Luca

They are also something of a battleground over which different ideas of queer art fight. You can certainly frame it, as the article I linked does, as universality vs specificity. But you can also frame it as the subtext vs the explicit, with the right use of pronouns as a sort of "coming out" for the music itself. But if the pronouns are the explicit, what is the subtext? It can be a lot of things, but I'm gonna try to narrow it down to two, that are often concurrent. A song can come from queer spaces, and it can speak to the queer experience. I always think about Diana Ross' I'm Coming Out. She's not queer as far as I know, and there is no love interest to have the "right" pronoun, but it's a queer classic, and I don't need to explain why.

Projects like Universal Love end up making gay songs that are explicit but have no subtext. The name itself is telling: between specificity and universality it seems to shoot for both at the same time, and land safely on harmless and inconsequential. And there's nothing wrong with that in itself, it's just an album. But one thing about it really makes me a but angry. The only song that comes with a gay subtext is Mad About the Girl, their version of Noel Coward's Mad About the Boy. The song was mainly recorded by women, but it's not hard to find a version by Noel himself. It's a sad, beautiful, old song about gay men's desire, written and sung by a gay man. Valerie June's attempt at a lesbian version is fine, but in the end it makes a song that has no subtext and no specificity, just the right pronouns. And can you even call them right if girl and joy don't even rime?