Conference Agenda

Released in 1980, both the Village People’s quasi-biopic Can’t Stop the Music and William Friedkin’s thriller Cruising presented distorted images of contemporaneous gay life. Both depicted New York’s gay community, yet they contrasted wildly in tone: one being colorful, campy, and closeted; the other seedy, perverse, and deadly. Although seemingly different in all respects, both films placed music centerstage and positioned a similar insider-versus-outsider musical world in which classical music signified difference. Building on recent studies of queerness in film music by James Buhler, Jack Dubowsky, and Scott Paulin, I examine how these two films navigated queer representation at a time when commercial culture was warming to gay-centered narratives.

In this paper, I analyzes how both films used classical music as a polyvalent symbol whose meaning changed based on who controlled the narrative. In Cruising, the straight creative team used the music of Luigi Boccherini to signal heteronormative respectability, while using punk music to represent queer deviancy. These genres’ extant associations with groups at the margins of society—disaffected youth and venerable elite—allowed the creators to delineate gay and straight worlds as diametrically opposed despite characters in the film belonging to neither associated group. By contrast, the predominantly gay creative team behind Can’t Stop the Music aligned its queer-coded characters with classical music and Broadway icons to elevate their cultural status (and to rehabilitate disco’s reputation after its untimely death). Analyzing the music in these films clarifies their depictions of queerness and ultimately demonstrates the anxieties over gay male portrayals in films of the post-Stonewall era.