68
Divina Commedia, La (Dante) 430
divine activity 151–152
“Dixie” (Emmett) 395
Dixon, Melvin 485–486
DIY ethos 215–216, 604, 623n.38
DJ Ipek 48
DJ Monkay 132–133
DJs, minority identified, fetishization of 50
DJ SexToy (Delphine Palatsi) 47
DJ Sprinkles 44–45
DJ Syd the Kid 122
Dollimore, Jonathan 103
domestic space, femininity of 367
Donizetti, Gaetano 463
Donnelly, Anthony 42
Doom Patrol (Morrison) 315–316
door, as sound-object 298–299
Dorsey, Thomas A. 81–83, 483
Doty, Alexander 70–71
Doug E. 135
Douglas, Michael 315–316
Douglass, Frederick 229–230, 386
Downing, Lisa 505
Downing, Sonja 571
drag 216
alien 386, 388
amateurism in 215–216
in Brighton 313–314
effect of 330–331
in Eurovision 509–511
forms of 455–456
origins of 313–314
See also cross-dressing
drag balls (pageants) 43–44, 46
drag culture, growing interest in 43–44
Drage, Austin 254–257. See also Honeytraps, the
drag queens 462, 476
Dranes, Arizona 81
Dreamgirls (Eyen) 482–483
Dream of the Red Mansion (Hongloumeng) 541
Drew, Rob 223n.12, 224n.19
Dr. Octagon 387–388
dualism
body/spirit 156
in cosmologies 563–565, 567, 569–570
in Indonesian performing arts 574
Du Bois, W. E. B. 389
Dunaway, Judy 303–304
du Pré, Jacqueline 281
Dutchboy 122–123, 132–134
Dutch government 562
Dyer, Richard 6, 314, 495
Dylan, Bob 487, 495n.3
Dyson, Michael 89

ear, as sexual orifice 278. See also aural listings

early modern vocal performance, erotic connotations of 452n.35
East Asia, Taipei as queer center of 585–586
Eastern Europe
Otherness of 615–616
queerness in 618
East Java, dance in 570, 575
Eastman, Julius 12
Eastman School of Music 149
Eazy-E (Eric Wright) 482, 498n.31
EBU. See European Broadcasting Union
eccentric acts 230
eccentricity, post-soul 230
Echols, Alice 18–19
École Polytechnique (Montreal) 325
ecstasy (MDMA) 41–42
Edelman, Lee 618
EDM. See electronic dance music
Edward Scissorhands (dir. Burton) 606–607
Ego and the Id, The (Freud) 126
Elaine Stritch: At Liberty (Stritch and Lahr) 68
electroclash 57n.52
electronic dance music
bass drum’s role in 200–201
Berlin and 36, 47–48
 Bhangra scene 43
changing demographics in 36
circuit parties and 45–46
counterhistories of 35
demographics and 50
hardcore continuum of 43
historiography of 37
history of 35, 49–50
mainstreaming of 51
master narratives of 37
as music of resistance 487
politics in 51
queers in, diminishing profile of 35–36, 50
queers of color in 16, 35–36, 50
queer women and 46–47
See also acid-house music; garage music; house music; raves
éléctro subscene 47
elegies about AIDS 485–487
Elia, John 124
Eltinge, Julian 460–462, 460f
Eminem 133
Emmett, Dan 395
emphasis (in speech), gender and 242–244, 243t, 248
empirical inquiry 374–375
End-Up (San Francisco) 38
Enlightenment, the 152
ensoulment 299
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Bacon-Smith) 186
Entertaining Mr Sloane (Orton) 312
En Travesti (ed. Blackmer and Smith) 146
Enuma Elish 147
environmental sound 18
ephebophile 409
ephemeral fields 370
Episcopal Church 154–156
epistemology of the closet 331
Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick) 441–442
Epperson, John 483
Erasure 484
erotic agency, musical form of 279
erotic cinema 277
erotic ethnocentrism 575
Erotic Triangles (Spiller) 571–572
Errington, Shelley 563–565
Eshun, Kodwo 392, 396, 399
essentialism 113–114
essentialization 614
Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor (McClurkin) 90
Etheridge, Melissa 286
ethical consumption 51
ethnomusicology 3–4
gender scholarship in 5
personal material in 26n.76
queer scholarship in 5
Eurobarometer 518n.19
Europe
new symbols and rituals for 506–507
patriotism in, for Europe 505–507
as queer phenomenon 515–516
right-wing political movements in 506
sexual minorities’ rights in 508
European Broadcasting Union 503–504, 507–508, 514–515
European Court of Human Rights 508
Europeanization 507–508, 515–516
European Monetary Institute 506–507
European Union 506–508, 510–511, 515–516
Europhoria 503
Europigeon (BBC) 508
Europop, critics dismissive of 504
EuroVision (Luscombe) 508
Eurovision Masterclass (Croft) 508
Eurovision Song Contest 503, 603–604, 619–620
camp aesthetic in 508, 511
contained image of universalism in 504
critics’ response to 504
English-language plays and shows about 508
first coming-out song in 510–511
first US broadcast of 503–504, 516
flag policy of 514–515
gender-bending performances in 509–514
ideological underpinnings of 507–508
LGBTQ people and 508
NBC’s licensing of 516
political tensions in 504
promoting transnational bonding 507
queer patriotism and 504–505, 508, 512, 514–515
 ritualized patriotism of 504
sexual and gender diversity topics and 508–517
US potential of 516–517
utopian vision of 515–516
Evangeline (Rice) 457
Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie (Longfellow) 457
Evita (Rice) 68
Exodus (Toronto rave promotion group) 42
experience, failure to register 300–302
Experience Music Project 5–6
experimental theater, performative aesthetic in 109–110
expression
elasticity of 375
queer and transsexual, modes of 375–376

Factory (Warhol) 398

fag rap 127–128
Fairfield Four, the 85
Faith, Paloma 319
falsettists 446
Falsettoland (Finn and Lapine) 73
fandom
cultural artifacts of 186–187
defense of 186
fan-made music videos 17 See vidding; vids
fans’ memories 195
Fanon, Frantz 157, 387
Fan Ruijuan 543
fantasy worlds, gap of, with lived spaces 296
Fantômette 47
Farewell My Concubine (dir. Chen) 540
farting, trumpets and 430, 433
Fast, Susan 13
Fat Boy Slim 318
Father Ted (Channel 4) 508
Fat Joe 489
Feder, Stuart 288
Fei Yanling 549–550
Feldman, Martha 443, 446
female butchness, changes in 121–122
female duets, destabilizing heterosexual unions 64–65
female fetishism 280–281, 285
female impersonators
 bodies and characters blending together 545
in China 552
glamorous, appeal of 459–460
homosexual subculture and 461
presenting ideal form of femininity 459–460
waning popularity of 462
female vocalism, social definition of 256
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (McClary) 7, 11, 328
Feminine Voice Techniques 247–249
femininity
cultural coding of 376
female impersonators as ideal form of 459–460
variety defying middle-class ideals of 467–468
feminists, anger of, in musicology and music education 327–332
feminist studies, music and 4
Feminist Theory and Music (FT&M1) conference 7–8, 328–329
femslash (female slash) 187, 193–194, 197–198
Ferri, Baldassare 451n.20
Festival! (dir. Lerner) 111
fetish, defined 279–280
fetishism 17–18, 278, 281, 287
presumed absent in women 280
response to 279–280
sex and, theories on 279–281
See also aural fetishism; female fetishism; music fetishism; sexual fetishism
fetishization
of minority-identified DJs 50
of queers of color in EDM 37
of sound and music 281–283
FetLife 284–285
feudal system 421
fidelity discourse 167–168
field recordings
ethical issues of 296–297
history of 297
queer readings of 295–304
subjects’ response to 297
Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba (Morad) 13–14
Fifth Symphony (Mahler) 177
Filene, Benjamin 111
filk 188
film
encouraging expectations about visual and sonic events 300
 erotic cinema 277
music for, in the Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12
queer cinema, scholarly attention to 590
watching of, structured by patriarchal unconscious 67–68
Finding Your Female Voice (James and Addams) 240
Finn, William 73
Fischer, Heinz 512–513
Fisk, Charles 11, 19–20
Fiske, John Safford 311
Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, the 85
Five Trumpets, the 85
Fixx, Tori 132–133
Flack, Roberta 483
Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance
(Jones) 13–14
“Flee by Night” (“Yeben”) 548–550
Flock of Seagulls, A 254–257
flow (in speech), gender and 242–244, 243t, 249
Flueckiger, Joyce 531–533
Flunder, Yvette 85–86
flute, symbolism attached to 566
Fogerty, Tom 482
Fong, Kandy 186, 188–189
Ford, Lita 262–263
Forman, Murray 124
formants 67, 242–244, 243t
Fortescue, George 457, 458f
42 Club (Brighton) 312–314
“Fotoapparat” (“Camera”) (Kamon!!!) 611–612
Foucault, Michel 26n.79, 280, 384
Fourth Symphony (Tchaikovsky) 7
Foxxjazell 369–370
Franklin, Kirk 83
Fraser, Jennifer 9–10
freedom
burdened individuality of 230
in music of Ndegeocello 232, 235
Ndegeocello’s conception of 234
vogelfrei and 232
freeplay 609–610
free jazz 384, 391, 396–398
Freemasons 319
Freitas, Roger 447
Fremdling 339–340, 342
frequencies 67
Freud, Sigmund 17–18, 126, 280–281, 287, 412, 446
Frith, Simon 495n.3
Frost, Samantha 374
Frost Fairs, The 322n.32
Fullalove, E. G. 44
Fuller, Sophie 14, 287–288
fundamentalism 158n.7
Fundamentalist movements 146
fundamental speaking frequency 245
Fun Home (Tesori and Kron) 73
future, unreal estate of 385

Gabriel, Peter 492–493

Gabrielli, Alessandro 446
Galas, Diamanda 145, 150–152, 154–157
Gallery, The (NYC) 38
gamelan music 9–10, 180–181, 405, 409, 561, 567–568, 575
Gamson, Joshua 18–19
gangsta rap 230–231, 235–236
Gao Lian 550
garage (musical genre) 35, 39–40
Garcia-Mispireta, Luis Manuel 10, 16
Gardiner, Andrea 127
Garland, Judy 68, 71–72, 312–313
Garvey, Marcus 386
Gauthier, Mary 484–485, 491
gay, as term 1–2
Gay Community Social Services 107–108
gay followings 66
gay genocide 150
gay globalization, karaoke and 218–219
“Gayhane” (Berlin) 48
gay liberation 150
gay marriage 302, 447
gay men
Black gospel performance and 16
characteristic speech of 258–259
musical theater and 16, 63
as sexual intermediaries 257
Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles 482–483
Gaynor, Gloria 483
Gay Pride (Hong Kong) 598
Gay Pride march (New York City) 1–2
Gay Theology without Apology (Comstock) 150
Gay Times 318
Gelfer, Marylou Pausewang 245–247
Geist, Morgan 36
gemblak 566–567
gender
coding of, inculcated in children 251
construction of, in the 19th-century working-class US 98
cultural assumptions about, reorienting 72
fluidity of, celebrating 374
as imitation 330
musical performances of 17–18
performance of 241–242, 326, 369–370, 551–552
presentation of 368
as resource 113–114
variance in 257–259
gender consonance 367
gendered singing 240
gendered speech 240
gendered vocalisms 251
gender essentialism, vocal 240–241
Gender Failure (Spoon) 111–114
gender identity
emphasizing material elements 375
signification of 376
vocal presentation and 239
See also identity
gender pluralism 563–564
Gender Research in Music Education 328–329
gender roles
discursive negotiation of 373
for trans musicians 373
gender signification 368
Gender Trouble (Butler) 43–44, 370
Gentile, Luigi 446
“Georgie, Belladonna, Sid” (McCullough) 316–317
Gerbino, Giuseppe 442
Gerschner, Augusta 474–475
Gestalt psychology 225n.28
GG Allin 493
ghost note 234–235
Gibbons, Orlando 147–148
Giddens, Anthony 610–611
Gilbert, Jeremy 397–398
Gill, John 9
Gillett, Robert 505
Gilroy, Paul 386, 388–389, 391–392, 397
Girard, René 221–222
girl groups, presumed inauthenticity of 256–257
Giuliani, Rudolph 44
Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Handel) 456–457
Gleaves, Sam 109
Glenn, Roy 175
globalism 385
G-Minus 134–135
GMWA. See Gospel Music Workshop of America
God
misogynistic 155–156
non-theistic understanding of 154–155
redefining 154–155
relational understanding of 154–156
God-Des 133
Goff, Philip Atiba (lightskinneded) 134–135
gogo 233
Gold, Lynn 245
Goldberg, P. J. P. 421
Golden Echoes, the 85
Golden Girls, The (NBC) 63
Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana 13, 17, 234
Gomez, Selena 211, 222
Goodman, Steve 306
Goodwin, Andrew 483–484
Gordon, Bonnie 451n.20
Goris, Roelof 560–561
Gorn, Richard 609–612
gospel beat 81
gospel music 81
aesthetics of 82
Black queer community in 82
Chicago as birthplace of 81–82
closeted singers in 89–90
connected to secular forms 81–82
documenting homosexuality in 84
popularity of 81–82
 queer roots of 81
re-presentation of, in AIDS context 483
unholy trinity and 85
Gospel Music Workshop of America 83
gossip culture 594–595
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) 88–89
Gottfried, Martin 74–75
Gould, Elizabeth 19–20
Graham Davies, Sharyn 564–565
grammar usage, gender and 249–250
Grant, Cary 462
Grant, John 482
Grant, Ulysses S. 505
Gratian 422–423
Gray, Mary 109
Green, Melinda 240–241, 248–250
Green, Adolph 72–73
Grego, Dazié R. 135
GRIME. See Gender Research in Music Education
Grimm, Jacob 232–233
Gropius, Manon 355
Gross, Aeyal 509
Grosz, Elizabeth 279
Guattari, Félix 398
Guilbert, Yvette 240
Guthrie, Gwen 489
Guthrie, Woody 487, 505
Guys and Dolls (Burrows, Swerling, and Loesser) 64–65
Gypsy (Styne, Sondheim, and Laurents) 69, 74

Habick, Timothy 261

Habit of Art, The (Bennett) 313–314
habitus 113–114
Haggerty, Patrick 107–109
Haimes, Todd 74–75
Halberstam, Judith 369–370, 376, 447, 527, 596–597
Hale, Grace Elizabeth 13–14
Hall, Radclyffe 311–312
Halliwell, Kenneth 312
Halperin, David 340, 574–575
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 415
Hamlisch, Marvin 78n.60
Hammel-Zabin, Amy 405–406
Hammerstein, Oscar 167, 170, 174–175. See also Carmen Jones (Bizet and Hammerstein)
HAMP. See HIV/AIDS Music Project
Hancock, Herbie 499n.42
Handbook of Music and Queerness (ed. Maus and Whiteley), development of 14–15, 22n.16
Handel, George Frideric 6–7, 147–148, 456–457, 463
Handley, Vernon 312–313
Hanson, Donald 406–407, 409–415
Hanson, Howard 149
Haraway, Donna 611–612
Hardaway, Anthony (First Lady) 86–87
hard-house music 46
Harding, Gilbert 312
hard techno 42
Hardkiss, The 604
Hardware Bar (NYC) 503
Hardwicke, John 409–412
Hardy, James Earl 131
Hardy, Ron 40
Harkness, Georgia 145, 151–155, 157
Harlem Renaissance, costume balls of 43–44
harlequinade 456–457
Harness, Kelley 195
Harrington, Rachael 246
Harris, Christopher 84
Harrison, Lou 12, 147–148, 561
Hartman, Saidiya 229–230, 235–236
Harvey, Jonathan 508
hate speech 100–102
Hathaway, Lalah 234–235
Hawkins, Dan 318–319
Hawkins, Edwin 85
Hawkins, Justin 318–319
Hawkins, Stan 369–370
Hawkins, Walter 85–86
Hawtin, Richie 41
Hayes, Eileen M. 6, 10, 13
Hayes, Sean 591–592
Haze, Angel 137
Headnadda’s Journey to Adidi-Skizm, A (Sha-Key) 136
head resonance 66
Heaven (London) 41–42
Hebrew Bible. See Bible
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Trask and Mitchell) 73
Heilbut, Tony 88–89
Heileman, John 406
Hellfire club 280–281
Hendrick, Pamela 249–250
Henley, Nancy 245
Henry, Pierre 298–299
Herdt, Gilbert 565–566
Herman, Jerry 63–64, 68–69, 482
Herman, Ruth 68–69
Herndon, Marcia 10
Herndon (Marcia) Prize 5
Heron, Gil Scott 482
heterogeneity, as agent for sociopolitical change 615
heteronormative texts, queering of 146
heterosexism, critique of 156
heterosexual family, as focus of nationalism 505
heterosexual matrix, undoing of 370
heterotopias 386
Heuer, Reinhardt J. 246–248, 256
Heyward, Carter 145, 151–152, 154–157
hierarchies, creation of 616–617
hijras 529–531, 533–534
Hilary and Jackie (dir. Tucker) 281
Hilton, Daisy 312
Hilton, Violet 312
Hindle, Annie 252, 472–475
Hi-NRG 46
Hinton, Alex 122
hip hop 12
artists included within 121–122
Black-popular-masculine affect of 123
clothing styles and 134–136
commercialization and global success of 129–130
conservatism in industry of 129–130
cultural production of 123–124
culture of, representing Black American music 124
decreasing range of Black performance in 125
definitions of 124
discotheques as early venues for 39
emotional investment in 135
future of 137–138
Golden Age of Queer Hip Hop 123, 130–133
heteronormativity of 123
heteropatriarchy of 123
homophobia in 122
hybridity of 124
importance of, to queer identity 122–123
lesbians and queer women in 131
LGBT artists in 121–122
lyrics of 133
as masculine space 135
masculinity reposititioned in 130
misogyny in 122, 233–234
offshoots from and shifts in 121–122
panic in, around male homosexuality 130
patriarchal voices in 233–234
as political statement 129
public dialogue in, on homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender 130–131
 queer aesthetics of 122–124
queer artists’ use of 17
queer emcees in 131
queer historiography of 122–123
queerness of 123
queer obsession in 131
queer scholarship on 142n.68
racial authenticity of 123
status of 139n.17
venerating Black men 135
white youth’s love of 129
Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City (Smalls) 132
Hirsch, Sandy 246–247, 250–251
Hirschfeld, Magnus 257
Hirt, Al 296
historiography, classical approach of 49–50
History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 280
HIV/AIDS 2
artistic creation after diagnoses of 357–362
changes in 363
discussion of, among Black Americans 489
effects of, on families 486–487, 492
first no. 1 single to address 235
impact on women of color 490
living with 355. See also PWAs
music about, flourishing 482
music therapy and 19–20, 354–364
musical representations of, sources of 495
new music to address 484–485
public experiences of 20
HIV/AIDS Music Project 481
HMS Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan) 457
Hoffman, Dustin 462
Hoffman, E. T. A. 350
Hogg, Ross 134
Holloway, Nicky 41–42
Holsinger, Bruce 422, 424–425
Holt, Claire 561, 564
homoeroticism
linked with Christian narratives and pacifism 148–149
militarism and 148–149
religious response to 146
Homo Hop Massive (NYC) 134
homohop movement, birth of 132–134
homonationalism 509
homophobia 2, 618
limiting research 10
school shootings and 329–330
in trad 101
homosexual, as socially created category 8
homosexuality
associated with gender variance 257
cross-dressing and 539–540
ritualized 565–566
Homosexual Law Reform Society (UK) 314
Honeytraps, the 242, 251–252, 254–257, 262–263
Hong Kong
culture of 587
direct elections in 596
gay and lesbian film festival in 588
gay music stars in 21
gossip culture of 592–595
identity of, and queer identity 586–587
LGBT rights in 593–594
male homosexual acts illegal in 588
musicians coming out in 593–597. See also Wong, Anthony
paparazzi culture in 594–595
popular culture of 587–588
postcolonial, queer stories in 589–590
queer culture in 586, 593, 598
queer politics in 596–598
queer undercurrent of 586
representing tolerance and freedom 596
returning to Beijing rule 588, 595
sexual expression in 585–586, 588
sexual minorities in, media representations of 595
Umbrella Movement in 587, 595–596, 598
Hong Kong Pride Parade 593
Hong Kong Scholars Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity 599
Hong Sheng 542
Hooper, Celia R. 249–250
Hope, Bob 462
Hornblowers, the 315
Horne, Marilyn 174
House, Son 111, 113–114
house music 392
 ballroom scene and 44
in Chicago 40
culture of, Thaemlitz’s critique of 44–45
early, resurgence in 36–37
early years of 35
garage and 39–40
reemergence of 50
Thaemlitz’s critique of 51
in the UK 41–42
utopianism of early scenes in 50
Hou Shaokui 549–550
Ho Wan-see, Denise 593–595, 597–598
Howard, Harlan 109
Howard, John 84
Howard and Satelle, Sister Act 468f
How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach (Callen, Berkowitz, and Sonnabend) 488–489
HRC. See Human Rights Campaign
Hubbs, Nadine 11, 108–109
Hughes, David 127. See also Master G
Hughes, Langston 386
Hughes, Walter 9
Hughes-Freeland, Felicia 572, 574
human bodies. See bodies
human interiority 306
Human League 235
humans
possibilities of, expanding global understanding of 528
weak sexual dimorphism of 245
Human Rights Campaign 131, 302
Hungary, Eurovision and 512, 513f
Hunter, Tab 65–66
“Hush, Hush, Hush” (Cole) 492–493
Husserl, Edmund 367
Hutcheon, Linda 167–168
Hutcherson, LeVern 174
hybridity 391–392
hybrids 425, 428–430, 431f, 433, 611–612
Hynde, Chrissy 286

IASPM-US. See International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch
Ice Cube 489
IDAHOT HK (Hong Kong) 598
identity
 construction of 531
emerging through time 373
fixed 610–611
hierarchical valuation of 605–606
postmodern understanding of 109–110
preconceived notions of 191–192
ritual formation of 530
identity politics 6–7, 192, 234, 589, 592, 595, 597–598
“I” displaced 326
IKEA 516
I La Galigo 564
illuminated manuscripts, commissioning of 437
imitation
karaoke and 212
post-colonial logics of 212
as term 218
imposition, theory of 568–569
improvisation
in music therapy 355–356, 359, 361–362
interpretations of 357
See also collective improvisation
“I’m So Wet” (Byrd E. Bath) 242, 258–260, 258f, 260f
incommensurability, consequences of 617
India
alternative gender expressions in, acceptance of 527
colonial anti-sodomy laws in 529
hijras in 529–531
Indian Penal Code, Section 377 535n.26
mahaprasad in 531–533
queer ethnomusicology and 9
queer identity and behavior in, indigenous constructions of 528–529
queer music in 525
third gender in 529–530
indices 168
Indonesia
cross-dressing in 563
cultural performances in 562
dances in, changing with political eras 570
entertainment in, as both ritual and theater 567
gay and lesbi subjectivities in 573
gender ambiguity in, history of 573–574
gender ideologies in 570
gender pluralism in 563–564
 gender roles and sexualities in 559
gender and sexuality understandings in, changes in 575
gender-transgressive performance in 562
history of 561–562, 575
indigenous languages in, designating different gender and sexual practices 560
language in, for gender and sexuality 572
masculinity in 569–570
multicultural makeup of 561–562
performing arts in, duality in 574
performing arts of, in the Western imaginary 560–561
ritual specialists in 562, 572–574
as source of orientalist fantasies 561
theatrical gender-bending in 567–574
theatrical performers in 562
“I Never Saw Another Butterfly” (Davidson) 411–412
influence, nature of 219–220
Informed Consent 284–285
Ingold, Tim 18
Inoue, Daisuke 212–213, 215
In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam) 447
instrumental music
story-like qualities of 11
traditional, machismo of 101–102
instruments, sexuality and 105n.13
internal difference, as necessary for political effectiveness 615
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch 5–6, 11–13, 112–113
International Phonetic Alphabet 246–247
Internet, The (hip hop group) 122
interpretation, transsexual style of 20
intersectionality 2, 101, 107–108, 266, 526, 528–529
intonation, gender and 242–244, 243t, 247
Intruders, the 38
inversion, in early 20th-century music 11
invisibility, cultivation of 586–587. See also politics of invisibility
Ireland, sexuality in, neutral experiences around 101
Irish culture
being out in 98
live-and-let-live facet of 98
Irish traditional music and dance
queer performers of 17
selfhood and social identity in 93
See also trad
ironic distancing 504
Israel, Eurovision and 508–509
“I Still Believe in Waltzes” (Lynn and Twitty; Hughes, MacRae, and Morrison) 263–266, 265f, 266f
Ives, Charles 288
I Was a Male War Bride (dir. Hawks) 476
Iyer, Pico 212–213

Jackson, Henry (Hank) 125–127

Jackson, Janet 486–487
Jackson, Michael 12, 369–370, 486–487
Jackson, Millie 489
Jacobi, Dereke 315–316
Jacobs, Jane 217–218
Jade Hairpin (Gao) 550
Jagose, Annemarie 123, 559
Jai Ho (Chicago) 49
Jamala 619–620
Jamal X 130–131
James, Andrea 240–241
Janiah 133
Jankélévitch, Vladimir 407
Japanda 619–620. See also Kamon!!!
Jarman, Derek 484
Jarman, Freya 17
Jarrett, Keith 362
Java, culture of 560–561, 567–570
Javanese court dance 569–570
Jeansneakers 198–199
Jehovanism 282
Jenkins, Henry 186, 188
Jennex, Craig 13, 112–113
JenRo 133
Jepsen, Carly Rae 222
Jett, Joan 242, 257, 260–263
Jimmy Jam 235
Joel, Billy 487–488
Johannson, Warren 422–423
John, Elton 483–484, 486–487, 492
John Paul II 155–156
John of Salisbury 425
Johnsen, Agnete 515
Johns Hopkins University 301–302
Johnson, E. Patrick 3, 16, 383, 390–391
Johnson, Jenny 20
Johnson, Magic 489
Johnson, Michelle Lynn. See Ndegeocello, Meshell
Johnson, Susan 68
Jolley, Yukiko S. 240
Jones, Alisha Lola 13–14
Jones, Angela 618
Jones, Gloria 483–484
Jones, Grace 266
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) 393–394
Jones, Mandana 196
Jones, Matthew J. 13–14, 20
Jones, Shannon 507–508
Joplin, Janis 18–19
Jordan, Richard Tyler 68–69
Joseph, Kevin 483
Jourdan, Alicia 472–473
Journal of Popular Music Studies 11–12
Jovovich, Milla 609–610
Jurriëns, Edwin 507–508
juxtaposition 425–426

“Kably, Kamon!!!” (“High Heels, Kamon!!! [Come On?]”) (Kamon!!!) 607–609, 608t
Kably, Kamon!!! (Kamon!!!) 606–607
Kachuck, Beatrice 329
Kalamka, Juba (pointfivefag) 132–135
Kalina, Robert 506–507
Kaling, Mindy 215
Kallberg, Jeffrey 614
Kam, Lucetta 589, 594–595
Kamon!!! 605, 620
audiovisual practice of 606–614
critiquing identity 618
destabilizing convention 607–609
influences on 606–607
members of 606–607
production of 613–614
reappearance of 619
sociopolitical critique by 611–612
status of 618–619
Kapsalis, Terri 282–283
karaoke 17
amateurism in 215–216
amenability of, to weeknight programming 217–218
 contact and 217–218
copying and 212
as critical mode 220, 222
cultural, aesthetic, and social functions of, study of 213–214
debased and denigrated, in Anglo-American contexts 213–214
depictions of 214
dissemination of 212–213, 218–219
elements of 211
as entertainment at gay venues 214
existing outside cultural systems 212
as financial venture for venues 215–218
gay globalization and 218–219
global repertoires of 219
as homosexual ritual 214
as homosocial practice in Japan 218
imitation and 212
insults associated with 223n.16, 224n.21
as kata expression 216, 218
love songs and 211
as material set of participatory practices 212
Ndegeocello’s apology to 235–236
origins of 212–213
performance of 217–218
queer aesthetics and 211, 218
as queer theoretical and aesthetic mode 212
repetition and 213
as representational trope 219
social manners of 218
social promiscuity of 217–218
specialized knowledge and participation regimes in 218
as surrender 221
systems for 214–215
Karaoke Culture (Ugresic) 212, 215–216
karaoke nights 214
Kartomi, Margaret 567
kata (patterned form) 216, 218, 221
Katey Red 369
Katz, Zebra 121–122, 137
Kaudern, W. A. 564
Kaye, Danny 462
Kazaky 604
KC and the Sunshine Band 38
Keats, John 222
Kee, John P. 83
Keeling, Kara 233
Kelly, Edwin 457–458
Kelly, Gene 72
Kemp, Paul 318
Kemp Town 321n.12
Kendricks, Eddie 38
Kerman, Joseph 4, 11
Key, Mary Ritchie 249
“Khlop’ia kukuruznye” (“Cornflakes”) (Kamon!!!) 608–609, 608t
Khubchandani, Kareem 49
Killa 191
King, Hettie 252
King, Lee Memphis 318–319
kink 278, 280–281, 283–284
Kinsey, Alfred 8
Kisliuk, Michelle 26n.76
Kitlinski, Tomek 615–616
Kitwana, Bakari 40–41
KJs (karaoke jockeys) 214–215
Kleban, Edward 78n.60
Klimt, Gustav 513–514
Knapp, Alexander 415n.3
Knight, Gladys 483–484
Knight, Marie 82–83
Knowing When to Stop (Rorem) 149
knowledge, queer production of 597
Knox, Collie 312
Knox, Sandy 493–494
Knuckles, Frankie 40
Koestenbaum, Wayne 7–8, 18–19, 146, 340
Koffka, Kurt 218
Kong, Travis 589
Kool Keith 387–388
Koskoff, Ellen 6, 327
Kosmos sisters 606–607. See also Kamon!!!
kothis 529
Koza, Julia Eklund 327
Kramer, Larry 369–370, 485–486, 488
Kreigh, LeeAnn 196
Kristeva, Julia 374–375, 406–408
Kron, Lisa 73
KRS One 301
K/S 187, 190–191
ku’er, as term 589–590
Kuhnt-Saptodewo, Jani 565
Kun, Josh 505
kunqu 21
amateur singers of, practicing musical cross-dressing 541, 548
arias in 551
characteristics of 540
characters in 542
competition in 544
dissonances in 545–546, 548, 550
diversity of dramatic characters in 542
dynamism of 541
as focus of Chinese films 540
future of 552–553
legitimation of 542
lesbian 539–540
male impersonators in 541, 543
as manner of negotiating gender and sex 540
music in 545–546
origins of 540
performance of 546–550
portraying gendered charms, gestures, and voices 545
queer expressions of difference in 548
se and yi inseparable in 544–546
sociopolitical subversiveness of 548
status of 539–540
transformations in 552
See also kunqu cross-dressing
kunqu cross-dressing 539–540
artistic and practical reasons for 543–544
as career strategy 544
as cultural-historical legacy 542
musical 541, 548
Kushner, Tony 483
Kwan, Stanley 539–540

La Babydoll 47
Labouchère Amendment 314
La Cage aux folles (Herman and Fierstein) 74
Lacan, Jacques 280–281, 445
Lachman, Ed 484
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 220
Lady Gaga 12, 233–234, 318–319
L’Aiglon (Rostand) 462–463
Lalgee, Salas B. 135
Lam, Joseph 21
Lamb, Roberta 327–329
Lambert, Mary 137
Lambkin, Graham 307n.3
La Mission (Berlin) 50
Lamoureaux, Augusta 472–473
Lane, Anthony 504
lang, k.d. 7–8, 108–109, 286, 484
Lang, Paul Henry 445–446
langendriyan 569
language
materiality of 607–608
usage of, gender and 242–244, 243t, 249–250
La Petite Maison Éléctronique 47
Lapine, James 73
Larner, James 179–180
Larson, Jonathan 73
La Rue, Danny 312–313, 315–316
Last Angel of History (dir. Akomfrah) 387
Late Show, The (CBS) 516
Lau, Paris 595
Lavender Country (Haggerty) 107–112
Law, Bonar 315
Leach, Elizabeth Eva 422
Lead Belly 111, 113–114
Leap, William 258
Lecklider, Aaron 596
Lee, Colin 13, 19–20
Lee, Gavin 11
Lee, Joon 374
legibility 368
Leif 121–122, 137
Leigh, Vivien 312
Leitham, Jennifer 369, 371, 373, 375, 377
Le Marais 47
Lemmon, Jack 462, 476
Lennox, Annie 286, 482, 484, 487–488, 499n.42
Leon, Francis (The Only Leon) 457–461
Le Pulp (Paris) 47
Le Rex (Paris) 47
Lerner, Murray 111
LeRoy, Jason 499n.42
lesbian, as term 3
lesbian feminist, as term 3
lesbian roles, iconic 71
lesbians
continuum 152–153
depiction of, in butch-femme roles 17
displaced 326
music of resistance for 487
as sexual intermediaries 257
as sexual inverts 372
speech of 261
lesbian sex, male pornography and 475
Les Ginettes Armées (The Armed Ginettes) 47
Leszkowicz, Paweł 615–616
Lessig, Lawrence 406–407, 409–411, 413–414
Le Troisième Lieu (The Third Place) 47
Leung, Helen Hok-sze 586, 589–590, 592–594
Leung Cho-yiu, Joey 594
Leutze, Emanuel 504–505
Levan, Larry 39–40
“Leviticus: Faggot” (Ndegeocello) 233–234
Lewis, Jerry 462
Lewis, Ryan 137
Lewis, Terry 235
LGBT movement 99
LGBT rights 615–616
LGBTQ culture
hip hop festivals 122. See also PeaceOut listings
mainstream scene for 99–100
uniformity of 100
LGBTQ studies, music and 4–6
Liang Guyin 547–548
Lianxiangban /A Romance: Two Belles in Love (dir. Kwan) 539–540
liberal humanism 229
liberal Protestant theology
characteristics of 152
diversity of perspectives in 147
emphasis on historical change 151–152
perspectivalism in 145
reflection in 147
liberal theology 152, 156
optimism of 153
pluralism at heart of 157
liberation theology 152, 156–157
life, in process of emerging 332–333
Life Ball 513–514, 514f
Lighthouse (London) 359
Li Hongniang 544–545
Lincoln, Abraham 504–505
Lindestad, Per-Åke 247–248
Lin Xi 586
lip-synching 216
Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to “Hedwig”
(Peraino) 11, 422
literary burlesque 463–464
Little Richard 85
liturgical celebration, parody and subversion of 150
Liu Cheng 547–548
Liu Yilong 544–545
lived experience, as source of knowledge 372
Liszt, Franz 342
Li Yu 539–540
Li Yugang 540
Lock, John 395
Lockard, Joe 615–616
Loft, The (NYC) 36–38
Logan, Olive 463–464
Logo (cable TV network) 196, 503–504
Lomax, Alan 111
Lomax, John 111
London
acid-house music in 41–42
raves in 42
warehouse parties in 42
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 457
Loot (Orton) 312
Lopez y Royo, Alessandra 561
Lorde, Audre 481
L’Oreal 598
Lorelei coffee bar (Brighton) 313
Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Hartman) 229
Lost in Translation (dir. Coppola) 219
Love Center Choir 85–86
Love Center Church (East Oakland, CA) 85–86
Love Don’t Need a Reason: The Life & Music of Michael Callen (Jones) 13–14
“Love You Like a Love Song” (Gomez; Armato and James) 222
Lowe, Melanie 614
Lucia di Lammamoor (Donizetti) 146
Luhrmann, Baz 181–182
LuPone, Patti 68
Luscombe, Tim 508
Lutyens, Edwin 311–312
L Word, The (Chaiken) 195
Lynch, David 415
Lynde, Paul 462
Lynn, Loretta 263–266
Lypsinka (John Epperson) 483
LYRIC (San Francisco) 133
Lyricist, The (Cyrus) 131–132
lyrics
for music about AIDS 481
reading experience through 481

Macclesfeld Psalter 428–430, 431f

MacDonald, Jeannette 68, 70
Mackelmore 137
Mack and Mabel (Herman) 64
MacLennan, John 588
Madonna 43–44, 486–487, 505, 611
Magic Sing home-system 214–215
Magnetic Fields, the 397
Mahabharata 568–569
mahaprasad 531–533
Mahler, Gustav 177–179
Mahu (Tahiti), third gender in 531
male body, spectacularization of, in musicals 72
male effeminacy, changes in 121–122
male-female complementarity 568
male impersonators
in China 552
class issues and, in US 473–475
never banned on the stage in US variety shows 475
tradition of in US 252
treated as honorary men by men in US variety 474–475
US, European antecedents of 462–463
waning popularity of in US 475
Mame (Lawrence, Lee, and Herman) 16, 63–66, 74–75
conflicting desires in 64–65
creation of 68–69
as the culmination of an era 72–73
La Cage aux folles and 74
lesbian overtones in 71
motherhood in 69
unconventional family structures in 69
women venerated in 67
Manchester (UK), warehouse scene in 41–42
Mancuso, David 37–38
Mandelboim, Gilad 503
Mango TV (China) 515
Manila, karaoke’s ubiquity in 215
Mann, Thomas 167, 176, 179–180
Mansfield, Josephine 474–475
Manson, Marilyn 286
March of the Falsettos (Finn) 73, 482
marginalia
influenced by sexual identity 436–437
in medieval devotional manuscripts 20, 426–436, 429f, 431f
reception of 437
marginalization, experience of 168
margins, as queer spaces 430–433
Marlowe, Julia 240
marriage equality 99, 302
Mars, Bruno 235–236
Marsden, Betty 315
Marskikh, Maks 604
Martin, Fran 589
Martin, Mary 71
Martin, Roberta 83
Marx, Karl 232, 281
“Mary Magdalene” (Ndegeocello) 234
masculinity
Black, negative form of 390
Christianity associated with 421–422
clerical 436–437
discourse on 129
divorced from sex 136
male impersonators’ portrayal of 473–475
procreation and, rethinking 449
proving of 461
working-class standards of 493–494
Master Bee 125–126
Master Gee 127–129. See also Hughes, David
Master at Work 44
Matadin, Vindoodh 315–316
materiality 372–373
human production of 368
queer transcendence of 376
reorientation toward 373–374
transsexual theory’s focus on 371
materialization 374
material objects, fetishization of 280–281
material texts, significance of, underestimated 373–374
Matmos 18, 296
matter, discourse and 374
Matthews, Carol 329–330
Maud Scratch Massive 47
Maurey, Yossi 508–509
Maus, Fred 129, 287–288
MAXX music festival (Beijing) 585, 586f
May, Derrick 41
Mazeppa 464–466, 465f
McClary, Susan 6–7, 11, 19, 146, 172–173, 327–328, 494–495
McClurkin, Donnie 89–90
McClurkin Singers, the 89–90
McCready, Vicki 249–250
McCullough, John 19, 314, 316
McEntire, Reba 493–495
McIntosh, Mary 8
McKellen, Ian 315–316
McLean, Don 505
McLean, Steve 487–488
MC Lymus 133
McMulland, Chelsea 114
McPhee, Colin 560–561
McRuer, Robert 492
media convergence 193–194
media fandom 187, 193–194. See also fandom
medieval music theory 438n.7
Mei Lanfang 540
Mei Lanfang (dir. Chen) 540
Melani, Atto 447
Melle Mel 127–128
melodrama, casting actresses in male roles 464–466
Melody Maker 42
melophilia 448–449
melophobia 289n.13
Melville, Alan 312
Memories of Male Sex Workers (Longyang yishi) 542
Menken, Adah Isaacs 464–465, 465f
Meow Mix (NYC) 134–135
Mercury, Freddie 482
Mérimée, Prosper 167, 170
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 304–305
mermaids 430–433, 432f
Merman, Ethel 68, 71
Meshell Ndegeocello presents The Spirit Music Jamia: Dance of the Infidel (Ndegeocello) 234–235
Method of Destruction 493
Metropolis (dir. Lang) 388
Metropolis (Monae) 388
“Metroseksual” (“Metrosexual”) (Kamon!!!) 609–610
metrosexuals 609–610
Meyer, Leonard 618–619
Meyerowitz, Joanne 116n.6
MGM 71–72
Miazhevich, Galina 511
Michael, George 486–487, 591–592
Middle Ages
art of, and conflicted life of the body 426
compartmentalizing of 421
hierarchies in 421–422
marginalized groups in 421–422
music in, mathematical and scientific aspects of 422
musical performance and erotic pleasures in 425–426, 427f
power ideology in 421–422
queerness in 422–424
sexuality in 422–424
Middle Passage 385–386, 388
Midler, Bette 482–483
Midtown 120 Blues (Thaemlitz) 44–45
Mika 591–592
militarism 148–149, 153
Miller, Ann 66–70, 74
Miller, D. A. 7, 18–19, 66, 214, 217
Miller, J. Hillis 220–222
Miller, Karl Hagstrom 111
Miller, Max 312
Miller, Verna 152–153
Mills, Jeff 41
Milne, A. A. 312–313
mimesis
history of 212, 218
queer, post-colonial logics of 212
Mindy Project, The (Fox; Hulu) 215
minimale subscene 47
Minnelli, Liza 331–332
Minorities Research Group (UK) 314
minstrelsy 457–459, 466–467, 475
mirroring 425–426
Miss Money 133
Mitchell, Al 319
Mitchell, Joni 189–190, 204n.30, 487–488, 495n.3
Mitrović, Marijana 511–512
MKS 319
Mockus, Martha 7–8, 12, 18–19, 528
modernity 385–386
Moe, Kelly 266
Moi Rene 44
Moisala, Pirkko 327
Mojave, third gender in 531
molly 320n.2
Molly Houses 311
Monae, Janelle 388
Monette, Paul 485–486
Monro 609–610
Montagu, Jeremy 428
Morad, Moshe 10, 13–14
Mordaunt, Michelle 245, 249–251
Moreschi, Alessandro 441, 443, 446
Morrell, Ottoline 315–316
Morris, Eve 107–108
Morris, Mitchell 267n.6, 370
Morrison, Grant 315–316
Morrissey 315–316
Morrow, Karen 68
Morte a Venezia [Death in Venice] (dir. Visconti) 167, 176–182, 178f
Mosbacher, Dee 6
motherhood
celebration of 69
musicals and 69–70
queer relationships to 68–69
voice of, responses to 70
Mothership Connection (Clinton) 387
Motschenbacher, Heiko 507–508
Moulin Rouge (dir. Luhrmann) 181–182
“Mourning Scene” (Rorem) 147–149, 153–155, 157
movies. See film
Moyet, Alison 319
Mrs. Doubtfire (dir. Columbus) 239
Ms Dynamite 319
Mui, Anita 590
multiplicity, inconsistent 615
Mulvey, Laura 67–68
Mums the Schemer 136
Muñoz, José Esteban 119n.46, 215–216, 384, 396–397, 406, 615–616
Munson, Benjamin 241
Murs 137
Musgrave, Thea 329
music
for AIDS patients 353. See also HIV/AIDS: music therapy and
Black emancipation and 389
bodily structures and 367
border zone with sound, queerness in 298
characterizing protagonists 181–182
deconstructionist textual analysis of 279
embodying a view 180–181
emphasizing material elements 375
engagement of, passion and 327
existence of 407–408
extreme experiences altering creation of 406–407
fetishistic qualities of 283
fetishization of 278, 281–283
framing non-normativity of sexuality 169
gendered power relations and sexual politics encoded in 279
ineffability of 407
LGBTQ studies and 4–6
lived experience and 327
material structures in 374
as means of coming out 340
nature of, in context of endings and death 363
nongendered 102–103
orgasmic potential of 285
participants in, contrasting bodily and “normative” affiliations 375
pedagogical uses of 488–489. See also music education
pedophilia and 405–406, 411–415
pleasure from 279
politics and 149, 396
positioning audience in relation to queerness 176
power narratives of 93
as primary space for Black culture 389
queering the listening function of 288
queering practices in 375
queerness in 354
queer theory for 525
reception of 374
religion and 149. See also gospel music
rhetorics of 16
role of, in operatic texts under adaptation 181–182
 sexual activity and 279
sexual function of 279
sexuality and 8, 287
sexual minorities’ identification with kinds of 3–4
as sexual representation 16, 279
sinfulness and 436
as social force 318–319
subjectivity and 424
subverting patriarchal or heteronormative texts 146
taking up narrator’s role 181–182
as technology of sexual self-making 279
as term 3–4
transcending difference 98
as volatile art form 355
Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Holsinger) 422
musical abjects 408
musical activity, sexual identity and 448
musical autonomy 148–149
musical beauty 612–613
musical cross-dressing 541, 548
musical experience, providing ways to resist plots 146
musical expression, reflexive and circular nature of 437
musical genres, identities associated with 111
musical iconography 424
musical instruments, manipulation of 428
musical meaning, interpretation of 11
musical pedagogy, power in 406–407, 488–489
musical performance
body imagery in, in marginalia 433–435, 435f
body parts engaged in 424
erotic pleasures and, in the Middle Ages 425–426, 427f
participants experiencing liberation and confinement 93–94
separate from sexuality 375
musical queerness, transgression and 424–425
musical reception, significance of 370
musicals (musical theater)
conflicting demands of 65–66
in the Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12
episodic structure of 64
female vocality in 70
gay characters used for comic relief in 73
gay men and 16, 68–69
governing rule of 66–67
 HIV/AIDS music in 484–485
homosexuality and queerness in 72–73
interruptive aesthetic of 64
inviting queer readings 66
leaving a gap for resistance 67–68
lesbian spectatorship and 71
lyrics of, queer meanings in 66
men glorified in 72
motherhood and 69–70
offering different modes of identification and pleasure 64
opera rendered into 174
queer characters in 72–75
queer energies in 66, 74
queerness and 63–64, 66
utopia and 64
women’s bodies’ function in 67–68
women’s strong roles in 67–68
musical sound, difference as asset in 93
Musical Times 252
musical transcription 11, 618–619
Music Box, the (Chicago) 40
music conventions, as parties for gays 83–84
music criticism, journalistic 5–6, 9
Music at the Edge: The Music Therapy Experiences of a Musician with AIDS (Lee) 13
music education
paucity of feminist scholars in 327
queerness and 13
social justice in 327–328
music fetishism 278, 285–287
music historians, dualistic strategy of 618
musician, as social role 8
“music itself, the,” 93–94, 102–104
musicking 4
music-making
descriptions of, sexual experience and 424
medieval depictions of 428
parodic depictions of 424
musicology
developing ideas on queerness and constructivism 370
limits of 525
meaning of 3–4
postmodern, obsessed with mastery 281
women in 327
 See also queer musicology
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (ed. Solie) 614
musico-sexual bodies, response to 437
musico-sexual practices 278
music of resistance 487
music studies
following other fields’ innovations 7
queer activity in, unavailable in public documents 5
queer perspectives lacking in 6–7
music theory
power and submission in 11
queer studies and 11
queer topics addressed in 10–11
music therapy
activity in 356
demographics in 168
expectations of 361
LGBTQ-related writing for 13
outcomes of 355–356, 358, 359f, 361
patients with AIDS 19–20. See also HIV/AIDS: music therapy and
musique concrète 298–299, 301, 607–608
My Prairie Home (dir. McMullan) 114
mystical gender 574

Nabokov, Vladimir 606–607

Namaste, Vivian 372–373, 375
NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt 485–486
Nanda, Serena 529–531
narrative, heteronormative drive of 64, 68
narrative checkpoints, adaptations and 168–169, 171, 175
narrative interpretation, queer music studies and 11
narrative restraint 235
narratives of deception 251–252
National Baptist Convention 83–84
National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Canada) 325
nationalism 505
European 505–506
queerness and 20, 505
nation-state, sexual identity and 503
Nazi Germany 153, 411
ND_Baumecker 36
Ndegeocello, Meshell (Michelle Lynn Johnson) 131, 229–236
butch throat of 230
 cover music by 234–235
female masculinity of 230–231, 234
freedom in music of 230–231, 235
hard to see 231–232
highlighting queer drama of Black life 234
identity of 230–231
on Mars 235–236
musical skeptics and 232
polyvocality of 235
self-naming of 232–233
vocals of 231–232, 234
Neale, Stephen 72
Near, Holly 155
Negritude 388
Negrón-Muntaner, Frances 76n.12
Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Nanda) 529–531
Nelson, Willie 114
neo-soul era 230
Network (dir. Lumet) 50
neuroses, music used to console 282
Neuwirth, Tom 512–514, 513f, 514f
Newcomb, Anthony 7, 346
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (ed. Sadie and Tyrell) 11, 328
new materialism 373–374
New Musicology 4
New Orleans, sissy bounce scene in 49
Newport Folk Festival 111
Newton, Huey 393
New York
cabaret laws in 44
deep house scene in 44–45
disco scene in 37–38
New York Restoration Choir 89–90
Ngaju Dayak, rituals of 565
N.I. Double K.I. 132–133
Night of the Night 127–129. See also Callahan, John
Night Shift (NBC) 483–484
Nimoy, Leonard 189–191
Nine Inch Nails 191
Ninth Symphony (Beethoven) 506–507
NME 42
Noah’s Arc (Logo TV) 124
Noble, Yvonne 445
Noel, Baraka 135
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Edelman) 2–3
noise 398
non-normativity
defining 168
in sexuality, reception context for 169
non-tribute covers 369–370
non-verbal gestures, gender and 242–244, 243t, 250–251
Nordberg, Lucy 319
Normal Heart, The (Kramer) 485–486, 488
Norman, Jessye 146
Norman, Karyl 461
Northern Ireland, trad in 104n.3, 105n.18
North Kunqu Opera Troupe (Beifang kunqu juyuan) 539–540
Norton, Graham 318, 508
Nyong’o, Tavia 15, 17–18

Oakenfold, Paul 41–42

Oates, Jennifer 248
objectivity, rhetorics of 19
Ocean, Frank 137
Ocean Rooms (Brighton) 318–319
Octagon, The (NYC) 131
octoroon, as character for female impersonators 459–460
Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All 122
Oedipal thesis 280, 287
OFWGKTA. See Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All
OhMiBod 282–283
O’Jays, the 38
Olaf, Erwin 509
Oldman, Gary 286
Oleschchuk, Petro 623n.39
Oliver, John 504
Oliver, Mark 42
Oliveros, Pauline 12, 18–19
Olivier, Laurence 312
Oman, third-gendered people in 531
O’Neal Twins, the 483
One Nut 130
ON Klub (Los Angeles) 128
online sex communities 284–285
ontology 305
On Tongzhi (Chou) 588–589
Onuka 604
opera
as adaptation 167
central emotional themes in 167
ballet sequences in, juxtaposition of 179–180
feminist critique of 146
misogyny of 146
Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Clément) 146, 499n.43
opera queens 12
opera seria 443–444
oppressed people, stereotyping of 111
oppression, intersectional analysis of 156. See also intersectionality
ORF (Austria national broadcasting) 512
orientalism, musical 198, 561
orifices, acceptability of, for sexual purposes 422–424
original, presumed validity of 17
originary trace 17
origins, queering of 375
origin stories 19
Orton, Joe 312
Oscar, Paul 508
OstGut (Berlin) 47–48
Other, Thea 127
otherness, audience identification with 111
O’Toole, Patricia 327
outsider populism 111, 115
Out There a Minute (Arkestra) 397
over-identification 618–619
Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy (ed. Lee) 13
Oxford University Press Handbook series 14

pacifism 148–149, 153

Paddick, Hugh 315
Padmore, George 386
Paduzzi, George 461
Paiushchie trusy (The Singing Panties) 604
Palace of Everlasting Life (Changshendian) (Hong) 542
Palatsi, Delphine 47
Panagia, Davide 605, 612–614
pan-European movement 505–507
Pankhurst, Lucie 256–257
Panorama Bar/Berghain (Berlin) 36
pantomime 455–457
pantomime dames 313–314
pants roles 463, 475
paparazzi culture 591–592
Papua New Guinea
queer ethnomusicology and 9
ritual same-sex sexual activities in 565–566
para-, as prefix 220–221
Paradise Garage (NYC) 36, 38–40
paraphilia 278
Paris, queer women and EDM in 46
Paris Is Burning (dir. Livingston) 43–44
Park, Frederick 311
Parker, Evan 362
Parsons, Nicholas 318
passing
as cisgendered heteronormative 263–266
narratives of deception in 251–257
as queer 257–263
passing guides for trans people 239–251
emphasizing alien fashion in singing 255
exposing naturalized gender presentations as fiction 241
making unconscious habits conscious again 70
musical performance and 240
on non-verbal gestures 250–251
recognizing overlapping vocal ranges for men and women 66
vocal instruction in 245–246
word choice suggested in 249–250
Pastor, Tony 474–475
patriarchy
caste system and 533–534
in German culture 513–514
patriotism and 504–505
patriotism 504–505. See also queer patriotism
Paul VI 409–410
PeaceOut 136
Peace Out East 122, 132–133, 136
PeaceOut World Homohop Festival 122, 132–133, 135
Peace beyond Passion (Ndegeocello) 233–234
Peaches 606–607
Pears, Peter 409
pedagogical songs about AIDS 485, 488–491
pederasts 408–409, 413
pedophilia 408–415
Pegley, Kip 7–8, 327
Peletz, Michael G. 563–564, 572
Pelligrini, Ann 109–110
Pennington, Stephan 17–18, 110
Peony Pavilion (Mudanting) 540–542
People of Color in Crisis (Brooklyn) 134
Peraino, Judith 11, 155, 422, 424, 609
Percy, William A. 422–423
Perez, Kathe 244
Perfecting Faith Church 90
performance
ethnic heterogeneity and 93
power of 64, 616–617
performative utterances, significance of 370
performativity
related to queerness and queer politics 616–617
repetition and 17
Pernet, Léonie 47
Perry, Imani 124, 135–136
Perry, Lee (Scratch) 387–388
personal material, used in writing about music 19
Personalism 154
perspectivalism 145
Pertwee, Bill 315
Peter, Paul and Mary 487, 490
Peter Grimes (Britten) 6
Peter Pan (Barrie) 71
Peters, Bernadette 68
Peters, Broc 175
Petersen, Karen E. 6
Peterson, Richard 109
Pet Shop Boys 592
Pettis, Pierce 491–492
phantomization 371–372
Phat Family Records 132–134
phenomenology 304–306, 367, 374–375
Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 304–305
phone sex 277
piano bars 214, 216–218
Pick Up the Mic (dir. Hinton) 122
Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) 219–220
Pierrehumbert, Janet 241, 258–259, 261
Pine, Claudia 189
Pinhua baojian [Precious mirrors of boy actresses] (Chen) 543
Pink Dot (Hong Kong) 598
Pink Season (Hong Kong) 598
Piper, Myfanwy 176–177
Pirate, The (dir. Minnelli) 72
pitch 242–247, 243t
attributed to more than biology 66
biologizing difference in 244
Place for Us (Miller) 217
Plague Mass (Galas) 145, 150–152, 155–156
Plantation Lullabies (Ndegeocello) 229–230, 232–233
Plastikman 41
Plato 212, 218
Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei) 542
poaching 186
Pointer Sisters, the 38
Poizat, Michel 444–445
Polari 314–317, 319
police, sound of 301–302
politically activist aesthetics, in country music 109
politics
aesthetics and 612–613
music and 149
See also identity politics; queer politics
politics of ambiguity 594–595
politics of invisibility 591–592
politics of recognition 104n.2
politics of resistance 594–595
politics of visibility 586–587
Pollack, Howard 18–19
Polo Arts company (Beijing) 539–540
polyamory 153–154, 278
polyphony 428, 442
Pop, Iggy 484
pop music, female orgasmic sounds in 282
Popular Music 11–12
Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions (ed. Fast and
Jennex) 13–14
popular music studies 3–4
cross-disciplinary nature of 5–6
permeable boundaries in, between academic and nonacademic 5–6
queerness in 11–12
pornography 277, 282
Porter, Cole 484, 487–488
Portland Gay Men’s Chorus 147–148
Possart, Ernst von 240
Postcolonial Tongzhi (Chou) 588–589
posthumanist genres 392
post-slavery, queer notions of 383
poststructuralism 376
Poulenc, Francis 12
Power Plant, the (Chicago) 40
Prayer Book of Charles the Bold 436, 436f
Precious Sword (Baojianji) 548
Preminger, Otto 170
pre-Stonewall era 258–259
pre-tonal music, analysis of 422
Price, Zella Jackson 483
Prince 369–370, 484–485, 487–488
Prince Zorpan (Byng) 313–314
private listening orgy 282
professional societies, queer groups within 4–5
Prosser, Jay 371–372
Prosumer 36
Protestant Fundamentalism 147
Protestant theology, tools of, for fostering transgressive queerness 157–158. See also liberal
Protestant theology
protest songs about AIDS 485, 487–488
Pseudo-Aristotle, marginalia in 428, 429f
PSY 266
psychoanalysis, cultural critique and 220
psychological dysmorphia 282
Puar, Jasbir 615–616
Pugh, Gareth 606–607
punk 375
Pussycat Dolls, the 198–199
Putnam, Robert 146
PWAs (people with AIDS)
civil disobedience and 491–492
daily realities of 491–492
damaging musical portrait of 493–495
portrayal of 484
stereotypical narratives about 491–492
subjectivity of 491–492
US government’s neglect of 488
See also AIDS; HIV/AIDS

Q-Formed 133
quare 3
intervening in queer terminology 383–384
pronunciation of “queer” 383
quasi-essentialist inquiry 374–375
Queen Diva (Big Freedia) 369–370
Queen Pen 131
QueenSpark 318
Queen’s Throat, The (Koestenbaum) 146
queer
definitions of 124, 559, 574–575
passing as 257–263
self-naming as 2, 7–8
 self-presentation as 10
as term 1–3, 20, 168, 383–384, 526–527
queer aesthetics
in karaoke 211
remote forms of 213
in vidding 185–186
Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam) 2–3
queer artists, self-rendering of 121–122
queer arts, imitative nature of 216
queer bars
amusements in 215–216
karaoke nights at 214
queer cinema, scholarly attention to 590
queer of color critique 3, 383–384
queer communities
cross-generational mentorship and cultural transfer in 41
youth of 447
Queercorps 131–132
“Queer Country Quarterly,” 108–109
queer critic, as artist 221
queer culture
hip hop and 122–123
as part of mainstream 527
visceral nature of 375–376
queer dance-music scenes, attention to 37
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Fuller and Whitesell) 287–288
queer ethnomusicology 12, 21
cross-cultural research guidelines for 526–528
fieldwork praxis for 527–528
intersectionality and 528–529
prioritizing indigenous conceptualizations 527–528
See also queer musicology
Queer in Europe (Downing and Gillett) 505
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Bravo) 2–3
Queer as Folk (Showtime) 2–3
queer hip hop, Golden Age of 130–132
queering
critique and 191–192
politics of, vs. queer politics 605
in Western literature 526
Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (ed. Barz and Cheng) 9, 13–14
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (ed. Brett, Wood, and Thomas) 7–8, 12,
369–370, 445, 528
Queering the Popular Pitch (ed. Whiteley and Rycenga) 11–12
queer interpretive style 20
queer knowledge, production of 597
queer liberation 146, 370
queer listening 288
queer masculinity, changes in 121–122
queer movement 3
queer music studies 12–14
lacking unified narrative 12–13
narrative interpretation and 11
non-musical thought and 8
state of the field 14
queer musicology 146, 371
castrati and 448
on musical autonomy 148–149
sources for 371
tools of, for Protestant theology 152
See also queer ethnomusicology
queer music theory 8, 11
Queer Music Theory (Lee) 24n.44
Queer Nation 2
Queer Nation Manifesto 1–3
queer negativity 618
queerness
as antithesis to real hip hop identity 121–122
in border zone between sound and music 298
bringing attention to binary thinking 620
cross-cultural 20–21, 528–529
cultural construction of 314
definitions of 613
dynamics of 607
as existential concept 343
for Berlin DJs, as sign of authenticity 36
fulfilling its potential 620
future of 384
genealogical models of 372
hip hop identity and 122–123
linked to Western cultural and academic contexts 613–614
musical, transgression and 424–425
musical theater and 63–64. See also musicals
musicology of 370
nationalism and 20
and “the people,” 615
 perception of 375
performative nature of 424
political side of 505
politics of 616–617
potentiality of 396, 406, 414
public representations of 314
queer politics and 616–617
reading in locations outside the site of production 605
as refusal of identity 618
rhetorics of 16
sexually liberating capacities of 369–370
signifiers of 368
sound of 295
temporality of 615
transsexuality as distinct from 371
utopian mode of 384
vidding and 191–192
Queerness of Hip Hop/Hip Hop of Queerness conference 142n.68
queerness of the sonic 302–304
queer nightlife, counterhistories of 43–49
Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music (Gill) 9
queer patriotism 504–505, 507–508, 510–512, 514–515
queer performance modes 216
queer phenomenology 304–306
Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed) 16, 304–305, 377n.1. See also queer phenomenology
queer politics 3, 123
performativity related to 616–617
vs. the politics of queering 605
queer practices
fused with Christian symbols 157
in context of capitalism and democracy 595
marginalization of, related to monogamy and domesticity 99
queers of color
double transformation of 35–36
drag balls and 44
EDM and 16, 35
unsurprised by resurgent conservatism 51–52
queer sincerity 109–112, 114–115
queer sociability, remote forms of 213
queer studies 2
cinema in 590
knowledge production in 594
music theory and 11
 surprise and 597–598
Western approach to 525–527
queer subcultures
considerations for studying 596–597
music within 527
Western attitude toward 527
queer theory 2
on abject sexualities and music 406
applied to music relatively late 422
cross-cultural 525–527
fluidity of identity and 625n.63
poststructuralist response to 586, 593
restrictions on 618–619
risking assimilationist agenda 616–617
subject of 614
triangulation in 221–222
undermining binary logic 615
zeal of 586, 593
queer time 396
Queer Ukeleles 319
queer utopia 618, 625n.64
queer women
music scenes of 46–47
dance scene of, in Paris 35
Quest Pistols 604
qupai 551
Qutb, Sayyid 157

Race-ing Queer Music Scholarship conference (Vancouver, 2016) 13

racial capitalism 231
Rader, Brad 128
Radical Harmonies (dir. Mosbacher and Sandstrom) 6
Ragnhild Nongrata 47
Railton, Diane 375–376
Rainbow Chorus (Brighton) 319
rainbow flags 515, 596
Rainbow Flava 132–134
Rainbow Parade (Vienna, 1996) 9–10
Raise the Umbrellas (dir. Chan) 598
Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (Rosenthal) 504–505
Ramayana 568–569
Rampling, Danny 41–42
Rancière, Jacques 615
rap 390–391
as Black American music 124
masculine performativity in 390–391
“Rapper’s Delight” (Sugarhill Gang) 123, 125–128
rate of speech, gender and 249
Rattigan, Terence 312
raves 40, 42–43
circuit parties and 46
commercialization of 46
Raykoff, Ivan 11, 20
Raymond, Daryl 134
Raymond of Peñafort 423–424
Reagan, Ronald 488
realism, reinstatement of 374
reception 168
Reckless Paper Birds (McCullough) 19
recordings
indifference of 296
 mise-en-abyme effect of 296
Red, Hot + Blue 484, 487–488
Redd, Sharon 482
Redemption of God, The (Heyward) 155
Red Hot Organization 484, 489
Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Hubbs) 108–109
Reed, Lou 486
regurgitation, karaoke and 220–221
Reh-Shawn 132–133
Rejoice in the Lamb (Britten) 409
relationality 155
relational theology 154–156
religion, music and 149. See also gospel music
religious rituals, specialized gender and sexual identities in 563
religious/secular divides 146, 151–152
religious texts, musically subverting or resisting 146
Relocations (Tongson) 220
Remy Ma 121–122
Renault, Francis 461
Rent (Larson) 73, 484–485
repetition 368
harmful effects of 229–230
karaoke and 213
Republic (Plato) 212, 218
rerecording 296
resonance 66–67, 242–247, 243t
resonant frequency 296
Resurrection (Virgo Four, 2011) 36–37
Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (ed. Bloechl, Kallberg, and Lowe) 614
Return from Planet Dub (Perry) 387
revelatory experience 481
reversal 425–426
Reynolds, Debbie 71–72
Reyog Ponogoro, rituals of 566–567
rhetorics 16
rhythm of speech, gender and 249
Rice, Edward E. 457
Rich, Adrienne 152–153
Rickman, Alan 286
Riggs, Marlon 233–234
Rigl, Betty 469f
riot grrrl movement 604–605
Ritchard, Cyril 71
ritual friendship. See mahaprasad
ritual identity formation 530
rituals, community performance of 531
ritual specialists, in Indonesia 562, 566–567, 572–574
Robertson, Carolina 6, 8, 10
Robinson, Cedric 231
Robinson, Max 498n.31
Robinson, Sylvia 125
Robinson, Tom 312–313
rock, as male-coded genre 262–263
Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop
Music (Stephens) 13–14
Rodger, Gillian 9–10, 252
Rodin, Auguste 311–312
Rogers, Bradley 16
Rogers, Henry 257–258
rollback 193
Román, David 481–482
Roman-Alcalá, Pablo (Beaner) 50–51
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 169
Rooney, Mickey 462
Rorem, Ned 7–8, 145, 151–155, 157
Rose, Billy 462
Rosenthal, Joe 504–505
Rosolato, Guy 77n.41
Ross, Diana 483
Rostand, Edward 462–463
Rothschild Canticles 435f
Roundabout Theatre Company 74–75
Round the Horne (BBC radio) 314–316
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 615
Roush, Jason 322n.32
Roy, Jeff 530–531, 536n.31
Royster, Francesca 230
Rubin, Henry 372–375
Runaways, the 260–261
Runaways, The (dir. Sigismondi) 260–261
rural people, stigmatized as non-normative 108–109
rural spaces, queer and trans people in 112
rural US
familiarity in 109
survival modes in, for queers 109
Rush Hour Recordings 36–37
Ruslana 603–604
Russia 604–605, 619–620
Russo, Julie Levin 193–194
Russo, Vito 488
Ryan, Annie 472–475
Rycenga, Jennifer 11–12
Rycroft, Martin 254–257. See also Honeytraps, the

Sackville-West, Lionel 311–312

Sackville-West, Victoria (Vita) 311–312
sacred gender 563–564
sacred music 149
Sadat X 489
safe sex, normalization and popularization of 488–489
Saint, The (NYC) 40
Sally’s II (NYC) 44–45
Salome (Strauss) 408
saloon entertainments 466–467
Salt-N-Pepa 482, 484–485, 490
Samson, Jim 347
Sandstrom, Boden 6, 10
Sandy Hook Elementary School 329–330
San Francisco, women DJs in 47
Sanneh, Kelefa 90
Sanremo music festival (Italy) 507
“Santa Claus Has Got the AIDS This Year” (Tiny Tim) 493
Sanyeahs, the 470–471
Sargent, William 409–410, 413
Sari-Sari store 215
Sarrasine 445
Sarrasine (Balzac) 444–445
Saturday Night Fever (dir. Badham) 38–39
Saul (Handel) 147–148
Saunderson, Kevin 41
Savage, Dan 85
Savage, Lily 318
Savoy, Bert 461
Say Amen, Somebody (dir. Nierenberg) 483
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
(Hartman) 229–232, 235–236
Schachter, Carl 346
Schaeffer, Pierre 299
Schärer, Hans 565
Scherzinger, Martin 11
Schiller, Anne 565
scholarship of difference 614
school shootings 329–330
Schubert, Franz 6–7, 11–12, 18–19, 339–340
B-minor “Unfinished” Symphony (D.759) 341–343
C-Major String Quintet (D.956) 344–345
“Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) 343–345, 348
G-Major String Quartet (D.887) 343–345
music of, inspiring religious experience 343
queering of music of 344
queer love for music of 343–344
queerness in music of 151, 340, 342
Sonata in A Minor, Op. 143 (D.784) 341–343
Sonata in Bb Major (D.960) 344–345
tenderness in music of 341–345, 350–351
“Wanderer” Fantasy 342
Winterreise 339–340, 342–343
Schumann, Robert 146, 340–341, 350
Carnaval 369–370
Frauenliebe und—leben 146
Kreisleriana 349–350
queerness in music of 340–341, 349
tenderness in music of 350–351
scientia sexualis (science of sexuality) 280
Score, Mike 255–256
Scott, Amanda 318
Scott, Suzanne 195
se (physical appearance; erotic charm) 177–179, 544–546, 548–553
sean-nós dance 105n.15
second-person address, in writing 326
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 2–3, 7, 18–19, 220–222, 374–375, 441–442
Seeger, Charles 617
Seesaw (Bennett) 72–73
self-oppression, sound of 302
Selwyn, Blanche 472–473
SEM. See Society for Ethnomusicology
sensationalism, in AIDS confessional songs 491–492
sense experience 304–305
sentimentality, as part of 19th-century US culture 459–460
Serano, Julia 371–373
“Serat Centhini,” 572
Serbia, Eurovision and 511–512
Serduchka, Verka (Andriy [Andrei] Danilko) 509–511, 603–605, 619–620
Šerifović, Marija 511–512
serio-comic songs 467–468
sessions, in trad 94–95
conversation between tunes in 97
dating and 99
demographics of 94–95
Sestre (Sisters) 509–511
sex
changing, physical process of 371–372
cinematic representations of 282
hearing in action 277, 286–287
music as representation of 279
sexes, complementarity of 568
sex/gender/sexuality (SGS), ideology of 526
sexism, in trad scene 101–102
sex toys, musical 282–283
sexual abuse, musical performance and 20
sexual arousal 278
sexual desires
abject 406
unacceptable, responses to 405
sexual dimorphism, enhanced vocally 245
sexual expression, queer 368–369
sexual fetishism
as medical construct 280
sound and music and 281
sexual identity
musical activity and 448
one-sex model of 438n.2
power arrangements and 615–616
signifiers for 369–370
theorization of 615–616
sexual intermediaries, gay men and lesbians as 257
sexual inversion 11, 372
sexuality
Chinese popular music and 590–593
history of 26n.79
in love relationships, as social construct 531–533
instruments and 105n.13
as male construct 531–532
material structures in 374
medical model of 280
 multimodal methodology for 374
music and 8, 287
presentation of 368
as resource 113–114
separate from musical practices 375
treatment of, in adaptations 181–182
as Western construct 531–532
sexual minorities
rights for, in Europe 508
violence directed toward 372
sexual morphology, sexual identity detached from 369–370
Sexual Offences Act (UK) 314
sexual perpetrators, understanding of 406
sexual politics 592
sexual signifiers, physical changes to 371
sexual trauma, effects of 413–414
sexual variance 257
Shaft 126–127
Shakespeare, William 415, 462–463
Sha-Key. See Walidah, Hanifah
Shakur, Tupac 230
Shallenberger, John 409–410
Shank, Barry 605, 612–614
Sharpe, Christina 235
Sheffield, Rob 223n.16, 225n.31
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 222
Shen Guofang 547–548
Shen Shihua 547–548
Sherinian, Zoe 9–10, 15, 20–21
“She Thinks His Name Was John” (McEntire; Knox) 493–495
Shields, Ella 242, 251–254, 261–262
ships, significance of 385–386
Shi Xiaomei 543
Shoom (London) 41–42
showstoppers 64
Siano, Nicky 38
signification 168–169, 173–174, 179–182, 368
Signor Blitz 470–471
sincerity
in autobiographical writing 110
musical 235–236
in transAmericana 109–110
rethinking of 109–110
 See also queer sincerity
sinfulness, music and 436
singing
amateur rituals and 218–219
associated with effeminacy 252–253
classical training for, varying by gender 241
effeminizing nature of 425
feminized 240–241
melodic speech as 240
therapeutic 358–360
singing voices, preserving, through transition 369
Sinker, Mark 384
sins against nature 422–424
sirens 425, 430–433
Skeggs, Beverly 111, 113–114
skin ego 371–372
slash 187–188, 190–192
slavery
destruction of African cultural remnants by 394
social death and 229
symbolically castrating Black men 390–391
slave ship 385
Slavin, Dianne 247–248
Slobin, Mark 93–94, 527
Slominski, Ted 10, 13–14, 17, 527, 535n.12
Sloop, John 116n.14
Slovenia, Eurovision and 509–511
Smaggher, Ivan 47
Small, Christopher 4
Smalls, Biggie 230
Smalls, Shanté Paradigm 17
Smart Bar (Chicago) 43
Smiley, Leigh Wilson 242–245
smiling, increasing formants 246–247
Smith, Patricia Juliana 314
Smith, Willie May Ford 483
Smoky Mix 606–607
SMT. See Society for Music Theory
Smut (Davis) 282
Smyth, Ron 257–258
social clubs 40–41
social contract 615
Social Gospel 152–154
social justice 327–328
social media, trad and 101
Society for American Music, LGBTQ Study Group in 5–6
Society for Ethnomusicology
conferences of, queer theory at 9–11
Gender and Sexualities Taskforce of 5, 10
Program Committee for 9
Society for Music Theory 5, 10–11
sociomusicality 111
sociopolitical change, heterogeneity and alterity as agents for 615
Sodersten, Marta 247–248
Soedarsono 569–570
Soeharto 569–570
Soft Cell 483–484
Solie, Ruth 327, 614
Solomon, Alisa 509
Solomon, Maynard 6–7, 19
Some Like It Hot (dir. Wilder) 476
Somerville, Jimmy 487–488
Sondheim, Stephen 74–75
Song for Eurotrash, A (dir. Stuart) 508
Song Hwee Lim 589
song poetry 481
songs in bad taste about AIDS 485, 493–495
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music (Hayes) 6
sonic signature 296
Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear (Goodman) 306
Sonnabend, Joseph 488–489
Sontag, Susan 109–110
soprano voice, reactions to 70
SO36 (Berlin) 48
Soulnubian 135
Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois) 389
sound
border zone with music, queerness in 298
fetishization of 281–283
fetishized qualities of 283
independence of, from association 303
intentionally deviant 408
liberating effect of 102–103
potential of 299
as queer erotic reality 287
queer identity coded in 422
 queerness and 18, 295, 302–304
queer phenomenology of 304–305
recording of and learning from 18
storage and reuse of, ethics of 296–297
textual analysis and 283
transcription possibilities for 299–300
sound artists, reascendance of the visual for 301
“Sound of Da Police” (KRS One) 301
Sound Factory (NYC) 40
Sound of Music, The (Lindsay, Crouse, Rodgers, and Hammerstein) 71
sound-objects 298
sound recordist, identity of 297
soundscape 18
sound studies 4, 305–306
Sounds of Sex (CD) 277
SoundStream 36
Source, The 131
source material, faithfulness to 167–168
South Asia
LGBTQ issues in 528–529
marriage in 533
migrants from, dance music and 49
non-binary gender expression in 529
sexual mores in 527
South Asian queer dance nights, transnational network of 35
Southeast Asia, gender plurality in 563–564
Southern California Community Choir 83
southern dialect, inflectional patterns in 264
Space Is the Place (dir. Coney) 20, 384, 389–396, 392f
spaceships 391–392, 395–396
Spain, Nancy 319
speaking frequencies, biological cause for 66
Spears, Britney 247–248
speech
continuum of 240
gendered contextualization of 242–244
socialization and 245
as sound 300
transcription of 300
Speech Dialect Attitudinal Scale 140n.36
speech habits, gender differences in 240–241
Speed, Malcolm 483
Spencer, Russ 254–255. See also Honeytraps, the
Spies, Walter 560–561
Spiller, Henry 21
Spiller, Hortense 390–391
Spirit of Memphis Quartet, the 85
‘splaining 94–95
Spoon, Rae 111–115, 369, 371, 373
Spooner, James 136
Springfield, Dusty 312–314
Springfield, Tom 312
Springfields, the 312
Springsteen, Bruce 505
stage impersonation 251–252
Staiger, Judith 68
Stam, Robin 506–507
stardom 594
Star Is Born, A (dir. Wellman) 68
Start, Al 319
Star Trek
fan conventions for 187
female fans’ responses to 187
homoerotic desire in 187
relational tensions in 187
vidding based on 186, 188–191
statecraft, queer logic of 513–514
Stavec, Karmen 510–511
steb 618–619
Stein, Alexander 281–282
Stephens, Joe 118n.33
Stephens, Vincent L. 13–14, 116n.14
stereotyping, of oppressed people 111, 253–254, 387, 391, 491–492
Sterne, Jonathan 305–306
Stewart, Patrick 286
Stewart, Rod 483–484
Stipe, Michael 591–592
St. John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral (NYC) 151
St. Lô 136
Stonewall (charity) 322n.31
Stonewall Riots 129
Stooshe 319
Stowitts, Hubert 561
St. Patrick’s Cathedral (NYC) 151
Strauss, Richard 408
Strayhorn, Billy 12
Streisand, Barbra 483
Stritch, Elaine 68
Strub, Sean 497n.24
Strykalo, Valentin 604
Studio 54 (NYC) 38
Stüttgen, Tim 20
Stychin, Carl 515–516
Subcultural Sounds (Slobin) 93–94
subcultures, Birmingham School accounts of 17
subjectivity 371–372, 424
Subotic, Jelena 507–508
subservience, performance of 259
substitution 425–426
subversion, queer celebration of 618–619
Sugarhill Gang, the 125–126, 128
Sugarhill Records 125
Sukarno 569–570
Sukop, Sylvia 108–109
Sullivan, Nikki 287
Sumish, Dimna 606–607
Summer, Donna 38
Sun Ra 20, 384, 387–388, 395
considered a traitor to jazz 393
distanced from Black macho 394
performativity of 391
political speeches, delivered to the Arkestra 397
quareness of 384
realness of 393–394
space politics of 393
undermining masculine clichés 391
See also Space Is the Place
Sunardi, Christina 570
Sunshine, Tommie 42
Superfly 390
Super Peach 609–610
Swedenburg, Ted 508–509
Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (Johnson) 86, 89
Sylvester (Sylvester James, Jr.) 18–19, 85
symbolic meaning, adaptations and 168
Symphony for Band (Matthews) 330
Symposia on LGBTQ Studies and Music Education 13
synchronization 301
S/Z (Barthes) 444–445
Szwed, John 398

“Tainted Love” (Coil; Jones) 483–484

Taipei, as queer center of East Asia 585–586
Talking to Girls about Duran Duran (Sheffield) 223n.16, 225n.31
Talmelli, Raffaele 443
Tamasaburo, Banto 540–541
Tama Sumo 36
tantric tradition 566–567
Tate, Greg 384
Tat Ming Pair 592–593
Taylor, Jodie 17–18, 319
Taylor, Leslie (Buttaflysoul) 135
Taylor, Elizabeth 331–332
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 6–7, 11–12
tea dances 45–46
techno 35, 40–41
technology
Black emancipation and 394
emotional investment in 281
foregrounding of, in music 609
Temptations, the 38
Tendencies (Sedgwick) 2
Tennant, Neil 591–592
Terrence Higgins Trust 483–484
Tesori, Jeanine 73
text
cultural impact of, shifting in new environments 168
interlocking levels of 168–169
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Jenkins) 186
Thaemlitz, Terre 44–45, 51, 369, 375
Tharpe, Rosetta 82–83
“That’s What Friends Are For” (Bacharach and Bayer Sager) 483–484
theater riots 458–459
Theatre Royal (Brighton) 311–312, 318–319
theology 147
theorization of difference 614
Things to Come (dir. Welles) 186–187
third gender 436–437, 529–531, 564–565
Third Lateran Council 423–424
Thomas, Gary C. 6–7
Thompson, Lydia 463–464, 464f, 466
Thomson, Virgil 12
Thorne, Barry 245
Thorne Crusaders, the 83
Thorson, Scott 315–316
Tieh Chang 594
Tiffany 486–487
Tilley, Vesta 252, 315–316
timbre 242–244, 243t
gender and 247–248
sexualization and 247–248
Time Out Hong Kong 594
Time Out New York 503
Tiny Tim 493
Tipton, George 189–190, 203n.20
T.Jonesy 191
TLC 484–485, 490
Tobin, Robert 508
Tobolski, Erica 251
Tod in Venedig, Der (Mann) 176–179
Todd’s (Detroit) 41
Tode, Emil 506–507
Tomkins, Thomas 147–148
Tomlinson, Gary 614
Tommy (The Who) 408
tonality (tonal music)
emergence of 422
gay male modernists and 11
tone scientists 399
Tonéx 90
Tongson, Karen 13, 17
Tongues Untied (dir. Riggs) 233–234
tongzhi, as term 588–590, 594
Took, Barry 315
TOP (TNT) 606–607
topeng Cirebong 567–568
topping from the bottom 213
Toronto, raves in 42
Total Chaos (ed. Chang) 124
trad (Irish traditional music) 94–95
being uncloseted in 97–98
coming out in 96–99
dating scene within 99
demographics of 96
difference influencing performance in 98
equality in 95
familial-type relations in 99
gossip in 97
harmonies in 103
hate speech and bullying in 100–102
homophobia in 101
homosocial male tendencies in 101–102
internal superculture of 93–94
in the Irish diaspora 94
LGBTQ performers in 93–96
liberatory and confining 103
after marriage equality acts in Ireland and the US 95
matchmaking attempts in 97
music, discourses of transcendence in 93–94
nationalist overtones of 94
 as orientation 95
participants in, presumed heterosexual 96–97
politics in 101
queer sexuality in 95
religious connection with 94
sessions in 94–95, 99
sexism in 101–102
sexuality in 103–104
social media and 101
Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music (Slominski) 13–14
trance music 46
transAmericana 108–110
transcription, musical, and cross-cultural interpretation 617–19
transference 354
transgender men
gendered experience of 372
identity experience of 372
interpreted as sexual inverts 372
transgender music
bodily experience and 373
making of 13
transgender musicians 369–371
gender identities of 371
music of 371
sexual identity of 373
textual and material practices of 373
transgender musicology 370–371, 374–375, 377
transgender passing guides. See passing guides for trans people
transgender people
asked to account for their gender identification 110
attacked as fraudulent 251–252
changing voices 239
drag balls and 44
dystopian representation of 377
experience of, diversity of 377
experiential knowledge of, turned into cisgender performance 241–242
observation of 368
out in the trad scene 97–98
passing aurally 63
visibility for 331
transgender performance, breaking the illusion of 253–254
transgender scholarship, diversity of 377
transgender spectrum 369
transgender vocalists, physical changes in 369, 371
transgender women, musicality and 367–368
transgressivness, perceptibility of 370
transness, changes in 121–122
transsexual expression 368–369
transsexuality 369
associated with investing in the body 371
distinct from queerness 371
lasting physical change of 368
material and embodied experience central to 368–369
transsexuals
critique of, for complying with repressive gender system 378n.10
literature by, for, and about 241–242
misrepresentation of 372
observation of 372
transsexual studies
distinct from queer studies 373
focus of, on materiality 371
trap music 137
trauma, effects of 411–414
travesty roles, women in 466
Travis, Randy 114
Travolta, John 38
Traxx, Tronco 44
Treadwell, Nina 17
Trefusis, Violet 311–312
Treitler, Leo 617–619
triangulation 221–222
tribal house music 46
Tribe Called Quest, A 136
Trikone-Chicago 49
Trip (London) 41–42
Trocadero Transfer (San Francisco) 38
trumpets 437
comic effects of 430, 433
depicted in marginalia 426f, 427f, 428–436, 431f, 436f–
iconography of 428–430
women playing 430–433, 432f
truthfulness
irony chosen over 110
in North American popular music 109
Tucker, Anand 281
Tucker, Sophie 240
Tune, Tommy 72–73
Turk, Edward Baron 70
Turk, Tisha 201–202
Turner, Kathleen 66
Turner, Nat 230
Turner, Tina 483
Turn of the Screw, The (Britten) 409
twice-told stories 84
Twilo (NYC) 40
Twin Peaks (ABC) 415
Twitty, Conway 263–266
2 Live Crew 489
Tyson, June 397

Ugresic, Dubravka 212, 215–216, 219

Ukraine
celebrity culture in 604–605
Eurovision and 509–511, 603–604
homophobia in 626n.79
language use in 620
music in 619–620
queerness in popular music of 604, 606
Russification of 626n.91
show business in 604
trash culture in 604
Ulbricht, Alexej 615–616
Umbrella Movement 587, 595–596, 598
UNESCO 540
United Farm Workers 129
United Federation of Phoenix 188
United Kingdom
acid-house party / rave scene in 40
hardcore continuum of EDM’s roots in 43
United States
constructing national heterosexuality 505
cross-dressing entertainment, 20th-century decline in 475–476
Eurovision’s potential in 516–517
female impersonation in 457–462, 458f, 460f
hate speech and bullying in trad scene 100–102
Jim Crow laws in 175
male impersonators in 462–463, 472–475, 473f
musical performance and national identity in 505
patriotic symbols and rituals of 505
 popular culture in, construction of 66
PWAs neglected in 488
theater in, class divisions and 458–459, 464, 466
transgressive female performance in 463–475
universalization 614
U People (dir. Demetrius and Walidah) 136
urban sounds, questions raised by 297–298
utopia
building of 414
desire for 614
Eurovision’s vision of 515–516
musical theater and 64
utopianism 50
utopian revolution, hope for, abandoned 615

Valenti, Jessica 327

Van, Marcus René (Mr. ManMan) 135
Van Borsel, John 250–251
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. 411
van der Kroef, Justus 563–565, 568–569
Van Der Stolk, Larion 255–257
van Lamsweerde, Inez 315–316
Van Leer, David 65–66
Vänskä, Annamari 511–512
Variations pour une porte et un soupir [Variations for a Door and Sigh] (Henry) 298–299
variety stage
ballet dancers on 468–470, 469f
challenges for women in 471–472
men in, treating male impersonators as honorary men 474–475
novelty acts of 470–471, 470f
performances on 466–472, 467f
validating construction of manhood 471–472
working-class gender constructions and 471–472
Vatter, Suki 282–283
vaudeville 466–470
Vaughn, Billy 9–10
“Vazaleen” (Toronto) 49
Verdon, Gwen 65–66
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC—Dutch East Indies Company) 562
Very Necessary (Salt-N-Pepa) 490
Vicious (ITV) 315–316
victim-survivors of sexual abuse, contradictory feelings of 406
Victorian period, promiscuity and cross-dressing in 311
vidding
Bad Girls and 195–202
collaborative nature of 193
community emphasis in 192, 194
defined 185–186
digital 194
gender and 187
lyric choices in 188
multilevel readings in 188
origins of 186–191
queer aesthetic in 185–186
queerness and 191–192
queer-oriented subject matter in 185–186
slash in 187
song choices in 188
Star Trek and 186, 188–191
technology and 186
VCRs and 193–194
video, pairing with music. See also vidding; vids
videodiscs 214–215
vids 185
defined 201–202
intertextual play in 197, 199
listening to 196–202
music in 185
as new readings of source material 196
Vincentelli, Elisabeth 504
Virgins of Bali (dir. Dickason) 560–561
Virgo Four 36–37
Virtuous Pedophiles (VirPed) 408–409
Visconti, Luchino 167, 176–177
Vivaldi, Antonio 463
VividCon 185, 188
vocabulary, gender and 249–250
vocal feminization program 240
vocal fry, women and 247–248
vocal gender essentialism 240–241
vocal gender performance 242
elements of 242–251, 243t
flexibility of pitch 242–244
studies of 242–244
vocal house music 46
vogelfrei 232–233
vogue balls 35, 43–44. See also drag balls
vogueing 44
voice
continuum of 240
gendering of 110, 241
gender truth and 239
octave ranges for men and women 245
as performance 241
as sound and presence 17–18
tone color in 245–246
Voice of an Angel, The: Poems and Letters for Spiritual Renewal from a Fractured Life
(Byrens) 409–410
Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 13
volume (in speech), gender and 242–244, 243t, 248
von der Horst, Dirk 17
von Unwerth, Ellen 513–514
vowels, resonance of 246–247
vowel triangle chart 246–247
voyeurism 277, 282
Vreeland, Diana 315–316
Vuletic, Dean 507

Wachowski, Lana 331–332

Wagner, Richard 405–406
Wainwright, Rufus 484–485
Wald, Gayle 82, 84
Waldoff, Claire 240
Walidah, Hanifah (Hanifah Johnson) 122–123, 132, 135–136
Walker, Albertina 83
Wallace, Michelle 390–391
Walter Hawkins and the Hawkins Family 85–86
waltz, queering of 9–10
WAM. See Western art music
Wang Shiyu 551–552
Ward, Clara 83–84
Ward-Royster, Willa 83–84
Warehouse, The (Chicago) 36, 40
Warehouse, The (South Bronx) 131
warehouse parties 42
Warhol, Andy 398
waria 572–573
Warner, Michael 505
warok 566–567
Warwick, Dionne 483–484
Washington, George 504–505
Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze) 504–505
“Waterfalls” (Ndegeocello) 235
Watkins, S. Craig 129–130, 135–136
Watney, Simon 497n.24
wayang, gender ambiguity in 568–569
wayang wong 569
Wayans brothers 455
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (Hartman) 229
Weber, Cynthia 513–514
Webster, David 312
Weelkes, Thomas 147–148
Weinberg, Tom Wilson 486
Welles, Orson 186–187
Wellhausen, Julius 147
Well of Loneliness, The (Hall) 311–312
Weng Jiahui 541
We’re Educators—With a Touch of Class! 490
Wesner, Ella 252, 472–475, 473f
West, Mae 461, 483
West, the
catching up to 605, 618
culture compartmentalized, in the Middle Ages 421
dualisms in 618
identity constructions of, moving beyond 528–529
musical notation of, rise of 617
sexual mores in 527
See also Western art music
West, Tim’m T. (25Percenter) 134–135
Western, Lillian 471
Western art music
closeted sexuality in 6–7
in the Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12
decentering of 4
queer studies in 4
scholarly resources on 12–13
sexuality research in 7
study of 3–4
Westheimer, Ruth 489
West Java, dance and gender in 571–572
West Side Story (Laurents) 64–65, 76n.12, 169
WETOC. See We’re Educators—With a Touch of Class!
Whedon, Joss 195
white Anglophone popular music, in the Cumulative LGBTQ Music Bibliography 12
Whiteley, Sheila 11–12, 14–15, 19, 116n.14
White Lies Black Sheep (dir. Spooner) 136
white revisionism 395–396
Whitesell, Lloyd 189, 204n.30, 287–288
White Stripes, the 606–607
Who, The 408
Why Karen Carpenter Matters (Tongson) 13
Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in
America (Kitwana) 40–41
Wilbourne, Emily 20
Wilde, Oscar 19, 219–220, 311, 314
Wilder, Holly 249–250
Wild Fruit brand 318
Wilken, G. A. 564
Williams, Hank 114
Williams, Kenneth 315
Williams, Linda 282
Williams, Robert 40
Williams, Robin 462
Williams, Sammy 78n.60
Williams, Saul 136
Williams, Wendy 130–131
Williamson, Cris 155
Williford, Daniel 591
Wilson, Anne 262–263
Wilson, Cassandra 234–235
Wilson, Ian 566–567
“Wishing” (Honeytraps) 242, 251–252
“Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” (Flock of Seagulls) 254–257, 255f, 256f
witch’s flight 233
Wizard of Oz, The (dir. Fleming) 70–71, 182n.8
Wobensmith, Matt 131–132
Wojnarowicz, David 485–486
Wolf, Stacy 64–65, 71, 182n.10
Wolfenden Committee (UK) 314
Wolk, Lesley 247–248
women
attending 19th-century theater 98, 466
cross-cultural thinking about, with music and power 6
F0 dropping with achievement of more social equality 245
function in musical theater 67–68
 keeping silent in church 442
mannish, hostility to 475–476
misogynistic ideas of, in AIDS music 489
missing and silenced 325
musical responses to AIDS 489
role in narrative cinema 67–68
socially pressured to smile 246
speaking more musically 240–242
transgressive, as portrayed in AIDS-related music 493–495
veneration of, in musical theater 67
Women & Music (journal) 13
Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Koskoff) 6
women’s music 6, 16, 155
Wonder, Stevie 483–484
Wonderful Town (Fields and Chodorov) 64–65
Wonder Mike 125
Wong, Anna May 73
Wong, Anthony 585–587, 590–596, 590f, 591f, 598
Wong, Deborah 218–219, 534
Wong, Faye 590
Wood, Elizabeth 11, 327–328
Woodford, Joe 515
Woolf, Virginia 311–312
working-class culture, stereotyped as masculine 253–254
working-class people, stigmatized as non-normative 108–109
World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, The (Ndegeocello) 232
Woubshet, Dagwami 485–486
Wurst, Conchita (Tom Neuwirth) 512–515, 513f, 514f
Wu Tang Clan 489

Xena: Warrior Princess (syndicated) 193–194

Xuanzong (emperor) 542

Ya Kid K 231–232
Yam Kimfai / Ren Jianhui 543
Yang Guifei 542
Yano, Christine 216, 218–219, 224n.19
“Yearning for the Secular World” (“Sifan”) 546–548
Yep, Gust 124
Yes 11
yi (art; skill) 544–546, 548–553
Youens, Susan 339–340
Young, Iris Marion 368
Young M.A 121–122, 137
YouTube 185–186, 193–194
Yue, Audrey 589
Yue Meiti 543, 551–552
Yurchak, Alexei 618–619
“Y Us” (Cyrus) 131–132
Yu Zhenfei 551–552

Zanfretta, Marietta 470–471

Zanzibar (Newark, NJ) 40
Zap Club, the (Brighton) 318
Zeiger, Melissa 485–486
Zero Patience (Greyson) 482
Zhang Peng 539–540
Zhou Xianggeng 547–548
Ziegfeld Girl (dir. Leonard) 71–72
“Zither Seductions” (Qintiao) 550–552
Ziv, Amalia 509
Zwingli, Ulrich 149