If you and I have had a conversation anytime over the past 6 months, you probably know that I’ve been working on my senior capstone thesis project for my Social Justice major. It’s been consuming my every waking moment. Finally, a few days ago, 15,004 words and 48 pages later, I finished the initial draft. I had the freedom to research any social justice related concept and create a thesis paper from it. I moved my topic multiple times, from the harms of neo-liberalism, to food and migration, and to Kansas City’s jazz scene, but I finally landed on a topic that combines my two big interests. I wrote my capstone about gender and sexual expression in music since 1900.
Given that today (March 31st) is Trans Day of Visibility, I thought it would be fitting to share a couple of excerpts from my writing. This exists as a celebration of queerness. It is a celebration of queer history, queer endurance, queer creativity, queer joy, and our sheer queer existence. Given the length of these excerpts and the piece as a whole, I’ve kept this part short, so you can save your reading energy for the excerpts themselves. But I will say this – your trans peers need you. Stand up to transphobia when you see it. Check in on your trans loved ones. I’ve linked a page with resources for trans people by IowaOne here, so use this or share this with anyone who may need it. Trans people deserve safety, privacy, and joy. Trans existence is beautiful, it’s essential, and I love being trans.
If you enjoy reading this and want to learn more about my work and the work of my peers, there will be a presentation celebration and reception with all the Social Justice and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies student capstone projects on display. This will take place on May 11th from 3:00-5:00 at the Iowa City Public Library. All are welcome to come celebrate the hard work done by myself and my SJUS and GWSS colleagues.
How Queer!:
An Anthology of Gender and Sexual Expression Through Music and Performance Since 1900
Album 1, Side 1: An Introduction
Track 1: Where Are We? How Did We Get Here?
Queerness – an act of being, or doing? To be queer, or to be a queer? Is queerness a fixed part of our core identities, or something we participate in each and every day? Language and the way we as a society define and categorize identity has long been at the center of the oppression and privilege battle. Queerness spent many years most closely associated as a derogatory term to be thrown at queer people in the second half of the twentieth century. It was designated as something inferior. Since then, there have been a myriad of internal community debates about what exactly constitutes a queer identity and who can call themselves queer, but the use of it as somewhat of an umbrella term for those who do not identify as cisgender and/or heterosexual has become commonplace. When considering where this shift happened, it is important to consider the political and social contexts existing concurrently with the different uses of the term. The way the queer identity was highly discriminated against and viewed as unnatural and deviant goes hand-in-hand with its pejorative use in this period of time. While the marginalization and discrimination against this community is still alive and well, we are leaps and bounds ahead of where we were 40 years ago; or are we?
As I write this, the American Civil Liberties Union currently shows 389 proposed bills on the floor in different state legislatures across the country, attacking different forms of queer livelihood, including bans on gender-affirming care, gay marriage, drag, education, and more. Of those 389, 29 of them are in my current home state of Iowa, and 34 of them are in my original home of Missouri (“Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures”). 63 bills attacking me, my loved ones, and my community; can we still claim to be leaps and bounds ahead of where we were 40 years ago? The genocide against queer people by the Reagan administration during the AIDS crisis is the only reason I say yes, we are better off. But otherwise, never before have I come across an era where we as a nation have put so much effort into the desecration of so many human rights as the one we currently live in. Historically, rights have been non-existent, fought for, and won. We are in a new era where an astounding amount of these rights are being taken back, or at least threatened to be taken back on politicized party lines. The right to an abortion, the right to access gender-affirming surgery, the right to marry who you want, all of these have been fully revoked, revoked in certain parts of the country, or been proposed in some way shape or form; these are just a few examples. Regardless of if these bills all pass through, the sentiment of intent is there, and the knowledge that the government and non-queer members of our community are actively pursuing the violent destruction of queer livelihood is enough to make us fear for our existence.
However, this fear for our existence is not new. We have dealt with this before. It is in these times we look into our community for the love, care, and support we are lacking from the rest of the world. It is what we have always done. Queer-coded letters were sent between “romantic friends,” homophile movements gathered gays and lesbians together, societally-abandoned queer folks found community in one another in New York City in the 1980s amidst the AIDS epidemic, and so on. Time and time again, when we are abandoned by our world, we turn to each other for support. In this culture of community, we seem to have created our own code. Certain articles of clothing signify certain things. Which ear does he wear the earring on? Is she wearing Doc Martens or Birkenstocks? The way we phrase things has different meanings. If two women exchanged weekly letters that expressed the desire for physical intimacy, what was their relationship? As small as an earring or a word choice, these simple actions meant something. They showed that we were here, even if in the shadows, we were here. Integral to the envisioning of our queer future is the understanding of our queer past.
The queer community, like many historically marginalized communities, turned to music as a form of queer visibility and world-making. Performers coded their lyrics to talk about their gender and/or sexual identities. They got on stage in clothes that pushed the societal limits of what gender presentation was supposed to be. They opened music bars and clubs for queer people to be with one another to enjoy this music. Just as queer identity is not something new, neither is the use of music and performance as a means of expression and world-making. The limits to which artists were able to do this were extremely dependent on the social contexts of the times and spaces they were living in.
For the purposes of this writing, I have chosen to focus on a few examples since the year 1900. In the early parts of the 20th century, vaudeville blues performers Gladys Bentley and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey expressed their Black queer identities in their music and performance in different styles, with Bentley being much more overt about her identity, and Rainey coding hers in more covert styles. Moving forward to the second half of the 20th century, the emergence of glam rock and disco brought about some of the most complex performances of gender identity yet, with artists like David Bowie, Grace Jones, and Prince. From the 1990s to the present day (2023), the rise of the internet has led to a huge rise in the formats of musical gender expression, with Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s promoting feminist and queer causes in their scene, indie-rockers Rainbow Kitten Surprise using the spotlight on their queerness to help other queer people in their community, and Lil Nas X rising to fame in the somehow combined circles of rap, country, and queerness. Whether explicitly or through queer-coded means, these aforementioned artists and countless others throughout history have engaged themselves or their audiences in the processes of queer world-making and being-for-self to provide a sense of community and queer futurity.
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Album 4, Side 1: The Final Chorus
Track 1: My positioning
In any sort of writing, I feel it is important for an author to situate themselves within their text. I am a 22-year-old white transman, living in the Midwest of the United States. I have been a musician for most of my life, performing on stage since I was eleven. The transgender existence in relation to music has been a unique one for me to experience, as well as to witness others experience. When I started playing music, I was nine. I came out as trans when I was 14. In the ensuing years, I started a medical transition, using testosterone and eventually getting top surgery. Amongst other things, my voice started to change, which had an interesting effect on my vocal abilities. On a physical level, learning to control my new and everchanging voice, I was (and still am to this day) learning what it meant to be a trans musician. But on a social level, I am also trying to figure out what that means.
When I came out and in the following years, it occasionally would feel like there was some sort of expectation on how I should present in my musicianship. I felt like I was pressured to be the “trans-musician,” when I truly just wanted to be a trans musician. I wanted these identities to coexist, but not be one in the same. I have since become very aware of myself in my songwriting and stage presence, and how it does or does not engage with my gender identity. I have written one song about my experience as a trans person, and it consistently gets the strongest reaction from crowds. I cannot help but ask why – what is it about this song that inspires the applause, the phones to come out for videos to go on Instagram stories, what is it? Is it some subsurface cisgender guilt coming out? A pity? Is it genuinely that good of a song? It is these questions that made me hesitant to go down the trans-musician route in the first place, because it would leave me with the ultimate question – do they like my music, or do they like me because I am trans?
This lead me on another path, and it is the path that ultimately drew me to writing this paper. I wondered about the musicians before me that engaged with their gender presentation. I wanted to know how they did it and why they did it, even if they were not trans like me. I know there is no right or wrong way to be trans or to be a trans musician, but we can learn from those before us. Afterall, the idea of a queer futurity relies on the evidence of the queer past. To understand my queer futurity, I need to understand what queer ancestors like me did. In my research, I selected a few specific queer artists whom I felt were particularly significant, but discovered others along the way that opened personal doors of interest, and for that I am grateful.
As mentioned in my introduction, this is an interesting, nay, devastating time for trans people in America. Trans rights are being slashed across the country in every capacity, and it has been heartbreaking and petrifying to watch. I have seen countless articles and posts about it, but one in particular that stuck with me was an Instagram post from an artist I like called Dreamgirl, that just so happens to share the hometown of Kansas City with me. The March 8, 2023 post features a photo of the lead-singer, Lacey Hopkins, staring at the camera, wearing an orange sweater, red sunglasses, and sporting a shaved head. Part of the caption sparked my interest, both as a trans person, and as someone working on this paper. It says “Arkansas, our southern neighbor & one of my favorite places, banned ‘drag’ in any form - no one can perform in any capacity in drag,’ and you can imagine how tightly yet loosely it is defined. I don’t know if, based on my own appearance, Dreamgirl is allowed to perform in Arkansas anymore. I’m non-binary & I don’t know what I look like. I don’t know how a fascist would perceive me, but I’ve got a good guess & have been growing out my hair in shame/fear.” The discussion of labels has always been interesting to me and is something very relevant in the writing I have done. What exactly constitutes queerness and gender expression is highly up for interpretation, but in our modern political and social contexts, that room for interpretation being put in the wrong hands is exceedingly dangerous for so many people. By categorizing certain things as queer or not queer, lawmakers can group certain performance styles into drag, inherently banning it. This is troublesome.
However, again, this is not the first time we have dealt with something like this in the queer community. They have tried to quiet and subdue us before, but we have never been silenced. We adapt, innovate, and push back. I am worried, yes, but the informative queer past tells us that our queer future is not going anywhere. By studying our queer past, we not only learn a history lesson, but we gain the tools needed for preserving our queer future even in the face of adversity; for trans people, trans musicians, trans-musicians, and queer people of all walks of life.
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Photo from NBC