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However, one might note that Auden also wrote an outright pornographic poem, "The Platonic Blow" -- not for publication, but it was pirated.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.