Queer Music

Queer Music
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If you’re a part of the LGBTQ+ community, there are certain songs that just hit different—whether because you listened to them in your bedroom on repeat as a closeted teenager or because your local guest bar plays them on repeat night after night after night. If you (like me) are always looking for an excuse to celebrate Pride year-round, blaring these classic queer anthems should do the trick.
Who among us hasn’t fallen hopelessly in love with a straight and had to pine quietly from afar while standing in a darkened corner of the club watching the object of your affection make out with their heterosexual love interest? No? Just me? Never mind then.
If there’s one thing us gays excel at, it’s moving too fast. So it should come as no surprise that the queer community fell hard for Carly Rae Jepsen’s career-making bop about infatuation at first sight.
“True Trans Soul Rebel” is punk in every sense of the word—a snarling, in-your-face song that puts “Against Me!” singer Laura Jane Grace’s experience as a then-newly out trans woman front and center.
It’s tough to rebound from a single that’s as bi-curiously cringe-worthy as “I Kissed a Girl,” but let’s face it: Katy Perry has pulled off the nigh-impossible. If you tell me you’ve never scream-sung “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?!” in the street during the evening hours of an LGBTQ Pride festival, you’re lying.
I dare you to name a more iconic lesbian rock song than the first single Melissa Etheridge released after coming out as a gay woman. What tune better captures the yearning, all-consuming feeling of falling in queer love?
With this hit, the Scissor Sisters immortalized the time-honored queer tradition of getting together and gossiping about everyone in the community.
Launched into the collective consciousness by Rick Owens during Paris Fashion Week in 2012, Zebra Katz’s catchy hit weaves black queer culture into the fabric of hip-hop.
Prior to the release of “Girls Like Girls,” Hayley Kiyoko was best known for starring in shows like The Fosters and movies like Disney Channel’s Lemonade Mouth . Now, well, she’s “Lesbian Jesus”—all because she decided to share her truth on the lead single of her 2015 EP This Side of Paradise .
With her tough-girl swagger and untouchable “I don’t care what you think of me” ethos, P!nk has always been an LGBTQ icon. Still, she sealed the deal with her 2010 hit, an ode to celebrating the hell out of what makes us different.
There are gay icons, and then there’s the gay icon, Cher. Her 1989 anthem is the song that launched a thousand lip-synch drag performances—no other queer bop will ever come close.
Before we had Tegan and Sara, we had the Indigo Girls. The folk-rock duo basically defined queer women’s culture in the 1990s, and “Closer to Fine” remains a vital track on many a baby lesbian’s coming-out playlist.
With her 1990 hit, the Material Girl thrust voguing—a staple of New York City’s underground ballroom scene—into the mainstream.
There’s no outrunning—or outdriving—Tracy Chapman’s gut-punchingly wistful ode to escapism and young love.
Cyndi Lauper cemented her loving relationship with the queer community with this classic paean dedicated to the rainbow-flagged outcasts and weirdos among us.
Are you sensing a pattern to this list? In 2011, Lady Gaga left the gay community gagging with this ode to being yourself and letting your freak flag fly.
Whether or not Diana Ross had the queer community in mind when she recorded the second single from her album Diana , it stands to reason that a euphoric, triumphant song about coming into your own would become an instant LGBTQ favorite.
Is there anything gayer than a bop about lusting over your crush from afar while you daydream ceaselessly about being brave enough to make a move?
Queer pop star Shamir’s endlessly danceable 2014 house beat is the perfect fusion of hip-hop and disco.
Frank Ocean did that, and by that, I mean came out as a queer Black man and then immediately released this iconic, heartrending—and explicitly gay—ode to lost love.
Long before Janelle Monáe came out as pansexual and nonbinary, LGBTQ fans saw ourselves in her. Now that we know she’s one of our own, it’s easy to recognize this and many of her other songs for what they are: fantasias of queer desire.
Listen to all the picks below and follow Harper's BAZAAR on Spotify.

Above, a central starting
point to the
Women's Music on this site
Please
see these other special sections of my site
The
JD Doyle Archives
has been approved by the IRS for 501c3 non-profit status,
so all donations are tax deductible. If you enjoy my site, please consider
a small donation.
All my sites have a huge amount of sound files and graphics, and well,
they are expensive sites,
requiring a large dedicated server.. If you're moved to help share
and preserve our culture's history I'd be very appreciative! - JD Doyle

From
January 2000 until March 2015 "Queer Music Heritage" was
both a radio show and a website, and the goal of both was to preserve
and share the music
of our culture. It has become the resource on the net for the history
of LGBT music. Each month's page gives the playlist and additional
pages of info, and
you can stream or download every show; there's over 580 hours of
programming available. This is a deep site, covering over 2000 pages.

Thanks for your support over the years.

Photo
by Alex Rosa / OutSmart Magazine / 10/20
The Drag
& Female Impersonation sections of my site really could have
been spun off into their own website...as they comprise so very many
pages of the site, and have been a major draw for people finding and
visiting my site over the years. I never did that as on my radio shows
I played scores of those artists, and wanted additional info I have
on them to be handy. They represent probably the largest collection
of this information on the internet.
As the graphic says,
major sections include:
  a Drag Artist Discography, cataloging recordings of these
performers
  Female Impersonation Galleries, for major performers of
the early years
  Club Information and Programs for the famous venues
  Vintage Sheet Music of the 1920s/30s; drag club matchbooks
  a major section on the Jewel Box Revue
There are a
WHOLE bunch of special interest areas of our music history I want to
point you to:
Special
Spoken
Word Vinyl:
James Baldwin
Christopher Isherwood
Gertrude Stein
Truman Capote
Homosexualité

Pat Parker--Judy Grahn
June Jordan--Adrienne Torf
Two 1960s LPs on Homosexuality
I
tried to make my last show, for March 2015, a special one, and it's
a four-hour romp with Camp Music.  You
can hear it Here ,
and the last OutRadio Here.

Also, to find all my websites, visit ww.JDDoyleArchives.org
Above
left, I've acquired a scrapbook from 1949, from Edinburgh, Scotland,
that tells of the 30-year love of Angus Fitzroy for Toby McCutcheon,
with photos, drawings and postage stamps to mark their world travels
Click for the Album
Have you thought of
downloading my shows, perhaps for your iPod? It's tricky if like me
you use Firefox, so I temporarily open up Internet Explorer and paste
in the show's URL. Then Right Click on the Download button...that's
always the lower half of
my Listen buttons. Get the dropdown menu, and select "save target
as" ....that should open up a box asking where on your computer
you want to save the file. Once saved you can move
to iPod, MP3 player, etc.
Perhaps
the coolest compliment I've gotten, from Gretchen's Press Page:
And,
this listener paid Such a compliment to what I do, and what the artists
do,
that I had to share it. I marvel at how well he summed it all up in
just a few words.
and,
above left, presented to me by Tret Fure, Thanks!
Two books about queer
music came out in 2017, which you may want to check out.
Both are out of the UK. I think both are good, and both have their pros
and cons.

Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out - Martin Aston
David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music - Darryl W Bullock
And in 2019 a Wonderful
book came out about Women's Music...
An Army of Lovers:
Women's Music of the '70s and '80s - Jamie Anderson ( Link )

Menergy: San Francisco's Gay Disco Sound, by Louis Niebur, is Wonderful.
Read my Review .

A good friend of mine,
Matthew J Jones, has written an essay on the books, and the
essay has been published in the JPMS, and gosh, he sent a lot of love
my way as well.
And I could not resist
a chance to show that piece of 1934 sheet music,
which I have framed in my office.
Harry
Roy & His Orchestra - We Love a Gay Song
Parlophone 1761, UK
Recorded at the Mayfair Hotel, London, 5/2/34
LISTEN
(vocals begin at 1:00)
For many
years I had a sort of preview page for this site...when you went to
the URL
you saw only the above graphic, which you had to click on to really
enter the site.
Now my site address goes directly to this page, as I guess it should
have for a long
time, but I still love the graphic and wanted to keep it visible.
My
Favorite Shows
Here is a list of the shows of which I am the most
proud. Yes, I'm proud of all of them and it's
like picking among your children. But here's a way to quickly point
folks to some highlights.
And I especialy love the ones in orange...
Note:
Use and Reproduction: Educational use only, no other permissions given.
Copyright to this resource is held by the content creator, author,
artist or other entity, and is provided here for educational purposes
only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without
written permission of the copyright owner. All copyrighted materials
included on this website are in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107 related to Copyright and “Fair Use” for Non-Profit educational
institutions, which permits the use of copyrighted materials to further
scholarship, education, and inform the public. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Search
site for an artist or song
  A
note about the search engine: it is set to simultaneously search all three
of my major sites; this one, along with Houston
LGBT History and
Texas Obituary
Project , and also The
Banner Project site.
New
Pages on QMH :
While no new shows are being added, I often add new graphics to a section,
or new information to sections
(like Gay Musicals ) and even
less often add an entirely new page, like these...(newest listed first)
Audiofile
was a monthly music review segment carried by the radio newsmagazine This
Way Out, on over 250 stations worldwide. It lasted 14 years, from 1997
through 2010. All segments are archived.

A companion show to QMH, OutRadio
focused mainly on new LGBT music.
The show ran from January 2010
through March 2015, all archived.
I
began a music blog in 2011, and added to it fairly faithfully (over 200
entries) through 2014, when I launched my other large websites and put
the blog way on the back burner...still, the material is on our music
history, and you may want to make a visit.

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