UC Berkeley

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes how musical cultures shaped queer identity in the US in the 20th Century. By examining a broad range of neglected texts (including cinematic musical shorts, sheet music, gay slang dictionaries and records of gay men’s choruses), I argue that gay men and lesbians used popular song both to foster sociality in private spaces such as homes and clubs and to conceal subcultural practices in public spaces such as the street, the office, concert halls and department stores. While scholarship on the musical tends to focus on its generic features, my project instead emphasizes the relation of musical culture to daily life and public visibility in the 20th Century. To highlight how associations with music remained vital in shaping queer visibility across the 20th century, my project tracks developments in the uses of musical culture by queers from the 1920s through the 2010s. By bringing histories and theories of sexuality to bear on media and vice versa, this project develops historiographic methods relevant to the study of difference in modern and contemporary society more broadly.

The first half of my dissertation argues that consumption of popular music helped queers create networks that enabled them to circulate (undetected) to and through locations where overt homosexual identity would be punished, in the US (Chapter 1) and abroad during WWII (Chapter 2). Focusing on collections of sheet music, Vitaphone musical shorts, army musicals, home magazines, gay travel guides and diaries, these chapters show how popular song acted as an affective interface for queers that disguised subcultural practices across heteronormative settings (as varied as the church, the park and the wartime canteen), and enabled fantasies of social and spatial circulation.

The second half of my dissertation demonstrates how the musical engendered queer systems of meaning from midcentury onward. Focusing on the period just before gay liberation, Chapter 3 argues that material musical culture in the form of pianos, sheet music, radios, phonographs and records fostered the development of coded, camp language in private spaces. I contend that these terms (from gay slang dictionaries) appeared innocuous to those who observed them, whether fellow consumers of music or police officers, but nonetheless contributed to popular stereotypes associating queers with musical entertainment. I go on to analyze the linguistic bind confronted by queers in the post-Stonewall 1970s and 1980s, during which they gained greater visibility by conforming to popular stereotypes about homosexual consumption and musicality. I explore this struggle in popular and academic discourse with case studies including the growth of gay men’s choruses and the contradictory rhetoric of early gay ethnomusicology. In Chapter 5 I turn to the 2010s and the viral video “Telephone Remake” (a remake of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” by US soldiers in Afghanistan) to theorize the political potential of the musical now that digital media offer new paradigms for the production and circulation of sexual identity.