This article considers the record, in both historical documentation and biographical reclamation, of the struggles and sensibilities of homosexual people of the West that came out in their music, and of the contribution of homosexual men and women to the music profession. In broader terms, it is further concerned with the special perspectives from which Western music of all kinds can be heard and examined.
1. Homosexuality and musicality.
2. The gay and lesbian movement.
3. Musical theatre, jazz and popular music.
PHILIP BRETT, ELIZABETH WOOD
To think about sexual categories as arbitrary, or contingent on historical or social practice, is still difficult because sexuality, like musicality, has been so thoroughly naturalized during the 20th century and intimately embedded in an individual sense of self (Jagose, 1996, pp.17–18). But, while maintaining the importance for modern society of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality and the process of acculturation that surrounds them, thinking historically about that sense of self has, paradoxically, become the basis of much gay and lesbian critical work. It also underwrites ‘queer theory’, the intellectual phenomenon based on the recuperation of the pejorative term ‘queer’ and the inflecting of gay and lesbian knowledge with postmodern knowledge and ways of thinking. Arguing along lines proposed by Foucault, Halperin (1990, pp.24–5) pinpoints the historical difficulty: ‘Homosexuality presupposes sexuality, and sexuality itself … is a modern invention’ which ‘represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse’. Before the beginning of the 19th century deviant sexual acts such as sodomy were not particularized according to gender or even species, and some ancient modes of same-sex desire, such as Sapphism and pederasty, can be traced through Western culture. By the end of the century, however, the dominant model of heterosexuality was posited upon its binary opposition to an actual (but still incoherent) homosexual identity. A similar process of identity formation can be seen in music, where ‘musicality’ replaced the earlier and vaguer ‘musicalness’ as an inherent quality attributed to ‘nature’ but actually constructed in musical institutions of various kinds, particularly educational ones involved in the development of musical talent (see Kingsbury, 1988).
The connection between musicality and homosexuality, and a strong supposition that the music profession was made up largely of homosexuals, entered public discourse as an indirect result of sexology, the scientific work fundamental to the modern understanding of sexuality, beginning with K.F. Ulrich's pioneering work on Uranism in the 1860s and expanded by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Moll and other German authorities. English studies around the turn of the century advocating a liberal attitude towards the ‘invert’ or ‘Urning’ frequently refer to the German sources. ‘As to music … this is certainly the art which in its subtlety and tenderness – and perhaps in a certain inclination to indulge in emotion – lies nearest to the Urning nature. There are few in fact of this nature who have not some gift in the direction of music’ (Carpenter, 1908, p.111). Havelock Ellis addressed the topic even more arrestingly (‘it has been extravagantly said that all musicians are inverts’) and quoted Oppenheim to the effect that ‘the musical disposition is marked by a great emotional instability, and this instability is a disposition to nervousness’, concluding that ‘the musician has not been rendered nervous by his music, but he owes his nervousness (as also, it may be added, his disposition to homosexuality) to the same disposition to which he owes his musical aptitude’ (1915, p.295).
Such beliefs, when juxtaposed with the public scandals in many European countries (most importantly the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895) created a climate in which neither the presence of homosexuals in music nor their contributions to it could be acknowledged, and in which the experience of social oppression that informs gay and lesbian lives could not be connected to musicality. Discussion of forbidden and illegal sexuality and music was impossible. The art of music, the music profession and musicology in the 20th century were all affected by attitudes to homosexuality that have played a part in forming the widespread belief that music transcends ordinary life and is autonomous of social effects or expression. These attitudes have also contributed to the resistance to critical inquiry into the politics, especially the sexual politics, of music and into issues related to sexual diversity such as gender, class, ethnicity and race, religious belief and power.
Conversely, the non-specificity of musical language and the doctrine of its autonomy from social issues led to a special situation in which music plays an important part as both safety valve and regulator in the mechanism of the ‘closet’, which is not only a symbol of the hidden nature of many gay and lesbian lives but is arguably the most important attribute of 20th-century homosexuality. In the words of the gay author Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘Historically, music has been defined as mystery and miasma, as implicitness rather than explicitness, and so we have hid inside music: in music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal without saying a word’ (1993, pp.189–90). The privilege of freely expressing desire and other feelings in music, a lifeline to those whose basic emotions are invalidated, appears also to have led to an unspoken agreement to preserve the status quo. Although heavily populated by gays and lesbians, the various branches of music have been slow to exhibit any overt opposition to the heteronormative order of things (Brett, in Queering the Pitch, 1994, pp.16–18).
Most homosexuals internalized their oppression. According to Weeks (1981, p.105), Wilde complained that he had been led astray by ‘erotomania’ and extravagant sexual appetite; the Irish patriot Roger Casement thought his homosexuality a terrible disease that ought to be cured; and the liberal humanist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson saw it as a misfortune (‘I am like a man crippled’). Many homosexual musicians combined such internalization of oppression with some manner of protest. The various mechanisms thus employed are sometimes difficult to decipher and musicology has as yet little experience with their cryptography, but they are arguably always there. Ravel's ‘conspicuous sublimation’ (Kramer, 1995, p.203); Strayhorn's self-effacement; Smyth's guarded codes in her operas and memoirs yet exultant lesbian erotic in her suffrage music (Wood, in Solie, Musicology and Difference, 1993, and 1995); the social radicalism of Blitzstein and Tippett; the eccentricity of Vladimir Horowitz; Ned Rorem's separation of his two roles as gay man and composer; Britten's pacifism and homoerotic discourse under cover of the musical treatment of canonic literature; Poulenc's musical camp juxtaposed with religiosity; the insider allusions in the songs of Cole Porter and Noël Coward; Landowska's fixing on the antediluvian harpsichord as the vehicle for her virtuosity; Henze's flight from serialism, and from Germany; Ferrier's (and many other singers') cultivation of a ‘sapphonic’ voice (Wood, in Brett, Queering the Pitch, 1994); the audacity and despair of blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday; Dent's debunking of Beethoven and other received notions; Szymanowski's involvement with the Dionysian (and his two-volume homoerotic novel, Ephebos); Copland's early embrace of eroticism (figured through orientalism or ‘blackness’) and subsequent eradication of corporeal or erotic elements in favour of a ‘pure and absolute’ style achieved by means of what has been called a ‘compositional scorched-earth campaign’ (Metzer, 1997); Virgil Thomson's collaboration with Gertrude Stein and the subversiveness of his criticism; Partch's ‘hobo’ voices; the falsetto-enhanced ‘lonesome-cowboy’ vocal disguise of Elton John, or his representation in music at the funeral of Princess Diana, the royal outcast; Cage's dual embrace of both noise and silence within music; Harrison's gamelan and championing of Esperanto; Oliveros's cultivation of communal ‘deep listening’, and her attachment to the accordion; Bernstein's exaggerated showmanship; even the aggressively blank faces of the Pet Shop Boys: all these, or yet other aspects of the art and self-presentation of these men and women, might be read as signs of both an accommodation to as well as subversion of the pervasive fact of the closet.
It will be objected that in many cases a ‘straight’ equivalent may be found. But a list of this kind, which could easily be expanded, shows not only how very considerable the homosexual presence has been in 20th-century Western music but also prompts questions as to how and why, in the post-Freudian age, a basic element of subjectivity could have been so little examined in relation to music, or why that relation should have been so obsessively denied. The fact that homosexual people represent different sometimes, opposing, stylistic and ideological positions, no matter what part of the music business they are involved in, argues against a unified ‘homosexual sensibility’ in music, any simple relation between sexual identity and musical expression. It does not support the view that there is no connection between the two.
Enabling the weird dissociation of homosexuality and music, in spite of their being so patently intertwined for an entire century, is the mechanism described as the ‘open secret’; its function ‘is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge’ (Miller, 1988, p.206), and its effect is to strengthen the binary oppositions (public/private, inside/outside, hetero/homosexuality) and to consign homosexuality to the private sphere, always on the verge of visibility and therefore always under surveillance as an unthinkable alternative. To the extent that music, as a performance art, must occupy the public sphere, with (as it were) all its secrets on display, then what Miller calls a ‘fantasmatic recovery’ of enormous proportions has to be mounted to keep those secrets from making any difference. To what degree resistance can be effective in such a situation is a matter of considerable debate in queer theory. Some incline to what has been termed the entrapment model (Sinfield, 1994, pp.21–7: derived from Althusser and various interpretations of Foucault), in which subversion merely contributes to containment or to a general postmodernist notion of the subject as completely determined by ideology and therefore without agency. Theories developed from Gramsci, Raymond Williams and Žižek, on the other hand, offer more possibilities of effective resistance by refusing to accept a totalizing system and by recognizing that any ‘dominant ideology’ is itself constantly undergoing diverse internal disturbances which dissidence may turn to its advantage in particular historical situations. ‘Coming out’ has been the most undeniably effective political action in recent years. Earlier times demanded different tactics. One of the most effective of these, retaining a certain power to the present, is ‘camp’, a disruptive style of humour that defies canons of taste and by its very nature evades any stable definition. Other solutions existed for those who refused this self-marking performative style. Britten, for instance, was arguably better advised in exploiting the open secret and capitalizing on his success to ensure wide circulation of the powerful critiques of the family, heterosexual relations, organized religion, patriarchal authority and militarism contained in his works.
Gender adds layers of complexity to the social situation of homosexuals in almost all musical contexts (as do race and ethnicity and class). The male homosexual has been in a particularly ambiguous position in most Western contexts because, especially if white, he had the option of exerting male privilege and power, providing he was not publicly exposed. Some who adopted that expedient behaved in particularly oppressive or offensive ways towards others, for they often overcompensated in elaborating their disguise. Lesbians, on the other hand, were treated as a minority not only because of their sexuality but also, in most musical contexts, because of a hierarchical gender system that pressed all women into certain roles (diva, harpist, pianist), castigated them for transgressing them and put severe obstacles in their path towards others (composer, conductor, saxophone player, impresario).
This system (by no means extinct) was exacerbated to an unusual degree in the concert hall context by the emphasis in the Romantic era on the enduring artwork of ‘absolute music’ and therefore on its creator, who became arguably more powerful, in spite of the reaction against Romanticism, as a result of high modernism's war on the non-subservient virtuoso performer (see Women and music and Feminism). Male and female homosexuals, therefore, have had very different experiences in various music worlds, but the basis for their common interest is the codification and regulation of gender roles with appropriate sexual positions and identities. The assignment of the male homosexual to a feminine position is mirrored, though not exactly, by the mockery aimed at a challenging or creative lesbian whose work is constantly labelled ‘virile’, ‘manly’ and ‘unnatural’, or ‘deficient in the feminine charm that might have been expected of a woman composer’, as demonstrated in turn-of-the-century critical responses to the music of Ethel Smyth and Rosalind Ellicott (Kertesz, 1995; Fuller, 1994). That similar criticism was directed at that icon of womanly respectability, Mrs H.H.A. Beach, when she wrote a powerful mass or symphony (the composer George Chadwick called her ‘one of the boys’), indicates the link and overlap between gynophobia and homophobia, as in the ‘masculine protest’ of Charles Ives (Solomon, 1987; Tick, in Solie, Musicology and Difference, 1993; Kramer, 1995, pp.183–8).
Threatened masculinity tends to see all musicians and their activities as feminine and to value (or devalue) them accordingly. Since people in music all share to some extent the taint of the effeminate or feminized, powerful institutional forces had to be mobilized to counteract that image, especially with the large-scale entry of music into the universities after World War II. The widespread adoption of a neo-serialist technique, the development of arcane forms of music analysis, the separation of a high art from any form of popular cultural expression and the equation of musical scholarship with scientific inquiry are all signs of a dominant masculinist, highly rational, heteronormative discourse in music all too unhappily but accurately characterized by the word ‘discipline’.
In the wake of the 1950s civil rights movement, which began to change the status of African-Americans in the USA, various New Left counter-discourses arose, including a reinvigorated feminist movement for women's rights. A militant gay and lesbian movement, fomenting in the USA after World War II, was catalysed by the Stonewall riot of 1969, when patrons of a New York gay bar, mostly working-class men and drag queens, fought a pitched battle with police on a routine raid. The movement borrowed from the struggle of oppressed racial minorities, devised its own tactics and linked its theory to both the sexual freedom movement and to the new oppression theories of feminism. Consensus grew among the various counter-discourses that unless a sexual revolution was incorporated into a political revolution there could be no real transformation of society and social relations. Alliances led in some contexts not only to the inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual concerns under one umbrella but also, somewhat later, to the involvement of the sexual minorities with the politics of race and class.
The subsequent global spread of the movement was complemented by initiatives in humanistic scholarship, consisting (as with feminism) of both a historical branch designed to uncover those ‘hidden from history’ and a theoretical branch concerned with the pertinent questions of sexual identity and subjectivity and their relation to capitalist society, although the two often overlapped. This scholarly initiative has given rise to a situation in which modern sexuality is both ‘the most meaning intensive of human activities’ (Sedgwick, in Stanton, 1992, pp.1–46) and ‘a sign, symbol, or reflection of nearly everything in our culture’ (Gould, ibid.) as well as ‘the name that can be given to a historical construct’ (Foucault) of social and sexual relations whose contents and meanings are in constant change and flux.
From the start, homosexual identity was seen as contingent: ‘our homosexuality is a crucial part of our identity, not because of anything intrinsic about it but because social oppression made it so’ (Altman, 1971, p.230; 1993, p.240). Questions about identity persisted, however, for a variety of reasons: identity categories were perceived by many as instruments of the homophobic and heterosexist order they sought to oppose; they tended to efface ‘hyphenations’ in identities as white domination of the movement came under fire; and they were thrown into disorder by the onset of the decentred, split subject of postmodern thought.
Accordingly, emphasis moved from identity towards representation. Some sense of this can be gained from Morrissey's self-presentation as ‘a prophet for the fourth gender’, punning on 19th-century sexology's ‘third gender’ while refusing to be determined by it (Hubbs, 1996). In an attempt to establish self-determination in the feminist subject, it was suggested that the role playing of working-class lesbian bar culture could be rehabilitated as a ‘combo butch-femme subject’ that seduces the sign system with artifice and camp rather than internalizing the torments of dominant ideology (Case, in Abelove and others, 1993, pp.294–306; for a musical application, see Peraino, 1992). Music, especially popular music, often seems to respond in its playful, coy or disruptive tactics around the vocal as well as the visual representation of sex and gender (consider Madonna, Prince or Boy George) to Judith Butler's notion of these supposedly natural characteristics as ‘performative’ utterances (i.e. like speech-acts) to which subjects submit in a constrained repetition as part of entry into language and society. Butler proposes the notable inversion in which ‘if a regime of sexuality mandates a compulsory performance of sex, then it may be only through that performance that the binary system of gender and the binary system of sex come to have intelligibility at all’, (ibid., 307–20; for a musical explication, see Cusick, in Barkin and Hamessley, Audible Traces, 1998).
It might have been expected that the academic investigation of gay and lesbian musics, the critique of heteronormative assumptions in such areas as music theory and an exploration of music and subjectivity, would also have begun in the 1970s. But the hermetic nature of postwar musicological discourse, and the policing of music that led many to acquiesce in the status quo, hindered the process. This policing, sometimes overt, as in the imprisonment of Henry Cowell (Hicks, 1991), but more often silent and insidious, also hindered feminist inquiry in musicology and the acceptance of women composers into the concert hall repertory and in opera.
Avenues for protest did of course exist or could be created, as left-wing radicals demonstrated through a revivified folksong movement in the 1960s. During the 1970s gay and lesbian musicians began to find the means to give their sexuality musical expression in various interesting ways, often by a radical reinterpretation of an existing musical genre or institution. Concert music and its scholarship were virtually impermeable at this stage because of the venues, conventions and institutions governing its performance and the aseptic ideological pressure of high modernism. Even opera, with its enormous gay and lesbian following (and open invitation to ridicule), was less susceptible than ballet to queer subversion: La Gran Scena Opera Company (founded in 1981) never became as successful as its older sister, the virtuoso drag ballet company Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo (founded in 1974). On the other hand, the entire opera world (and to some extent that of musical comedy and other music-theatre genres) had long been a stage on which gays and lesbians could perform, or see performed, their presence and humanity. Impresarios, managers, producers, critics, librettists and composers contributed to this atmosphere along with singers, characters and roles. ‘Where else can you see two women making love in a public place?’ (Reynolds, in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 1995, p.133). Such coupling runs the gamut, moreover, from the ‘principal boy’ of lower-class British pantomime, with her fish-net stockings and full-hipped swagger, to the aristocratic Oktavian playing butch to the Marschallin's femme in a fin-de-siècle Viennese bedroom, which has sometimes been seen as a symbolic performance of lesbian desire (Mary Garden refused to ‘out’ herself by creating the role); and the potential for such interpretation grew when modern performing practice, putting original tessitura before gender sensibility, assigned full-throated mezzos and sopranos to castrato roles. Historical female couplings without cross-dressing, too, can take on fresh significance as a result of being exposed to a marginal perspective, like Dido and the Sorceress in Judith Peraino's account of Purcell's opera (in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 1995, pp.99–131). Closet dramas or parables abound: Szymanowski's King Roger, Henze's The Bassarids, Britten's Albert Herring, Owen Wingrave and Death in Venice; Britten's Peter Grimes is a powerful allegory of homosexual oppression (Brett, 1977, 1983) along lines suggested already by operas, such as Janáček's Káť'a Kabanová and (more especially) Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, that explore the oppression of women. ‘Real’ gay or lesbian characters are harder to find. Mel and Dov, the inter-racial couple in Tippett's The Knot Garden (1970), appear to be opera's first ‘out’ gay males; predictably, they break up, one of them returning to heterosexual lifestyle. Countess Geschwitz, the one heroic and truly loving character of Berg's Lulu, stands as a shining example of musico-dramaturgy that manages to transcend essentialism and stereotyping (see Morris, in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 1995).
A remarkable phenomenon of the period immediately after the Stonewall incident was the emergence of lesbian-feminist or ‘women-identified’ singer-songwriters, bands, choruses, record labels and production companies (Olivia and Redwood were both founded in 1973). Venues such as women's coffee-houses and women-only music festivals were also established, with largely lesbian audiences. Rarely broadcast, ‘women's music’ was a grass-roots movement from its beginnings in Maxine Feldman's Angry Atthis and Madeline Davis's Stonewall Nation (both 45 rpm singles, 1971) and Alix Dobkin's album Lavender Jane Loves Women (1973) through its growth and achievement in the work of such artists as Holly Near, Meg Christian and Cris Williamson, whose first album, The Changer and the Changed (1975), has been described as ‘the best-selling independent album of all time’ (Post, All Music Guide, 1994, p.1039). With an emphasis on acoustic instruments, the music is grounded in folksong styles, sometimes inflected with blues, rock, jazz, reggae and even classical music. Openly addressing lesbian desire and relationships as well as the feminist critique of patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, it became important as an arena in which lesbian community could be forged in the USA.
Another phenomenon was the inception of gay and lesbian bands and choruses. Among the earliest was New York's Victoria Woodhull All-Women's Marching Band (1973), named after a 19th-century feminist and presidential candidate (and not exclusively lesbian, although its theme song was ‘The dykes go marching in’), and Catherine Roma's Anna Crusis Women's Choir in Philadelphia (1975), a leading organization in the performance of new music by women. The Gotham Male Chorus, founded in 1977, later incorporated women to become the Stonewall Chorale, the first gay and lesbian chorus. In 1978 Jon Sims founded the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band and Twirling Corps, which became a noted focus for the political aspirations of the large gay and lesbian community in that city; a Gay Men's Chorus soon followed.
While several of these initiatives began as different expressions of communal pride, they have burgeoned into cultural institutions and lasting, full-scale artistic movements across the world. The choruses in particular have thrived, founding their own international organization, Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses, at the Gay Games in San Francisco in 1982, and now greatly outnumbering the bands, who also founded a national association, Lesbian and Gay Bands of America, in 1982. In particular, they have contributed to the queer critique of musical institutions and authorized culture by mixing traditional, popular and highbrow musics of all kinds within single concerts; and, by means of a substantial commissioning programme supported by frequent performances and festivals and faithful audiences, have stimulated creativity among gay and lesbian composers and given support to other significant contemporary music seen as sympathetic to the movement. A Society of Gay and Lesbian Composers was founded in San Francisco in the 1980s in response to this and other stimuli.
The musical theatre has been a special place for gay identification and expression, arguably exceeding even opera in this regard. Not only have gay men traditionally had great affinity for it, but they have shared in its production at every level. Among them are leaders in the field such as Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Lorenz Hart, Noël Coward, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. If the dream of every sensitive gay young man was to take Broadway or the West End by storm, the actual thematics of musical theatre were as heterosexist as those of any other representational form of the pre-Stonewall era. Nevertheless, ways were found to introduce coded or not-so-coded messages (like ‘You're a queer one, Julie Jordan’ in Carousel, 1945) for a knowing homosexual audience while staying within conventional narrative boundaries. These might include title (Novello's final work, Gay's the Word, 1950), lyrics such as Coward's ‘Mad about the boy’ (from Words and Music, 1933), with its coded references to A.E. Housman and Greta Garbo, or Porter's Farming (Bronski, 1984, p.113), characters and plot, such as the ‘tomboy’ Maria in The Sound of Music (Wolf, 1996), and performers such as Mary Martin as a cross-dressed lesbian in the role of Peter Pan (Wolf, 1997). There has also been a long tradition of appropriation of the material from musicals in every conceivable gay context. With the 1970s articulation of gay and lesbian identity, musicals with gay themes or characters arrived, many of them becoming mainstream commercial successes. If Cabaret (Masteroff/Kander/Ebb, 1966) both spectacularized and masked homosexuality, and Applause (Comden/Green/Strauss/Adams, 1970) presented it as pathology, Michael Bennett's A Chorus Line (Hamlisch/Kirkwood/Dante/Kleban, 1975) sentimentalized it in a characteristically liberal way. La cage aux folles (Fierstein/Herman, 1983), affectionately portrays a gay couple, one of whom is a drag queen, and Kiss of the Spider Woman (McNally/Kander/Ebb, 1992) adapted Manuel Puig's powerful novel about the growing attachment between two prisoners, one homosexual and the other heterosexual. The musical theatre has even dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis, most notably in Falsettoland (1990), the final part of William Finn's trilogy, and also in Jonathan Larson's Rent (1996), based on Puccini's La bohème.
Jazz's more limited relation to homosexuality can be delineated through two careers. Billy (Dorothy) Lee Tipton, the jazz pianist, performed gender as undetected drag, but her impeccable improvisations, gift for mimicry, same-sex ‘marriages’ and adopted sons may have had more to do with success in a male-dominated music and its venues than in a dildo and tuxedo, and serve to show that difference is in the eye of the beholder (Middlebrook, 1998). Billy Strayhorn, composer of one of the most famous titles in the history of jazz, ‘Take the A train’, and a good deal else many people associate with his mentor, Duke Ellington, seems willingly to have accepted virtual anonymity and the hiding of his abundant talent behind Ellington's benign and affectionate protection in order to be openly gay (Hajdu, 1996, pp.79–80). Queer lore sees jazz itself (like heavy metal) and its audience as fundamentally heterosexual, but John Gill (1995) explores this half-truth and critiques attitudes towards gay or bisexual jazz musicians, such as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Gary Burton, in a manner that has opened up the topic.
The long tradition of male and female impersonators, who always sang as part of their act, unlike the lip-synching drag artists of the technological age, is closely linked with queer presence and representation in popular culture. The famous openly lesbian male impersonator, Gladys Bentley, who attracted the rich and famous to her act in Harlem and introduced scat-singing and lewd extemporary parodies of popular songs as well as explicit lesbian lyrics into her act, represents an extreme of the interwar years. At times her strong, fierce voice ascends into what sounds like a male falsetto, tapping what Emma Calvé called the ‘fourth voice’ to mark her ‘third sex’. In the USA at least, drag and (to a lesser extent) male impersonation carried the stigma of gender liminality that also marked homosexuality, leading to bans in many places (e.g. Los Angeles) in the repressive 1930s. British drag, on the other hand, survived into the television age, usually through impersonators. Impersonation and popular music were not outside the force of the closet and the ‘contract’ to which highbrow musicians were obliged to subscribe. Even Julian Eltinge, perhaps the most celebrated female impersonator of the earlier part of the century (with a pleasing alto voice), went to great lengths to hide his homosexuality; many pop stars have shown extraordinary reluctance to disclose their sexual orientation.
On the other hand, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith could record a number of overtly lesbian songs in the 1920s, and gay and lesbian performers could become popular in the New York Prohibition era ‘pansy craze’ (Chauncey, 1994). Later, rock and roll included homosexuality among its counter-culture effects, through flamboyant performers like Little Richard and songs like his 1956 hit Tutti Frutti, or even Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock (1957) with its reference to homoerotics behind bars. Later groups such as the Doors (Jim Morrison singing I'm a Backdoor Man, 1968) and the Rolling Stones (whose notorious Cocksucker Blues, 1970, Decca refused to release) maintained this tradition. ‘Raga-rock’, almost exclusively associated with George Harrison and the Beatles, was in fact initiated by the lead singer and principal songwriter of the Kinks, Ray Davies, with an Indian-influenced song, See my Friends (1965), about his own sexuality; it confirms the often-observed link between exoticism or orientalism and Western homosexual culture (Bellman, 1998). Further steps led to Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side (1972), with its tribute to Andy Warhol's New York clique, already been reflected in the work of the influential group Velvet Underground, Elton John's popular gay love song, Daniel (1972), to Rod Stewart's The Killing of Georgie (1976), the first top-40 hit unambiguously about gay people, and to Tom Robinson's celebratory Glad to be Gay (1977). The era also saw a number of independent (even rebellious) women singers. Janis Joplin, whose major relationships were with women, and who seemed as unashamed of this as of the rest of her colourful life, possessed an intensity that might have founded an entire movement but for her premature death in 1970. Dusty Springfield, the spirited British soul singer who was a lesbian icon, survived a career slump in the 1970s and cemented her gay following by later recording with The Pet Shop Boys.
In the 1980s the mainstream music industry seemed to respond to the increasing conservatism of Britain and the USA with further closeting of artists and their music. David Bowie, for instance, and others who responded to the swinging-both-ways 1970s, would no longer advertise their sexual ambivalence or pretend to be gay, and gay performers in the mainstream were usually guarded and their songs still coded. A number of British male groups composed largely of gays – Soft Cell, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Erasure, The Pet Shop Boys – maintained a discreet front. Even gender-bending Boy George and Culture Club kept up evasive talk long after almost anyone had ceased speculating about them (Morrissey theorized this evasiveness). Jimmy Somerville and his group Bronski Beat were a notable exception, performing out songs in an out manner and reaching the charts at the same time. The openly gay duo Romanovsky and Phillips became widely known and developed beyond their San Francisco folk beginnings with Trouble in Paradise (1986). Surprisingly, the moody balladeer Johnny Mathis, long an idol for soulful gay youths, came out in 1982 without much fuss.
The growing crisis over AIDS and HIV infection (from about 1981) which, because it was at first associated with male homosexuals and intravenous drug users in Western societies, received little governmental attention, eventually spurred activism, particularly as the homosexual artistic communities, which were particularly hard hit by it, felt themselves to be further targeted by repressive governmental measures. The resulting wave of politicization of the arts produced in music a sense of community manifest in the numerous AIDS benefits and memorials of the late 1980s and early 90s: for example, the Live Aid event at Wembley Stadium, north-west London, and many tributes to the casualties in classical and popular music; the 1985 hit (That's what friends are for) by Dionne Warwick and Elton John; concerts among classical music organizations; and a string of commemorative works. These included John Corigliano's Symphony no.1 (1989) and a continuing, collectively produced AIDS Quilt Songbook (first performed at Alice Tully Hall, New York, in 1992) that alludes to the great quilt of the NAMES project (a collective, international work of art, numbering over 43,000 panels, to commemorate individually those who have died of AIDS). As much a work of protest as commemoration is Diamanda Galás's three-album project, begun in San Francisco in 1984 with the title Masque of the Red Death (after Edgar Allan Poe), eventually becoming the four-movement Plague Mass (as recorded in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, in 1990).
A feature of the effect of AIDS and HIV in music was the re-use and reinterpretation of earlier music associated with gay consciousness. Two famous disco hits of the Village People, whose creator, Jacques Morali, died of AIDS in 1991, resurfaced allusively, Go West as an AIDS anthem by the Pet Shop Boys and YMCA in a lugubrious ‘classical-music’ version for cello, voice and guitar with clarinet obbligato in the film Longtime Companion (1990). This, the opening number in a ‘Living with AIDS’ concert near the end of the film, both mourns the recent dead (as well as the era of sexual freedom and its music) and encourages survival through gay humour and irony. The first CD of the Chrysalis ‘Red Hot’ series promoting AIDS awareness and benefiting research and relief consisted of covers of Cole Porter by various artists in a context that gave new and poignant meaning to such songs as ‘I've got you under my skin’: the record not only literally made ‘gay music’ of Porter's songs for the first time but also carried a warning to the listener against letting the music ‘reinforce an overall sense of social abstraction’. Though gays and lesbians devised more radical forms of social protest during the same period, the adoption by liberal people in general of an issue strongly affecting the queer community marked a distinct change and support was particularly strong in music and other artistic fields.
This second wave of political action coincided with changes within musicology and criticism brought about by the belated impact of post-structural interdisciplinary ways of thinking: this began a process of wresting ‘absolute’ music from the ideology of universal values, transcendence and autonomy; it also heralded a more inclusive, as well as more firmly located, critical practice that refused to leave the category ‘music’ unmarked in the traditional manner but embraced all musical phenomena and avoided meaningless comparisons between different genres and cultural practices. There soon emerged a group of gay and lesbian scholars and critics prepared to work on gay and lesbian topics and with a set of procedures, derived from feminist and post-structuralist critiques, with which to accomplish it, work characterized by the same refusal to obey traditional genre separations as had been characteristic of the earlier gay and lesbian musical organizations. In the USA, the founding in 1989 of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society constituted a recognition of this phenomenon.
Among the effects was to throw into greater relief gay and lesbian composers of the post-World War II era. No lesbian in music before or since Ethel Smyth had been as publicly committed to feminist activisim or as candid about same-sex desire as Pauline Oliveros, who strongly represented her own lesbian feminism and community among the American avant garde from the 1960s onwards. The increasingly celebrated Lou Harrison had always been assertive of his gay identity. The death of John Cage in 1992 opened the way for long-delayed discussions of his partnership with Merce Cunningham and the radicalism that stopped short of declaring his sexuality. Important during the mid-90s was the self-identifying of 11 gay male composers on a CD, Gay American Composers (1996), followed a year later by a disc devoted largely to an earlier generation of males as well as one celebrating lesbian composers of the present day. Several mainstream recording companies had already issued recordings under such titles as Out Classics, Sensual Classics and Classical Erotica, but what these principally illustrated was the increasing commodification of gay or lesbian desire and its commercial exploitation. Lesbian musicians and composers, in particular, have a tradition of not only remaining outside commercial and institutional networks but also of resisting all musical models, and the work of the composer Sorrel Hays (formerly recorded as the pianist Doris Hays), as well as that of the performance artist and composer Meredith Monk, strongly maintains that tradition at a time when gay and lesbian artists were under increasing pressure to join the mainstream.
The gay presence in music during the 1990s was enhanced by such works as John Corigliano's Of Rage and Remembrance, a new version of the third movement of his Symphony no.1 incorporating chorus and soloists, who sing a text by William Hoffman, librettist of The Ghosts of Versailles, and, in a startling application of chance technique, the names of personal friends they have lost to AIDS and wish to commemorate. Harvey Milk, an opera by Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie on the life and times of a gay activist assassinated in 1978, was not a critical success. But opera companies marketing to their audience, are more frequently producing gay and lesbian operas, for example Matthias Pintscher's Thomas Chatterton (Dresden) and Paula M. Kimper's Patience and Sarah (New York).
In popular music, the 1990s also saw a reversal of the cautious approach of the 1980s and the emergence of openly lesbian musicians into the mainstream from the alternative space of women's music. The extraordinary singer and songwriter k d lang, who had earlier invaded the heterosexist field of country music with strongly woman-identified music and had gained a lesbian following, came out in 1992 (see Mockus in Brett, Queering the Pitch, 1994). So did Melissa Etheridge and Indigo girls, which gave lesbians clear representation in popular culture, consolidating, as it were, the sexually ambiguous representations of Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked and Madonna, as well as the out-lesbian images of Phranc and Two Nice Girls. The growth in women's punk bands and the ‘riot grrrl’ phenomenon of the Pacific Northwest meant that lesbians could also project a more aggressive image in music.
Rob Halford, famous for three decades as front man of the heavy metal group Judas Priest, came out in 1998 and revealed how simple it had been to transfer the sometimes scary accoutrements of the gay leather world on to the metal stage without disturbing the primarily straight male audience. A knowing gay heavy-metal audience invested in super-masculinity had always understood homoerotics in place of straight homosocial bonding (Walser, 1993, pp.108–36). At the close of century, numerous gay and lesbian singers and queercore bands had a crossover popular following, or recorded on mainstream labels. The institution of the Gay/Lesbian Music Awards in 1996 consolidated and encouraged an already prolific field of endeavour.
By the end of the 1990s, then, an art-form, a scholarly discipline and a journalistic medium that had all set their faces rather sternly against the notion that deviant sexualities had anything to do with them, though the evidence to the contrary lay all around, found themselves with a modest inundation of ‘queer’ material – to use the term which, once a form of abuse, had been reclaimed around 1990 as an umbrella for the alliance of people of all unorthodox sexualities and those willing to associate with them.
The approach so far in this discussion has been along the traditional modernist lines of emphasizing production: the composer and, perhaps less so, the performer. An arguably better way of defining ‘gay and lesbian music’, is to invert that model and, invoking the ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating’ (Haraway, 1991, p.196), to consider both the audience and particular venues as creating (if only by contingency and for the moment) a label for the music.
In answer to the question ‘What is Gay Music?’ posed by Out magazine (November 1996, pp.108–14), Peter Rauhofer said: ‘It's all about the diva effect, an attitude that gay people immediately identify with’. This statement has a certain appeal as a generalization across 20th-century homosexual cultures in the West, including both gay males and lesbians. Among affluent males the diva effect tends to produce a devotion to sopranos (Joan Sutherland or Maria Callas, most notably, the latter being central to Terrence McNally's play The Lisbon Traviata) and a subject position known as the Opera Queen, widely discussed and theorized (Bronski, 1984; Mordden, 1984; Koestenbaum, 1993; Morris in Solie, Musicology and Difference, 1993; Robinson, 1994). Lesbian devotion may be equally intense, as instanced by the story of the young woman who committed suicide after being refused admission to Mary Garden's dressing room (Castle, in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 1995, pp.25–6). It differs in attaching itself to dramatic sopranos, mezzo-sopranos or contraltos, especially if they are suspected of ‘belonging’ (like Garden) or if they cross-dress frequently in such roles as Orpheus, Oktavian or the Poet in Ariadne auf Naxos. The tradition goes back beyond Garden (George Sand was ‘mad’ about Malibran) and included among its celebrated divas Olive Fremstad, the Wagnerian soprano who is the heroine of Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark and Marcia Davenport's Of Lena Geyer (Castle, and Wood, in Brett, Queering the Pitch, 1994).
In the cult of the queer, Judy Garland is a saint, heaven is ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ (from The Wizard of Oz) and ‘friend of Dorothy’ the secret mantra of its votaries. Other such divas might include Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Edith Piaf, Zarah Leander (the deep-voiced diva of the German scene), Bette Midler (who began her career in a New York bathhouse), Barbra Streisand and Madonna. Any supposed lesbian leanings among these idols are beside the point: more crucial are certain characteristics, portrayed in their singing, such as vulnerability (or actual suffering) mixed with defiance, to which their admirers relate; the quality of their humour is also an important ingredient.
The diva effect may have less strong a hold upon exclusively straight audiences; when it does occur, it is often imbued with camp elements of excess and style associated in straight culture with homosexuals. Liberace, for instance, appealed to a broad (but not gay or lesbian) audience by developing a canny mixture of sentimentalism and transvestism around his candelabra and piano. His repertory included musical as well as sartorial camp, for example his cross-dressing of Porter's ‘Night and Day’ in the haute couture of Beethoven's ‘Moonlight’ Sonata (for a cultural appraisal see Kopelson, 1996, pp.139–85, and Garber, 1992). His manipulation of the ‘open secret’ was more extreme than that of many less flamboyant but also closeted gay musicians: the openly flaunted markings of a hidden identity allowed those who adored him to use their adoration (and his and their mother-love) to bolster their own sense of identity and superiority.
Another notable sphere of queer interest and sponsorship has been the dance floor. Disco (not simply a category of music but ‘also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film, etc., in a word, a certain sensibility, manifest in music, clubs, etc., historically and culturally specific, ideologically and aesthetically determined – and worth thinking about’: Dyer, 1992, p.149) is widely maligned; but dance-club life throughout Europe and the USA was transformed after the 1970s with the advent of Gloria Gaynor, Sister Sledge, Sylvester, the Weather Girls and many others, to whose fast-and-heavy beat, colourfully synthesized sounds and comforting sentiments gay men and sometimes lesbians gyrated and celebrated ‘family’ in safe queer spaces that were close to realizing what opera and The Wizard of Oz could only begin to suggest. More localized and specialized forms, such as the even faster and louder House music of the 1980s, and later Acid and Techno, developed as Disco moved into the straight mainstream. In the 1990s gay dance music was strongly affected by the artistry of RuPaul, possibly the recording industry's most successful drag queen. Like rock and roll before them, Disco and House were heavily derived from black performing styles and sounds, the African-American diva from Grace Jones to RuPaul being as important here as in the opera house. They momentarily displaced racial tensions to create an idealized arena for queer identity to be performed (Currid, 1995); this is as close as can be to gay music, one might think, yet its placing of queer performativity on the platform of black ‘diva-inity’ leads to a complicated play of identification.
Focus on a particular audience and its ‘situated knowledge’ may also undermine traditional critical arguments seeking to eradicate all identity in music save nationality. The New York Times review (by Paul Griffiths, 7 July 1998) of Kimper's opera and the CRI recording of the music of lesbian composers mentioned above, concludes that ‘sexual preference, as well as sex, is inaudible’, and calls that conclusion ‘inevitable’. The response immediately suggests itself, ‘inaudible to whom’? Modernist criticism, anxious to check the proliferation of meaning and keep forms of authority and canons of taste in place, puts the onus of proof on ‘the music itself’. But the notes cannot so easily be separated from their context (of performance, venue, genre and audience, as well as musical allusion): if stripped of all associations – an impossibility – they can yield no meaning.
In some few cases, such as the bizarre juxtapositions in Poulenc's instrumental music, a homosexual sensibility is clearly audible, but then only to someone who has some grasp of the aesthetics of that much-discussed but uneasily defined phenomenon known as ‘camp’. Further, the orientalism or exoticism of a great range of 19th- and 20th-century music can be heard not simply as decorative acculturation but as an audible manifestation of some dissatisfaction with prevailing Western mores. More complicated musical strategies, such as the set of motivic and tonal interactions that signal the tragedy of internalized oppression in Peter Grimes, may be revealed as criticism involves itself more deeply and widely with such questions. Such markers, however, are possibly more prevalent in (closeted) homosexual culture in which classical music is so heavily implicated than in openly lesbian or gay music, such as Disco or the kinds of alternative women's music mentioned above. Here, context exerts so powerful an influence as to overthrow conventional associations: even the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic masculinity, met its gay destiny when, tricked out with a heavy beat and other accoutrements, it hit the Disco scene in the 1970s as A Fifth of Beethoven.
The identity of music is the sacred issue … that women, working-class laborers, gays and lesbians, blacks, religious or ethnic communities, or anyone else should identify music in some other way or imagine music to embody completely different and differentiated cultural spaces, that becomes blasphemy against what MUSIC is. Imagined in this way it may not be MUSIC anymore. (Bohlman, 1993, p.417: after McClary, 1991)
Accordingly, an important strategy among gay and lesbian critics is to insist on the possibility and the importance of different receptions of all kinds of music, an insistence which can undermine any authority or objectivity criticism might claim for itself and of destroying the essentializing or minoritizing drive to confine gay or lesbian music criticism to style analysis. A special lesbian relationship to music itself has been insisted upon and explored (Cusick, in Brett, Queering the Pitch, 1994: originally proposed at the first Feminist Theory and Music conference, 1991); this prepared the ground for a good deal of later critical work (not all of it by self-identifying gay, lesbian or bisexual critics) that refuses previous protocols in an effort to reach imaginative and varied views as to what kinds of phenomena might coexist as ‘lesbian and gay – or queer – music’ and how these might relate to sets of other positions, even the hegemonic one.
The discussion so far has pertained to the 20th century, to Europe, North America and their outposts, and has largely been confined to recent musical phenomena. ‘Gay and Lesbian Music’ is arguably confined to these specific times and places. Beyond the West, the dilemma becomes even more apparent. In non-Western musics, gender and sexual ambiguities and inversions, not to mention same-sex sexual practices, found in many cultures with different musics and different sexualities, have drawn the imagination of the West, with its attraction to and cultural fantasies about them. The symbolic inversions around the cross-dressed male ‘talèdhèk’ in Balinese song and dance; transsexual performance by spirit-guides or ‘halaa’ among Temiar people; the Hawai'in ‘māhū’ of indeterminate gender; or the Mapuche of the southern Andes: all these bear witness to the warning that ‘gay, lesbian, bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual … conjure but a limited glimpse of the variations on gender that are beginning to emerge from cross-cultural research’ and ‘reduce the complexity of personhood to a handful of oppositions contrived by an ethnocentric discourse’ (Robertson, 1992).
Some of the musics of non-Western cultures became source material for homosexual Western composers cruising off-limits but cannot be amalgamated with or subsumed under a Western category. Homosexual or pederastic composers from Saint-Saëns onwards were at one time particularly susceptible to the attractions of orientalism, perhaps because of the projection of illicit sex discerned by Said's critique (1978), perhaps, as Lou Harrison has suggested, because of an identification with the Other or even (as in the case of Cage) because of dissatisfaction with available resources: this topic remains problematic and interesting in relation to gay and lesbian music. But since orientalism in music at the turn of the present century is represented most strongly by non-gay minimalism, no essentialist link ought to be imagined. Interestingly, ethnomusicology has been even more nervous of categories of sexual behaviour manifest in music than has historical musicology.
Given that the study of sexuality is a modern phenomenon, a long history of homosexuality in music is an impossibility. There is room, however, to explore how same-sex sexual or erotic relations have been regarded in different times and places and how the social experience of being involved in them might affect musical utterance: ‘it will be history written from the perspective of contemporary gay interests’ (Halperin, 1990, p.29) asking questions never posed during musicology's long preoccupation with straight fact. An example might be the placing of Hildegard of Bingen's lyrical effusions in a context of the medieval eroticization of the body focussed (in her case) on same-sex desire: pointing out ‘how insistently “queer” medieval Christianity can be’, Holsinger (1993, p.120) suggests that ‘rather than looking for “actual” lesbians and gay men in the Middle Ages, why not try outing medieval devotion itself?’ Turning to organum, he explores the writings that constantly represent polyphonic practice in corporeal terms as ‘coupling’ (copula) and in relational terms as the product of their male singers. Such rhetoric, he suggests, not only explains the link between sodomy and polyphony in the puritan tradition but uncovers a queerness at the heart of organum that is also represented in some homoerotic verses of its leading composer, Leoninus (Holsinger, 2001, chap.4). Ironically, then, the polyphony and harmony that differentiate Western music most notably from that of other cultures can be seen as from the start connected to same-sex desire and ‘art music’ originally fell into disrepute through roughly the same association that it has been trying so hard to avoid in the 20th century.
There seem few enough clues at present about how the frequent accusation of sodomy against musicians of the late medieval and early modern periods should play into a notion of the music they produced. It is not known whether composers like Nicolas Gombert, Dominique Phinot, Tiburzio Massaino, Johann Rosenmüller and Jean-Baptiste Lully shared anything but shame for their sexual desires, and whether even that affected their composition. The first four undoubtedly suffered, Gombert serving a three-year stint in the galleys, Phinot being executed (his body was burnt), Massaino going into exile and Rosenmüller being imprisoned together with the schoolboys involved. A canon at Loreto, Luigi Fontino, was beheaded in 1570 for sodomy with a choirboy (Sherr, 1991); and it has been suggested that Gombert's first book of motets (1539) may have been assembled as an apologia with a view to gaining him a pardon (Lewis, 1994, pp.333–67). Lully, on the other hand, made a fortune and founded an operatic tradition, apparently undamaged by attacks on ‘les sodomites’ at court that culminated for him in the removal from his house of the page whom he was suspected of sodomizing. Moreover, since the librettist Campistron was a member of the sodomitical court circle, Lully's last two stage works, Acis et Galatée (1686) and Achille et Polyxène (1687) may represent the earliest known gay collaboration.
If Lully's case is well documented, particularly in ribald contemporary comments, recent speculation about Zelenka appears to derive solely from a structural and semantic analysis of his trio sonatas (Reich, 1987); no evidence concerning Zelenka's sexuality or sexual practices survives: he remained unmarried and was a solitary, unassuming figure, seen by some contemporaries as a reserved, even bigoted, Catholic. It is one thing to infer a musician's participation in same-sex culture and to examine ideological traces of homophobia in the literature that result from his status as a ‘suspect’ (as with Thomas's essay on Handel in Brett, Queering the Pitch, 1994), but another for same-sex desire to be discerned internally and then used to make a lesser-known composer of the period appear deviant and exciting and his music therefore more marketable. This new Zelenka image belongs rather to the late 19th century, as exemplified in the decadent movement and such key figures as J.-K. Husymans, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (see Hanson, 1997), than to the early 18th.
Very different from this case is the increasing number of examinations of works for cultural traces that are writ large in the surrounding societal context, or identity-based critical interpretations enriched with a sense of the history of culture. Work on communities of nuns and on the many women composers of Italy, for instance, has prompted questions about how early modern religious eroticism might reflect an erotics of these suppressed voices, and has invited lesbian interpretations of the work of the many religious women who exhibit extravagant devotion to the Virgin Mary. Recent work (by Cusick) on Francesca Caccini also shows how a feminist and specifically lesbian approach can enliven and illumine the discussion of historical issues around music and the patriarchy. In view of the various inflections of the Orpheus legend, too, significance has been read into the fact that in the Monteverdi-Striggio Orfeo the male singer loses his female lover only to ascend to heaven in the arms of another man. Whether or not Handel had homosexual relationships, the revelations about the circles in which he moved – and exactly how his modern biographers articulate their anxiety about the possibility he might have done so – makes Thomas's essay a salutary contribution to Handel scholarship. The castrated male who is the central figure of every opera seria in Handel's time not only complicated questions of gender and sexuality but also embodied the threat represented by the music itself: these ‘Italian Syrens’ are compared by the anonymous author of Satan's Harvest Home (1749) to the ‘Chromatic Musick’ of ancient Greece and the ‘Women Singers and Eunuchs from Asia’ by whose agency, apparently, the ancient Romans ‘quite lost the Spirit of Manhood, and with it their Empire’. Italy was ‘the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy’ where ‘not a Cardinal or Churchman of Note but has his Ganymede’ (pp.51, 56). In North Germany an Italian castrato was not needed to sound the anti-effeminate alarm: mere minuets in symphonies seemed to J.A. Hiller ‘like beauty spots on the face of a man: they give the music a foppish appearance, and weaken the manly impression made by the … serious movements’ (Head, 1995).
A gay and lesbian discourse about music will undoubtedly wish to do more in the way of exhuming those musicians identified with same-sex desire. But there are equally important issues to be addressed. Attention has been drawn to a vein of homophobia in traditional musical scholarship. Whether it be reaction against the prospect of a great composer's deviance, the invention of an ‘artistic persona’ (following literary New Criticism) to evacuate the connection between the life of a gay or lesbian artist and his or her work of all meaning, or the recent movement to import from literary criticism Harold Bloom's theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’, with its assumption that male relations are always fraught with contention rather than love (Whitesell, 1994–5), an opposing or context-providing protest has to be registered. Procedures need to be followed that do not leave homosexuality lying unregistered in the clothes of the open secret as mere decadence or a taste for elaboration. Inevitably part of the focus will be questions of artistic collaboration, sponsorship (for example by the Paris salon and circle of the Princesse de Polignac, including Nadia Boulanger, and in American music around Bernstein, Copland and Barber) and even the effect on heterosexually identified composers of being liberated by a circle consisting largely of homosexuals and their culture, as was Stravinsky by the Mir iskusstva (‘World of Art’) group around Diaghilev, or of their music becoming the centre of a homosexual cult, as Wagner's appears to have become in Germany.
The greatest challenge for a gay and lesbian approach is undoubtedly the German canon in art music and its satellites. Composers in this tradition are still assumed to be stable entities; and idealization surrounding them includes the default position of exclusive heterosexual activities. The literature about them, however, frequently reveals an embarrassment or evasion that implies an ingrained homophobia in musical scholarship. Since sexual orthodoxy can never be assumed, especially among musicians, the constant parade of heroism and masculinity in the repertory from Beethoven to Strauss, and its representation in criticism and scholarship, may seem like a ruse to divert attention from an endemic queerness so firmly repressed that even to suggest it is an error of taste and judgment (as in the cases of Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms). More nuanced studies of the circumstances of such composers may link them to patterns of same-sex love or desire, such as have been discerned among the literary figures of the age of sensibility and of Romanticism (whether or not these patterns included sexual acts). Reception of their music from a gay or lesbian standpoint (e.g. Cusick, 1994; Brett, 1997; Wood, 2000) should broaden the range of criticism across the entire historical spectrum, throw new light on the meanings people attach to the music they identify with and help to open the way towards new discussion of the power of music of various kinds in peoples' lives.
Following the inception of a homosexual identity (see §1), Tchaikovsky became the first musician widely known to fit the role. As early as 1908 he was called the one ‘thorough-going Uranian’ to attain ‘to the highest eminence in this art’ (Carpenter, p.111). Tchaikovsky was without peer in reaching a German level of technique and formal command. His manifest deviance enabled critics so minded to keep the German symphonists themselves untainted. It is worth noting, in the light of some of the criticism that has linked Tchaikovsky's supposed sentimentality, morbidity and lack of formal values with his sexuality, that his concert music was initially heard as ‘free from the frightful effeminacy of most modern works’ (Bernard Shaw) and as ‘impersonal’ and containing ‘glimpses of the strong man's hand’ (Ernest Newman; see Brown, 1999).
In novels, plays, films and other representations in dominant culture, the homosexual always dies: and it is significant that a fierce controversy has developed around Tchaikovsky's death. Suicide has been suggested – whether at the direction of Tsar Alexander III, of his own volition, at the behest of his (homosexual) brother Modest to avoid a homosexual scandal or (stranger still) at the direction of former classmates worried about the honour of the old school. Defenders of the ‘official’ account of cholera in Modest's biography attribute these rumours to an essentialist (and homophobic) image of Tchaikovsky as tragically pathological without perhaps allowing sufficiently for the equally essentialist (and unrealistic) implications of the composer's being fully accepting of his sexuality and its consequences. A gay or lesbian approach to him will in any case wish to redress the balance towards his lively aspects, and the difference he made to the fields of concert music, opera and ballet. For instance, Matthew Bourne's remarkable reinterpretation of Swan Lake (1995), in which a tightly feathered male corps replaced the swans in tutus and the love music became the occasion for breathtakingly homoerotic spectacle, attained for some an authenticity beyond anything imagined by historically informed performing practice. Tchaikovsky's own life also reveals moments of potential resistance, such as the entire ballet he and Saint-Saëns danced for each other on the story of Pygmalion (Tchaikovsky) and Galatea (Saint-Saëns). That occasion in December 1875 epitomizes the social predicament of homosexual musicians throughout the ensuing century: two composers, celebrated throughout Europe, occupying a central site, the stage of the Moscow Conservatory, to enact a closet drama; private delight cannot have been unmixed on that occasion, as on so many others in so many other lives, with the apprehension of disclosure. Such tensions of the human spirit brought about by the forces of oppression and the counterforces it also generates are much in need of deciphering in order to make greater sense of social and musical experience, both then and now. By focussing on such matters, a gay and lesbian perspective has the means to expand the entire critical and historical enterprise.
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S. Citron: Nöel and Cole: the Sophisticates (Oxford, 1993)
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L. Garber: Lesbian Sources: a Bibliography of Periodical Articles, 1970–1990 (New York, 1993)
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W.M. Studer: Rock on the Wild Side: Gay Male Images in Popular Music of the Rock Era (San Francisco, 1994)
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M. Head: ‘“Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man”: Gender in 18th-Century North-German Discourse of Genre’, JM, xii (1995), 143–67
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D. Metzer: ‘“Spurned Love”: Eroticism and Abstraction in the Early Works of Aaron Copland’, JM, xv (1997), 417–43
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E. Barkin and L. Hamessley, eds.: Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (Zürich, 1998)
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D.A. Miller: Place for Us [Essays on the Broadway Musical] (Cambridge, MA, 1998)
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E. Wood: ‘Decomposition’, in Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance, ed. S.-E. Case, P. Brett and S.L. Foster (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 201–13
B.W. Holsinger: Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA, 2001)