Music has always been gay to me. I mean, music is an expression of culture and my culture, my family, my history is capital G gay. Well, more capital L Lesbian, but we won’t get weighed down by semantics. My two mothers played more lesbian political folk than could be considered appropriate. I could sing Alix Dobkin’s Amazon ABC word for word at age nine. My childhood was spent at concerts where sensible-shoed women sang about feminism and politics - gay, lesbian and queer people singing, playing, opining and let’s face it, whining, is at the core of my being.
By adolescence, my cultural references were considered a little odd. In year 9, my peers were besotted with Triple J’s Merrick and Rosso, religiously listening to them on the bus home from school. I remember feigning interest in these masculine voices – both the hosts and so many of the musicians they played – but each day I would surreptitiously load my Walkman with cassettes, often heart-wrenching ballads that spoke to my lovelorn teenage self, most commonly Dusty Springfield.
Dusty came out as a woman who loved women AND men in 1970, and she offered me a vision of queer femininity and sexuality that was different to my mothers’, different from their feminist lesbian folk and the community I grew up in. I read about her obsessively. And when I listened to her music, I found myself in the lyrics, heard my loneliness in every catch of her voice. Incidentally, Dusty’s career took a nosedive after she came out and wasn’t resurrected for nearly 15 years. It took a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys (NB: GAAAAAAY) to see her back on Top of the Pops.
I’m a musician, songs are my bread and butter. I know their power and I play with that as a performer. But nothing, nothing, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand-up, makes my blood momentarily freeze, makes my body respond in unspeakable ways, than a queer person singing on the radio, queer people singing en masse at an underground party, queer people raising their fists to songs blaring out of speakers mounted on Mardi Gras parade floats (with scant regard for OH&S).
My girlfriend speaks often of her own queer musical awakening, which took place far later than mine (straight parents less inclined to spin Meg Christian’s Ode to a Gym Teacher on the stereo). Perhaps the first awakening was in 1992, eight years since Frankie Goes to Hollywood had been banned from the living room disco of her family home, and only five years after her mother threw out her George Michael cassette because of the sexual song titles.
She remembers driving down a freeway, her father tapping the accelerator in time with the beat of the music on his newly installed CD Player. KD Lang’s Constant Craving crooned its way out of the speakers and from the backseat her childhood carsickness revisited her. She can tell you everything about that car trip, from the passing road signs to the smell of diesel, the bickering of her siblings, what an Uncle Toby’s Forest Fruit muesli bar smells like after six hours in the Queensland heat. But mainly she remembers what the fear of being found out can do to someone on a family trip to Noosa.
Music is universally lauded for its redemptive qualities; there are a million images of mountains, skies and fields, with quotes about music emblazoned across them with no fear of font, nor favour, that I could share with you here. Music as refuge, music as balm, music as words when all others fail, but the clichéd nature of a love of music shouldn’t diminish our celebration of what it can offer us as LGBTIQ+ people.
Any old cis-het teen can get passionate about a song that encapsulates their latest crush or existential dilemma. But when you add secrecy, otherness and the fear of discovery, the feeling that not a person on this earth could ever love you, this emotional connection to music is compounded. Memory is transformed into intense nostalgia and investment, and that, my friends, well, that is the fertile, cultural soil in which queers and music plant their hopes for a more connected future.
Maeve Marsden will present Homage – A Queer Musical Tribute at The Factory Theatre on Oct 24th.
Maeve Marsden is a writer, producer and performer who works across theatre, cabaret, storytelling and music. Most notably, she hosts and programs LGBTQI+ storytelling night and podcast Queerstories, and tours with cabaret shows Lady Sings it Better and Mother’s Ruin: A Cabaret about Gin.
