Nadine Hubbs

‘I Will Survive’: musical mappings of queer social space in a disco anthem

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at prime and bursting 1970s dicsos. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of discos multiracial ‘gay’ revellers and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

A French Connection: Modernist Codes in the Musical Closet

The tone and language leave little doubt but that this letter constitutes what we would call, in contemporary parlance, a coming-out statement. Sam Barber had already, precociously and secretly, come to terms with his irrefutable desire and resolved to follow it in spite of his society’s expectations. The pursuit of this desire attached to a particular identity, and it was a dangerous one: as its (repeated) binary juxtaposition with athletics here makes clear, this identity was figured in opposition to conventional masculine and heterosexual positions.2

Jolene, Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton's Loving Address of the Other Woman

Recently a Billboard feature highlighting Dolly Parton’s support of her gay fans rocked Facebook and Twitter. The combination of themes is nothing new. For years the National Enquirer has periodically blared that the curvaceous blonde hyperfemme country icon is gay. Dolly, for her part, has responded graciously and nonhomophobically. To the recurrent allegation that she is carrying on a secret relationship with her lifelong friend Judy Ogle, Parton answers, “Well, I’m not gay, but if I was, I would be privileged to have Judy as a partner!”1 I’m not here to question Dolly Parton’s sexual identifi cation. But I will discuss her signature song, “Jolene,” in relation to homoerotic address and genre bending and will link this to certain questions about country music and its meanings in American culture.2 Parton wrote “Jolene” and recorded it in 1973, and in early 1974 it went to number 1 on the country charts. Since then “Jolene” has had many lives as a cover song recorded by a variety of mostly female artists in a dazzling range of styles; in 2011 it posted at number 219 on Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”3