This is a draft of a chapter that has been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the forthcoming book Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory edited by Gavin Lee, due for publication in 2023. Preorder the $39.95 paperback with a 30% discount code AAFLYG6 here.
Preamble by Gavin Lee
My forthcoming edited volume Queer Ear has no afterword, a book structure that perhaps reflects the multivalence within the book and its open-ended possibilities. Here, having convened the recent Queer Sinophone Sound symposium (2023) (Western Sydney University and University of Sydney), I lay out one response to the very book I had edited. As an editor, I might be seen as an insider to the project, but I write in this response from another part of my identity that is more than queer.
In prominent intellectual Wang Xiaobo’s essay “On the Question of Homosexuality,” the reader of today is presented with what is taken as self-evident truths in most of the English-speaking world, e.g. homosexuality is not a choice and hence not a moral issue. (Wang’s essay reflects on the pioneering Their World: A Look at the Chinese Male Homosexual Community, which he had co-authored with his opposite sex partner Li Yinhe, who was the lead researcher, in 1992.) But what is interesting is Wang’s essay’s intervention in the sociohistorical juncture of post-1978, post-Cultural Revolution China in which it was written. The fundamental issue in the essay is that homosexuals should not be oppressed based on prejudice, rather than US queer theory of the 90s (Butler, gender performance etc.), which Li was invested in (Li revealed in 2014 that she has been with a trans male partner for the past 15 years, after Wang's death in 1997). Wang’s essay contained what was conceivable and most urgent for him to articulate within the specific sociohistorical juncture of 1990s China.
Similarly, Queer Ear is very much the product of its context, where queer discourses can be articulated. In contrast, while organizing the Queer Sinophone Sound symposium, I encountered composers who remained in the closet, and performing groups who did not want to be written about for fear of state surveillance. This led me to think about the conditions of possibility for there to even be a queer world, a queer soundscape, a queer ear—just as Wang’s essay is constricted by his time and place. Growing up in Singapore in the 90s as a closeted English-speaking teen, the queer world I discovered was one of US queer writers such as David Leavitt, Edmund White, and Paul Monette. There were just a few big bookstores where a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books (entirely or almost entirely in English if I recall correctly) could be found. Aside from the newly invented internet chat rooms called IRC (Internet Relay Chat) (as obsolete as phone lines today), US queer literature was the only other queer space I found within the "Gender Studies" section of those bookstores. I knew being gay was terrible from my parents, who told me gay people were mentally ill, and from someone I had briefly dated in high school, who had been told by his best friend that homosexuality is a sin—and dating me means their friendship is over.
Just recently, I reread one of my favorite passages from David Leavitt’s Equal Affections (a beloved purchase from the Borders bookstore in the 90s in Singapore), about how Walter, going through his mid-life crisis, is contemplating leaving Danny. Walter peers out from his office in one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center towards the other tower. Reading this passage, I recognized a temporal disjuncture between Leavitt’s 1989 novel and the post-9/11 era. There are other references in the novel which feel dated, include men who felt they had to be discrete in kissing goodbye. The present moment is sometimes understood to be one of queer expression and fierce resistance—yet we might ponder whether this queer universe is universal within places like San Francisco, where just last night, I had witnessed a powerful drag performance by Indigenous artistes Aunty BB Anuhea and Piss E Sissy, versus in the sea of red surrounding urban dots of blue. What is the extent to which queer resistance is possible in other times and places—in China of the 90s, or even today, and in Singapore, where gay sex was decriminalized only in 2022 (but queers were simultaneously denied marriage equality in the same session of parliament)? How does one weigh the option of critiquing closeted composers and gay teens in other geographies, from within spaces of queer expression and resistance, whether in San Francisco or in US queer music academia, queer music theory? Does critique mean embracing the inchoate articulation of queerness in the vast majority of geographies outside the Europe/US—or does it mean eviscerating global queers for not being queer enough? Even for those in Europe/US, queers may be “born in the homes of the oppressors”—to use Paul Attinello’s memorable phrase (in his afterword to my Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music). Many queers continue from a young age to (as I stated in my introduction to Queer Ear) “collect scraps at the heteronormative table, recycling and reusing bits and pieces of an often hostile world to fortify our closets.” This is the context in which we should understand Maus’ analysis of how Edward Cone hid his gayness within non-specific language such as: a “strange, unsettling element” that “persistently returns” and blossoms into “ingratiating” music offering “sensuous delights.” This shows us how even in oppressive contexts, queer listening with a queer ear has created safe inner spaces for those who had no other recourse, or were shaped by their contexts into believing that they didn’t. In Foucauldian terms, the articulated knowledge of the pre-2001 era is “connaisance,” whereas as relative outsiders to that era, present day writers such as Maus are able to see the conditions of possibility—“savoir”—which had shaped that articulated knowledge. (2001 delineates the work of the OG New Musicologists from the work of a later generation whose writings were produced in a climate of increasing LGBTQ+ acceptance as discerned through marriage equality.[1])
Maus’ “Queer Sexuality and Musical Narrative” is an incredible essay. Consider that, perhaps, music theory has been queer all along, and is now just coming out. Click here and enjoy!
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/195RHN7_oDNRCCeo2eSQZ1uHzh3OT-hrh/view?usp=sharing
Excerpt:
"Now if one asks, as I did at the beginning of this section, how “Schubert’s Promissory
Note” might relate to Cone’s gay male subjectivity, the answer is in part obvious, in part
obscure. Here and in the subsequent discussion of Newcomb, I do not draw on detailed
knowledge of these writers’ lives. My suggestions are based on generalizations about the lives of
twentieth-century gay men and other LGBTQ+ subjects—specifically, about people growing up
in respectable, mostly homophobic twentieth-century Euro-American settings. They are based on
the experiences that could occur within certain cultural resources of identities, events,
psychologies, and narratives. Recall, too, that Cone was born in 1917 and grew up in the South
in a particularly homophobic time, amidst widespread pathologizing of homosexuality. Someone
growing up gay, lesbian, or bisexual in such a society was likely to experience same-gender
sexual attraction, when it arose, as, on one hand, alluring, on the other hand, discontinuous or
incompatible with much of their environment, and therefore possibly quite frightening. This fits
well Cone’s description of “a strange, unsettling element” that “persistently returns” and
blossoms into “ingratiating” music offering “sensuous delights.” In Cone’s continuation to topics
of disease and disaster, the account becomes obscure and problematic. It seems we are to
understand Cone as having some unspecified personal relation to the distressing conclusion of
this composition. It is possible to fill in details of a story that might match Cone’s personal
situation, but what I can offer is purely conjecture. Here is one version. In this story about a
young gay man, call it Narrative 2A, there is incompatibility between the serenity of the
protagonist’s familiar world and a dawning awareness of forbidden sexual appetites, leading to
delightful but dangerous sexual exploration. The protagonist finds himself in an impossible
situation, unable to reconcile two aspects of his life that both seem indispensable. The outcome,
which could be understood as fearfully imagined or as real, is a catastrophe in which neither his
initial placid identity and environment nor his unfettered enjoyment of a new sexual life can
survive. The music provides a vivid image of this catastrophe."
Notes
[1] 2001 also marks the commencement of US military unilateralism and the new multipolar global order with China's entry to WTO, accompanied by the reorientation of the Republican party around race as a distraction from the economic effects of US neoliberal offshoring made possible by China.
