Conference Agenda

On August 1, 2024, Chappell Roan performed “Pink Pony Club” to Lollapalooza’s biggest daytime crowd ever. As one-hundred thousand people belted the chorus in exuberant, a cappella unison, they found momentary utopia in an anthem by a lesbian drag queen about the revivifying power of the queer dance floor—just ten minutes from the site where, forty-five years previously, hordes of angry people had demonstrated their hatred for such music at Disco Demolition Night.

The performance is significant in queer pop music history not only because Roan achieved this record as a queer woman—let alone a drag performer—but also because “Pink Pony Club” is such a tremendously queer text. Musically, it interpolates queer dance floor anthems like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” (1978); lyrically, its story resembles “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1939); and live, Roan’s gestures reference quintessential pop performances by queer artists like David Bowie. On every level, the song facilitates queer survival: as an archive, by extending queer performances from the past into the future; as a portal, by realizing the sort of queer utopia theorized by Muñoz as “a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual present” (2009); and as a road map, charting a path toward the future for queer individuals who find themselves in restrictive circumstances.

This paper offers, on the one hand, a celebration and analysis of Roan’s remarkably detail-oriented work as one of the most publicly visible stewards of queer historical memory; and on the other, an attempt at conjuring a space for queer joy and hope in the face of “the darkness of the lived instant” (Bloch 1986). On the day after the 2025 inauguration, Dan Savage said, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. It was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.” “Pink Pony Club” enacts this spirit against new horrors for queer and trans people, and it self-reflexively acknowledges its place in a powerful historical lineage of queer dance anthems.

Less than a year after her arrest at the “Stop the Church” protest outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Diamanda Galás debuted her work Plague Mass on 12 October 1990 at the Episcopal Church of St. John the Divine, located approximately six miles north of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The work’s political intention was clear: Galás, like many other LGBTQ+ activists, disagreed with the Catholic Church’s stance on AIDS prevention and reproductive rights. My research looks into valuable footage recorded by an audience member during one of Galás’s tour concerts of Plague Mass at the Lisner Auditorium on 11 April 1991 and investigates how the sonic and visual details of the performance exert political persuasion.

I focus on the second and fourth movements of Plague Mass—“This is the Law of the Plague” and “Confessional.” In these two movements, Galás created distinctive vocal timbres through techniques such as glossolalia, inhalation phonation, using double/single microphones, and mixing pre-recorded and live sound as ways to critique biblical texts, including the Books of Leviticus and Job. I argue that through Galás’s vocal timbres, textual arrangement, and staging, both movements of Plague Mass present and deconstruct problematic dualism pervasive in the discourse of the HIV epidemic—clean and unclean; proper and improper ways of life.

My analytical methodology—"deciphering embodiment"—encompasses Sylvia Wynter’s notion of "decipherment," which emphasizes evaluating texts’ performative functions instead of merely interpreting their symbolic values, and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s radically redefined “embodiment,” which explores the possibility for the body and voice to function as “the object, subject, material, and source of symbolic construction, as well as the product of cultural inscription.” My research contributes new perspectives to the existing body of scholarship, viz., David Schwarz (1997), Thomas Long (2012), and Steven Wilson (2016), by linking fields of performative studies, voice studies, and critical theories about sexualities and life.

On June 12, 1971, the White House hosted the widely televised wedding of Tricia Nixon, daughter of soon-to-be-disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon. The ceremony, draped in bourgeois decorum, sought to project stability amid anti-war unrest and mounting public dissent. In response, the Cockettes (a San Francisco-based performance collective blending drag, psychedelia, and theater) premiered Tricia’s Wedding (1971). The surrealist film twisted the political pageant into a gender-bending bacchanal, starring disco forerunner Sylvester as Coretta Scott King alongside Goldie Glitters as Tricia Nixon. The film lampoons Nixonian propriety, ridiculing punitive moral codes that have historically policed heterosexual orthodoxy.

This paper argues that Tricia’s Wedding performs a sonic and theatrical unmaking of the wedding ritual. Off-kilter organ, honky-tonk piano, and cabaret musicality puncture the White House’s civic liturgy, exposing marriage as a commodified metric of heterosexist prosperity. The reenactment dissolves into a carnivalesque commons where Queer bodies forge shared modes of life beyond the state’s design. Through dissonance, vocal fragmentation, and musical disorder, the film exposes the polished façade of civic order as brittle, performative, and fundamentally unstable.

Set against Haight‑Ashbury’s communal art scene, the Cockettes emerge from a Bay Area counterculture devoted to collective living and performance as a means of challenging prescribed social categories and their political implications. Embedded in the region's experimental‑music and free‑theater ferment, the Cockettes combined improvisation and parody with a vocal palette that ranged from gospel harmonies to torch-song crooning. The film’s stylistic collage contributes to a Queer world-building that prioritizes multiplicity and porous boundaries. Together sound, imagery, and embodied excess converge in an audiovisual rite that continually reanimates the troupe’s shared sense of self.

Drawing on archival research conducted at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, this project foregrounds Tricia’s Wedding as a significant example of sonic camp deployed as countercultural resistance. By positioning sound as a vehicle for gender play, ritual metamorphosis, and collective imagination, the study contributes to musicological discussions of experimental performance practices in 1970s San Francisco. Ultimately, the film’s sonic tactics resonate beyond the Bay Area, underscoring Queer aesthetics’ potential to reorient scholarly approaches to sound, performance, and cultural politics.