Guides: LGBTQ+ Music Resources: Books

Book Resources

Breaking down the Walls of Heartache by Martin Aston
Call Number: ML3470 .A88 2017
ISBN: 9781617136528
Publication Date: 2017-06-01
(Book). Popular music's queer DNA is inarguable, from Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" to David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, from cross-dressing Kurt Cobain to "female Elvis" k.d. lang. Regardless, gay and lesbian performers have preferred the safety of the closet for generations, mainly due to the tenuous legal status of homosexuality and the rife homophobia that lives on in spite of the victories of Gay Liberation. Only in 2014 did an 'out' gay pop star, Sam Smith, top the US chart. Bearing this in mind, it comes as no surprise that there has never been a comprehensive general history of LGBTQ+ personalities and influences in and around popular music until now. Martin Aston's Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out is the first book to convey the protracted and, at times, torturous tale of popular music's queer past, present, and future. Aston's book offers a definitive social and musical history spanning 100 years, starting in the British music halls and Harlem blues clubs of the early 20th century and continuing through the noughties of the 21st, and replete with insights on best-known stars and hidden pioneers alike. An exceptional first salvo in what's destined to be a field of inquiry for generations, Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache deserves a place of honor on library shelves, nightstands, and coffee tables perused by music fans of every gender and persuasion. Although there have been essay collections, magazine articles, and other media blips that touch on its LGBTQ+ roots, Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache is the first chronological narrative that presents music's coming-out story against a detailed backdrop of social and political change. At 540 pages, it's certainly the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Aston's sources include over ninety original interviews and an archive of other materials accumulated over his twenty-plus year career as a music commentator and journalist focused on LGBTQ+ life and culture; the book also features a full sixteen pages of photographs. And, unlike all other studies of LGBQT+ music culture currently available, this account gives as much attention to women as it does men. Moreover, many of the first performers to defy the laws and morals of their time have never been documented in print. Now, for the first time ever, Aston shares the stories of a 1950s lesbian rockabilly trio, a 1960s gay soul siren, the first gay country band, the only true gay glam rockers and punk rockers, the pioneering queer rappers, and the first trans musicians. His account concludes with the omnipresence of LGBTQ+ performers across all genres, but also regards with a wary eye the present status of LGBTQ+ persons in Russia and Africa, where the long, hard journey to personal freedom (and freedom of expression) is far from over.

Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music by Todd C. Borgerding (Editor)
Call Number: ML3838 .G378 2002
ISBN: 9780815333944
Publication Date: 2002-02-22
This collection of essays addresses questions of gender and sexuality as they relate to music from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. These essays present a body of scholarship that considers music as part of the history of sexuality, stimulating conversation within the discipline of musicology as well as bringing music studies into a broader dialogue with feminist, gender, and queer theory.

Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality by Florian Heesch (Editor); Niall Scott (Editor)
Call Number: ML3534 .H423 2016eb
ISBN: 9781317122982
Publication Date: 2016-07-07
Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality brings together a collection of original, interdisciplinary, critical essays exploring the negotiated place of gender and sexuality in heavy metal music and its culture. Scholars debate the current state of play concerning masculinities, femininities, queerness, identity aesthetics and monstrosities in an area of music that is sometimes mistakenly treated as exclusively sustaining a masculinist hegemony. The book combines a broad variety of perspectives on the main topic, regarding gender in connection to: the history of the genre; the range of metal subgenres; heavy metal's multidimensional scope (music, lyrics, performance, style, illustrations); men and women; sexualities and various local and global perspectives. Heavy Metal, Gender and Sexuality is a text that opens up the world of heavy metal to reveal that it is a very diverse and ground-breaking stage where gender play is at the centre of its theatricality and sustains its mass appeal.

Just One of the Boys by Gillian M. Rodger
Call Number: 9780252050169
ISBN: 9780252050169
Publication Date: 2018-01-04
Female-to-male crossdressing became all the rage in the variety shows of nineteenth-century America and began as the domain of mature actresses who desired to extend their careers. These women engaged in the kinds of raucous comedy acts usually reserved for men. Over time, as younger women entered the specialty, the comedy became less pointed and more centered on the celebration of male leisure and fashion. Gillian M. Rodger uses the development of male impersonation from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to illuminate the history of the variety show. Exploding notions of high- and lowbrow entertainment, Rodger looks at how both performers and forms consistently expanded upward toward respectable--and richer--audiences. At the same time, she illuminates a lost theatrical world where women made fun of middle-class restrictions even as they bumped up against rules imposed in part by audiences. Onstage, the actresses' changing performance styles reflected gender construction in the working class and shifts in class affiliation by parts of the audiences. Rodger observes how restrictive standards of femininity increasingly bound male impersonators as new gender constructions allowed women greater access to public space while tolerating less independent behavior from them.

Lady Gaga and Popular Music by Martin Iddon (Editor); Melanie L. Marshall (Editor)
Call Number: ML420.L185 L33 2014eb
ISBN: 9781134079872
Publication Date: 2014-01-03
This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape--directly and indirectly--thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women's studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

Queer Country by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher
Call Number: ML3524 .G64 2022eb
ISBN: 9780252053221
Publication Date: 2022-03-22
Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists' expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.
Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity by Sophie Fuller (Editor); Lloyd Whitesell (Editor)
Call Number: ML63 .Q44 2002
ISBN: 9780252075780
Publication Date: 2008-08-08
Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences, repertoires, venues, and specific works, this intriguing volume explores points of intersection between music and queerness in Europe and the United States in the years 1870 to 1950--a period when dramatic changes in musical expression and in the expression of individual sexual identity played similar roles in washing away the certainties of the past. Contributors are Byron Adams, Philip Brett, Malcolm Hamrick Brown, Sophie Fuller, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, Ivan Raykoff, Fiona Richards, Eva Rieger, Gillian Rodger, Sherrie Tucker, and Lloyd Whitesell.
Queering Freedom: Music, Identity and Spirituality by Karin Hendricks (Editor); June Boyce-Tillman (Editor)
Call Number: ML3916 .Q44 2018
ISBN: 9781788745086
Publication Date: 2018-10-08
This book is intended to challenge the status quo of music learning and experience by intersecting various musical topics with discussions of spirituality and queer studies. Spanning from the theoretical to the personal, the authors utilize a variety of approaches to query how music makers might blend spirituality's healing and wholeness with queer theory's radical liberation. Queering Freedom: Music, Identity and Spirituality represents an eclectic mix of historical, ethnomusicological, case study, narrative, ethnodramatic, philosophical, theological, and theoretical contributions. The book reaches an international audience, with invited authors from around the world who represent the voices and perspectives of over ten countries. The authors engage with policy, practice, and performance to critically address contemporary and historical music practices. Through its broad and varied writing styles and representations, the collection aims to shift perspectives of possibility and invite readers to envision a fresh, organic, and more holistic musical experience.
Queering Kansas City Jazz by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone
Call Number: ML3508.8.K37 C4 2018
ISBN: 9780803262911
Publication Date: 2018-11-01
The Jazz Age, a phenomenon that shaped American leisure culture in the early twentieth century, coincided with the growth of Kansas City, Missouri, from frontier town to metropolitan city. Though Kansas City's music, culture, and stars are well covered, Queering Kansas City Jazz supplements the grand narrative of jazz history by including queer identities in the city's history while framing the jazz-scene experience in terms of identity and space. Cabarets, gender impressionism clubs, and sites of sex tourism in Kansas City served as world-making spaces for those whose performance of identity transgressed hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide a critical deconstruction of how the jazz scene offered a space for nonnormative gender practice and performance and acted as a site of contested identity and spatial territory. Few books examine the changing ideas about gender in the turn-of-the-century Great Plains, under the false assumption that people in middle-American places experienced cultural shifts only as an aftershock of events on the coasts. This approach overlooks the region's contested territories, identities, and memories and fails to adequately explain the social and cultural disruptions experienced on the plains. Clifford-Napoleone rectifies this oversight and shows how Kansas City represents the complexity of the jazz scene in America as a microcosm of all the other people who made the culture, clubs, music, and cabarets of the age possible.
Queering the Field by Gregory Barz (Editor); William Cheng (Editor)
Call Number: ML3798 .Q43 2020
ISBN: 9780190458027
Publication Date: 2019-10-21
Drawing on ethnographic research and often deeply personal experiences with musical cultures, Queering the Field: Sounding out Ethnomusicology unpacks a history of sentiment that veils the treatment of queer music and identity within the field of ethnomusicology. The thematic structure of thevolume reflects a deliberate cartography of queer spaces in the discipline-spaces that are strongly present due to their absence, are marked by direct sonic parameters, or are called into question by virtue of their otherness. As the first large-scale study of ethnomusicology's queer silences andqueer identity politics, Queering the Field directly addresses the normativities currently at play in musical ethnography (fieldwork, analysis, performance, transcription) as well as in the practice of musical ethnographers (identification, participation, disclosure, observation, authority). Whilerooted in strong narrative convictions, the authors frequently adopt radicalized voices with the goal of queering a hierarchical sexual binary.The essays in the volume present rhetorical and syntactical scenarios that challenge us to read in prescient singular ways for future queer writing and queer thought in ethnomusicology.
Queering the Pitch by Philip Brett (Editor); Elizabeth Wood (Editor); Gary Thomas (Editor)
Call Number: ML55 .Q44 1994
ISBN: 9780415907538
Publication Date: 1994-01-27
A collection of gay and lesbian work in music and musicology. Musicologists, scholars, academics, critics, performers and composers examine the areas of musical education, voice and listening, history and biography, as seen through an interdisciplinary and political eye. A collection of gay and lesbian work in music and musicology. Musicologists, scholars, academics, critics, performers and composers examine the areas of musical education, voice and listening, history and biography, as seen through an interdisciplinary and political eye
Queering the Popular Pitch by Jennifer Rycenga (Editor); Sheila Whiteley (Editor)
Call Number: ML3470 .Q43 2006
ISBN: 9780415978040
Publication Date: 2006-05-05
Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of musical texts -performance, cultural production and sexual meaning - situating music within the broader patterns of culture that it both mirrors and actively reproduces. The collection is divided into four parts: queering borders queer spaces hidden histories queer thoughts, mixed media. Queering the Popular Pitch will appeal to students of popular music, Gay and Lesbian studies. With case studies and essays by leading popular music scholars it provides insightful discourse in a growing field of musicological research.
Queerness in Pop Music by Stan Hawkins
Call Number: ML3470 .H39 2016eb
ISBN: 9781317589716
Publication Date: 2015-12-07
This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naivety, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized.　Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise.
Queer Noises by John Gill
Call Number: ML63 .G47 1995
ISBN: 9780816627196
Publication Date: 1995-03-02
British music critic Gill has penned a tell-all tome, although he's careful not to out anyone who hasn't already left clues waiting to be pieced together. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, he pinpoints the contributions of gay musicians throughout the century, showing how their sexuality shaped their careers and their artistic visions. Curiously, during the Birth of the Blues, queer noises were resounding. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both women of independent means, were quite open about and in hearty pursuit of their sexuality. But while the signature of the Jazz Age was musical improvisation, the line was drawn at homosexuality. One particularly hostile critic remarked that because Cecil Taylor was queer, he couldn't really play the piano ``properly.'' The advent of rock and roll coincided with the arrival of a monolithic music industry that actively sought to control its artists. It was not so long ago that a hint of homosexuality could threaten artists' livelihoods, yet today such major pop stars as k.d. lang and Elton John can be visibly gay without losing their audiences. This engaging musical survey--which also looks at opera, avant-garde and punk--deconstructs a century of repression and reclaims the contributions of gay musicians for the world to see.
Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs
Call Number: ML3524 .H78 2014
ISBN: 9780520280663
Publication Date: 2014-03-22
In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America's most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics. In Hubbs's view, the popular phrase "I'll listen to anything but country" allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive "omnivore" musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class. With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country's manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible. Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.
Roll over, Tchaikovsky! by Stephen Amico
Call Number: ML3917.R8 A45 2014eb
ISBN: 9780252096143
Publication Date: 2014-06-15
Centered on the musical experiences of homosexual men in St. Petersburg and Moscow, this ground-breaking study examines how post-Soviet popular music both informs and plays off of a corporeal understanding of Russian male homosexuality. Drawing upon ethnography, musical analysis, and phenomenological theory, Stephen Amico offers an expert technical analysis of Russian rock, pop, and estrada music, dovetailing into an illuminating discussion of homosexual men's physical and bodily perceptions of music. He also outlines how popular music performers use song lyrics, drag, physical movements, images of women, sexualized male bodies, and other tools and tropes to implicitly or explicitly express sexual orientation through performance. Finally, Amico uncovers how such performances help homosexual Russian men to create their own social spaces and selves, in meaningful relation to others with whom they share a "nontraditional orientation."

The second sound: conversations on gender and music by Julia Eckhardt; Leen De Graeve
Call Number: ML82 .E25 2017
ISBN: 9789082649512
Publication Date: 2017-06-01
The Second Sound is an imaginary conversation between musicians and sound artists on the role of gender and sex within their field. It gathers testimonies from a variety of artists from different backgrounds into a single stream of (often contrary) opinions. Together, they address questions like: How do life circumstances find their way into music and sound art? How does music reflect historical and social structures? What does discrimination do, and how can we navigate around it? How to unlock networks? Is the under-representaiton of women and LGBTQ people in the field a symptom or a cause? Is art itself gendered? And can it reflect the gender of its maker? Is a different way of listening needed to more accurately understand those voices from outside the historical canon?
Sing Out! by Boze Hadleigh
Call Number: ML385 .H14 1997
ISBN: 9781569801161
Publication Date: 1998-03-25
With a Foreword by symphony orchestra conductor Leonard Bernstein and insight into such varied figures as Beethoven, Billie Holiday, Boy George and Bette Midler and Bruce Springsteen.

The Singing Teacher's Guide to Transgender Voices by Hearns, Liz Jackson; Kremer, Brian
Call Number: MT820 .J23 2018
ISBN: 9781635500936
Publication Date: 2018-05-20
The Singing Teacher's Guide to Transgender Voices is "the first comprehensive resource developed for training transgender and non- binary singers. This text aids in the development of voice pedagogy tailored to the needs of transgender singers, informed by cultural competence, and bolstered by personal narratives of trans and non- binary singing students. The singing life of a transgender or non-binary student can be overwhelmingly stressful. Because many of the current systems in place for singing education are so firmly anchored in gender binary systems, transgender and gender nonconforming singers are often forced into groups with which they feel they don't belong. Singers in transition are often afraid to reach out for help because the likelihood of finding a voice teacher who is competent in navigating the social, emotional, physical, and physiological challenges of transition is minimal at best. This text equips teachers with a sympathetic perspective on these unique struggles and with the knowledge and resources needed to guide students to a healthy, joyful, and safe singing life. It challenges professional and academic communities to understand the needs of transgender singers and provide evidence-based voice education and real-world opportunities that are authentic and genuine. The Singing Teacher's Guide to Transgender Voices is the first book of its kind to provide thorough, organized information on the training of trans singers for educators in both the academic and independent teaching realms."

The Velvet Mafia: the gay men who ran the Swinging Sixties by Bullock, Darryl W.
Call Number: ML385 .B925 2021eb
ISBN: 9781787592070
Publication Date: 2001-02-25
Concentrating on the friendship between impresario Larry Parnes, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, and showbiz solicitor David Jacobs, the book details how they shaped the Swinging 60s, along with their associates including songwriter Lionel Bart (author of the hit musical Oliver!), record producer Joe Meek, Sir Joseph Lockwood (the head of EMI), Vicki Wickham (manager of Dusty Springfield and assistant producer on the influential TV show Ready Steady Go), and more. Drawing on rare and unpublished archive material, personal diaries, and new interviews from some of the survivors of that turbulent decade, The Velvia Mafia shows how—in the period leading up to the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality and the founding of the Gay Liberation movement—LGBT professionals in the music industry were working together, supporting each other, and changing history.
The Vinyl Closet by Boze Hadleigh
Call Number: ML385 .H14 1991
ISBN: 9780962349799
Publication Date: 1991-04-01
This new blockbuster by Boze Hadleigh covers the music world from the classical world to today's headliners. Fast-paced, brightly written & jam-packed with real facts on every page. Hadleigh shows the music world as it really was & is, from classical to punk rock & among the stars of ballet. In his Foreword, Leonard Bernstein writes: "From an early age I was aware that much of the most sublime music ever created derived from the efforts & souls of homosexuals. Our world feels free to enjoy this ageless music time & again, but not to acknowledge even the simple, mutual humanity of composers, conductors, singers & other gay artists ..This is where Boze Hadleigh's true contribution rests--in educating our minds & hearts...Entertaining & revelatory..." From pre-publication letters to the author: "...an unforgettable read for anybody who's ever sung or hummed...It's wickedly gossipy & lots of baaad, clean fun."--Boy George. "Camp with a High-C!"--Madonna. "Honey, this one's a scorcher! The chapter 'Songbirds' lays scandalously bare several of my musical sisters."--Pearl Bailey.

LGBTQ+ Music Resources

Book Resources

Additional Links