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Cabarets and Revues

HOMOSEXUALS HAVE BEEN ATTRACTED TO CABARETS, nightclubs, and coffeehouse performances throughout modern history, even when the acts presented may seem resolutely heterosexual. This may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that theatrical presentations do not contain a fixed set of signs allowing for only one interpretation.

Even though many revues, nightclub acts, and cabaret performances were not created or performed by homosexuals, gay patrons have often found in them a preferable alternative to the "legitimate" theater. Historically, cabarets and revues have been much more likely to mention (or imply) same-sex desire than the "legitimate" theater; perhaps, more importantly, same-sex desire has been less frequently condemned or criticized in cabarets and revues than in most mainstream plays.

In the public mind, homosexuality is often linked with bohemian artistic and theatrical circles. While there is nothing inherently queer about the performative, it is plausible that cabaret and other theatrical entertainments appeal to gay men and lesbians because most of them have been performing much of their lives: convincing people that they are "straight." Having a keen appreciation for performance as a form, many homosexuals have at various times in modern history found a supportive atmosphere in the many theaters, pubs, and cafés located in most major cities.

Variety Shows, Music Hall Entertainment, and Dance Halls

Early in the nineteenth century, many British taverns had a "music room" adjacent to the bar in which entertainment was performed. These variety shows presented singers, dancers, and comedians. In 1850, these entertainment lounges were separated from taverns to appeal to more middle-class, family audiences.

Despite the move, British music hall entertainment still had much to offer nonheterosexual patrons, for it often featured a "best boy" (a woman in a breeches role) and the "dame" (played by a man in drag). The fact that men were playing men, women playing women, men playing women, and women playing men on the same stage allowed for numerous double entendres, comic misconceptions, and sexual layerings.

These same conventions were employed in British pantomime, which began in the 1870s and continues to this day in the form of the English Christmas pantomime.

While the famous dance halls of Paris—such as the Folies Bergères (est. 1869) and the Moulin Rouge (est. 1889)—might seem wholly dedicated to heterosexual titillation, most of the Montmartre halls did their part to expand the sexual continuum. Nude showgirls did not appear until 1910, but female impersonators had been part of the bill since the beginning.

One of the most famous was Barbette (Vander Clyde, 1904-1973), an American acrobat who wowed audiences in the 1920s and 1930s as the "jazz-age Botticelli."

American Minstrel Shows

American theatrical sites of same-sex desire in the nineteenth century were also found in unlikely quarters: minstrel shows. As minstrelsy evolved from a solo act to an evening-length work in the early 1840s, the all-male, Caucasian cast members not only performed caricatures of African Americans, some of the men also played female roles. When actresses joined minstrelsy troupes in the 1890s, they were often called upon to play male roles.

Unlike European revues, American minstrelsy added the topic of race and racialized desire to the performance of gender. While it is true that many of the race and gender illusionists of these various British, French, and American entertainments resorted to the most demeaning and freakish of portrayals, it is also true that these performances put same-sexed bodies in romantic situations and occasionally pointed up the cultural construction of gender and race as well.

Revues

Given the loose structure of a revue, it is much easier (than in a book musical) to insert a same-sex allusion, or even a homosexual character, because such allusions or characters do not have to contribute to the development of an evening-long plot.

For example, Noël Coward's revue Words and Music (1932) contained the song "Mad About the Boy, " in which a cockney woman, a schoolgirl, a prostitute, and a society lady sing about a handsome male movie star. For the New York production of this revue, Coward added a stanza sung by a businessman describing how he had "vexing dreams" about the boy in question.

In the 1920s and 1930s, queer allusions became a staple of the revues in New York and London. The critic Percy Hammond noted that The Ritz Revue (1924) contained so "many references...to topics so disorderly that one suspects Kraft-Ebbings [sic] to be hidden among the librettists."

In the West End, The Gate Revue (1939) featured the song "All Smart Women Must"—sung by two effeminate men and one lesbian—which warned women that "fairy" fashion designers conspired to make women unattractive to men.

In 1958, an official from the Lord Chamberlain's Office was sent to reassess a drag revue, We're No Ladies, appearing in a small London theater. While the script had received a license, the officer found that the audience was "familiar with the phraseology of the perverted" and suggested closing the show, as the venue was likely to become a "focal point for pederasts."

Similarly, due to the oppressive tactics of the police and citizen groups such as the Society for Suppression of Vice, theatrical presentations that ventured into samesex desire in New York City were routinely closed during the period from 1870 to 1940.

Drag Revues

The most successful gay-themed revues, those that managed to avoid legal entanglements and were financially lucrative, were those featuring drag and theoretically aimed at a heterosexual audience. Notable examples include Finocchio's nightclub, the Jewel Box Revue, and military shows.

Located on Lower Broadway, the West 42nd Street of San Francisco, Finocchio's opened in 1936 with a performing company of sixteen. Run by Marjorie and Joseph Finocchio, it remained a family-owned business for sixty-three years until rising rents forced its closure in 1999. Headliners included twenty-seven-year veteran Lucian Phelps (a Sophie Tucker expert), drag legend Rae Bourbon, and Don McLean (also known as Lori Shannon), the 6-foot-6 comic who played Archie Bunker's drag queen friend on "All in the Family."

Other famous clubs featuring drag revues were the Queen Mary in Los Angeles, San Francisco's Black Cat Café (where José Sarria performed camp operas for over forty years, beginning in 1958), New Orleans's My Oh My Club, Miami's Gayla, Seattle's Garden of Allah, Minneapolis's Paradise Club, Hollywood's Garden of Eden, and New York City's Moroccan Village and Club 82 (open until 1978).

The Jewel Box Revue was not only the longest-running gay touring entertainment company (performing continually in the United States, Mexico, and Canada from 1942 to 1975), it also was one of the few racially integrated entertainments in the 1950s.

Begun in 1939 in a Miami gay bar (the Jewel Box), the revue, fashioned by lovers Danny Brown and Doc Benner, was an elaborate entertainment with comic sketches, musical numbers, lavish production numbers, fabulous costumes, but absolutely no lip sync. Eventually playing heterosexual nightclubs, the revue—featuring "Twentyfive Men and a Girl, " as it billed itself—introduced many patrons to female impersonation (both comic and serious) for over thirty years.

Another genre of the drag revue that escaped police harassment was the cross-dressing entertainments common in British and American military units. So popular were they during World War II that they moved to legitimate theaters and continued to play for ten years after the end of the war.

Although it can be argued that these revues, with names such as Misleading Ladies, Boys Will Be Girls, Forces in Petticoats, and Soldiers in Skirts, were not wholly affirming of same-sex desire, they were nevertheless a far cry from "Don't ask, don't tell."

Without the elaborate sets and costumes that were the hallmark of the Jewel Box Revue, British Music Hall, Parisian girlie shows, and Broadway revues, intimate revues in bars and clubs often slipped around decency laws since they lacked the visibility of their more opulent sisters.

Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that New York (and many other states) had laws that prohibited homosexuals from congregating in licensed public establishments, which meant that nightspots often paid off the police to remain safe spaces for their gay clientele. In many municipalities these laws were on the books until the 1970s.

Cabarets and Nightclubs

In the 1880s, cabarets that featured solo performers or small revues began to appear in Paris, and by 1900 in Berlin. A showcase for emerging artists, these revues frequently were critical of political and social repression, resulting in a satirical style immortalized in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (which were the source material for the 1966 Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret).

Early in the twentieth century, cabarets began to open in New York's Bowery, Greenwich Village, and Harlem districts. Typically, the audience was gayer than the material presented on stage. Historian George Chauncey cites a report in 1920 that "most of the patrons paid more attention to the action of the fairies [in the audience] than to the cabaret performance" onstage at the Hotel Koenig (East 4th Street near First Avenue).

Prohibition (1920-1933) radically transformed nightclubs and cabarets, as club owners sought out ever more outlandish acts in order to draw patrons to their now alcohol-less environments. Beginning in Greenwich Village as gay-oriented entertainment for a gay audience, "pansy shows" moved to Times Square nightspots, attracting heterosexual tourists and locals intrigued with homosexual exotica.

While some of the entertainers were gay, others were straight and performed the gender equivalent of blackface, coarsely broadening what they perceived to be the low camp and effeminacy that epitomized the gay male.

Nightspots in Harlem between the wars were a vital component of the Harlem Renaissance as African American writers and performers energized each other while exploring the possibilities of being black in America. These journeys were often led by lesbians, gay men, and bisexual performers such as Phil Black, Mabel Hampton, George Hanna, Alberta Hunter, Bessie Jackson, Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon, Jackie "Moms" Mabley, Bessie Smith, and Gertrude "Ma" Rainey.

Among the most famous lesbian entertainers to emerge was Gladys Bentley, a large, masculine, darkskinned woman who performed in a white tuxedo and top hat at Harlem's Clam House and Edmond's Cellar.

White patrons not only "slummed" in Harlem clubs to experience hot jazz, impassioned singing, and sensuous dancing, but also to participate in interracial drag costume balls at the Savoy Ballroom and the Manhattan Casino.

Gay-themed entertainment also found a supportive home in speakeasies, the private clubs that appeared during Prohibition—quasi-legal places where alcohol could be served because they were ostensibly membership-only establishments. Undoubtedly, the transgressive aura of homosexuality was seen as an acceptable element in the netherworld in which speakeasies operated.

Small Bars and Intimate Cabarets

With the repeal of Prohibition and the influx of military personnel to large urban areas during World War II, an enormous number of small bars and cabarets sprang up. The standard bill of fare in a bar or nightclub that provided live entertainment was the female singer. Accompanied by a single piano player or small combo, her material might be all comic, all cry-in-your-beer ballads, or a mixture of the two.

From chic nightclubs to the rankest coffeehouse, the intimate cabaret (fewer than 100 seats) also permitted a wide class range to attend, since admission was often covered by the price of a single drink. Famous New York nightspots that attracted gay customers include the Blue Angel (1943-1964) and the Mafia-owned Bon Soir at 40 West 8th Street, which ruled New York City's cabaret circuit from 1949 to 1967.

While female impressionists Lynne Carter, T. C. (Thomas Craig) Jones, and Charles Pierce were staples on the cabaret circuit during the 1950s and 1960s, many American cities had ordinances against cross-dressing, which obviously had a direct impact on the inclusion of travesti in revues and cabaret acts.

Thus, openly gay performers who performed flagrantly (or even veiled) gay material were often censored by nervous cabaret owners or through police intervention. Instead of hiring outrageous performers such as Gladys Bentley, post-World War II clubs most often featured a glamorous chanteuse whose set consisted of standards from the golden age of movie musicals.

The absence of gay performers or gay material did not mean that gay audiences abandoned nightclubs, however. Indeed, several performers were particularly known for attracting gay audiences despite the absence of overtly gay material. As the maître d' at New York City's Upstairs at the Downstairs told author James Gavin, "I mean, who could have a gayer following than Mabel Mercer? Every old queen with four days to live came to see her."

When Ben Bagley arrived at the same club in 1962, he was told he had free rein to create the types of revues he wanted, with the exception of hiring Kaye Ballard, since, according to owner Irving Haber, "she brings in the fags."

The 1960s

With increasing competition from television, and uncertain how to incorporate the new sexual frankness of the 1960s, many clubs that featured live entertainment began to close. Two women who appeared in the 1960s extended the life of cabaret, not only as a result of their extraordinary talent, but also because of the support of their gay fans.

When Barbra Streisand made her cabaret debut in 1961, the nineteen-year-old performer dealt a death knell to the icy café chanteuse. From 1961 to 1963, she alternated among New York City's Bon Soir and Blue Angel, Chicago's Mister Kelly's, and San Francisco's hungry i. Bette Midler played at the Downstairs in 1967, and then, in a pathbreaking move that cemented her fame to a gay following, Midler and Barry Manilow played the Continental Baths in 1971.

With eclectic repertoires and undeniably rich voices, these unique women—the "S&M of Cabaret"—revitalized the nightclub act by discarding Hollywood/Vegas glamour for thrift-store clothes. Neither performer was classically beautiful and both were Jewish (Midler channeled her Jewishness via Hawaii and Streisand via Brooklyn), with a brazen chutzpah that found support from gay patrons looking for their own liberation in the midst of the 1960s sexual revolution.

Midler was perhaps the first mainstream performer not only to embrace her gay audience, but also consciously to tailor her act for them. As she told Newsweek in 1973, "I was playing to people who are always on the outside looking in."

Post-Stonewall Entertainments

Despite their popularity, the "S&M of Cabaret" could not save the genre. James Gavin estimates that in New York City between 1972 and 1982 almost forty nightclubs and cabarets opened and closed. Arthur Bell of the Village Voice dubbed many of them part of "the K-Y Circuit, " since they depended upon a predominantly gay clientele.

Post-Stonewall entertainments basically divided into three groups: the drag lip-sync revues that became popular in many gay bars, now augmented by drag king shows in some women's bars; comedy clubs; and the return of upscale cabarets.

While stand-up comedians have been around since minstrelsy and vaudeville, nightspots dedicated completely to standup are a recent occurrence. After Jose's Cabaret and Juice Joint inaugurated Gay Comedy Open Mike Nights in 1990 in San Francisco, other comedy clubs began to open their doors to gay comics.

Openly queer performers such as Rick Burd, Charles Busch, Kate Clinton, Sara Cytron, Frank DeCaro, Ellen DeGeneres, Lea Delaria, Maxine Feldman, Emmett Foster, Marga Gomez, Lisa Kron, Sabrina Matthews, Frank Maya, Steve Moore, Bob Smith, Robin Tyler, Suzanne Westenhoffer, and Karen Williams found humorous ways to incorporate their sexual identity into their acts.

The traditional nightclub refashioned itself in the 1980s and 1990s in elegant (and expensive) rooms such as Café Carlyle, which became a home to Bobby Short and Barbara Cook; joined by the Algonquin Club, the Rainbow Room, and Michael Feinstein's at the Regency, which all sought to return to the swank of legendary New York City nightclubs.

This trend was mirrored on the West Coast, at San Francisco's Plush Room (York Hotel) and at Los Angeles's Cinegrill (Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel) and Jazz Bakery.

Although frequented by a gay clientele, these clubs are in many ways a return to the 1940s, with their emphasis on female singers and revues featuring Broadway show tunes. With the rise of gay visibility in film, mainstream theater, television, and print media, cabarets are no longer among the rare venues where homosexuals can safely meet outside of private homes.

—Bud Coleman

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Clum, John M. Something for the Boys: Musical Theatre and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Gavin, James. Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

Kaiser, Charles. The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Kirk, Chris, and Ed Heath. Men in Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press, 1984.

Michener, Charles. "Bette Midler." Newsweek, December 17, 1973, 62.

Newton, Esther. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Paulson, Don, with Roger Simpson. An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Reballato, Dan. 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London: Routledge, 1999.

Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Cage, John (1912-1992)

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL AND CONTROVERSIAL American composers of the twentieth century, John Cage is best known for his work utilizing chance as a factor in writing music.

Born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, the son of an inventor father and a writer mother, Cage developed musical interests early. After spending two years at Pomona College in Claremont, California, he spent two years in Europe, where he tried to compose music for the first time. After returning to the United States, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell.

In the mid-1930s, he began composing for percussion instruments and developing some of his ideas about sound and noise. He also married. Although Cage had had sexual affairs with young men, including the aspiring artist Don Sample, with whom he traveled in Europe, in 1935 he wed Xenia Andreevna Kashevaroff, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest.

Late in 1938, Cage and his wife moved to Seattle, where he gave percussion concerts and wrote his first piece utilizing electronic technology in composition, the Imaginary Landscape No. 1. Also in Seattle, he met a young student at the Cornish School for Performing and Visual Arts, the dancer Merce Cunningham, who was later to become his life partner and artistic collaborator.

In 1942, Cage and his wife moved to New York, where Cunningham was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company. The composer and the dancer began developing dance programs. By 1945, Cage had divorced Xenia and acknowledged Cunningham as his personal as well as his professional partner. The relationship with Cunningham would endure for the rest of Cage's life, which ended in New York City on August 12, 1992.

Cage and Cunningham produced pieces in which the music and dance were created independently but presented simultaneously. The two elements, neither related or unrelated, simply occurred in the same space and time. Their first great success was their ballet The Seasons (1947), which was commissioned by the Ballet Society of New York (later known as the New York City Ballet). After 1953, their preferred venue for their work was the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which is still in existence.

Cage and Cunningham became part of a largely gay circle of New York avant-garde artists that included Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly, who might be said to have anticipated postmodernism in their theories and practices.

Cage is best known for his theories de-emphasizing the role of personal expression in producing art. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, Cage sought to suppress his personal tastes and desires in favor of emulating nature's creative process through the use of chance operations and indeterminacy.

In 1951, Cage discovered the I Ching —the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, a system of divination based on the tossing of coins—and began using it to write music. He would assign musical value (pitch and duration) to all possible combinations of the three coins and write the music much as if he were taking dictation. The resulting compositions may in fact have emotional content but it is derived from the process and is not the result of the composer's intention (as is traditional in Western art).

These chance-derived pieces, once notated, were intended to be performed as written, and, barring the usual interpretive discrepancies, performances tended to be similar. Cage later extended this thinking by writing music in which most or all pertinent decisions related to pitch and tempo were left to the performer, thus yielding radically different performances of the same piece.

Aria (1958), for example, uses a series of colored squiggles rather than conventional bar notation. The performer is instructed to assign a different vocal style to each color and follow the up-and-down direction of the line by singing higher or lower pitches.

Variations IV (1963) takes this approach to its logical conclusion by allowing the performers to employ any sound-making device or action for any length of time.

Another famous work is the Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1952), which uses twelve radios with two performers each, one controlling the tuning dial, the other the volume knob: the performance varies depending on what is being broadcast at any particular time.

Cage's practice of decentralizing the process of composition shifts the responsibility of creating meaning from the producer to the audience. Art is no longer solely in the hands of the artist but becomes an act of attentive observation and organization on the part of the viewer/listener/ receiver. In this way, Cage's work follows the model of meditation.

Undoubtedly Cage's most famous (or notorious) example of this compositional process is the work entitled 4'33" (1952), in which a pianist sits silently at a piano for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting, Cage's work asks the listener to create a world of sound out of silence.

Cage introduced his ideas to an entire generation of artists through his teaching. In addition to numerous visiting appointments throughout the United States, he taught for extended periods at the School for Social Research in New York and at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He encouraged students to look outside themselves for inspiration and to think of art not as selfexpression but as self-alteration.

The abstract character of Cage's works does not present many opportunities to read them as "gay" works. Only a few pieces seem to have what might be considered autobiographical content, but his process does provide what might be considered a democratic attitude toward sound in which all sounds (including those generally considered noise) are valued equally. Silence itself is valued as much as any notes actually performed.

Art historian Jonathan D. Katz has suggested that

Cage's ironic emphasis on the importance of silence in music reflects a political position related to the imposed silence of the closet prevalent in 1950s America.

—Jeffery Byrd

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Katz, Jonathan D. "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse." GLQ 5.2 (1999): 231-252.

Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman, eds. John Cage: Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Revill, David. The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

Castrati

CASTRATI (SINGULAR FORM: CASTRATO) were male singers who were castrated before they reached puberty so as to retain their high voices. This practice, while not exactly commonplace, persisted in Europe from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and reached its height in the eighteenth century. It was, moreover, exploitative; castrati were usually poor boys, often orphans, and the operation itself was of dubious legality.

The justification for this extreme measure was the result of various dictates of the Catholic Church during the years following the Reformation. As certain scriptural passages called for women remaining silent in church, their voices were banned from choirs; therefore, in order to retain the four-part harmonies of polyphonic church music, the mutilation of young boys was deemed an acceptable sacrifice in the name of divine service.

As adults, castrati were capable of singing in the vocal range usual for female contraltos and, in some instances, sopranos, but with much stronger projection.

Castrati first entered papal service toward the end of the sixteenth century, and their numbers quickly increased. Simultaneously, they began to appear in opera, usually performing heroic male roles, such as Nerone in Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea (1642), the title role in George Frideric Handel's Giulio Cesare (1724), and Orfeo in Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). In regions where the Catholic Church banned women from performing on stage, castrati performed female roles as well.

Castrati reached the height of their popularity from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this time, they were the major stars of the operatic stage and enjoyed the reputations and behaviors of latter-day female divas. They drew large fees for their performances, took fantastic stage names, were known for temperamental and capricious conduct on the stage and off, and, despite their mutilation, were said to engage in sexual intrigues of every sort with both sexes.

The most celebrated among them were Senesino (Francesco Bernardi, 1680-1750), Farinelli (Carlo Broschi, 1705-1782), and Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano, 1710-1783).

Operatic roles for castrati continued to be written by major composers such as Mozart, Rossini, and Meyerbeer through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But with the Napoleonic wars and the diminishing of papal powers, the practice of castration for musical purposes was more often seen as cruel and inhumane.

Women, moreover, had been seen and heard on the operatic stage with much greater frequency since the eighteenth century, and, with fewer castrati available, female contraltos in male attire took over their roles. The last two known castrati were Domenico Mustafá (1829-1912), who was director of the pope's Sistine Choir from 1860 to 1898, and Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922). In 1903, Pope Pius X banned castrati from papal choirs; Moreschi was, nonetheless, a member of the Sistine Choir until 1913.

Castrati were not necessarily homosexual, though many seem to have conducted affairs with either sex or both. They nevertheless occupy a "queer" space in cultural history, since their peculiar situation as emasculated men rendered them less than masculine according to societal norms, even as their performances made them objects of admiration and even envy.

Embodying the roles of women and male heroes alike, they blurred distinctions of sex and gender. Accordingly, these shape-shifters have retained a certain queer appeal- as evinced by their presence in such contemporary works as Anne Rice's novel A Cry to Heaven (1982) and Gérard

Corbiau's film Farinelli (1994)—long after they have ceased to exist.

—Patricia Juliana Smith

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gilman, Todd S. "The Italian (Castrato) in London." The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 49-70.

Heriot, Angus. The Castrati in Opera. London: Calder and Boyars, 1975.

Miller, Felicia. "Farinelli's Electronic Hermaphrodite and the Contralto Tradition." The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 73-92.

Poizat, Michel. The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Arthur Denner, trans. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Reynolds, Margaret. "Ruggiero's Deceptions, Cherubino's Distractions." En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 132-151.

Rice, Anne. A Cry to Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Rosselli, John. Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Cheung, Leslie (1956-2003)

LESLIE CHEUNG FIRST GAINED LEGIONS OF FANS IN Asia as a pop singer. He went on to a successful career as an actor, appearing in sixty films, including the award-winning Farewell My Concubine (1993). Androgynously handsome, he sometimes played sexually ambiguous characters, as well as romantic leads in both gay- and heterosexually-themed films.

Leslie Cheung, born Cheung Kwok-Wing on September 12, 1956, was the tenth and youngest child of a Hong Kong tailor whose clients included Alfred Hitchcock and William Holden.

At the age of twelve, Cheung was sent to boarding school in England. There he adopted the English name Leslie, in part because he admired Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind, but also because the name is "very unisex."

Cheung studied textiles at Leeds University, but when he returned to Hong Kong, he did not go into his father's profession. He entered a music talent contest on a Hong Kong television station and took second prize with his rendition of Don McLean's "American Pie."

His appearance in the contest led to acting roles in soap operas and drama series, and also launched his singing career. His first album, The Wind Blows On (1981), was a bestseller in Asia and established him as a rising star in the "Cantopop" style. He would eventually make over twenty albums in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Quickly gaining an enthusiastic fan following, Cheung played concerts in packed theaters, auditoriums, and stadiums. Although never as well known in North America, Cheung drew full houses for his concerts at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 2000, for which tickets cost as much as $238.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Cheung also pursued a movie career. His first film was the soft-porn Erotic Dream of the Red Chamber (1978).

In his next film, Patrick Tam's Nomad (1982), Cheung played a young man fixated on his mother. The initial version included a scene in which Cheung's character, clad only in underwear, fondled himself while talking on the telephone with his mother. Hong Kong censors objected, and the scene had to be reshot with Cheung in trousers.

Cheung had a featured role as a rookie policeman in John Woo's 1986 crime thriller A Better Tomorrow, one of the films that established the Hong Kong action genre. He also appeared in the movie's two sequels (1987 and 1989).

In 1989, Cheung was one of the stars of Stanley Kwan's Rouge, a stylish drama in which he played a young man who falls in love with a courtesan who is dressed as a man when he first encounters her. The young man reneges on a suicide pact with his sweetheart, whose ghost returns to visit him fifty years later.

Cheung also starred in Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild (1990), this time as a callous, womanizing playboy, a role that earned him the Best Actor Prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards.

Shortly after this success, Cheung announced his retirement from his singing career and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, for a period.

The actor next went to China to make Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993). The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, but was banned in China because of its homosexual theme.

In Farewell My Concubine, Cheung played a young actor at the Peking Opera who specializes in women's roles. This was in accordance with the Opera's tradition that all characters, male and female, be portrayed by men. In preparation for his role, Cheung spent months studying the conventional movements and gestures used by the Opera's actors for such parts. He also learned the dialect of Beijing for the film.

Cheung's character in Farewell My Concubine is a boy who is made to chant "I am by nature a girl, not a boy" to prepare him for a career impersonating women. The youth is befriended by one of the Opera's leading men, of whom he becomes enamored. Critic Jay Carr called Cheung's performance the "most affecting and unceasingly fascinating" of the film.

Cheung next appeared in Peter Chan's gender-bending comedy He's a Woman, She's a Man (1995), playing a man who falls in love with a woman disguised as a man.

In Chen Kaige's Temptress Moon (1996), Cheung starred as an unsympathetic heterosexual character, a manipulative, blackmailing gigolo. Although the film was considered somewhat flawed, critic Stephen Holden described Cheung's performance as "arresting."

Cheung played one of a pair of gay lovers in Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997), an ironically titled piece because the couple, who make a trip to Argentina to rekindle their relationship, fail to find their longed-for happiness.

Cheung's personal situation was more fortunate. After making Happy Together, he came out publicly and acknowledged his lover, Tong Hock Tak, a banker. Speculation about Cheung's sexual orientation had been rife for some years, but he had always dodged questions, fearing that revealing his relationship might be deleterious to Tong's career. By this time, however, Cheung's fortune—skillfully managed by Tong—had grown to the point that Tong was able to retire from his job.

Still, coming out was not without risk for Cheung, since very few star Asian entertainers are openly gay. In Cheung's case, as the journalist Ronald Bergan reported, "the move did nothing to diminish his following; it only increased it."

In the late 1990s, Cheung resumed his singing career.

His comeback album, Legend (1997), was a great success, and several more bestsellers followed. He returned to the concert stage as well, and in 2000 played a year-long "Passion" tour, described by Allan Hunter as "noted for the kind of spectacular costume changes and flamboyant attitude that would have made Liberace seem selfeffacing." His onstage wardrobe featured eight outfits by Jean-Paul Gaultier, including a white tuxedo with angel wings, gold hot pants, and a "naughty skirt."

In reviving his singing career, Cheung made music videos, one of which featured a pas de deux with a Japanese male ballet dancer so sexy that it was banned by Hong Kong's top channel, TVB.

In his last film, Law Chi-Leung's Inner Senses (2002), Cheung played a psychiatrist tempted by evil spirits to kill himself.

Thus, fans who heard of Cheung's suicide on April 1, 2003, hoped at first that the story might be a macabre April Fool's Day joke. But soon they learned that Cheung had indeed taken his own life by jumping from a twentyfourth- floor balcony at Hong Kong's Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Cheung had long suffered from depression and reportedly had tried to commit suicide the previous year by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. He left a note in which he thanked Tong, his family, and his friends, but concluded poignantly, "I have not done one single bad thing in my life. Why is it like that?"

Disconsolate fans quickly created a shrine at the spot of Cheung's death. Their memorial offerings of flowers, notes, personal mementos, and photographs covered half a block. Admirers of all ages joined in paying tribute to the popular artist.

—Linda Rapp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bergan, Ronald. "Leslie Cheung: Asian Actor and Pop Star Famed for His Androgynous Performances on Stage and Screen." Guardian (London), April 5, 2003.

Carr, Jay. " 'Farewell My Concubine' Holds an Unflattering Mirror to China." Boston Globe, October 29, 1993.

Corliss, Richard, and Stephen Short. "Forever Leslie." Time (International Edition), May 7, 2001, 44.

Goodman, Peter S. "Farewell to a Troubled Star and a City's High Times." Washington Post, April 5, 2003.

Hartl, John. " 'Farewell My Concubine' Latest Film to Explore World of Sexual Ambiguity—a First for China." Seattle Times, October 24, 1993.

Holden, Stephen. "A 'Gone with the Wind' in China, without War." New York Times, October 5, 1996.

Hunter, Allan. "Leslie Cheung." Scotsman, April 3, 2003.

Mizui, Yoko. "Gender Bender from H.K." Daily Yomiuri, November 30, 1995.

Rayns, Tony. "Leslie Cheung; Pop singer and star of 'Farewell My Concubine.' " Independent (London), April 3, 2003.

Stuart, Jan. "Happy Together." Advocate, November 11, 1997, 67.

Choruses and Bands

SINCE THEY WERE FIRST ESTABLISHED IN THE 1970s, lesbian and gay musical organizations have grown remarkably in number, size, and sophistication. Their many concerts, recordings, and events are among the most striking examples of communal expression within the gay and lesbian subculture.

Most medium and large North American cities boast gay and lesbian choruses, as do many cities in Europe and Oceania. These organizations have evolved to become much more than musical institutions. As representatives of gay and lesbian communities, they generate powerful political and social expression both for and between those communities, through texts and symbolism as well as through the sheer emotional power of music.

As alternatives to a bar/club culture, they are catalysts for the creation of solidarity and commonality among individuals often marginalized by the larger society.

Early Lesbian and Gay Musical Groups

Lesbian musical organizations began appearing in the 1970s. The earliest of these, called Women Like Me, was established by composer Roberta Kosse in 1971 in New York. The ensemble mostly performed Kosse's own works. It disbanded in 1980.

Hester Brown started the Victoria Woodhull All-Women's Marching Band in 1973 in New York. She named the group for a nineteenth-century feminist presidential candidate. The band played for the first Susan B. Anthony Day celebration and for three of the New York Gay Liberation Day parades. Although the Woodhull Band was not exclusively lesbian, its theme song was "When the Dykes Go Marching In."

Catherine Roma founded the oldest chorus still in operation, the Anna Crusis Women's Choir, in 1975 in Philadelphia. This group has since joined the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA), becoming its senior member.

On the West Coast, vocalist and conductor Sue Fink established the Los Angeles Community Women's Chorus in early 1976.

The Gotham Male Chorus was founded in New York in late 1977 by conductor Donald Rock, who wanted a chorus that would "dig music as well as each other." In 1980, this group added women to become the Stonewall

Chorale, the first of the gay and lesbian mixed-voice ensembles.

The Legacy of Jon Sims

The San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band & Twirling Corps, the first such organization to declare a gay or lesbian identity by name, was founded in June 1978 by Jon Reed Sims (1947-1984). It made its first public appearance later that month at the city's Gay Pride Day parade.

After the establishment of the Band & Twirling Corps, Sims founded in rapid succession the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus (November 1978, at the public memorial for slain City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone), Golden Gate Performing Arts (an administrative organization, March 1979), the orchestra Lambda Pro Musica, and the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Men's Community Chorus.

Sims's work inspired a network of gay and lesbian instrumental and choral ensembles that came into existence with remarkable speed.

Choruses were soon founded in Los Angeles (July 1979), Seattle (September 1979), and Chicago (October 1979). A 1981 national tour by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus inspired the founding of choruses and bands in many other cities.

Sims directed the Band & Twirling Corps until January 1982. Under his leadership, the Corps presented concerts at such important San Francisco venues as the Louise Davies Symphony Hall, Grace Cathedral, and the famous disco Dreamland.

Sims died of AIDS in San Francisco on July 16, 1984. From the beginning, he intended to create a national network of gay and lesbian instrumental and choral ensembles. The success of that network, both during his lifetime and after, remains an astonishing legacy.

Sister Singers Network and GALA

In 1981, the Sister Singers Network was established among the women's and lesbian choruses. In 2002 it had fortyfive choruses as members. It has produced a number of regional, national, and international women's choral festivals and encourages cooperation and sharing of resources among its members.

The first organizational meeting of what later became GALA (the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses) occurred in June 1981 in Chicago. That meeting involved a number of directors and founders of ensembles, including Jerry Carlson (Chicago Gay Men's Chorus, later the Los Angeles Gay Men's Chorus); Dennis Coleman (Seattle Men's Chorus); Richard Garrin (Chicago's Windy City Gay Chorus); Dick Kramer (San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus); Gary Miller (New York City Gay Men's Chorus); and Susan Schleef (Chicago's Artemis Singers).

In 1982 in San Francisco, at the first Gay Games, fourteen of the choruses met for the First West Coast Choral Festival. This meeting led to the establishment of the GALA Choruses Network that same year, with Jay Davidson of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus as its first President.

In addition to the choruses that belong to GALA, at least seventy other gay and lesbian choruses are in existence, including the members of the Sister Singers Network and a number of independent groups.

GALA Festivals

The first national GALA Festival, held in New York in 1983, was called COAST ("Come Out and Sing Together") and attracted twelve choruses with some 1, 200 members. This event was followed by festivals in Minneapolis

(1986), Seattle (1989), Denver (1992), Tampa (1996), and San Jose (2000). Each festival has shown a steady increase both in attendance and GALA membership.

In 2004, the GALA Festival was held in Montreal. This is the first festival to be hosted by a Canadian city.

Since 1995, GALA events have also included Small Ensemble Festivals, which showcase the numerous chamber and popular ensembles that have emerged from the larger choruses.

In addition to officially sponsored GALA festivals, member choruses are often involved in regional festivals, as well as guest appearances in each other's cities. For example, the New Orleans Gay Men's Chorus, founded in 1982 by Jerry Zachary, has in recent years scheduled joint concerts with choruses from Houston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Berlin.

In 2002, GALA included 170 choruses with a total of about 8, 000 individual members. These gay male, lesbian, and mixed-voice groups are scattered throughout North America, Europe, and Oceania.

GALA Activities

One of the most important functions of the GALA choruses has been the commissioning of new work by significant, mainly gay or lesbian, composers. Composers commissioned by the GALA choruses include Roger Bourland, David Conte, David Del Tredici, Janice Giteck, Libby Larsen, Holly Near, Ned Rorem, Robert Seeley, Conrad Susa, Gwyneth Walker, and Martin Wesley-Smith.

Many of these commissions have been subsequently published, some of them under the auspices of GALA. Often these works incorporate gay or lesbian issues and concerns, especially the creation of "family" within the community or, less often, specific political issues.

Performers who have appeared with GALA choruses include Maya Angelou, Natalie Cole, Michael Feinstein, Jerry Hadley, Marilyn Horne, Bobby McFerrin, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Mark Morris, Holly Near, Bernadette Peters, Roberta Peters, Diane Schuur, and Frederica von Stade.

GALA choruses have received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and from numerous state and municipal sources, as well as from private supporters and ticket sales. More than 600 thousand individuals purchase tickets to one or more GALA concerts per year. The combined audiences for GALA choruses—including community appearances and television and radio broadcasts—is said to be more than five million.

Repertoire

Although many of the choruses in the larger North American cities are large ensembles (thirty or more singers), most of the European choruses are smaller groups, often oriented toward chamber or cabaret productions.

The repertoire for the lesbian and gay choruses includes the traditional popular and classical choral music for women's and men's, as well as mixed, voices, in addition to many new compositions written for the choruses, as well as new arrangements of popular and classical works.

Instrumental Ensembles

Although they have not resulted in quite so large a network, instrumental ensembles such as concert and marching bands and orchestras have appeared in many cities. Perhaps the most notable of these is the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic of San Francisco.

The Lesbian & Gay Bands of America (LGBA) held its first meeting in Chicago on October 3, 1982. In 2002, it comprised twenty-five ensembles, including bands in North America and Australia. LGBA celebrated its tenth anniversary at the Gay Games in San Francisco in 1992. An ensemble of LGBA members performed at the Clinton Inaugural in 1993. Another celebration took place in Melbourne in 2002.

Programming

Programming concerts for lesbian and gay ensembles is a complex activity, since band and chorus music—especially as performed by same-sex choruses, with their limited pitch range-is not in itself a major attraction in the contemporary marketplace.

Gay and lesbian ensembles must target their communities carefully, presenting music that will appeal to a diverse audience and also further the communal and political aspirations of glbtq communities. This demands a great deal of flexibility in technique and repertoire, as many groups need to connect both with audiences interested in classical music and audiences who listen to a variety of genres of popular music.

Many ensembles find it useful to create traditions such as holiday concerts or yearly productions of stage shows to keep their audiences coming back. Choruses often form smaller ensembles that perform popular work in nontraditional venues such as gay and lesbian bars or cabarets.

Most groups also become a kind of community resource. In addition to their scheduled concerts, they often appear at local community events such as gay pride celebrations, scholarship fundraisers, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) receptions, and Human Rights Campaign dinners.

Organizational Structures

Lesbian and gay ensembles vary widely in their organizational structures. In the 1970s and early 1980s, many groups attempted to create structures that escaped the formal hierarchy of a conductor directing the activities of the group, or avoided the judgmental aspect of auditioning members.

In the long run, many groups found that a committeebased, partially democratic form of the traditional classical ensemble structure enabled them to achieve some continuity. The negotiations between organization and freedom remain an important aspect of the politics of each ensemble as well as an aspect of relations among ensembles.

These tensions sometimes produce conflicts between issues of musical presentation and sociopolitical status. Every lesbian and gay musical ensemble has at some time experienced the pull between the conflicting goals of musical excellence and community service. But despite these conflicts, many groups frequently manage to achieve high levels of musical professionalism.

The gay and lesbian choral movement has had a large impact, not only on gay and lesbian communities and their public image but also on the world of choral music, which has been greatly enlivened by its presence.

—Paul Attinello

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attinello, Paul. "Authority and Freedom: Toward a Sociology of the

Gay Choruses." Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. New York: Routledge, 1994. 315-346.

______. "Sims, John Reed." Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Classical Musicians. Laura Kuhn, ed. New York: Schirmer/Macmillan, 1997. 1263.

Boerger, Kristina. Whose Music Is It Anyway?: Black Vocal Ensemble Traditions and the Feminist Choral Movement: Performance Practice as Politics. D.M.A. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.

Gordon, Eric A. "GALA: The Lesbian and Gay Community of Song." Choral Journal 30.9 (1990): 25-32.

Roma, Catherine. "Choruses, Women's." Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. Bonnie Zimmerman, ed. New York: Garland, 2000. 166-167.

_____. "Women's Choral Communities: Singing for Our Lives." Hotwire 8.1 (January 1992): 36.

Vukovich, Dyana. "The Anna Crusis Women's Choir." Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 4.1, issue 7 (1986): 50-63.

Wise, Matthew. "Choruses and Marching Bands." Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. George E. Haggerty, ed. New York: Garland, 2000. 189-190.

Christian, Meg (b. 1946)

APIONEER IN WOMEN'S MUSIC, MEG CHRISTIAN WAS among the first to address lesbian and feminist issues in her songs. Her commitment to the empowerment of women also led her to become a founding member of Olivia Records, a woman-oriented company.

Christian was born and grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. After graduating from the University of North Carolina with a double major in English and music, she briefly returned to her hometown but moved to Washington, D.C., in 1969 to perform in the city's nightclubs.

While there she had an epiphany. Watching an appearance by feminists Ti-Grace Atkinson and Robin Morgan on the David Frost Show, she was appalled by the host's disrespectful treatment of the women, which caused them to walk off the set. Christian was sufficiently incensed to write a letter to Frost, a move that she called "my first political act."

As a result of her newfound political consciousness Christian drastically changed her repertoire. She began to write her own music and to sing the songs of Cris Williamson in order to speak about women in "a loving, honest, positive way."

Her new focus made her show less commercially viable. Nightclub owners were uninterested in a performer who attracted a mostly female audience, especially an audience with a growing contingent of lesbian fans. Christian therefore took to appearing at alternative venues such as coffeehouses and women's centers.

Participating in the feminist movement gave Christian a sense of empowerment and inclusion. As she commented later, in a 1981 interview, "I certainly thought that I was 'the only one' in about 400 categories until I found the women's movement." During this period (the early 1970s), Christian embraced the idea of separatism. She joined a women's collective and preferred to play concerts before women-only audiences.

In 1973, she met and befriended Cris Williamson. Together with a group of others they founded an allwoman business, Olivia Records. The company's first album was Christian's I Know You Know (1975). Over the next decade she put out three more: Face the Music (1977), Turning It Over (1981), and From the Heart (1984). Olivia also released a compilation album, The Best of Meg Christian, in 1990.

After several years of operation in Washington, D.C., the collective moved Olivia to Oakland, California. The company did so well that in 1983 Stephen Holden of the New York Times dubbed it "one of the record industry's most solid success stories of the last decade."

Christian played an important role in Olivia's success. Her early hits such as "Ode to a Gym Teacher, " which affirmed the value of a role model "who taught me being female meant you could still be strong, " quickly won her fans, whose numbers just kept growing.

Other musicians were admirers as well, and many eagerly joined Christian on Turning It Over . In reviewing the album, Deborah Weiner commented on Christian's "impressive skills as a guitarist, singer, and songwriter" and also cited the "facility and expression of subtle shadings and dramatic textures" of her guitar technique. She praised Christian's contributions to lesbian music, writing, "we...need the intelligence, sensitivity, and humor" of Christian's work.

In addition to recording, Christian toured extensively, playing at music festivals and in concerts. She sometimes appeared with Holly Near, with whom she had a threeyear love affair in the late 1970s. She also performed with Cris Williamson, notably at a Carnegie Hall concert to celebrate Olivia's tenth anniversary.

Christian put tremendous energy into working for both professional success and political causes, but she still felt that she "wasn't being good enough, that there was so much to be done." Under stress, she turned to alcohol. Eventually she recognized the need to get help and enrolled in several recovery programs. At the same time, she became interested in exploring spirituality and began studying Siddha Yoga.

In 1984, she decided to leave the music scene and devote herself entirely to the spiritual life. After traveling to ashrams (religious communities) throughout the world, Christian, who had adopted the first name Shambhavi, settled in one in upstate New York.

Through Siddha Yoga, Christian studied Indian music and instruments. As a result, she produced two CDs, Fire of My Love (1986) and Songs of Ecstasy (1995). The collections include both traditional religious songs and compositions by Christian.

Christian's departure from Olivia had been completely amicable, and she remained on excellent terms with the women there. She was reunited with the organization in 2002, when she performed on a cruise ship for Olivia, which now offers vacation packages for lesbians and their families and friends. Her first public performance in almost twenty years was warmly received. She has returned in subsequent years, giving delighted fans the opportunity once again to enjoy her artistry and her affirming voice for women.

—Linda Rapp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davenport, Katherine. "Meg Talks." off our backs 11 (March 31, 1981): 19.

Harper, Jorjet, and Toni Armstrong, Jr. "Meg Departs." Hotwire 5 (January 31, 1989): 21.

Harrington, Richard. "Heart of a Woman; Meg Christian's Music." Washington Post, November 3, 1981.

Holden, Stephen. "Olivia Records Is a Success in 'Women's Music.' " New York Times, November 4, 1983.

Near, Holly, and Derk Richardson. Fire in the Rain...Singer in the Storm: An Autobiography. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990.

Weiner, Deborah. "Turning It Over." off our backs 11 (December 31, 1981): 26.

Classical Music

THE TERM CLASSICAL MUSIC IS A CONVENIENT SHORTHAND that refers to the body of Western art music, as distinguished from popular or folk music, composed from approximately 800 A.D. to the present.

Music history is generally divided into large stylistic periods. These periods and their approximate date ranges are: Medieval (prior to 1400), Renaissance (1400-1600), Baroque (1600-1750), Classical (1750-1820), Romantic (1820-1900), and Modern (1900-present). Many genres are represented in this long history, including chant, madrigal, motet, cantata, mass, requiem, concerto, quartet, symphony, opera, and song, to name only the most popular.

Although the terms gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual are modern in origin and anachronistic when applied to premodern periods, in almost every era composers and musicians were known to be attracted to their own sex or wrote music that can now be understood as having particular interest for glbtq people. And one genre in particular, opera, has especially captured the hearts of gay men.

The presence in earlier musical eras of people we would now identify as gay or lesbian is apparent primarily through contextual clues rather than hard evidence or explicit documentation. Hence, the identification of individuals as evincing same-sex desire is sometimes highly controversial.

Pre-Baroque Music

As a result of its unfamiliar aesthetics, its largely ecclesiastical subject matter, and the predominance of vocal music, often in foreign languages, the music of periods prior to the Baroque is the least known and appreciated by modern listeners. A few works, however, have been used in movie soundtracks (such as the chant "Miserere, " by Gregorio Allegri, which is used in Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's film of E. M. Forster's Maurice) or appear on novelty Christmas CDs (as in the popular Chant Noël ).

The earlier the period, the slighter the surviving evidence as to the sexual orientation or affectional preference of composers or performers, and the more difficult it is to construct a case for same-sex attraction. However, much early music was composed within all-male or all-female subcultures, as in monasteries, priories, or convents, and homosocial elements may sometimes be discerned in the music, as, for example, in the texts and contexts of twelfth-century Notre Dame polyphony.

The strong emotional attachment of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) to her disciple and assistant, Richardis von Stade, is well attested. Hildegard's liturgical cycle, the Symphoniae, which expresses physical and spiritual desire for the Virgin Mary, has frequently been regarded as homoerotic.

A thirteenth-century woman, Bieiris (or Bieris) de Romans, is credited as the author of the only surviving example of a secular lesbian love song, "Na Maria, pretz e fina valors."

Records exist of the Netherlands composer Nicholas Gombert (ca. 1490-ca. 1556) having violated a boy in the Holy Roman Emperor's service and being sentenced to the galleys for a period in exile on the high seas. This incident resulted in his removal as a priest (or canon) in the cathedral of Tournai, so we can infer homosexual interest (or at least pedophilia) on Gombert's part. Other Renaissance composers who were likely attracted to their own sex include the Burgundian Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1400-1474), the Netherlander Orlando di Lasso (1532-1594), and the Italian Madalena Casulana (ca. 1540- ca. 1590), the first published woman composer.

The Baroque Period

Baroque music is one of the most popular and well-known classical music styles today—thanks largely to Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann, and George Frideric Handel. Baroque music features a clear harmonic structure with well-marked cadences, generally functional harmony (it sounds "right" to modern ears), and clear and memorable melodic lines.

One of the most famous of the Baroque composers is George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)-best known for Messiah and the Music for the Royal Fireworks . He left tantalizing clues suggesting his same-sex sexual orientation. Still a controversial claim, the gist of the argument is that Handel apparently never slept with women, so he must have slept with men.

Gary Thomas, in Queering the Pitch, the seminal collection of essays edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Thomas, argues that the circumlocutions used by Handel's earliest biographers in an effort to avoid addressing this issue support the conclusion that they believed Handel must have been homosexual.

Thomas also discusses milieus in which Handel may have circulated with some impunity: molly houses (the eighteenth-century equivalent of a gay bar) and Italy; yet he leaves a final answer to the question open for further investigation.

In passing, Thomas also mentions the great likelihood that composer Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713) was at least a Cardinal's kept boy in Rome. Other Baroque composers believed to be involved in homosexual liaisons are Jean- Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) and Johann Rosenmüller (ca. 1619-1684).

Francesca Caccini (1587-1641), a professional singer and composer of both sacred and secular music, and often credited as the first woman opera composer, apparently lived a woman-centered life. Her work, including the Florentine court opera La liberazione di Ruggiero dall' isola d'Alcina (1625), has been interpreted as strongly gynocentric. This opera, for example, uses the normative master plot reinforcing patriarchal monarchy to show how the female coregents of Florence might win by playing within the rules rather than lose by being perceived as too ambitious.

Sometimes, individual pieces by composers seem to be homophilic and thus subversive in nature. Or, conversely, composers sometimes alter their sources to disguise the homoeroticism that may have inspired their work. For example, Lydia Hamessley, in Queering the Pitch, argues that Henry Lawes deliberately misreads an erotic poem of attraction between women by Katherine Philips in his 1655 musical setting of the work to weaken the meaning of the text and reinforce the heterosexual norm. Playing against expected types in opera is also a means of exploring nonheterosexual ways of being.

The Classical and Romantic Periods

Music of the period of Mozart, Haydn, and (all but late) Beethoven is characterized by a slowing of harmonic rhythm (how rapidly the harmony changes), greater stability, an emphasis on gracefulness and balance, and a move from vocal toward instrumental compositions.

If the scholarly disagreements over Handel's alleged homosexuality are heated, even more contentious is the controversy over the strong likelihood that Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was also homosexual. Schubert is a transitional figure who bridges the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Romantic period.

The Romantic style is characterized by a loosening of the harmonic and melodic rules, an increased emphasis on new harmonies, harmonic relationships, and dissonance (clashing or discordant sounds), a heightened emotional expressiveness, and the rise of the piano as a favored compositional medium.

Schubert chose to compose along a deliberately different path from that outlined by the aggressive and hypermasculine Beethoven, who was held up as the model and measure for composers until at least World War I.

Music historians have remarked on a studied, carefully planned and executed deviance in Schubert's choice of materials and, especially, his harmonies—in particular, the progression to keys related by the interval of a third rather than the more conventional dominant-tonic or fifth-related progression—and also in his creation of formal musical structures in sonata-allegro form, the traditional form of a first movement in the Classical and Romantic periods.

As a result of these tendencies, Schubert has often been dismissed as a "feminine" or weak composer, and this perceived femininity is sometimes related to his alleged homosexuality.

Much of the evidence for Schubert's homosexual orientation is circumstantial but nevertheless strong. It includes Schubert's own journal entries, accounts of him by his friends, and existing letters between Schubert and his friends. Schubert certainly moved in homophilic, if not actually homosexual, circles, and some of his close friends were jailed on morals charges; but the case for Schubert's own homosexuality, while very suggestive, is not yet considered conclusive among scholars.

Although the composer and critic Robert Schumann (1810-1856) once contrasted the "masculine" Beethoven (1770-1827) to the "feminine" Schubert, Beethoven's intense preoccupation with his own adopted nephew has invited speculation from some twentieth-century writers and filmmakers about his sexual orientation.

Similarly, the complicated, but apparently unconsummated, relationship between Schumann and Johannes Brahms has also been the subject of speculation.

More certain is the bisexuality of Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).

The end of the Romantic period brought two further composers who were likely to have been homosexual: Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) and the lesserknown Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921).

Tchaikovsky, well known for his ballets Swan Lake, Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty, his symphonies (especially the sixth, Pathétique ), and the ever-popular 1812 Overture, was alleged to have committed suicide because, so the story goes, his sexual involvement with a minor noble of the Russian Imperial Court was about to be revealed, creating a scandal that would have ruined him. The composer's death of cholera is reliably documented, but there is some question whether he knowingly drank untreated water, or was forced to do so.

Interestingly, Tchaikovsky is also the first documented case of "gay-bashing" among composers: Reviews of his works went from raves to scathing denunciations once the allegation of homosexuality became known. Perhaps for this reason, he has been a particular favorite among gay men, who have widely embraced the Pathétique Symphony as a musical sketch of unrequited homosexual love.

Best known for his Carnival of the Animals and Symphony no. 3 ("Organ" Symphony), Saint-Saëns was a prolific composer and mentor to the next generation of composers, including Gabriel Fauré, André Messager, and Eugène Gigout. Self-identified as a pederast, Saint-Saëns spent a great deal of time in North Africa, both to fulfill his desire for Arab boys and to absorb musical inspiration from the exotic locales.

Other lesser-known composers of the late Romantic period also thought to be homosexual are Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), a Frenchman who wrote miniature pieces and songs; Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), whose sexuality is revealed in a close reading of her letters and diaries in conjunction with her compositions; Ernest Chausson (1855-1899), best known for his Poème de l'amour et de la mer ; and Modeste Mussorgsky (1839-1881), composer of the popular Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain .

Many of Smyth's compositions, including her Songs of Sunrise, were probably inspired by her passion for militant suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.

Even Edward Elgar (1857-1934), heterosexually married and a stalwart Roman Catholic, and best known in the United States for his Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1, frequently used at commencement ceremonies, is thought by some to have had a homosexual affair with August Jaeger, the dedicatee of the Nimrod variation (no. 9) of the "Enigma" Variations.

The Twentieth Century to the Present

The common musical language recognizable from the Renaissance to the early part of the twentieth century was stretched to breaking and dissolution by the end of World War I.

New ideas about dissonance and its emancipation (that is, freeing dissonance from its traditional function as a momentary heightening of tension) were championed especially by the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). These ideas led to freely atonal works (compositions not written in a traditional key) and twelvetone, or dodecaphonic, music, but also opened the door for other experiments in classical music, including the incorporation of jazz and non-Western musical forms and instruments.

Gay and lesbian musicians, who are more easily identified in this period than in earlier ones, have been at the forefront of twentieth-century music. A short list of the great composers of the century who were gay would necessarily include such giants as Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and Aaron Copland (1900-1990), plus a number of others both well known and beloved, including Karol Szymanowski, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Gian Carlo Menotti, Francis Poulenc, Manuel de Falla, and Virgil Thomson. Similarly, many celebrated gay performers and conductors were active in twentiethcentury music. Some closely related fields, such as ballet and modern dance, as well as opera, are also heavily populated by gay and lesbian artists.

Several famous lesbian salons, including those associated with Natalie Barney (1876-1972), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), and the Princess de Polignac (1865-1943), emphasized classical music, among other arts. Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), perhaps the greatest composition teacher of the century, not only frequented these circles, but numbered among her students such talented gay composers as Copland, Gian Carlo Menotti (b. 1911), Ned Rorem (b. 1923), and Virgil Thomson (1896-1989).

Gay men and lesbians also have often been among the most experimental musicians of the experimental twentieth century. For example, Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964), and Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) incorporated jazz rhythms, harmonies, new instruments, and melodic coloration into the classical language. The conductor and composer Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) introduced challenging music to classical music audiences all over the world, especially in Minneapolis and New York, though his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic was shortened as a result of rumors about his homosexuality.

Others, such as Copland, Thomson, Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), and Henry Cowell (1897-1965) explored the richness of folk music and dance traditions, expanding their musical idiom to include nontraditional types of harmony—for example, modal (based on Medieval church modes), quartal, and quintal (based on fourths and fifths instead of thirds).

Gay composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003) introduced Eastern influences and new instruments such as the Indonesian gamelan, or gong orchestra, into the common language.

Other gay composers achieved prominence in opera, including Britten, Menotti, Samuel Barber (1910-1981), and Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926). Composers such as Blitzstein and Bernstein often blurred the distinction between operatic music and more popular musical theater, a practice in which they were followed by David Del Tredici (b. 1937) and the most successful contemporary composer for the musical theater, Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930).

Perhaps the most experimental of all twentieth-century composers is John Cage (1912-1992), whose lover and collaborator was the pathbreaking choreographer Merce Cunningham (b. 1919). Cage broke all the rules of compositional control by including chance, or aleatoric, processes in his music. Among his most famous works is the piece entitled 4'33", which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.

Among the leading contemporary gay composers and conductors are the Pulitzer Prize- and Academy Award- winning composer John Corigliano, who has written moving music in response to the AIDS crisis; and Michael Tilson Thomas, who as music director of the San Francisco Symphony has commissioned music by openly gay composer David Del Tredici set to poems about gay life by authors such as Thom Gunn and Allen Ginsberg.

One could expand this list of gay and lesbian figures in classical music considerably-it is by no means exhaustive. What is not clear is whether there are more gay and lesbian composers today than in previous periods or we can simply recognize them more easily today. In any case, gay men and lesbians have had a sizable impact on the world of classical music and continue to shape its future.

—Mario Champagne

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackmer, Corinne E., and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Brett, Philip, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.

GLSG Newsletter. The Gay & Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society (1991-).

Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Kopelson, Kevin. Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Kramer, Lawrence, ed. "Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture." Nineteenth-Century Music 17.1 (Summer 1993).

Solie, Ruth, ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Cliburn, Van (b. 1934)

THE YOUNG AMERICAN PIANIST VAN CLIBURN GAINED sudden worldwide fame in 1958 when, at the height of the Cold War, he won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. Critics praised his technique and virtuosity, and Americans hailed him as a hero. Cliburn embarked on an ambitious performing and recording career that garnered numerous awards and brought him international acclaim. Since 1962 he has sponsored a quadrennial International Piano Competition that bears his name. He retired from the stage in 1978 and resumed limited concert appearances only in 1989.

Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Jr. was born on July 12, 1934, in Shreveport, Louisiana, where his father, Harvey Lavan Cliburn, was working as a purchase and sales representative for an oil company. His mother, Rildia Bee O'Bryan Cliburn, was a piano teacher. She was to exert a major influence on the life and career of her only child.

Rildia Bee Cliburn was a serious and talented pianist. She attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and then the New York School of Musical Art, where she studied with Arthur Friedheim, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. The playing style that she learned and in turn taught to her son reflected the musical trends of the late nineteenth century.

Mrs. Cliburn hoped to be a concert pianist, but her parents considered such a career inappropriate for a woman, and so she went home to Texas and began giving piano lessons.

Van Cliburn started studying piano with her when he was three years old. By the age of four, he was performing with a children's church group.

In 1941, the Cliburn family moved to Kilgore, Texas. Cliburn performed at various venues in the area, earning a reputation as a prodigy. At twelve, he played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1 with the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

In 1951, Cliburn entered the Juilliard School, where he studied with Rosina Lhévinne. She brought a Russian romanticism to his style that was admirably suited to the repertoire he favored.

Cliburn's talent garnered him numerous awards. He won the Dealey Award and the Kosciuszko Foundation's Chopin Prize in 1952, and the Juilliard concerto competition the following year. In 1954, he won the Roeder Award and the Edgar M. Leventritt Foundation Award, the latter bringing him the opportunity to play with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. After graduating with honors later that year, Cliburn began touring as a solo performer.

The turning point in Cliburn's life came in 1958, when he won the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. His performance awed critics. Composer Aram Khachaturian declared Cliburn's rendition of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 3 better than that of Rachmaninoff himself.

The response of the American public to Cliburn's triumph was based at least as much on politics as on aesthetics. Having been beaten at the space race when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, Americans were eager for a victory of their own. Cliburn's success in Moscow gave them not only that but a classic American hero to boot. Tall, boyishly handsome, accomplished and charming yet modest, Cliburn was lionized by the press and embraced by the public.

Distrust between the superpowers was such that there were persistent rumors that Soviet officials had tried to pressure the judges to give the prize to a Russian, but that pianist Sviatoslav Richter had insisted that it go, deservedly, to Cliburn, and that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev himself had ratified the decision.

Cliburn was given a ticker-tape parade in New York upon his return from the competition and appeared on television shows such as Person to Person, What's My Line? and The Tonight Show. His recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 1 shared the top of the LP charts with Johnny Mathis's Greatest Hits album and the soundtrack from South Pacific. It became the first classical music album to sell a million copies within two years.

Cliburn was much in demand on the concert tour. He gave almost a hundred performances a year. His appearances in 1960 included a tour of the Soviet Union, where he was an audience favorite.

By the mid-1960s, however, the adulatory reviews for Cliburn were becoming mixed. Critics complained that he had not expanded his repertoire much beyond the works that had brought him the Tchaikovsky prize and showed little interest in doing so. Although Cliburn's repertoire was in fact wider than such comments suggested, it is true that the core of his program changed little over time.

By the beginning of the 1970s, Cliburn's grueling concert schedule had taken a toll on him. His playing had become erratic, and critics continued to harp on his lack of musical growth. In 1974, Cliburn announced that after completing the concerts to which he was then committed he would take a respite from the stage. After September 1978, he did not perform publicly until 1989, when he began accepting a limited number of concert dates.

Cliburn retired to a lavish house in Fort Worth, Texas, and became prominent on the local music scene. Among the projects to which he devoted his time was the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which he founded in 1962 and which is held quadrennially in Fort Worth.

In 1996, Thomas E. Zaremba filed a palimony suit against Cliburn, claiming that due to "an oral and/or implied partnership agreement" he was entitled to a share of Cliburn's income and property. Zaremba asserted that he had assisted in the management of Cliburn's career and finances as well as performing domestic services such as helping Cliburn care for his aged mother. Zaremba further alleged that Cliburn may have exposed him to AIDS during their seventeen-year relationship, which lasted until around the end of 1994, after which Zaremba moved to Center Line, Michigan, where he found work as a mortician.

Cliburn called the accusations "salacious" but otherwise had little to say about the case. Indeed, though always described as gracious and polite, Cliburn is known to be notoriously difficult to interview. Music insiders had long been aware of his homosexuality, and he and Zaremba had appeared together at public functions in Fort Worth, but in Cliburn's thirty-plus years as a celebrity, the press had never linked him romantically with anyone.

The public's image of him was still that of an elevenyear-old American boy—he seemed almost frozen in time at the moment of his victory in Moscow. There is ample evidence in his habits for this image: He is a lifelong Baptist and a regular churchgoer, neither drinks nor 54 Cliburn, Van smokes, lived with his mother until her death at 97, and begins his concerts with "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Zaremba's lawsuit was eventually dismissed due to the lack of a written agreement, which is required under Texas law.

In December 2001, Cliburn was among the artists feted at the Kennedy Center Honors. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, herself a pianist, praised Cliburn's "grace and lyricism" and "the power of his music to build bridges across the cultural and political divide."

—Linda Rapp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas, Jack, and Wayne Lee Gay. "Man Sues Van Cliburn for Millions." Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 30, 1996.

Horowitz, Joseph. "As Ever, Cliburn Does It His Way." New York Times, April 28, 1991.

Page, Tim. "For Van Cliburn, An Early Crescendo." Washington Post, December 2, 2001.

Recio, Maria. "Cliburn Saluted at Gala." Fort Worth Star-Telegram, December 3, 2001.

Reich, Howard. Van Cliburn. Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993.

Steinberg, Michael. "Cliburn, Van." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Stanley Sadie, ed. New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2001. 16:55.

Teachout, Terry. "Two fallen stars." Commentary 106.1 (July 1998): 55-59.

Conductors

In spite of the presence of many gay, lesbian, and bisexual figures in the field of classical music, it is difficult to identify more than a handful of self-identified, openly gay or lesbian conductors even in the early years of the twenty-first century. As well, it is difficult to find much explicit discussion of the relationship between homosexuality and conducting. Yet the invisibility of sexual minorities on the podium should in no way diminish their very real, if often overlooked, contributions to classical music.

As they gain a more secure place in the profession and more visibility, openly gay and lesbian conductors no longer fear explicit persecution, and a few have begun to enjoy a tentative and gradual acceptance. In the last twenty-five years, gay and lesbian conductors have used their success both to broaden classical music to speak to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and to use music as an artistic activity around which to organize, strengthen, and heal glbtq communities.

The Rise of the Conductor

Conducting is a relatively new practice in the history of classical music. As the eighteenth century came to a close, a new role and public persona developed for music directors. Before the 1780s and 1790s, the terms conductor and conducting had little or no connection to music. Gradually, the meaning of the terms grew to encompass musical direction, and they acquired new nuances of meaning to coincide with the birth of the modern conductor.

Prior to this development, orchestral and choral directors existed, but they served more as timekeepers than interpreters and often played or sang in the ensembles they directed. Generally speaking, prior to the late eighteenth century, the job of the musical leader was to mark the beat and to maintain an even tempo.

The role was far from consistently fulfilled, and it involved a number of practices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that appear quite foreign—and even humorous-to our notions of conducting. Musicians often rapped large wooden canes, waved handkerchiefs, or stomped loudly before the baton was introduced in the 1820s and became a standard conducting tool in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In musical periods before the Romantic era (roughly 1820-1900), the composer typically found himself directing his own works, especially if he served as an official court or church musician. In this tradition, the Kapellmeister (literally "chapel master, " or provincial conductor) served in many different musical capacities—composer, orchestral organizer, and conductor. Well-known composers such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven often led performances of their music from the keyboard.

As the very structure of classical music began to change, both in terms of the music itself and how it was produced, the roles of composer and conductor grew apart, and the conductor began to take on new functions as interpreter of the score and performance coach of the orchestra and choir.

The need for a professional conductor grew in part from the rhythmic innovations of the music itself. Composers such as Mozart and particularly Haydn and Beethoven began to introduce rhythmic irregularity into their music, altering one of the chief characteristics of the prevailing Classical style. As composers experimented more with various ways of achieving rhythmic variety in a work, such as syncopation (the accenting of "off" beats) and rubato (flexibility of tempo), ensembles had greater need for a director not only to maintain an even tempo and steady beat but also to guide them through the new style of musical expression that such innovations required.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, musicians also began to rely less on the aristocracy and the church and more on public audiences and concerts for support. The new market for music created new professional and artistic independence from the previous system of patronage, but it also demanded higher standards for musicians and greater accountability. The conductor gradually assumed responsibility for the musicianship of the ensembles he directed. (He, that is, for until the latter part of the twentieth century almost all conductors were male.)

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the conductor became increasingly more influential and powerful. He grew into a celebrity in his own right. He was expected to be a charismatic leader who inspired the orchestra, interpreted the music, and attracted audiences to his ensemble's performances.

The Emergence of Gay Conductors

Prior to the consolidation of the role and identity of the conductor in the nineteenth century, many musicians who organized and directed choruses, orchestras, and smaller musical ensembles were also composers. Several of these composer-conductors were known for their involvement in same-sex sexual activity.

The clearest example of the type during this period may be Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), a central figure in French music in the late seventeenth century. In addition to being Louis XIV's royal composer, he is generally credited with primary responsibility for the development of French opera. Although he married Madeleine Lambert and fathered six children, he created a number of scandals because of his sexual relationships with men.

Scholars have much more easily identified conductors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who would now be classified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, even though their sexuality often imperiled their conducting careers or required them to exercise great discretion.

The life and career of Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) highlights the difficulties gay conductors faced in the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, he caused a sensation when he debuted at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. His intensely physical conducting style, ability to conduct from memory without a score, and refusal to conduct with a baton marked him as an innovative and talented conductor. His assumed his first major position as conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; after twelve successful years there, he became the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1950.

But Mitropoulos's tenure at the New York Philharmonic was troubled. In The Maestro Myth, Norman Lebrecht argues that not only did his critics dislike his musical tastes, they also despised him for his homosexuality, which was an open secret in the musical world. As Mitropoulos's popularity waned, critics used his bachelor status and implicit homosexual sensibility against him.

Mitropoulos was ultimately replaced by a man who more adeptly cultivated the proper masculine, heterosexual image that audiences required of their conductors. Ironically, that man was Leonard Bernstein, himself a deeply closeted homosexual.

Exposing the homophobia that pervades the conducting profession, Lebrecht argues that the world of classical music fiercely protects the virile, masculine, mysterious image of the conductor. "Gay conductors, " he writes, "are advised to hide their presumed vice as timidly as any country vicar." Often gay conductors have been free to pursue their sexual inclinations in private, but they have been required to maintain the image of the powerful, heterosexual maestro.

If Aaron Copland (1900-1990) had a relatively easier time succeeding as a gay conductor than did Mitropoulos, it was probably due to the fact that he was a composer as well. Although better known as the "Dean of American Music, " as he came to be called, Copland spent roughly the second half of his career actively conducting.

Early in his education, Copland studied conducting for a short period of time with Albert Wolff, but most of his training in conducting came informally through the opportunities he found to conduct his own early compositions.

During the 1950s, Copland began to pursue professional conducting more actively and expanded his repertoire to include works by other composers, mostly other twentieth-century figures. In January 1958, he conducted the New York Philharmonic; that performance led to an engagement shortly afterward with the London Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble he would work with over the next twenty-five years. From this point, Copland's career as a conductor took off, and he began an international career as a touring guest conductor.

Most critics agree that Copland accepted his homosexuality and was able to live his life in relative openness, even if he would not be regarded as publicly out by today's standards. Copland refrained from commenting explicitly on his sexuality and its relation to his work as a composer. Although the subject of the relationship of sexuality to music is now open to discussion, nothing has yet been written on Copland's sexuality in relation to his conducting.

Interestingly, critics generally tend to describe Copland's music as "masculine" and "manly, " yet his presence on stage conveyed a different impression. As his biographer Howard Pollack notes, "For all his restraint, he cut a boyishly vigorous figure on the podium." Other critics have noted his "verve, " "élan, " and "zest" while conducting.

Given the difficulties Copland experienced in garnering respect from some of the American orchestras he worked with, it is tempting to speculate on the impact his sexuality—implicitly communicated or otherwise—may have 56 Conductors had on his reception by the conservative classical music establishment.

Whereas Copland may have come to terms with his sexuality somewhat quietly and discreetly, it could be argued that Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) never fully solved the puzzle that his homosexual desires presented him.

Married to the actress Felicia Montaleagre in 1951, Bernstein was well aware at that time of his sexual attraction to men. Unable to reconcile that attraction with his desire to be heterosexual, he remained committed to Montaleagre for most of his life, even as he pursued relationships with men. He remained conflicted over his homosexuality throughout his life.

If Bernstein's response to his sexuality was different from his one-time mentor Copland's, so, too, was his conducting career. Known for his dramatic presence in front of an orchestra, he was undeniably the most successful American conductor of the twentieth century (over the objections of critics who felt that his style was overly extravagant).

Bernstein's accomplishments were many. In succeeding Mitropoulos as music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, he became the first Americanborn conductor to lead one of the premier orchestras of the United States. Scholars credit him, along with other American composers and conductors, including Copland, with transforming classical music by creating a distinctly American idiom within a musical tradition that had been up to that time largely dominated by Europeans.

After assuming his role at the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein used his position as conductor to create innovative musical programs that emphasized the conductor's role as teacher. His mission, as he put it, was primarily educational. His televised series of Young People's Concerts was a landmark in bringing music appreciation to the masses. The recipient of numerous national music awards, he recorded prodigiously and reached a level of popularity and cultural visibility unprecedented for an American conductor.

Thomas Schippers (1930-1977) was a meteoric arrival on the American conducting scene until his untimely death at the age of forty-seven. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he reportedly began studying piano at the age of four. At twenty, he made his Broadway debut conducting Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Consul . At twenty-one, he became the youngest conductor to appear at the New York City Opera, and at twenty-five he became the second-youngest conductor to debut at the Metropolitan Opera.

In 1958, Schippers conducted the open-air concerts at the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, founded by his mentor, Menotti. He also conducted the ill-fated premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra (1966), written to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Opera's new home in Lincoln Center. In 1970, he became conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, a position he held until his death in 1977 of lung cancer.

Talented, stylish, youthful, and handsome, Schippers attracted admirers of both sexes. Although he married in 1965, he reportedly maintained a long relationship with Menotti.

The Overlooked History of Lesbian Conductors

Even though the history of conducting is almost entirely male dominated, there is also a history of lesbian conducting. In medieval and early modern Europe, convents were central sites of musicmaking for women. In these same-sex institutions women were responsible for all aspects of music, and from this rich history scholars have identified female musical directors who were likely involved in sexual relationships with other women.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Madalena Casulana (ca. 1540-ca. 1590), Francesca Caccini (1587-1641?), and Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704) are women who composed and probably conducted works that invite lesbian interpretation and suggest the sexual interests of their composers.

The most prominent lesbian composer/conductor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Britain was Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944). Best known for her compositions, especially in opera, she also conducted on occasion. Most of the critical work thus far on Smyth that considers her lesbianism relates it to her compositions rather than to her conducting. In addition to living openly as a lesbian, she was actively involved in the British suffrage movement and served a short sentence in prison for her radicalism.

Dutch Jewish lesbian Frieda Belinfante (1905-1995) was another pioneer. In Amsterdam just prior to World War II, she became the first woman to conduct her own orchestra. Belinfante began her musical career as a cellist, but the onset of the war postponed her career.

Active in the Dutch resistance and in helping other Jews escape the Netherlands, she was forced to flee after she participated in the attack on the Amsterdam population registry in 1943. After the war, she emigrated to the United States and settled in Orange County, California, where she founded and conducted the Orange County Philharmonic Orchestra.

Openly Gay Conductors

In the last twenty-five years, a few openly gay and lesbian conductors have been able to crack open the conducting closet and use their authority and experience to bolster the gay community and transform the heterosexism of the world of classical music.

Kay Gardner (b. 1941) entered the world of classical music as a flutist, but from a young age aspired to orches-tral conducting. Keen to the challenges that women face in such a traditional field, she declared, "Conducting, especially orchestral conducting, is the last stronghold of the musical patriarchy."

Her early career involved researching and playing women's folk music, and, even though she married in 1960 and had two children, she remained interested in women's community and music, both folk and classical. In the late 1960s, Gardner formed her own chamber orchestra, and eventually left her husband to pursue her musical studies full-time at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In the early 1970s, she became active in Lavender Jane, a radical feminist music group, while she continued to work on her degree. In 1973, she helped produce the first openly lesbian classical LP, called Lavender Jane Loves Women.

In 1977, she decided to pursue her dream of conducting and moved to Denver, Colorado, to study under Maestra Antonia Brico. In 1978, she cofounded the New England Women's Symphony and became its principal conductor. The ensemble was in existence only briefly, but its commitment to showcasing and supporting women composers and conductors had a powerful impact on the growing role of women in classical music.

Since then, Gardner has grown less interested in conducting traditional classical music and has focused more on conducting her own work and using her influence as a conductor to support other female musicians.

Conductor, teacher, and administrator Jon Reed Sims (1947-1984) is best known for his work in founding a number of gay and lesbian music organizations in the late 1970s, including the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Marching Band & Twirling Corps, the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, Golden Gate Performing Arts, the orchestra Lambda Pro Musica, and the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Men's Community Chorus. His contributions to building gay and lesbian musical networks are regarded as fundamental to the creation of post-Stonewall gay communities in the United States.

Considered something of a maverick by the conservative faction of the music world, Michael Tilson Thomas (b. 1944) has had a notably successful international music career as pianist, conductor, and lately, composer. He became assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at twenty-five, in 1969. Subsequently, he held positions as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

In 1995, he assumed his current position as music director of the San Francisco Symphony. In this role, he has commissioned a number of important works by openly gay composers, including Lou Harrison and David Del Tredici.

Tilson Thomas's support of Del Tredici allowed the composer to create Gay Life, a series of pieces based on poems by Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, and Paul Monette. In so doing, the composer and the conductor have helped broaden the range of classical music by allowing it to address explicitly gay issues and gay lives in music.

—Geoffrey W. Bateman

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackmer, Corinne E., and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds. En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Brett, Phillip, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Burton, Humphrey. Leonard Bernstein. New York: Doubleday, 1994.

But I Was a Girl (Maar Ik Was Een Meisje). Videotape. Dir. Toni Boumans. Interview with Frieda Belinfante by Klaus Müller. Frame Media Productions, 1999.

Galkin, Elliott W. A History of Orchestral Conducting. New York: Pendragon Press, 1988.

Holsinger, Bruce Wood. "The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)." Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 19(1993): 91-125.

Jackson, Barbara Garvey. "Musical Women of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." Women and Music: A History. Karin Pendle, ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. 54-94.

Lebrecht, Norman. The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991.

LePage, Jane Weiner. "Kay Gardner." Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1983. 92-117.

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.

Schuller, Gunther. The Compleat Conductor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Schwarz, Robert K. "Cracking the Classical Closet." Advocate, May 11, 1999, 48.

Secrest, Meryle. Leonard Bernstein: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

"Sims, John." Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. New York: Schirmer/Macmillan, 1992. 1263.

Solie, Ruth A. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Trotter, William. "Mitropoulos, Dmitri." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Second ed. Stanley Sadie, ed. New York: Macmillan, 2001. 16:764.

Copland, Aaron (1900-1990)

IN THE COURSE OF A LONG LIFE THAT SPANNED NEARLY the entire twentieth century, Aaron Copland composed a significant number of frequently performed musical works that have become so ingrained in the American cultural consciousness that the mere hearing of them evokes for many the idea of American history, struggle, and courage.

Copland was born on November 14, 1900, to an impoverished Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York, and his early experiences were shaped by the urban "melting pot" of American culture. That he was also homosexual contributed to the outsider status that might be said to manifest itself in the celebration of the underdog, "the common man, " that characterizes his music.

Like many other prominent twentieth-century American composers, Aaron Copland was trained in France by Nadia Boulanger. His music, however, is best known for its rejection of European, neo-Romantic forms and the creation of a uniquely American, modernist style in his orchestral works, particularly his ballets and film scores.

Upon his return from France in 1925, his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra had its premiere performance with the New York Symphony Orchestra, Boulanger playing the organ. This work established Copland's reputation in his own country, and by the late 1920s he had begun experimenting with a daringly modern style that incorporated elements of jazz, reflected most notably in his Piano Concerto (1927).

By the end of the 1930s, Copland had incorporated into his music elements suggesting a number of American popular motifs, particularly those of the American West (for example, the pioneering settlers, the cowboy, the outlaw), along with the influences of folk song and Hispanic culture.

These elements are present in Copland's most famous works written between the late 1930s and the early 1950s-the peak years of his career-particularly the ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944). The music from these ballets has, for over half a century, been appropriated for a wide variety of purposes in the media, whether as themes for television programs, in advertising, or, however ironically, in the soundtrack of Spike Lee's film He Got Game (1998).

So pervasive is his music in American culture that it is hardly an exaggeration to suppose that virtually every American, irrespective of any interest in classical music, has heard Copland's compositions somewhere.

Provocatively-perhaps subversively-his ballet pieces present traditionally "masculine" heroic roles and images in the supposedly "effeminate" (and, in many cases, homosexual) context of ballet and dance. Some critics, for instance, have seen a homoerotic element in the interactions of the title character and Sheriff Pat Garrett in Billy the Kid.

Rodeo presents an even more complex gender theme that many homosexuals, both then and now, can understand. Its heroine, a tomboy who is as adept as her male counterparts as a rodeo rider, is rejected and mocked for her efforts, and it is only when she puts on the garb and behavior of traditional femininity that she finds acceptance- and heterosexual romance. While more recent critics see the female protagonist's change as a capitulation to conformity, the ballet can also be interpreted as an ironic commentary on gender norms.

The success of these ballets notwithstanding, Copland's music reached an even larger audience, one outside the traditional sphere of "high culture, " through his composition of scores for a number of now classic films addressing the American experience, including Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), The Red Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1949).

Among his other famous compositions are El Salón México (1936), A Lincoln Portrait for narrator and orchestra (1942), and an opera, The Tender Land (1954), as well as the familiar Fanfare for the Common Man (1943).

It is ironic, considering the political climate rampant in the United States during the decade following World War II, that the composer whose music was so strongly identified with the American myth was not only a homosexual but a leftist. In 1953, despite (or perhaps because of) his public stature, Copland was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged Communist sympathizer, as he had-in his identification with the "common man"-supported socialist causes in the 1930s.

During the interrogation, Copland was a model of dignity and, in his answers, gave the committee no information that corroborated the Committee in its "witch hunts." Frustrated by this less than useful witness, the Committee dismissed Copland, but, as a result of his questioning, the performance of A Lincoln Portrait scheduled for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration a mere two weeks later was cancelled by government officials.

Despite this insult, only a decade later, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Copland the Medal of Freedom for his contributions to American culture.

Unlike many gay men of his generation, Copland was neither ashamed of nor tortured by his sexuality. He apparently understood and accepted it from an early age, and throughout his life was involved in relationships with other men. In later years, his affairs were mostly Copland, Aaron 59 with younger men, usually musicians or artists, whom he mentored, including composer Leonard Bernstein, dancer and artist Erik Johns (who wrote the libretto for The Tender Land ), photographer Victor Kraft, and music critic Paul Moor.

Given the social prejudices of the times in which he lived, Copland was relatively open about his homosexuality, yet this seems not to have interfered with the acceptance of his music or with his status as a cultural figure.The likely explanation is that Copland conducted his personal life with the character istic modesty, tactfulness, and serenity that marked his professional life as well.

In his later years, Copland was increasingly disabled with the advance of Alzheimer's disease. In spite of failing health, until his death at the age of ninety on December 2, 1990, he remained a participant in the advancement of American music and culture, not only as a composer but as a conductor, teacher, and author as well.

In the words of his recent biographer Howard Pollack, the accomplishments of this unlikely and unassuming cultural hero over the course of his long life made him truly an "Uncommon Man."

—Patricia Juliana Smith

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, Arthur V. Aaron Copland. New York: Da Capo Press, 1990.

Butterworth, Neil. The Music of Aaron Copland. London: Toccata Press, 1986.

Copland, Aaron. The New Music, 1900-1960. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968.

Copland, Aaron, and Vivian Perlis. Copland: 1900 through 1942. New York: St. Martin's, 1984.

_____. Copland: since 1943. New York: St. Martin's, 1989.

Dobrin, Arnold. Aaron Copland: His Life and Times. New York: Crowell, 1967.

Peare, Catherine Owens. Aaron Copland: His Life. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Pollack, Howard. Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Corelli, Arcangelo 1653-1713)

A RCANGELO CORELLI, BORN IN 1653 IN FUSIGNANO, an Italian village between Ravenna and Bologna, was one of the seventeenth century's most widely admired composers and performers. His music has lasting appeal largely due to its refined sense of poise, the balance of all the forces within each composition, and its modern sense of tonality. Some of his works are regarded as models of perfection, and Corelli himself has been called "a modern Orpheus."

Corelli's music is rigidly formal and simple in design, but nevertheless original. It achieves magnificent effects with a surprising economy of means. Corelli used intriguing sequential progressions and descending bass figurations that are typical of operatic laments. He helped achieve a new independent status for chamber forms such as the trio sonata that were formerly regarded as merely decorative.

After Corelli, the distinction between musica da chiesa (church music) and musica da camera (chamber or dance music) was increasingly blurred. His trio sonatas and Concerti Grossi (1714) were widely imitated all over Europe. Not only famous as a composer, he was also regarded as the foremost violinist of his day. In addition, he was admired for his skills as a music teacher.

Much of the information that exists about Corelli, especially about his early days as a student in Bologna, is unreliable. More particularly, a widely reported claim that he provoked the jealousy of French composer Jean-aptiste Lully is almost certainly not true.

Corelli's personal life has been the subject of much speculation. Most scholars now believe him to have been discreetly homosexual. He never married and lived closely with male friends.

Corelli's rise to fame was meteoric, helped by the fact that music publishing began to proliferate in the early eighteenth century. His rise was also spurred by his influential patrons: Queen Christina of Sweden; Cardinal Pamphili, then the richest man in Rome; and the young and princely Cardinal Ottoboni, the nephew of Pope Alexander VIII. He thus enjoyed the patronage of the most influential people at a time when Rome became a flourishing center of music in Europe.

While many eighteenth-century descriptions of Corelli report on "the mildness of his temper and the modesty of his deportment, " others note that his eyes sometimes bulged with anger. Corelli led a quiet, disciplined life, composing within the walls of Cardinal Pamphili's villa, where he shared rooms with fellow musicians Carlo Cignani and Carlo Marat.

He continued this kind of life after 1690, when he resided at the villa of Cardinal Ottoboni, La Cancelleria, which had the atmosphere of an exclusive academy of talented male artists.

While residing at Pamphili's villa, Corelli became utterly devoted to another of the cardinal's employees, the second violinist Matteo Fornari, whom he met in 1682. According to one source, the composer was never far from Matteo's side for almost twenty years after their first meeting. This long-standing intimacy is alluded to in the two fine trio sonatas dedicated to Corelli and Fornari by the younger composer Guiseppe Valentini. Fornari oversaw the publication of Corelli's op. VI concertos after the composer's death.

Corelli moved in the same circles as George Frideric Handel, now also widely believed to have been homosexual.Although Corelli's music influenced Handel's, Corelli claimed not to understand Handel's work, which was much fuller in texture and required more dynamic force than his own works. He said that he would be unable to play it correctly.

Corelli was admitted to the Academy in Rome, along with the composers Bernardo Pasquini and Alessandro Scarlatti, in 1706. Two years later, he retired from public life. He died in 1713, a wealthy and widely respected man. He was buried in the Pantheon, next to the painter Raphael.

Corelli's musical legacy and influence extends to the great figures of the succeeding generation of baroque composers, Handel, Bach, and Telemann, but also to Couperin and the enigmatic English composer John Ravenscroft. All of these composers have paid homage to Corelli's poised and elegant compositions.

—Kieron Devlin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allsop, Peter. Corelli: New Orpheus of Our Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999

Burrows, Donald. Handel. New York: Scribners, 1994.

Moroney, Davitt. "Corelli, Arcangelo." Gay Histories and Cultures. George E. Haggerty, ed. New York: Garland, 2000. 215.

Talbot, Michael. "Arcangelo Corelli." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Second ed. Stanley Sadie, ed. London and New York: Macmillan, 2001. 457-463.

Corigliano, John (b. 1938)

A MERICAN COMPOSER OF SYMPHONIES, CHAMBER WORKS, choral settings, operas, and film scores, John Corigliano has created some of the most moving music inspired by the AIDS epidemic.

Corigliano was born in New York on February 16, 1938, into a highly musical family. His father was a distinguished violinist and the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic from 1943 to 1966, while his mother was an accomplished pianist.

Corigliano trained at Columbia University and at the Manhattan School of Music, after which he worked as a music programmer for various New York radio stations and as music director for the Morris Theatre in New Jersey. He has taught composition at the College of Church Musicians (Washington, D.C.), the Manhattan School, the Juilliard School, and Lehman College, City University of New York, where he holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Music.

Among Corigliano's works are a violin sonata (1964); a clarinet concerto (1977), a flute concerto (Pied Piper Fantasy, 1981), as well as various other concertos; a Grammy Award-winning string quartet (1996); the score to the film Altered States (1980), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award; and the Dylan Thomas Trilogy (1961-1976, settings of Thomas's poetry for chorus and orchestra).

He is perhaps best known for his score to the film The Red Violin (1997), for which he received an Academy Award; his music for the opera The Ghosts of Versailles 1991), which was commissioned and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and his Symphony no. 1 (1990).

The Symphony no. 1 was inspired by the loss of many of Corigliano's friends to AIDS. Commissioned by Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the symphony is notable for its large scale and dark mood. Although inspired by the devastation of AIDS, the symphony stands on its own on purely musical terms, without regard to a specific historical context.

Its third movement, "Giulio's Song, " includes a cello solo based on a theme improvised by Corigliano and his cellist friend Giulio Sorrentino. This movement inspired the separate, briefer chaconne Of Rage and Remembrance (1993), which was commissioned by gay men's choruses in Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco.

Scored for chorus and soloists (mezzo-soprano, boy soprano, two tenors, and two baritones), this work is set to poetry about loss by the poet and playwright William Hoffmann (who also provided the libretto for The Ghosts of Versailles) and farewells to various friends lost to AIDS; the work concludes with a verse from Psalm 23, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, " sung in Hebrew by a boy soprano.

The vocal score explicitly names friends of Corigliano and Hoffmann who have died of AIDS, and directs the singers to name friends whom they have lost to AIDS as well. Thus, the work is not only an occasional piece but also a continuation of the venerable tradition of communal choral lament.

The year 2000 saw the premiere of Vocalise, scored for soprano, orchestra, and live electronics; a song cycle based on verses of Bob Dylan; the Suite from The Ghosts of Versailles ; and the Symphony no. 2 for String Orchestra, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001. Corigliano continues to produce extraordinary compositions.

—Robert Kellerman

BIBLIOGRAPHY CARMAN,

Joseph. "Corigliano's Big Score." Advocate, May 9, 2000, 59.

Cockrell, Dale. "Corigliano, John." The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. H. Wiley Hancock and Stanley Sadie, eds. 4 vols. London Macmillian, 1986. 1:511-512.

Corigliano, John. Of Rage and Remembrance; Symphony no. 1. St Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor. Sound recording. RCA Victor, 1996.

Country music

like blues and jazz, is a peculiarly American musical form. With its roots in the folk ballads of England, country music was born in the blend of the "hillbilly" music of the Appalachian mountains, the African American blues of the deep South, and the wailing twang of the cowboy music of the West.

But country music is more than a combination of various musical traditions. Lyrics give life to country music and those lyrics tell the real stories of ordinary people. Country music celebrates the trials and triumphs, loves and losses in the lives of small-town, rural, and, more recently, urban and mostly white working people.

Because of its focus on conservative social groups and old-fashioned values, country music has often been associated with bigotry, intolerance, and jingoistic patriotism. However, every kind of personal lifestyle, quirk, and foible is represented on the back roads and in the small towns of the United States, and country music has found room to discuss most of them frankly. Although country is in some ways one of the most conservative of musical genres, country songs cover a wider range of topics than almost any other type of popular music.

Gay and lesbian audiences are attracted to the country scene for several reasons. First, the sincerity of country's exploration of the emotions and experiences of working people draws many disenfranchised Americans to the genre. Then, there are the outfits. Ever since country left its simple hillbilly roots behind, the pageantry of bouffant hair and spangled cowboy shirts has been as much a part of the country-music scene as wailing fiddles and moaning slide guitars.

Many gay men, unable to resist a pageant, are drawn to the campy side of country, even as they also appreciate the directness of the music's emotional appeal. The adulation of gay men has been particularly important to the legends of such larger-than-life country-music performers as Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. Moreover, many gay men have been attracted to country music by the recent advent of such "country hunks" as Dwight Yoakum, Alan Jackson, and Billy Ray Cyrus.

Lavender Country

In 2000, an unprecedented intersection of the gay community and country music occurred when the album Lavender Country by the band of the same name was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee, as the first openly gay countrymusic album. Released in 1973 by a Seattle organization called Gay Community Social Services, Lavender Country was the direct result of the newly erupting gay liberation movement.

Patrick Haggerty, the founder of the band as well as its main songwriter, grew up working on his family's small dairy farm in Port Angeles, Washington. Country music had been the soundtrack of his childhood, and when he became a radical gay activist, country was the natural vehicle for him to express both the newly public emotional life of gay men and their desire for social change. Songs like "Back in the Closet Again" and "Singing These Cocksucking Blues" added a new dimension to country's traditional themes of heartbreak and hope.

Other Gay Country Singers

Lavender Country has been followed by other gay countrymusic singers, many of whom were also raised on the country sound. Doug Stevens, songwriter and front singer with the Outband grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, and left his country roots behind to study classical music. When his lover left him after learning that Stevens was HIV-positive, however, he found that composing country songs best expressed his pain.

Other gay country singers such as Sid Spencer, Mark Weigle, Jeff Miller, and David Alan Mors find a welcoming venue at events sponsored by the International Gay Rodeo Association, founded in 1985 to unite more than twenty gay rodeo organizations in the United States and Canada. In 1998, the Lesbian and Gay Country Music Association was formed to support gay country musicians and to promote country music within the gay community.

Lesbians and Country Music

Lesbians have always been drawn to strong women, and lesbian interest in country was often expressed in the early 1970s by widespread crushes on such apparently straight country singers as tough-talking Tanya Tucker, deep-voiced Anne Murray, and down-to-earth glamour girl Dolly Parton.

Probably the best-known lesbian country singer is Canada's k.d. lang, whose rich, sophisticated voice practically seduced the country world to take her in. Although lang released three acclaimed country albums (A Truly Western Experience in 1984, Angel with a Lariat in 1987, and Absolute Torch and Twang in 1989) and delighted lesbian audiences with her overtly butch appearance on stage, she did not come out as a lesbian until 1992. Since then, lang has drifted away from country, becoming mostly a pop singer.

Other lesbian singers came from the folk tradition and thus were comfortable with a country song or two, but few were mainly identified as country. Since the birth of women's music in the early 1970s, Alix Dobkin, Woody Simmons, Robin Flower, Teresa Trull, and Barbara Higbie have demonstrated a definite country influence when they appear at women's coffeehouses, clubs, and festivals. Groups like the Reel World String Band, Deadly Nightshade, and Ranch Romance draw crowds of hooting, foot-stomping lesbians to concerts that rival any country hoedown.

Country Western Dancing

In the mid-1980s, another phenomenon gained popularity among both gay men and lesbians—country western dancing. Drawn to the flash and polish of country line dancing and two-step, gay men and lesbians from Dallas to New York City and from Los Angeles to Toronto flock to country-music dance clubs.

They dress in bolos and pointy-toed boots and learn the Texas two-step and line dances with names like "Achy Breaky Heart" and "Boot-Scootin' Boogie." On these dance floors those who grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry (country music's venerable showcase of talent in Nashville) meet with those who grew up listening to rock and roll to dress in costume and move in the tightly controlled syncopation of the cowboy dance.

Political Attitudes

There are, however, many within the lesbian and gay communities who decry the increased popularity of country music, pointing out that country speaks to a straight, conservative, white society and that many fans of country music are homophobic and racist. In particular, gay men and lesbians of color have often felt alienated by the country craze, seeing it as the glorification of those who enforced segregation in the South and destroyed Native American society in the West.

Still, queer lovers of country music can point to such stars as multiple Grammy winner Garth Brooks, who has been publicly supportive of gay rights. Brooks even released a song, "We Shall Be Free, " that includes in its definition of liberty the freedom to love whomever you choose. Even when it created a storm of controversy, Brooks stood behind his song, leading many gay and lesbian country fans to hope that country music can, indeed, find a place for everyone.

—Tina Gianoulis

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dickinson, Chris. "Country Undetectable: Gay Artists in Country Music "Journal of Country Music 21.1 (1999): 28-39.

"Gay Ole Opry." Advocate, December 15, 1992), 75.

The International Association of Gay/Lesbian Country Western Dance Clubs: www.iaglcwdc.org.

The Official Lesbian and Gay Country Music Association:www.lgcma.com.

Coward, Sir Noël (1899-1973)

NOëL COWARD OCCUPIES A UNIQUE PLACE IN TWENTIETH century theater. An accomplished playwright, actor, composer, and lyricist, he was also a singer and cabaret performer, as well as a writer of short stories and an accomplished amateur painter. Most of all, he was a consummate man of the theater, whose wit and sophistication belied his humble origins and helped define the role he played as heir to Oscar Wilde: a brilliant observer who both mirrored and satirized the dominant society that had, in a real sense, co-opted him.

After earning success at a very early age, he was both the epitome of upper-class English manners and a satirist who exposed the foibles and hypocrisies of his age, especially in regard to heterosexual courtship. Although he was a popular playwright whose intent was ostensibly merely to amuse and entertain, he nevertheless challenged surprisingly directly many of his society's assumptions about love and sex, imbuing his work with a camp sensibility that disdained conventional sexual morality as the product of small-minded individuals and groups.

For most of his life, homosexuality was a criminal offense in England; hence, it is not surprising that Coward was not openly gay. Yet his homosexuality was an open secret among the cognoscenti in the theater and in the café society where he held sway for five decades. Moreover, in his plays, particularly Private Lives (1930) and Design for Living (1933), he rejected normative sexual values, which are presented as stultifying and unsatisfying, in favor of more adventurous, unconventional arrangements; and in his songs and cabaret performances he often intimated, through double entendre and allusion, his own unconventional sexual preference.

Life and Career

Born Noël Pierce Coward on December 19, 1899, in Teddington, a village near London, he was the son of an ineffectual piano salesman and a doting mother.

Although his formal education consisted of only a few years at the Chapel Royal Choir School, he was a voracious reader who in effect educated himself. Near the end of his life, Coward mused, "How fortunate I was to have been born poor. If Mother had been able to send me to private school, Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, it would probably have set me back years. I have always distrusted too much education and intellectualism."

After participating in amateur and community theatricals, Coward launched his professional acting career at the age of twelve, debuting on the West End in 1911. Having appeared frequently in West End productions during his adolescence, he made his film debut in D. W.Griffith's Hearts of the World (1917), starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish.

He was introduced to high society as a fourteen-yearold protégé of artist Philip Streatfield, who died during World War I, but it was Coward's own wit and charm that bought him entrée to a world of upper-class privilege that would otherwise have snubbed him because of his lower-middle-class origins and rather suspect profession. Exposure to this society helped shape both his own persona as the cosmopolitan bon vivant and the settings and characters that he would employ in his plays. Coupled with his early absorption of the bohemian attitudes of the world of the theater, his experience in British upperclass society also helped free him from the bonds of middle-class sexual morality and manners.

Coward, who had a genius for friendship, would later count among his friends such members of the British aristocracy as the Duke of Kent (with whom he may have had an affair), Lord and Lady Mountbatten, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. His close friendships in the theatrical community included Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne, all of whom appeared in his plays. Perhaps more surprisingly, he maintained a close friendship with novelist Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge.

Enormously energetic and prolific, Coward dominated British theater between the two world wars. His first full-length play, I Leave It to You (1920), was produced when he was only twenty-one. He soon began writing songs for both his own shows and those of others. He alternated between producing and writing (and often starring in) musical revues and operettas, the genre pioneered by his friendly rival Ivor Novello, and writing (and sometimes appearing in) more serious comedies. Among the works of these decades are The Vortex (1924), Hay Fever (1925), Bittersweet (1929), Private Lives (1930), Cavalcade (1931), Words and Music (1932), Design for Living (1933), and Tonight at 8:30 (1936).

These works, which often featured Coward paired with actress Gertrude Lawrence, established the playwright and actor as a leading figure among the younger generation of popular entertainers. Although from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the works of this period may seem merely light and amusing, they were with some justification viewed by many of Coward's contemporaries as threatening. One reviewer protested that the characters of Private Lives were "four degenerates" and described the play as "a disgusting exhibition of moral and social decadence." Such a reaction is one indication that Coward succeeded in raising questions about his society's complacent morality and smug certainties.

In the politically charged 1930s, many intellectuals dismissed Coward's plays and musicals as breezy entertainments irrelevant to the momentous events that would culminate in social revolution and world war. But to see these works as completely nonpolitical is to miss their subversiveness.

In a manner similar to Wilde's comedies, Coward's plays amuse, but they also expose his society's often concealed tensions and anxieties, especially in regard to sexual matters. Moreover, given the censorship imposed on the popular stage during this time, particularly regarding sexual matters, Coward's penchant for pushing the envelope is remarkable.

During the years of World War II, Coward not only entertained British troops around the world, but he also produced such characteristic works as Blithe Spirit (1942) and Present Laughter (1942). He also produced, directed, wrote, and starred in the patriotic film In Which We Serve (1942). One of his one-act plays is the source of David Lean's acclaimed wartime film Brief Encounter (1945).

The years following World War II were difficult ones for Coward, at least as a playwright. To many theatergoers, he had come to seem old-fashioned, representative of a particular period—the years between the world wars—that was now long gone. His plays repeatedly failed in the West End. Moreover, when he relocated, first to Bermuda and then to Jamaica, to avoid crippling postwar taxes, he was regarded as unpatriotic. In addition, he was recovering from a personal crisis: Soon before the war, his longtime romantic relationship with American stockbroker and business manager Jack Wilson had come to an unhappy end.

In the postwar years, Coward both found his life partner and redirected his career. In 1945, he fell in love with South African actor Graham Payn, who had as a boy appeared in some of Coward's revues. Although Coward attempted to make a star of Payn, casting him in several shows, Payn, though talented, lacked his partner's charisma and ambition and never achieved the stardom that Coward sought for him. Nevertheless, theirs was a close and satisfying relationship that lasted the rest of Coward's life. Among their theatrical and society friends, they were accepted as a couple.

Although Coward continued to produce plays on the West End, he more and more oriented his career toward America, frequently appearing on American television and-at the suggestion of his friend Marlene Dietrich-launching a successful cabaret act that, rather improbably, took Las Vegas by storm. He also prepared successful screenplays for films of such earlier works as The Astonished Heart (1950) and Tonight at 8:30 (1952), and acquired a large house at Les Avants in Switzerland.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Coward was in effect "rediscovered, " with several major revivals of his work in New York and London, and a belated recognition of his achievement. During this time, he also wrote his most daring play on the subject of homosexuality, Song at Twilight (1966), a play that features a gay novelist, Hugh Latymer (perhaps based on Coward's old friend W. Somerset Maugham), who weighs the costs of coming out and decides to remain in the closet.

Coward himself made a decision not to come out publicly, even after homosexuality was decriminalized in England in 1967 and New York's Stonewall riots of 1969 ushered in the period of gay liberation. When friends urged him to come out, he refused, saying, not altogether facetiously, "There are still a few old ladies in Worthing who don't know." Perhaps the real reason he refused to declare his homosexuality is that he knew that such a declaration would preclude the knighthood that he richly deserved but that had been withheld from him for so long.

The knighthood was finally awarded in 1970. In 1971, Coward received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater. In 1972, musical revues based on his songs and sketches began successful runs in both London (Cowardly Custard) and New York (Oh Coward! ).

During this period of renewed appreciation, on March 26, 1973, Coward succumbed to a stroke. He was buried on the grounds of Firefly, his home in Jamaica. Later, a plaque in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner was erected in his honor.

On December 9, 1998, with Graham Payn at her side, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, unveiled a statue of her longtime friend in the foyer of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.

Theater Music

Coward's contribution to musical theater is primarily that of songwriter. Although his fully realized musicals seem dated, his songs (often written for revues) have a life beyond their original contexts and continue to charm by virtue of their wit and sophistication.

Songs such as "A Room with a View" (1928), "If Love Were All" (1929), "Someday I'll Find You" (1930), "Twentieth Century Blues" (1931), "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" (1932), "Mad about the Boy" (1932), "Mrs. Worthington, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage"(1935), "A Marvelous Party" (1939), "Matelot" (1945), and "Sail Away" (1950) have become standards.

Coward's songs are notable for their diversity, ranging as they do from comic patter songs rooted in the English music hall tradition to witty, often sardonic observations on twentieth-century life, to sophisticated, bittersweet ballads that express loss and longing and loneliness. Coward's signature as a songwriter is his peculiar balance of humor and pathos.

In an essay entitled "How I Write My Songs, "Coward explained that, although he had very little formal training as a musician, he had "a perfect ear for pleasant sounds." In writing music, he generally worked with a professional musician who wrote down the notes for him.

But what is distinctive about a Coward song is not its melody, but its lyrics. As a lyricist, Coward ranks with such songwriters as Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim. Since most of his songs were written for characters in musicals or sketches or operettas, they usually express emotions rooted in particular situations or plots, but they often transcend those situations to give voice to universal feelings.

Some of his songs have become particularly identified with Coward's own persona, though they were originally sung by women. For example, "Mad about the Boy, " particularly when performed by Coward himself, captures the giddiness and hopelessness of an infatuation with an unobtainable object of desire. "It's pretty funny but I'm mad about the boy, / He has a gay appeal, that makes me feel, / There's maybe something sad about the boy." In songs such as this, Coward both reveals and conceals the desire that cannot be named openly.

Coward began writing songs for his own plays and, having a slight voice, he intentionally made them vocally undemanding. His style of singing—really dialogue with music—exerted considerable influence on American musical theater.

Indeed, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote the part of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (1956) with Coward in mind, tailoring the songs assigned to Higgins to Coward's style. Because Coward refused to make commitments of more than three months to any role, the part actually went to Rex Harrison. However, all of Higgins's songs, such as "Why Can't the English" and "A Hymn to Him" echo earlier Coward classics such as "Mad Dogs and Englishmen."

Ironically, Coward's later musicals, Sail Away (1960) and The Girl Who Came to Supper (1964), were criticized for sounding too much like My Fair Lady.

Cabaret Performer

Coward was a journeyman actor who frequently took roles in his own plays. He sometimes appeared in the works of others, such as a 1953 London revival of Shaw's The Apple Cart and Carol Reed's 1959 film of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. But his greatest role was always himself, the suave British sophisticate.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Coward often appeared on American television, usually in specials such as the show Together with Music: Noël and Mary Martin (1955), for which he wrote several new songs. But his paramount success as a performer may have been in his cabaret act.

Developed quickly for what was to have been a fourweek booking at London's Café de Paris in 1951, the act was an unexpected success. It was revived many times during the 1950s, most famously in Las Vegas in 1955 For the Las Vegas opening, Frank Sinatra chartered a plane to bring such Hollywood celebrities as Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, and Joseph Cotten. The cabaret act not only solved Coward's money problems, but also made him known in America as someone who—British sophistication notwithstanding-could entertain ordinary people.

The cabaret act presented him alone on stage with just a pianist, his only prop a lit cigarette extending from a long holder. In his persona of the slightly jaded, unabashedly queer, upper-class Englishman, he performed his songs, told stories, and reminisced. However, he never indulged in self-congratulatory comments on his long career. In one of his funniest songs, "Why Must the Show Go On?, " he admonished against such a temptation, saying "Gallant old troupers / You've bored us all for years."

In a tribute to the American songwriter Cole Porter, he penned new-even more risqué-lyrics to Porter's classic, "Let's Do It, " referring to such contemporary personalities as Tennessee Williams and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In a prescient review of Coward's cabaret performance, Kenneth Tynan justly remarked that the success of the act depended less on the content of the show than on the qualities embodied in Coward himself. "In Coward's case star quality is the ability to project, without effort, the shape and essence of an unique personality, which had never existed before him in print or paint. Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, precisely what we mean by 'a very Noël Coward sort of person.' "

Coward's cabaret performances spawned such albums as Noel Coward at Las Vegas (1955) and Noel Coward in New York (1957).

Coward's plays are frequently produced all over the world. His musicals are seldom mounted, but his songs can be heard on many fine recordings and in compilation albums and revues such as Oh Coward!, Cowardly Custard, and Noel and Gertie.

—Claude J. Summers

—Albert J. Carey

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Castle, Terry. Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Clum, John. Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Hoare, Philip. Noël Coward: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Kenrick, John. "Noel Coward 101." www.musicals101.com/noel.htm

Lahr, John. Coward the Playwright. London: Methuen, 1982.

Lesley, Cole, Graham Payn, and Sheridan Morley. Noel Coward and His Friends. New York: William Morrow, 1979.

Mander, Raymond, and Joe Mitchenson. Theatrical Companion to Coward: A Pictorial Record of the First Performances of the Theatrical Works of Coward. New York: Macmillan, 1957.

Morley, Sheridan. A Talent to Amuse: A Biography of Noel Coward. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

Sinfield, Alan. "Private Lives/Public Theater: Noel Coward and the Politics of Homosexual Representation." Representations 36 (Fall 1991): 43-63.

Cowell, Henry (1897-1965)

A MERICAN COMPOSER, PIANIST, THEORIST, AND TEACHER Henry Dixon Cowell was an important musical innovator who sought to create an "ultramodern" style based on the synthesis of Western, Asian, and African music. His brilliant career as composer and performer was severely damaged when he was arrested at the age of thirty-nine for having sex with a seventeen-year-old male and subsequently imprisoned.

The circumstances of Cowell's upbringing were unusual and influenced his personal and musical perspectives throughout his life. He was born on March 11, 1897, in Menlo Park, California, then a rural area southeast of San Francisco. For many years, he made his primary residence in Menlo Park. Cowell's parents, who divorced in 1903, were writers of anarchist bent who provided him with home schooling.

As a boy, Cowell was better acquainted with Appalachian, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and Tahitian music than with European concert forms. In 1910, he came to the attention of Stanford University's Lewis Terman, a pioneer of intelligence testing. Terman took note of the boy's erudition, facility in conversation, and limited academic skills. He observed, "Although the IQ is satisfactory, it is matched by scores of others...but there is only one Henry." Terman later diagnosed the 66 Coward, Sir Noël -|| Cowell, Henry composer as not a "true homosexual, " but someone delayed in his heterosexual development.

From the start of his career as composer and performer, Cowell was a musical innovator. His piano composition The Tides of Manaunaun (1912) was the first to include tone clusters (adjacent notes sounded simultaneously, requiring that the keys be struck with the arm or hand).Aeolian Harp (1923) was one of Cowell's first pieces to require performers to manipulate the strings of a piano directly, a practice later associated with the "prepared piano" technique of Cowell's student, John Cage.

In 1931, Cowell collaborated with the Russian engineer and musical inventor Léon Thérémin to develop an electronic keyboard instrument called the Rhythmicon.

Although he composed twenty symphonies, Cowell's five Hymns and Fuguing Tunes (1941-1945), orchestral and choral works based on early American hymnody, remain his best-known works.

Cowell was an untiring advocate of contemporary music and frequently acted as mentor to other composers. As a teacher in California and New York, his students included Cage, Lou Harrison, George Gershwin, and Burt Bacharach.

In 1925, Cowell organized the New Music Society of California. In 1927, he founded the quarterly New Music, which grew to include a concert series and record label. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Cowell guided the Pan-American Association of Composers. In 1930, he published New Musical Resources, a book he had worked on since 1919. Besides these efforts, he disseminated his views on music in countless articles and interviews, frequently championing other American composers, particularly Charles Ives.

In 1936, Cowell's career halted abruptly when he was arrested for having sexual relations with a seventeen-yearold youth. Hoping for a lenient sentence, Cowell pled guilty, confessing not only the incident with the boy but other homosexual contacts as well. Rather than leniency, he received a sentence of one to fifteen years in prison.

Beginning his term in San Quentin Penitentiary in 1937, Cowell continued to compose, teach, and write. Although he was vilified by much of the press, he received loyal support from his family and many colleagues, including dancer Martha Graham and composer Percy Grainger. Of his close friends, only Ives, whose work he had supported so faithfully, cut off relations with him.

In 1940, Cowell was paroled, and he moved to White Plains, New York, accepting work as an assistant to Grainger. In 1941, he married Sidney Hawkins Robertson, an ethnomusicologist who had lobbied for his release and with whom he was to collaborate on a study of Charles Ives. In 1942, he received a pardon that enabled him to become a Senior Music Editor in the Office of War Information.

In later years, until his death on December 10, 1965, Cowell continued to write, teach, and (though less frequently) perform. He was the recipient of many grants and honors. A prolific composer, he inspired contemporaries and younger musicians to embrace both world music and innovative techniques.

Many friends and music historians, however, believe that he never lived up to the promise he had shown before the disaster of his arrest and conviction, though some attribute the decline of his influence to his (idiosyncratic) interpretations of non-Western musical forms rather than to the trauma of his imprisonment.

—Charles Krinsky

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cowell, Henry. New Musical Resources. New York: Knopf, 1930.

Hicks, Malcolm. "The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell." Journal of the American Musicological Society 44 (1991): 29-119.

Nicholls, David. "Cowell, Henry (Dixon)." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Second ed. Stanley Sadie, ed. 29 vols. New York: Grove, 2001. 6:620-630.

_____, ed. The Whole World of Music: A Henry Cowell Symposium. Sydney: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997.

Skinner, Graeme. "Cowell, Henry." Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 107-108.

Cunningham, Merce (b. 1919)

ONE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY'S MOST INFLUENTIAL dancers and choreographers, Merce Cunningham is known for his innovations and originality. Adapting the theories of his collaborator and partner, the composer John Cage, and of the French painter and art theorist Marcel Duchamp, Cunningham pioneered in his use of chance in the creation of dance pieces and in a nonhierarchical approach to movement and staging.

Cunningham was born on April 16, 1919, in Centralia, Washington, the second of three sons of a successful attorney and his wife. He began studying dance at an early age. He attended the University of Washington for a year, then studied at the Cornish School for Performing and Visual Arts in Seattle, where he met composer John Cage, who was working there as an accompanist. The two eventually became lifelong companions and artistic collaborators.

While studying in Seattle, Cunningham became acquainted with the choreography of Martha Graham. In 1939, while attending a summer of dance classes at Mills College in Oakland, California, he met Graham, who invited the young man to dance with her company in New York.

Merce Cunningham, photographed by J. J. Guillèn in 2000.

In the fall of 1939, Cunningham became only the second man to dance with Graham's company. He created several key roles in major pieces for her and became a soloist, but he eventually grew weary of her emphasis on narrative and psychological content. He wanted to explore movement through space in a more direct manner, without metaphoric overlay.

In 1942, Cage joined Cunningham in New York, and by 1944 they had begun presenting their own programs. In 1947, the Ballet Society of New York (later known as the New York City Ballet) commissioned their ballet The Seasons. This work, with costumes and sets by Isamu Noguchi, proved a great success and established them as significant figures on the American dance scene.

Along with painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Cunningham and Cage became part of a circle of young gay artists whose ideas not only challenged the macho self-expressive Abstract Expressionists, who were to dominate the 1950s New York art scene, but also provided a model of alternative creative process that has become the hallmark of postmodern art.

Influenced by Cage's use of chance in music, Cunningham applied the same thinking to dance and devised methods whereby decisions about movement sequences would be determined randomly and unpredictably. Retaining the turnout of classical ballet and the fluid upper body of modern dance, Cunningham also utilized many "ordinary" movements such as walking and running.

Cunningham deconstructed the traditions of Western stagecraft by placing equal emphasis on all parts of the performance space. In Cunningham's work, each dancer is considered the center of the space he or she occupies; wherever the dancer faces is "front." Together, Cunningham and Cage developed an aesthetic based on democracy of space and form in which all elements are considered equal in value.

In the summer of 1948, and each summer thereafter until 1957, when the college closed, Cunningham and Cage taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an arts school known for its spirit of innovation. In 1952, at Black Mountain, they staged what is arguably the first multimedia event in America.

This work, entitled Theater Piece #1, combined elements of movement, music, visual art, and poetry, all presented simultaneously, with no aspect dominating. This interdisciplinary approach became a hallmark of Cunningham's later work as he collaborated with luminaries from the worlds of visual art and music.

In 1953, Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which began touring nationally by 1955. For five decades, it has occupied a unique place in American dance. The company continues to perform both new and revived works.

Ever the innovator, Cunningham embraced technologies such as film and video in the 1970s, producing works that are not merely recorded documents of live performances but video dance pieces unto themselves. In the 1990s, Cunningham began working with a complex computer program called Life Forms, which provides new methods for generating movements to be performed by dancers and which also allows for the creation of images to be used as projections in live performances.

Cunningham's work does not reveal itself as queer in terms of its content. While other choreographers might employ same-sex duets to evoke such content, Cunningham does not, since the combination of dancers is often determined randomly. Indeed, Cunningham's work de-emphasizes gender altogether.

Insisting that his dances are not psychological or in any way "about" him, he eschews an overtly political stance in favor of a collaborative model that may be said to represent a queering of the creative process. The creative artist is removed from the center of the artistic endeavor. All hierarchies are dismantled and all alternatives are considered equal.

Cunningham's relationship with Cage endured for fifty-four years, until Cage's death in 1992. The personal and professional collaborations between the two men have made them role models for several generations of gay men and lesbians.

Now recognized as a seminal figure in twentiethcentury American culture, Merce Cunningham has received numerous prestigious awards and honors, including the National Medal of Arts and membership in the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.

—Jeffery Byrd

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banes, Sally, intro. Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/ Bill T. Jones. Philippe Verge, Siri Engberg, and Kelli Jones, eds. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1998.

Cunningham, Merce. The Dancer and the Dance: Conversations with Jacqueline Lesschaeve. New York: Marion Boyars, 1985.

Fitzpatrick, Laurie. "Merce Cunningham, 1919- ." Gay and Lesbian Biography. Michael J. Tyrkus, ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. 139-140.

Jordan, John Bryce. "Cunningham, Merce (1919- )." Gay Histories and Cultures. George E. Haggerty, ed. New York: Garland, 2000. 231-232.

Sylvester, David, et al. Cage, Cunningham, Johns: Dancers on a Plane. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Curry, John (1949-1994)

JOHN CURRY'S COMBINATION OF ATHLETICISM AND grace brought him enormous success in both figure skating and dance. A five-time champion in his native Britain, he also won gold medals in world and Olympic competition.

Although it was a potentially career-destroying move, Curry came out publicly as a gay man before the 1976 Winter Olympics, becoming one of the very few elite athletes to come out while still competing. Throughout his career, he consistently spoke candidly about his sexual orientation.

Curry was born on September 9, 1949, in Birmingham, England, where his father was an engineer and factory owner. As a small child, Curry became fascinated with dance, but his father considered dancing inappropriate for boys and firmly vetoed the idea of dance lessons. He did, however, allow young Curry to take up figure skating at age seven.

With his natural aptitude and dedication, Curry won his first competition a year later. He continued to meet with success and went on to win the British junior title in 1967.

Although Curry's father had agreed to let the boy become a figure skater, he showed little enthusiasm for his son's athletic endeavors. Only twice did he see Curry skate.

After his father's death, Curry, then sixteen, moved to London, where he began taking the long-denied dance lessons and worked part-time to eke out enough money to pay for coaching for his skating.

Curry placed second in the 1968 and 1969 British championships and won the first of his five national titles in 1970.

Like his contemporary Toller Cranston of Canada, with whom he shared a number of traits including his sexuality, Curry suffered from the prejudice of judges against his skating style, which emphasized grace and artistry, and which some considered "feminine, " even though Curry also demonstrated mastery in jumping and other physically demanding aspects of the sport.

Curry's glory year was 1976. After a narrow victory over Robin Cousins in the British championships, he went on to win gold medals in the European Championships, the Olympic Games, and the World Championships. Curry had the honor of carrying the British flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and after his triumph at the games, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. He was also named England's sporting personality of the year.

Curry had come out publicly as a gay man prior to the Olympics, and upon his return to Britain he spoke openly about his sexuality.

Curry turned professional after his win at the World Championships. Saying that he "never could see the point of spending twelve years training to go dress up in a Bugs Bunny suit," he turned down lucrative offers from established ice shows and formed his own company, one that emphasized dance.

His Ice Dancing show was a hit on Broadway as well as in London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In his production Curry sought to explore the relationship between skating and dance. Twyla Tharp was among the choreographers with whom he collaborated.

Curry also did choreography for the first show and took an increasing role in subsequent productions, choreographing fifteen of twenty-four numbers in the 1984 version of the show. These included Johann Strauss's Skater's Waltz, which Curry performed with JoJo Starbuck, and an ensemble piece to Aaron Copland's Rodeo .

In addition to his skating career, Curry appeared in a number of plays, including a 1980 Broadway production of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Brigadoon that was choreographed by Agnes de Mille. Curry's performance of the "Sword Dance" was a highlight of the show.

Curry saw AIDS take a toll in the skating world. "It is hard to watch people in that situation, and it was frightening when people started to become ill, " he said, adding," You start to think 'When is it going to be my turn?' "

It was in late 1987 that Curry found out that he, too, was HIV-positive. The following year, he participated in Skating for Life, a show to help fund AIDS research. His final skating performance, in 1989, was part of another AIDS benefit.

Diagnosed with full-blown AIDS in 1991, Curry returned to England to spend his last years with his elderly mother. He died on April 15, 1994, in Binton, Warwickshire.

Curry was held in high regard by the skating community. World and Olympic champion Peggy Fleming described him as "totally devoted to the art of skating, " and Olympic medalist Paul Wylie lauded him as "the ultimate skater." In recognition of his artistic interpretation of the music of classical composers, Curry has been called the "Nureyev of the ice."

He was also much admired for his candor and courage in coming out despite the potential risk to his athletic career. Curry was always forthright in this regard. In a 1992 interview, he stated, "I never pretended not to be homosexual, ever."

—Linda Rapp

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bird, Dennis L. "John Curry." Obituary. Independent (London), April 16, 1994.

Draegin, Lois. "Dancing on a Knife-Edge." Newsweek, August 6, 1984, 73.

Longman, Jere. "John Curry, Figure Skater, Is Dead at 44." New York Times, April 16, 1994.

Malone, John. "Curry, John." The Encyclopedia of Figure Skating. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1998. 43-44.

"Skater Who Was One Jump Ahead." Manchester Guardian Weekly, April 24, 1994, 31.

Springs, Sonja. "The End of an Ice Age." Observer (April 17, 1994): 15.