Conference Agenda

Queer culture poses a fraught relationship with the hegemonic mainstream. Queer community spaces, once necessarily underground, are now frequented by straight and LGBTQ+ people alike; queer vernacular, fashion, and media now have a profound influence on mainstream cultural expression, but these roots often become obscured in the process. As a result, queer expression today is more visible to non-LGBTQ+ folks than ever before, yet these watered-down queer cultural artifacts inadvertently become a generalized representation of queerness to those who experience it from the outside. Queer artists are thus forced to negotiate complex waters between the self-sufficiency of queer communities’ radical roots and the assimilationist aesthetics and affordances of mainstream success.

Central to these negotiations are issues of identity, self-expression, safety, autonomy, and the preservation/dilution of queer culture, which we address in this panel. “Singing ‘Out:’ Radicalism and Assimilation in Queer Community Choirs” contrasts the activist history of LGBTQ+ choirs with the current practices of one such ensemble in Michigan, blending auto-ethnography and queer theory to demonstrate the choir’s importance for queer community-building while also interrogating their assimilationist tactics. “It’s Funny, Honey: Gender Identity and the Performance of Drag in Musical Theatre” centers the perception of man-in-a-dress humor by queer and straight audiences, linking this to actor/character gender identity and the harm perpetuated against trans+ folks by uncritical stereotypes in musical theatre. “‘Doing Something Unholy:’ Mainstreaming Queer Subculture on TikTok” explores the ways in which the popular social media app has coded drag practices into its main functions, tracing users’ interactions with Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ viral hit “Unholy” through siloed digital neighborhoods known as “Queer” and “Straight” TikTok to consider how the app at once propagates and dilutes queer culture.

As members of the queer community, we intimately understand the perks and pitfalls of mainstream co-optation of our hard-won cultural capital. Our panel brings this ubiquitous topic into dialogue with central musicological and social theory perspectives, seeking to make crucial interventions in communal and commercial performances of queer identity, both onstage and onscreen.

Many community choirs facilitate localized amateur musical performance as a form of community engagement, but LGBTQ+ community choirs also carry out a unique political legacy. Many such groups started as an act of reclamation of visibility (and audibility) in the face of the AIDS crisis and its rampant homophobia, but today are far less politically radical. For instance, the LGBTQ+ community choir Out Loud Chorus (OLC) in Ann Arbor, Michigan creates a thriving subsection of the local queer community, but also exemplifies this trajectory from radical protest to assimilationist politics.

My research on Out Loud Chorus is founded on extensive and ongoing field work, including active participation in the choir and interviews with members. Following Thomas Turino’s articulation of four main fields of musical practice, I discuss OLC’s use of presentational and participatory performance modes, and argue that the choir’s unique methods break down the distinction between these two categories and enable community building through the process of choral music making itself. Additionally, music director Saleel Menon’s use of popular music and a performatively camp (after Susan Sontag) demeanor constitute inclusive pedagogy, encouraging holistic confidence and musical engagement.

Despite these merits, the choir’s ongoing activities, including a recent activism-themed concert, tend towards an assimilationist politics which contrasts with its radical roots. For, as Jodie Taylor (2012) argues, “Queer as a verb – to queer something – is to unsettle that which is normalized: particularly, but by no means exclusively, sex, gender, and sexual norms and the manner in which they relate to one another” (Taylor 605, emphasis my own). Not only does OLC intentionally seek to normalize queer subjects in the eyes of the public, but many interviewees who embraced the identity label queer also defined it solely as an “umbrella term” for LGBTQ+ subjects. Although Out Loud Chorus successfully uses the communal practice of choral music to build a welcoming space for the queer community that it serves, their assimilationist tendencies beg the question—who is this community space actually built for?

From Shakespearean times to the present day, bending gender roles has long been fair game on stage, and especially so in musical theatre. Yet the specific ifs, hows and whys of cross-dressing on stage have changed over the years. Many of today’s musical theatre performers, creatives and aficionados bring different values before the proscenium arch than they did five, ten, and fifty years ago, but we continue to see huge variation in the ways in which drag roles are played. Is drag always a gag, and who gets to decide?

I argue that drag performance in musical theatre falls into two categories: diegetic (where the characters themselves are aware that they, or others, are in drag), and non-diegetic (where only the audience is aware of the drag). Building on work by Judith Peraino (2006) and Raymond Knapp (2006), I examine elements of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, contrasting them with examples from Chicago and Matilda to show that drag performances can demonstrate or lack nuance whether diegetic or not – neither is automatically more sensitive than the other. Alongside, I consider the identities of notable performers who have played Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Hedwig, Mary Sunshine and Agatha Trunchbull in these shows, interrogating the “man-in-a-dress” trope to elucidate upon the complicated margin between stereotyping and representation, and to determine who gets to be in on the joke in each case. I also reference insight given by actors and theatre creatives who are members of the trans+ and non-binary communities about such representation on Broadway today (Paulson 2022), to build a case for a fundamental rethink of the diegesis of drag in musical theatre.

Nuanced discussion of gender non-conformity in musical theatre has rarely been more important, given the rapidly increasing visibility of trans+ and non-binary actors on our stages. In this paper I question what makes drag funny in musical theatre, reflecting on the kinds of harm that the queer community can often suffer at the hands of clumsy drag.

In August of 2022, Sam Smith shared a snippet of an unreleased song in a TikTok video; Smith and collaborator Kim Petras were seen dancing and lipsyncing at a mix console to their sexy new song, “Unholy.” The song quickly went viral on the platform, and when Smith and Petras released it in September that same year, it became the first single by trans and non-binary artists to reach no. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

TikTok virality has been a reliable predictor of Billboard chart success for the last few years, but “Unholy” is uniquely situated to illustrate the ways in which queer subcultures have influenced mainstream popularity on the short form video app. Using Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s model of platform studies, as well as Michael Warner’s theory of publics and subcultures, I examine the ways in which TikTok’s platform has encoded queer cultural touchstones, including drag practices like lipsyncing and dramatic transformations, into its functionality.

I also explore how TikTok’s algorithm creates siloed neighborhoods like Queer TikTok, where queer community and culture are propagated. In this space, “Unholy” was celebrated as a joyous queer banger and evoked queer desire, while on Straight (meaning both mainstream and non-LGBTQ+) TikTok, the song’s sexiness turned hetero, obscuring its drag subcultural aesthetics. I consider whether this mainstreaming of queer subcultures amounts to their death, as Warner suggests, or if their transformation in new networked publics and digital subcultural spaces allows them to thrive in new forms.