What the hell is that? I don’t even know what it means! A so-called “gay movie” or “gay book” is identified as such because of it’s GLBT content; it’s characters and/or subject matter. But the vast majority of music, even most music with words, is androgynous, unisex. A couple of weeks ago our topic was, “All My Exes Live in Texas.” In my short piece I also referred to that beautiful song, “Could I Have This Dance For the Rest of My Life?” Different as those two pieces are, they can both be taken to be heterosexual or homosexual, depending on the preference of the listener, as is the case with most songs. I am wiling to bet that many of us in this room listened to those old love songs of the forties and fifties and, when performed by a singer of our own sex, turned them into songs of love directed at us. Certainly there are, these days, a few songs that are unmistakably GLBT; amusing lyrics performed by drag groups, Lady Gaga singing about coming out, more recently even a collection of songs about gay marriage, but the total of all this specifically GLBT-themed music together would not add up to a single drop in the ocean of music in it’s entirety.
Is “Gay Music,” then, that which is written and/or performed by someone of the GLBT family?
If so we could talk about Tchaikovsky and Elton John and a vast number of others in between.
But what sense would that make? We don’t call a book a “gay book,” because it’s author happens to be gay; usually we don’t even know, although that kind of information is much more readily available these days. If J.K. Rowling unexpectedly revealed that she was a lesbian, would the Harry Potter tales suddenly become lesbian books and movies? K.D Lang is openly lesbian, but I would not call her songs “lesbian music.” Many movie producers and actors are GLBT but that doesn’t make their movies “queer.” No-one refers to “A Farewell to Arms,” as a gay movie just because Rock Hudson starred in it.
Maybe because, at least until recently, we of the GLBT community had little we could call our own, we would like to claim significance to “gay music,” but personally I find it a bit of a reach.
But wait! As I typed that last sentence, with one eye on the Winter Olympics on TV, I caught a few bars of our very own National Anthem. Perhaps I’m just missing it. When we strive to hit the high notes of the “land of the free,” could we be celebrating our freedom? Well, yes, we could, but I’m afraid I’m much too cynical to accept that phrase at face value. But, now I’m trawling through National Anthems, perhaps I really have stumbled onto something. After all, how many times in the first twenty years of my life did I sing out, in the British National Anthem,
“God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God Save the Queen!”
February, 2014
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