It would be difficult, if not impossible, to fully convey (in words, via texts) the terrifying, overwhelming experiential sphere of LGBT+ people from countless geocultural locations and social strata in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.Footnote 1 What had initially been only partially understood and encountered in a nebulous, rumoured form (a ‘gay cancer’) transformed—via countless, exponentially increasing numbers of physical manifestations—into a lived confrontation with a pitiless mortality. And although the syndrome eventually attracted enough scientific scrutiny to grant it a greater ontological certainty—in part via the bestowal of an acronymFootnote 2—there were many who believed that research progressed in a manner that was incomplete, glacial, and grudging. The scientific-medical community was viewed as not entirely free from the same sorts of prejudices that guided the official, political response favouring silence (engendering death) over action in relation to a crisis afflicting a reviled ‘minority group’—a group, in fact, in many instances comprising multiple ‘minority’ statuses ascribed in relation to sexuality, race, religion, or other variables, and one often obliquely referred to as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. AIDS was constructed as a plague affecting only communities that many in the majority preferred to remain invisible, and so of little interest to ‘normal’, ‘blameless’ citizens. Indeed, the syndrome was constantly (and continues to be) posited by many as divine retribution for the evil transgression of homosexuality.

It was in the context of watching countless loved ones suffer and ultimately (most often) succumb that business as usual appeared to many in LBGT+ and other marginalized groups, as well as their allies, not only inadequate but ethically/morally unacceptable. If, in decades past, assemblages such as the Mattachine Society had proudly donned the drag of aspirations to a status of ‘model minority’, then many of those whose lives had been impacted by AIDS—and, it appeared, a political-medical-scientific establishment undergirded by apathy (and hostility) rather than urgency (and compassion)—began to coalesce around an understanding that self-abnegation and obsequiousness to the structures of power were likely to result in continued neglect and disregard, and a future filled with the corpses of countless friends, lovers, and family members. This experience of understanding one’s self and community as disposable resulted in considerable, animating anger (pent up certainly for many over years, decades, lifetimes of having been subjected to abuse, discrimination, and violence); as Sedgwick has argued, the indissoluble links of queerness to a source in childhood shame (a connection that, one assumes, provokes a rage at being shamed) is, in part, what affords it ‘a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy’ (1993: 4). Thus coalitions, rather than capitulating to the tacit eviscerating and infantilizing compulsions to remain silent, compliant, with a Pollyannish, optimistic belief in a paternalistic medical-political complex (marked, in part, by decades of homophobic abuses) began to explore the marshalling of ‘negative emotions’ in order to counter the complacency, indifference, and denials of an establishment that had shown little beneficence to a community of what were constructed as sexual reprobates. Here, the collectives OutRage! and Gran Fury are emblematic—the requisiteness of the ‘negative’ apparent in their very appellations. The latter group in particular highlighted the ways in which the material and symbolic were intertwined, both in terms of the attempted eradication of those constructed as expendable Others, and the intervention against such efforts.Footnote 3

To posit an exact equivalence between the responses to same-sex desire in relation to AIDS and ethnomusicology (both injurious to LGBT+ persons) would be problematic on numerous levels. Yet Gran Fury’s understanding of the intricate and intimate entanglements of the material and the symbolic (or ideological-discursive) reminds us that ‘homophobia’s symbolic violence…does not need to be expressed to be committed’, that ‘silence is its home’ (Tin 2003/2008: 20). As such, it is indeed instructive to explore the workings of the silencing (and erasure) of specific groups of Others—especially as they play out in spheres ostensibly constructed as resting upon an ethos of equity—as well as the number and quality of responses to the silencing over the course of decades. It is important to note from the outset that although ethnomusicology as a discipline has been defined, in part, by what was early on self-presented as an empirically and ethically essential drive to explore musical products and processes outside the (Western) cannon, elisions were likewise field-defining. For example, while class, race, and geography may have begun to have been emancipated from the strictures of academic chauvinism as early as the mid-twentieth century (at least superficially), within this discipline that was engendered in the service of giving voice to those silenced by what was presented as a Eurocentric music scholarship (read: musicology), gender still continued to be implicated in the devaluation of significant numbers of musical practices up until a much later date.

An optimistic (or charitable) explanation for the ensuing corrective of the 1980s (marked by such important publications as Koskoff’s edited volume, one of the few in the field at that time in which the vast majority of contributors were women) (1987) would be to assume that the egalitarian impulse that putatively undergirded the discipline, the desire to right both academic/intellectual and social/cultural injustices, organically both allowed for and encouraged work—at the level of disciplinary tenets, as well as individual researcher-professors—that would address this subjugation. Yet it seems equally likely that owing to the specific historical-cultural context, other potentiators were implicated. Marked by a heightened (albeit often inadequate and timid/tentative) attention to and visibility of feminist studies, and widely read, influential, and ultimately discipline-defining publications such as Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Butler’s Gender Trouble (Sedgwick 1990; Butler 1990), the zeitgeist of the moment almost certainly compelled the largely male-helmed discipline of ethnomusicology to recognize and engage with gender, lest it reveal itself every bit as structurally hierarchical as those against which it defined itself—exclusionary constructions positioning musicology as the second component of a simplistic ‘us/them’ binary, via a widespread cultural dynamic of ‘continuing [a] dichotomization between members and outsiders’ (Barth 1969: 14).Footnote 4 Ethnomusicology, a discipline that has historically drawn on and shown a wholehearted interest in the theoretical apparatuses of neighbouring disciplines—from Marxism to structuralism and beyond—could not realistically feign obliviousness to the gendered voices echoing through the hallways of its academic contemporaries.

Whether the appearance of the gender corrective was the result of magnanimity or perceived coercion, the general period from the 1990s into the aughts witnessed a reasonable (if still insufficient) number of significant gender-focused publications (e.g., Doubleday 1999, 2008; Herndon and Ziegler 1990; Magrini 2003; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Sugarman 1997; Waxer 2001; inter alia), leaving some to dare to dream of brighter days to come.Footnote 5 Yet appearing as such work did in an overwhelmingly masculinist sphere (as I will soon show), such ground-breaking scholarship was often constructed not as central to culturally grounded explorations of music and music-making, but somehow of importance only to those with ‘special interests’. Moreover, the extent to which many studies (to say nothing of committees, organizations, departments) appeared to collapse ‘gender’ into ‘woman’ indicates a historical and indeed continuing uneasiness of the discipline with the arguably more radical interrogations necessitated by an embracing of feminist theory—a dynamic not unrelated to my concerns here, not least of which is the status of the experiencing body.Footnote 6 In this context, ‘gendered women’, sitting (at this historical moment) at the children’s table of the ethnomusicological banquet, arguably served a cynical purpose: the window dressing of inclusion occluding two interrelated variables that have occupied a considerable amount of space in the contemporary scholarship of other disciplines that have regularly influenced ethnomusicological inquiry, yet which were absent for decades from ethnomusicological inquiry—same-sex sexuality and desire, and masculinity.

In short, while the interrogation of these often-interrelated constructions has produced a rich array of critical inquiries in disciplines ranging from comparative literature to cultural anthropology,Footnote 7 such perspectives have been, until only very recently, stunningly absent from ethnomusicological research. Even more remarkably, the discipline of musicology, continually positioned as the conservative and reactionary Other against which ethnomusicology has defined itself, has in this regard produced numerous texts exploring non-normative sexual identity in relation to musical practice.Footnote 8 Both Brett (1994) and Biddle and Gibson (2009) are perhaps correct in their suggestions that musicological attention to masculinity and non-normative sexualities (to say nothing of feminism) has been grudging and relatively minimal (at least relative to other humanities and social science disciplines); indeed Brett, in a deliciously blunt salvo, characterizes musicology’s treatment of homosexuality (an ‘obliteration by silence’) as ‘one of the most crushing indictments of positivistic musical scholarship’ (15–16). However, publications from so-called ‘stodgy’, ‘elitist’ musicology and allied disciplines—monographs, edited volumes, numerous journal articlesFootnote 9—functioned as beacons of light for those relegated to the shadows, standing in high relief to the dearth of ethnomusicological studies theoretically engaging LGBT+ persons, same-sex desire, and/or the construction of (male, heterosexual) masculinity. Up until approximately 2013, there were, in the course of over six decades only four ethnomusicological monographs with sustained attention to any of these areas of inquiry (Fikentscher 2000; Hayes 2010; Spiller 2010; Stokes 2010),Footnote 10 none published before the twenty-first century. Additionally, a search of the discipline’s journal over the same time frame results in barely more than tumbleweeds and cricket chirps.Footnote 11 There have been no themed journal issues, as has been the case with popular music studies.Footnote 12 And while the supposedly ‘musty, old’ New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 2001 included a lengthy entry devoted to ‘gay and lesbian music’ (Brett and Wood 2001),Footnote 13 such a rubric has no correlate in the mammoth Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, which contains only a smattering of superficial references to either homosexuality, same-sex desire, or masculinity.Footnote 14 I have most likely missed one or another study (or paragraph, or footnote), yet any revelation of such omissions as ‘aha!’ moments would be akin to arguing that gender parity exists in popular music practice by shouting ‘Sandy West!’ or ‘Fay Milton!’—taken from a roster of 100 rather than 100,000.

What I will argue in the following two chapters is that a significant number of ethnomusicologists—the enactors and effects of the ideologies and discourses of ethnomusicology—have historically been invested in the performative and discursive-ideological construction of a type of masculinity that necessarily forecloses the very possibility of allowing visibility/audibility to same-sex desire within the discipline. Moreover, it is this injunction that has contributed to ethnomusicology’s retention of its most exploitive, colonialist, and paternalistic impulses, as well as its intellectual stagnation. Part of this mania for masculinity relates to the ‘feminine’ connotations that have often clustered around the sonic/musical (as opposed to, say, the visual, with its relation to graphic representation, narrative, and control).Footnote 15 Structural inequalities allow for this continued policing and banishment, yet structure must be viewed not only as cause of inequality, but also an effect of an uneasily lived gendered subjectivity.Footnote 16 Additionally, I will underscore just how imbricated the (heterosexual) masculine is with the homosexual and homophobic; as Kimmel has argued, many men in Western society,Footnote 17 terrified of being judged weak or ineffectual (that is, insufficiently masculine), and equating the homosexual with such negative assessments, must constantly enact masculinity in order to gain acceptance. Homophobia is thus ‘a central organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood’, motivated by ‘the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal…that we are not real men’ (1994: 131). It is notable that Kimmel’s work continues, over the course of two decades, to uncover the homophobic impulses undergirding constructions of masculinityFootnote 18—common ‘in both the working-class bar and the university coffee house’ (2008: 13)—and it is not Kimmel alone who has made such connections. Although some researchers (Anderson 2009; McCormack 2012; Anderson and McCormack 2018) have argued that the virulence of homophobia has been progressively waning in certain (Western) contexts, others have found ample evidence to support the contention that the perceived attainment of stereotypical masculinity is a driving force for significant numbers of men (especially at formative points in their development), and its support and propagation are often reliant upon a vilification and denigration of male homosexuality (Diefendorf and Bridges 2020; Pascoe 2007).Footnote 19

In the specific disciplinary landscape with which I am concerned, I argue that by constructing themselves and their discipline-progeny from the outset in contradistinction to musicology—concurrent with the embrace of cultural anthropology (on far more than simply a methodological level)—ethnomusicologists have been invested in something much more malign than enacting intellectual allegiances, or feuds over academic turf.Footnote 20 The tacit homophobia that marks the discipline is responsible for the ongoing silence surrounding same-sex sexuality (as distinct from the often de-sexed understandings of queerness frequently encountered in much humanities-based scholarship), as well as the silence about the silence. Silence was the overwhelming response from the vast majority of political, administrative, and juridical entities at the beginning and height of the AIDS epidemic, and it is certainly no coincidence that ethnomusicology’s continuation of this averted gaze and the concomitant locked lips—at the very time when increased attention was arguably most necessary (especially among academic practitioners ostensibly motivated by a commitment to fighting social injustice)—was concurrent with the discipline’s own increasing visibility, and its move towards greater institutionalization and lust for increased institutional power. Any acknowledgment of the field’s myopia has generally occurred only in private (individual, exasperated musings, or casual conversations, often with an air of nonchalant resignation; ‘the way things are’, ‘boys will be boys’), never manifesting as official, unwavering, or enraged demands for recognition or transformation, a stunning absence in the context of multiple cultural moments marked by social actions motivated by fury.

Much to the contrary, in the present context, when ‘visibility/audibility’ occurs within the field (often as a type of queerness that engages only marginally with embodied, erotic, same-sex desire), decades of silencing—rather than motivating unabashedly emotional, urgent calls for scrutiny—are swept under the carpet, relegated to a past that magically will never return, assumed to be of little importance to an understanding of the dangers of disciplinarity and institutionalization. Yet such amnesia can only ever lead to repetition; anger, rage, fury are replaced by a compelled obliviousness that is necessary to support the status quo of power. The refusal to explore the specificity of such glaring elisions is implicated in the ability of injurious actions and structures to seethe and yet again erupt, never fully vanquished, often reappearing in even more virulent, destructive forms. These instruments of injury may be shockingly evident or dangerously surreptitious—merging, often, in our present disciplined, administered academic institutions, to perpetuate the very inequities they purport to battle. Yet no matter the mode or means of perpetuation, the response is the same: no outrage, no anger, only silence. In the following two chapters, the reasons for such silence—the prohibitions against speaking up at all, let alone with fury—will be explored.