Conference Agenda

In 1927, Brazilian novelist and (ethno-)musicologist Mario de Andrade embarked on a three-month journey from São Paulo to northern Brazil. The “journey to discover Brazil,” as he called the trip, was meant to culminate in an ethnographic visit to the Wari’, inhabitants of the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Land. When his plan to visit the Wari’ fell through, Andrade wrote a work of ethnographic fiction instead, imagining what such an encounter might have been. The highs and lows of this venture appear in O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), a posthumously published travelogue that combines memories and fiction. Rather than offering an amusing tale about the curious behavior of the Other, Andrade’s ethnographic fiction estranges Western norms of sonic propriety and parodies the prerogatives of positivist ethnography.

This paper examines these issues in two parts. Part I considers Andrade’s earwitness account of a world where “listening is a mortal sin” and sound “is the ultimate sexual gesture.” His insertion of polite society’s mores into this imaginary world opens a space to interrogate how sound governs sexual practices, bodily functions, and hygienic imagination. In analyzing the practices dramatized in the fiction, I propose sonic propriety as a notion to describe civilizing practices that seek to bring unwanted bodily noises to a low level of audibility. Part II focuses on the fiction’s parody of positivist ethnography from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how ethnographers transduced Western fascination with the Other’s sexual practices into the realm of scientific knowledge and necessity. The fiction, thus, points to an ethnopornographic tradition (Sigal, Tortorici, and Whitehead 2020) in which the erotic practices of those deemed Others became objects of scientific inquiry. By positing ethnopornography as a constitutive formation of scientia sexualis, I suggest that the latter developed not only in Europe (Foucault 1976) but also in sites of colonial and neocolonial extraction.

Advertised as the first X-rated musical, The Newcomers premiered on July 10^th, 1973 in New York, NY. It was reviewed in major trade magazines and was featured in Playboy that year. The film starred some of the biggest names in the adult industry at the time, those from major successes such as Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. The Newcomers made national news when police raided several New York adult movie theaters and confiscated the film. In 1974, a “softcore” version was released to theaters as Seven Delicious Wishes and screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1975. Both versions played in theaters until 1980, and neither have become available to the public since.

Since 1980, The Newcomers seems to have been forgotten having only a few mentions in print and online. The X-rated version of Alice in Wonderland (1976) is often misattributed as being the first X-rated musical, and, for a time, was advertised as such. The First Nudie Musical (1976) is a fictional film about the making of the first X-rated musical, but it, too, seems to be unaware of The Newcomers. Elizabeth L. Wollman’s 2013 book Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, which includes a chapter dedicated to hardcore musical films, does not mention The Newcomers anywhere.

Based on the work of Williams (1989), Bronstein (2011), Haberski (2014), and Gaskill (2023), this paper contextualizes the film within the time and culture of porno chic (1972–3) and Second Wave Feminism. Using sheet music obtained from the Library of Congress and audio clips from the film’s trailer, this paper includes partial reconstructions of the film’s songs and uses descriptions from reviews, articles, and advertisements to provide an idea of how music was used in it. The Newcomers has also been described as a comedy, so I use other films by its director to provide a sense of his style of comedy. To close, I argue that his most recent film, #ShakespearesShitstorm, fuses comedy, sex, and music more successfully than in The Newcomers and explain why the film remains in storage.

The Continental Bathhouse in New York provided musicians an opportunity to explore creative performance aesthetics including “camp.” The Baths were a safe space for gay men and a non-judgmental creative space for performers. I argue the accepting atmosphere of the Continental Baths combined with the live performances’ secondary entertainment role allowed artists to explore camp aesthetics to gain audience attention. My research draws upon the social history of gay bathhouses in Manhattan in the twentieth century, accounts of the Continental Bathhouse performance environment, and performance images of Bette Midler, Jackie Curtis, and Jobriath, among others.

The live performances that took place on the small stage in the Continental Baths played a secondary role in entertainment to the social and secret sexual rendezvous for which gay men primarily came to the Baths. Patrons often dressed in bath towels or nude. An unorthodox performance space like a bathhouse calls for unorthodox performance styles such as incorporating elaborate costuming and crude, sexual comedy. In general, the Baths had a very relaxed environment for the clientele as well as the performers giving them the creative freedom to explore non-traditional performance aesthetics.

In order to catch the audience’s attention, Bette Midler, an up-and-coming artist at this time, incorporated camp elements into her wardrobe: for instance, she wore a black lace corset, gold lame pedal pushers, platform shoes, and “her hair looking like she had stuck her finger in an electric socket.” Drawing on Esther Newton, I frame camp as an aesthetic thought process characterized by “incongruity, theatricality, and humor” and driven by intent, while also looking to Sontag’s notion of camp seeing objects in quotations. Bette Midler’s stage persona, “The Divine Miss M” is an exaggerated theatrical performance of herself, becoming the “freak who sings in the tubs.” The audience adored her comedic burlesque-like routines. Midler’s performances attracted larger audiences to the Baths, transforming this space into a prominent social venue in New York City in the 1970s. Other young artists such as Jobriath and Jackie Curtis followed Midler’s lead and found success in ‘camping up’ their performance.