Drew Daniel, a member of the electronica duo Matmos, a gay man, and a favorite contemporary philosopher of mine, posits in his essay “All Sound Is Queer” that sound itself is a connection we have to the multiverse, where our beings themselves exist to cocreate our identities and worlds—but because sound can live both above and below the limits of human frequency, sound lives both with us and in realms we cannot know. It is above and below our boundaries of perception. Just as with gaydar, some of us get glimpses of the sounds outside of our natural abilities, and we are drawn to the shadow, the gray area, the twilight. Here are just a few moments in which music allowed us to go into the back room and feel it.
1925: Ma Rainey is arrested for hosting an lesbian orgy
Maxine Feldman began performing as an openly lesbian folk singer starting in 1964. (In later years, Feldman identified as transgender.) In a 2002 interview, she explained that her most famous song, “Angry Atthis,” was an explicit protest. Feldman wrote it in May 1969, and, while not directly connected, it anticipated the famous disruption at the Stonewall Inn that happened later that summer: “Feel like we’re animals in cages / And have you seen the lights in the gay bar / Not revealing wrinkles or rages / God forbid we reveal who we are.”
The pioneer musician and composer and godmother of electronic music Wendy Carlos is a trans woman who had some of her earliest commercial success at a time when she was first receiving hormone treatments (for a “psychological condition known as gender dysphoria,” People helpfully explained). Carlos was anxious about making public appearances, but she began to feel more comfortable after she decided to come out in a 1979 interview in Playboy magazine. Carlos told People, “The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent. . . . There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life.”
