Quare Times: An Introduction to a Queer Perspective on Afrofuturism and a Reading of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place

The film Space Is the Place (1974), directed by John Coney, stars Sun Ra who was also co-author of the script. This chapter explores Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism as shown in the film, bringing it into relation with José Muñoz’s notion of a queer future. Rather than focusing on Sun Ra’s sexuality, this chapter argues that his quareness (E. Patrick Johnson’s useful term drawn from African American vernacular) emerges in the sonic and performative aspects of his work. Sun Ra’s spaceship offers a future-oriented response to the slave ship and Middle Passage (as described by Paul Gilroy) and to the limitations of the here and now. The notion of assemblage (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) articulates the quareness of Sun Ra’s collective improvisational practices.

Free as a Bird? Thinking with the Grain of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Butch Voice

Across a prolific, genre-spanning career, Meshell Ndegeocello has persistently avoided music industry labeling. This chapter considers the adequacy of conceptions of the butch voice and female masculinity as modalities for summing up her aesthetic strategy. More central than her transgression of customary modalities of history and memory, the chapter suggests, is the persistent quest for freedom in black music by any means musically necessary. Suggesting that the butch voice is both heard and silent, the chapter moves toward an aesthetics of redaction in her most recent music, especially in albums devoted to cover songs.

Musical Awakenings: The Experiences of a Queer Music Therapist in the Face of HIV and AIDS

This article describes a gay music therapist’s experiences of working with clients living with HIV and AIDS through improvisation and performance. Sessions were held from 1988 to 1991 at London Lighthouse, a center for people facing the challenge of AIDS. Through descriptions of interactions with clients, as well as an audio extract from an actual session itself, the reader can enter into the realities of the music therapy process, which brings together music and loss. The article emphasizes the personal authenticity of the therapist and its meaning for the therapeutic process, and describes the beginnings of Aesthetic Music Therapy, a music-centered model of practice.

Musical Abjects: Sounds and Objectionable Sexualities

This discussion examines two musical situations involving sexual impulses and behaviors that are widely deemed unacceptable: the pedophilia of composer Benjamin Britten and the sexual abuse of choirboys at the Columbus Boychoir School in the 1970s. The aim is to consider whether an examination of the music created within these contexts might contribute to a more nuanced understanding of trauma, sexual abuse, and dangerous forms of desire; and whether a queer theory-inspired approach to these “abject” musical objects might encourage the development of more substantive and meaningful ethical positions toward people currently labeled as sexual deviants or perpetrators of sexual violence.

Queering Brighton

Every place has its local history of queerness, as shown in this chronicle of queerness in Brighton, England. The author sketches an account of Brighton’s non-normative sexual practices and sexually dissident residents and visitors, especially from the late nineteenth century on. The discussion identifies many gay clubs and other sites of queer community. Two examples illustrate aspects of mid-twentieth-century queer culture: the 1960s radio comedy “Round the Horne,” rich in camp humor and using the queer underground language Polari; and a recent poem by Brighton poet John McCullough that shows nostalgic affection for Polari. The author includes information about her own initiation into the gay world of Brighton. The queer culture of Brighton has produced extensive historical and present-day local self-documentation on websites, which provides much of the information for this discussion.

Interdisciplinary Enqueeries from India: Moving Toward a Queer Ethnomusicology

The goal of this article is to conceive of a cross-cultural queer theory for ethnomusicology 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. It begins from an assumption that Western meanings of “queer” do not match the ways of living and musicking with sex, gender, and sexuality that exist throughout the world. To this end, it presents eight theoretical guidelines to help scholars scrutinize the dominant Western gaze in queer scholarship, while allowing for local phenomena to expand global understanding of not just difference, but of human possibility. These guidelines engage concepts of gender and sexuality, ethnographic methodology, mainstream and marginal cultures, indigenous conceptualizations, intersectionality, and performative identities. It then applies these ideas and guidelines to case studies from South Asia by Jeff Roy (2017), Serena Nanda (1990), and Joyce Flueckiger (1996).

Queering Middle Class Gender in Nineteenth-Century US Theater

This chapter considers cross-dressed roles 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 discusses the origins of cross-dressed roles in English theatrical traditions, as well as connections to similar roles in European opera and operetta. It also considers other kinds of performances present in variety that challenged middle class gender construction of the period, and suggests that variety represented working class gender roles, and humor was found at the expense of hegemonic middle class ideals. This becomes particularly clear in the performances by male impersonators in variety of the 1860s–1880s. By the end of the century the middle class had expanded to include portions of the variety audience, and audiences no longer found the satirical treatment of middle class men funny. This, and growing mainstream recognition of homosexual populations, particularly in urban areas, caused the decline of cross-dressed performance.

The Queer Pleasures of Musicals

This chapter examines how queer pleasures are sublimated into musicals by analyzing the 1966 play Mame. Through this close reading of Mame and a broader consideration of musical theatre and film, this chapter explores how the show (and the genre, more generally) harnesses the power of the female body to disrupt the heteronormative impulses of narrative; creates a parthenogenetic world that celebrates motherhood; ironically deploys conventional representations of femininity; critiques heterosexual romance; and channels queer desire through the structure of musical theater. It also considers the relationship of musical theatre to camp, lesbian representation, and the spectacular male body. Finally, it provides an account of homosexuality and queerness in musicals that followed Mame—including La Cage aux Folles, A Chorus Line, Rent, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch—identifying moments that transcend the dichotomy between closeted structures and the representations of identity.

Music in the Margins

This chapter examines the prominence of “queerness” in music-related images in devotional books of the period 1200–1500. Musical and sexualized images in the physical margins of medieval books blurred the divinely ordained categories of society, reveling in the queering of traditional hierarchies by music and the sounding sexual body. The chapter first considers notions of queerness in music in the Middle Ages, particularly as it pertains to music’s conception, representation, and performance. It then explores the concept of queerness and sexuality before 1500 by referencing Christian legal texts and musical behaviors and practices that might have been construed as acts of transgression, and the distinct overlap of discourses relating to musical and erotic pleasures. It concludes with a discussion of clerics’ sexual identity, showing that the increased focus on celibacy threatened the distinction between men and women, and sparking a crisis in clerical identity in which masculinity figured significantly.

Endangered Tenderness

At a lecture in 1984 about the figure of the alienated Fremdling in Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle, I understood more clearly than ever before why Franz Schubert was the composer with whom I had most identified as I struggled with my own homosexuality. In a flash, the term Fremdling came to identify a figure who haunted not only Schubert’s songs, but also much of his instrumental music—a queer, existentially imperiled figure whose expressions of tenderness were so often overshadowed by ominous or disquieting musical elements. Frederic Chopin is another composer whose music has strongly resonated with my own experience of sexual and affective dysphoria, not only in the longer pieces, in which the promise of emotional fulfillment is either denied or ambiguous, but also in the melancholy nostalgia of many of the shorter pieces, especially in those with ambiguously evocative, duetlike textures.