Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 30 Aug 17 - 07:25 AM

... and straight men can also proudly enjoy Judy Garland and musical theatre....

..bollocks to entrenched sexuality stereotypes...!!!


...I was the only male sat in the front row of a KD Lang arena concert..

[..errrm.. though it did help having a gay sister who was high up in the UK fanclub procuring priority tickets for me and the mrs...
However my sister did conform uncritically to all the archetypal lesbian identity 'dress code' as per Viz comic character "Millie Tant "...]

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 30 Aug 17 - 02:56 AM

Seems to me that certain performers, certain music producers, certain musical styles, may be adopted by the Gay community and, therefore, become identified as 'Gay music'. As such, it might be regarded by some as a representation of 'Gayness'. Kylie, the Communards, Pink, much of the electro-pop of the '80s, all say 'Gay' to me, but my wife doesn't see it.

But is the music itself Gay? Nope, don't think so. It's not the music per se, it's how people relate to it, what they were experiencing and where they were when they first heard it, and lots of other influences affecting their perception.

IMHO, YMMV.

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 30 Aug 17 - 02:41 AM

Specific genres of electro dance music are associated with gayclub sub culture & identity.
But the music itself is not 'gay'... how can it possibly be...?????

That's just a very daft false belief that a moronic insecure young boy might cling to...!!!

Straight men can proudly enjoy Hi-NRG Disco...

[but perhaps best we don't dance to it in public.. not because it might 'turn' us, but because we are mostly shite dancers... 🕺🏼 ]... 😜

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Joe_F
Date: 29 Aug 17 - 09:05 PM

First, following up this diversion into poetry: Certainly, a poem like "Lay Your Sleeping Head" does not depend on the sex of the person who inspired it. True, it emphasizes (in the third stanza) the likely cost of love, but that is the subject of a good deal of heterosexual love poetry as well. However, knowing that Auden was gay puts some extra spin on the foreboding. That is even more true of the following, which emphasizes the *risk* of love (I am quoting from memory):

That night when joy began
Our narrowest veins to flush,
We waited for the flash
Of morning's levelled gun.

But morning let us pass,
And day by day relief
Outgrows his nervous laugh,
Grows credulous of peace,

As mile by mile is seen
No trespasser's reproach,
And love's best glasses reach
No fields but are his own.

However, one might note that Auden also wrote an outright pornographic poem, "The Platonic Blow" -- not for publication, but it was pirated. It leaves no room for speculation.

Many of A. E. Housman's bitter late poems are more understandable in view of his homosexuality. In one posthumous poem he even dared to stick up for Oscar Wilde.

As to the official subject of this thread, it is hard to imagine that any *tunes* "sound gay", in the sense that, say, jazz & the blues sound Afroamerican, or (in America) eastern European tunes sound Jewish. A song might be called gay if the words deal with gay themes; I have a tape of such songs, and they seem to me to be nothing much. Alternatively a song might be called gay if it (or someone who performed it) is taken up as an emblem by part of gay society. I do not belong to that part, so I won't comment on that.

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 29 Aug 17 - 01:15 AM

Lay your sleeping head, my love
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
-- W H Auden

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 28 Aug 17 - 08:59 PM

years ago, i remember reading an article by an English teacher who said that one his students had become very upset upon finding out that WH Auden's classic poem Lay Your Sleeping Head had been written for a gay lover.

the student had responded to the profession of love. not knowing anything of Auden.

i think when you write of love. its the same stuff. whatever your sexual preference. we're all human - the truths in great art are immutable.

why would music be any different?

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Aug 17 - 07:16 PM

Shit

Blicky

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Aug 17 - 07:16 PM

oops blicky didn't work, lemme try again

a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/08/22/can_music_be_gay_listening_to_soundscapes_in_provincetown.html?wpisrc=burger_bar">Blicky

Subject: RE: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Janie
Date: 28 Aug 17 - 01:24 PM

Lavendar Country

Subject: Can Music Be Gay (Not As In Happy)?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Aug 17 - 09:06 AM

OK, this is an interesting question...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/08/22/can_music_be_gay_listening_to_soundscapes_in_provincetown.html?wpisrc=burger_bar

Blicky