Queering the pipe organ

The overrepresentation of queer organists (especially gay men) in the United States pipe organ community has long been anecdotally acknowledged. While a causal relationship is hard to establish, American narratives of the pipe organ over the past century can offer insight into the relationship between the pipe organ and queerness. I demonstrate that the history of the pipe organ in the United States is laden with queerness in fictional portrayals, through its associations with camp developments, and as a result of its relationship to the closet. The pipe organ has garnered associations with flamboyance, camp, fastidiousness, and secrecy, all of which exhibit close ties to queerness. These patterns are nuanced by the pipe organ's association with Christian churches, pointing to a picture of the pipe organ's queerness as subversive in some American liturgical settings. Following a queer musicological approach, I argue that the pipe organ has been uniquely coded through American cultural associations as a queer instrument, the implications of which I discuss.

QUEERING THE PIPE ORGAN by Samuel Judd A Senior Honors Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The University of Utah In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Degree in Bachelor of Arts In Music Approved: ______________________________ Haruhito Miyagi, PhD Thesis Faculty Supervisor ______________________________ Kimberly Councill, PhD Director, School of Music _______________________________ Paul Sherrill, PhD Honors Faculty Advisor ______________________________ Sylvia D. Torti, PhD Dean, Honors College April 2023 Copyright © 2023 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The overrepresentation of queer organists (especially gay men) in the United States pipe organ community has long been anecdotally acknowledged. While a causal relationship is hard to establish, American narratives of the pipe organ over the past century can offer insight into the relationship between the pipe organ and queerness. I demonstrate that the history of the pipe organ in the United States is laden with queerness in fictional portrayals, through its associations with camp developments, and as a result of its relationship to the closet. The pipe organ has garnered associations with flamboyance, camp, fastidiousness, and secrecy, all of which exhibit close ties to queerness. These patterns are nuanced by the pipe organ’s association with Christian churches, pointing to a picture of the pipe organ’s queerness as subversive in some American liturgical settings. Following a queer musicological approach, I argue that the pipe organ has been uniquely coded through American cultural associations as a queer instrument, the implications of which I discuss. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii INTRODUCTION 1 VILLAINS, MISFITS, AND THE CLOSET 8 EXCESS, DRAMA, AND THE ORGAN AS CAMP 22 THE KING OF INSTRUMENTS IS GAY: SO WHAT? 37 CONCLUSION 44 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 47 NOTES 48 BIBLIOGRAPHY 54 iii 1 INTRODUCTION The overrepresentation of queer men among organists has long been anecdotally acknowledged. Two of the most successful organists in contemporary history to break into the mainstream, Virgil Fox and Cameron Carpenter, have been noted for their queerness, usually in the form of discourse surrounding their virtuosic “flamboyance.” Even apart from high-profile performers, many have observed what seems to be an unusually high number of American organists who are gay men. Music critic Sarah Bryan Miller dubiously commented in 1996 that AIDS had been “thinning the ranks” of organists, parenthetically adding that “a disproportionately high number of organists are gay, for reasons no one seems able to determine.”1 Users in a 2008 thread on The Organ Forum and a 2015 Quora thread remark on this phenomenon, providing a variety of speculation as to the reasons behind it.2 In both threads, users claim that there is an “old joke” that “AGO,” the abbreviation for the American Guild of Organists, in fact stands for “Another Gay Organist.”3 In separate interviews for the Washington, D.C. queer newspaper Washington Blade, the gay organist Charles Miller estimated that “about 75 percent” of American organists are gay men, and Carpenter agreed that “it seems most American organists are gay or at least questionable if not questioning.”4 Both organists provided their own conjectures for the cause of this pattern, but so far, no research has been conducted to establish causative conclusions. In any case, the notion of definitively asserting any causal factors to account for the high proportion of queer American organists seems both unlikely and unproductive. Instead, I aim to examine the relationship between the pipe organ and queerness, paying particular attention to how this relationship might bear on the organist community in the United States. 2 For the purposes of this endeavor, I conceptualize queerness as a distinct quality of non-normativity positioned in opposition to oppressive cisgender, heterosexual, and patriarchal mores. My account relies on a queer feminist conception of musicology that situates music among the importantly social contexts from which it is traditionally stripped, and I especially draw out its interactions with gender, sexuality, and power. This necessitates pushing back against prevailing musicological persuasions that deem personal social identities—whether that of the composer, performer, or listener— irrelevant to “the music itself.” The musicologist Suzanne Cusick contends that the historical privileging of “the music itself” emerges from a background of canonic homogeneity and supremacy. It is an attempt to sustain the narrative that the only identities that matter in Western music history are male, straight, and, I would add, white and cisgender.* Further, the disembodiment of music, especially through the veneration of absolute music, reinforces idealized masculine norms of rationality, transcendence, and autonomy that exclude and suppress women and gender and sexual minorities.5 Her ultimate claim, which I take here as an assumption, is that “‘the music itself’ . . . the music with which we as listeners have aesthetic experiences—has always been both a gendered and a political entity.”6 The loaded sociality of music backgrounds my arguments. Judith Peraino, another musicologist, applies an expressly queer lens to musicology, explaining, “A queer orientation manifests in studies that consider musical practice itself as an extension of sensual/sexual practices and dynamics of power that forge non-normative subjects or erotic relations.”7 On this view, queer musicology need * Crucially, such a narrative relies on the presumption of these identities, which thereby exist as “non-identities.” Thank you to Virginia Solomon for this point. 3 not attempt to catalog which composers and performers throughout Western history have been gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, or queer. Indeed, such a project may never be fully possible. Rather, queer musicology allows us to critically analyze how the inescapable gendered and political systems that govern our lives show up in our interactions with musical entities, and indeed are partly constituted by these encounters. The philosopher Judith Butler famously argues that we perform gender and sexuality according to constructed and oppressive norms.8 Their analysis gives way to a politics of performativity that inevitably seeps into our musical lives. Just as gender, sex, and sexuality are socially constructed sets of intricate norms and practices, so is music a socially constructed institution to which we bear complex gendered, sexual, and erotic relations. Queerness extends to the musical sphere in the form of practices that both disrupt its established norms and illuminate how these norms reinforce hegemonic ideologies. A queer musicological orientation allows us to identify and underscore these practices. This queer orientation requires us to recognize, as Cusick writes, the power, pleasure, and intimacy that course through music.9 She offers a generalized view of sexuality as a particular type of relationship defined by this “power/pleasure/intimacy triad,” where queer perspectives offer a “fruitful way of thinking about all our sexualities as reflected in our relationships with music, and thus as ultimately constitutive of our musicalities.”10 Within this framework, sexuality functions as much more than just a description of the objects of one’s sexual desire. It permeates one’s musical life and offers unique ways of disrupting and subverting patterns of power in one’s relationship to music. Cusick visualizes this interplay as “who’s on top,” the subject or the music—an 4 undoubtedly erotic image, though an abstract one.11 Importantly, sexuality and the erotic are taken to be inextricable from music and musicality, in a direct challenge to the theoretical premises of conventional musicology. More concretely, Peraino argues that “music frequently serves as a site or an action of resistance—the queer technique that unsettles the technology,” referring to Foucault’s theory of identity-creation technologies.12 In this way, queerness functions in music as a token of non-normativity. Recalling the original meaning of the word “queer,” queerness is strangeness, it is disruption, it is difference. To be queer in the musical world is to stand at odds with the musical world’s attempts to consolidate its power in alignment with the dominant patriarchal, repressive, and heteronormative strictures of Western society. From this standpoint, I argue that the pipe organ has been coded in American cultural consciousness as a queer instrument. The relationship between queerness and the pipe organ reflects a rich history of non-normativity not only within classical and church music communities, but also in the larger national psyche of the United States. This claim may seem strong and even counter-intuitive. I expect many to initially resist the idea that the pipe organ could represent queer non-normativity. The organ is often seen as an imposing symbol of strength, dominance, and masculinity; indeed, its ranks of visible pipes evoke a distinctive phallic imagery. Its indelicate mechanical qualities could not seem further from the emotional expression, freedom, and fluidity one might expect from a so-called “queer instrument”—not to mention its conspicuous association with Christian churches, typically (at least for most of their history) bastions of doctrinal conservatism, sexual orthodoxy, and unyielding patriarchy. However, I attempt to counter 5 these perceptions through examining two central facets of the American image of the organ. First, organists themselves possess a unique character in American consciousness, shaped by implicit cultural associations passed down through fiction, film, theater, and television. The organ has taken on a number of qualities through its relationship to those who supposedly play it. Most of the organists depicted in fictional media starting in the nineteenth century have been villains—and villains, in turn, have been coded as queer for just as long, if not longer. The gothic, spooky connotations the organ acquired as a result further led to its starring roles in horror films throughout the twentieth century, another heavily queered genre. The sense of mystery surrounding actual organists, who are often hidden from sight, emerged from and carried on these established associations. I will explore implications of closetedness and temperament that attend to these historical factors. The bottom line is: organists in American media and institutions have been represented as weird and mysterious—and subtly queer. Second, the pipe organ carries its own reputation, frequently lamented (and sometimes lauded) for decades, of being dreadfully camp. And camp, of course, is a joyfully queer phenomenon. Simply put, the organ can be a bit much. Not only has the organ facilitated gratuitously flamboyant performances, but it also boasts a history of excessive, expensive, and opulent design, construction, and experimentation. The ornate façades dating back to the Baroque era and elaborate scope of many instruments beginning in the nineteenth century have given the organ an air of excessive indulgence that has fueled American queer cultural flourishing. This milieu, combined with the midtwentieth century cult of the performer, allowed Virgil Fox to rise to soloistic triumph, 6 further cementing the grandiose image of the pipe organ. Parallel to these developments, the theater organ thrived for a short time, electric organs such as the famous Hammond models burst into the popular music scene, and American consumerism produced the world’s largest pipe organs in secular spaces, distancing the instrument from its religious roots. Altogether, pipe organs played out the high camp narratives of the queer United States in a small but increasingly visible piece of the nation’s cultural capital, accelerated through the twentieth century. Throughout all of this, the organ continued to find a place in American churches, which grew increasingly diverse. The role of the churches in the story of the queer pipe organ cannot be ignored, but it is also an incredibly messy story. I will attempt to discuss the aspects of religiosity involved in my analysis where possible and pertinent, but I do so at the risk of generalizing my account. Queer church musicians offer a vast range of reasons for pursuing their vocation in spaces that are often hostile to them, and I hope to keep them in the background as I lay out my broader analysis. Finally, queering the pipe organ matters, because every queer organist—and if the anecdotes are right, there are a lot of us—steps into a discipline fraught with traditionalism, homophobia, and snobbery. Sooner or later, many of us encounter the phenomenon of queer men possessing disproportionate representation in the organ world, and we are left to wonder why. I believe it is not a coincidence. However, though it is sometimes acknowledged, the prevalence of queer people in the organ community is rarely discussed, which can make it difficult to fully participate in that community. Revealing this queerness where it has intentionally been obscured can lead queer people to find a deeper attachment to their craft and more meaningful engagement with their 7 community. It creates space for queer possibility in traditionally repressive contexts. Uncovering the queerness hidden throughout organ and broader musical communities can yield understanding into the complicity of music in upholding dominant structures of power. It can help us combat the oppression that arises from this background. And if music truly is political, that is worth a great deal. 8 VILLAINS, MISFITS, AND THE CLOSET: CODING THE QUEER ORGANIST Because queerness is a social phenomenon sustained by human beings, one cannot discuss the proposed queerness of any musical instrument without considering the coding of the people who relate to it, especially the musicians who play it. Notably, organists enjoy a long pedigree of depictions in American fictional media, usually as troubled villains or mysterious loners, and the list of organists portrayed in film, television, theater, and video games is extensive. Queer theorists have observed the cultural intersections of fictional villainy and dominant attitudes about queerness, as well as the subtle relationships between queerness and the horror genre. I contend that the organ has, in many ways, paralleled these developments, featuring as an accessory to many villains and boasting an iconic status within the horror film canon. In particular, the notorious opening motif of J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565, has become a campy hallmark of horror films, dating back to its diegetic use in such preCode* films as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Black Cat (1934). The film scholar Royal S. Brown suggests that the Toccata and Fugue had been commonly played by theater organists to mark dramatic cues while accompanying silent films, so its usage would have been familiar to American audiences.13 The role of the organ in film thereafter arguably drew upon and continued the legacy of the theater organ. However, much evidence indicates that the organ as a literary and film topos extends beyond mere allusions to theater organs and the relatively short-lived silent era of film. * “Pre-Code” refers to the period in American film between the advent of sound film and the establishment of the Production Code Administration. The subsequent enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) prohibited depictions of themes deemed immoral. 9 Both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Black Cat feature highly educated, wellrespected men—Dr. Jekyll and Hjalmar Poelzig, respectively—who play the organ and also commit atrocious murders. The idea of the organist as tortured genius resurfaces in the characters of Captain Nemo (both Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and its 1954 film adaptation), Durand Durand (Barbarella, 1968), and Dr. Phibes (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, 1971). Other prominent organist-villains in fictional media include most depictions of the Phantom from Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (beginning with the 1925 film adaptation and including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s successful 1986 musical adaptation), the antagonist Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean series, video game villains such as Ganondorf (The Legend of Zelda franchise) and Bowser (Mario franchise), and Maestro Forte, an actual, personified pipe organ from Disney’s 1997 direct-to-video animated film Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas. The latter represents perhaps the ultimate and most explicit queercoding of the pipe organ, realized through Tim Curry’s stereotypical queer associations and melodramatic performance. All of the other examples, though, also exhibit traits that fall within identifiable patterns of queer-coding, beginning with the stereotype of the gay villain. In this section, I investigate the queer dimensions of villainy, horror, fastidiousness, and closetedness, along with their close ties to popular conceptions of organists. In turn, I will show how the organ has garnered its queer undertones through association. Horror as a film genre is replete with queer suggestion. Horror and queerness— cast both in gestures at “homosexuality” and in terms of a larger realm of sexual deviancy and contra-normalcy—have a long and complicated relationship. Harry Benshoff, a 10 scholar of queer media studies, traces this history back to origins in gothic literature, which literary and queer theorists have prolifically mined for queer subtext.14 These subtexts were amplified in film by the German Expressionists, many of them gay, who explored themes of subjectivity, the deep and morbid subconscious (including sexual deviancy), and homoeroticism. Their work was marked by an “opposition to ‘normality’ as constructed through realist styles of representation,” and its purveyors faced increasing scrutiny and censorship following the rise of Nazism.15 Many of the pioneering filmmakers of this genre fled the regime, bringing German Expressionist ideals to Hollywood. Depictions of sexuality and deviancy, often violent, flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s before the Production Code forbade portrayals of “sex perversion.” The enforcement of this Code led to the flourishing of implicature and stereotypical coding as modes of either embedding queer narratives in film or, more commonly, reinforcing the moral supremacy of heterosexuality through contrasting the male hero with sissies and degenerates.16 Throughout the twentieth century, filmmakers looked to villains and monsters to bring to life expressions of non-normativity, ranging from queer or unexpected pairings to the condemnation of gender nonconformity to morally equating homosexuality with sociopathic violence, pedophilia, communism, and disease. The idea of queerness as a contagion, whether physiological or ideological, backgrounded horror films in which the heterosexual “normal” couple triumphs over the grotesque monster or evil villain. This subtle and persistent queer coding of characters who challenge the dominant norms of conduct, communication theorist Larry Gross explains, “serves to maintain and police the boundaries of the moral order.”17 Villains and monsters, usually ostracized by society and often ultimately destroyed, epitomize the 11 consequences of deviancy in a culture afraid of any threat to the heterosexual, capitalist, nuclear family. Villains themselves are coded as queer, their moral deviancy reinforced by “unnatural” couplings or stereotypical mannerisms. Horror and noir films exploited queerness and homophobia to account for the villainy in which they reveled.18 Importantly, they also exploited race and racism; Gross, drawing an analog between queer and racialized representation, remarks that “when members of a minority begin to appear on movie and television screens, the roles they are permitted to play are generally limited to two categories: victim or villain.”19 The initial conventions of queering relationships on screen were to exoticize them, creating interracial pairings, odd couples, masculine women with feminine men, and so forth. The pairing of two men scientists attempting to create new life without heterosexual intercourse, as in Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), reflects another iteration of the queered “couple.”20 The two most famous and typecast actors in American classical horror films were foreign-born: Boris Karloff and Béla Lugosi, “racial Others” who starred alongside each other in a number of films throughout the 1930s. Benshoff characterizes the “Karloff-Lugosi vehicle” as a “sado-masochistic queer couple”; they typically played morally corrupt characters violently pitted against each other, as in The Black Cat and The Raven (1935), often hinting at tensions of desire.21 Interestingly, both of these films feature the organ—specifically, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The organ becomes a soundtrack to this transgressive pairing of deviants, cueing in the queer and the evil together. 12 Additionally, villains and monsters tend to take on cultural signifiers of queerness in order to reinforce this theme. The (nearly always male) villain was often coded as gay according to the stereotypes of the time, “even when he supposedly lusts after the female ingenue,” Benshoff writes. Often he is tinged with the era’s signifiers of male homosexual culture, being finely acculturated, somewhat dandified, and given to bizarre modes of dress, make-up, and deportment. He is shown to love the arts, both through his modernist set design and his obsessive organ playing, a pun on male masturbation which has circulated for decades. Regularly, the gothic villain is touched with a European decadence or a British air, both of which constituted a certain subcultural fashion at the time among male homosexuals.22 Benshoff here chalks up the abundance of organs in queered horror to a love of the arts characteristic of stereotypical gay sensibilities, as well as the double entendre of the word “organ.” This latter point introduces the erotic into depictions of the organ. The musicologist Julie Brown remarks that “the cinematic image of a man playing his organ at home or in some other secluded place is quite sexually suggestive,” and “by the time of the Dr. Phibes films [1971–2] . . . the sexual connotation is quite camp.”23 The idea of the organ’s erotic implications as camp also surfaces in the 1968 film Barbarella, where a pipe-organ-like machine functions to sexually stimulate its victims to death. The pipe organ’s eroticism thus generally mirrors phallic channels of power as a symbol of masculinity and, by extension, patriarchy.24 Most organists depicted in fiction are men, 13 implying a homoerotic power dynamic between societal “equals,” or, alternatively, the emasculation of organists in service of their instrument. Erotic or not, the organ bestows some level of prestige and influence upon those who have mastered it. Whether or not Benshoff’s one-off reference to the organ captures the entire picture, the organ certainly was (and still is) a sign of cultural privilege and education. Following their establishment in early horror, American filmmakers used these flags of cultural propriety and effeminacy to code more “realistic” villains such as Nazi spies or communist schemers in horror, noir, and action films.25 The organ, an expensive and complicated European artifact, assists in this characterization. Critics and scholars have additionally noted the consistent coding of Disney villains as queer. Given Disney’s immeasurable cultural influence in the United States, the archetype of the Disney villain is essential to understanding the broader landscape of villain-queering. Often taking Ursula (The Little Mermaid, 1989), Scar (The Lion King, 1994), and Governor Ratcliffe (Pocahontas, 1995) as paradigmatic examples, these critiques center around Disney villains’ campy aesthetics, feminized or gender-bending costume and mannerisms, and roles in disrupting the heterosexual “happy ending” narrative trajectory.26 These traits subtly code villain characters as bad, transgressive, and abnormal to an often frightening degree. Conversely, they associate queerness with immorality, wrongdoing, and repugnance. The emblematic Disney princess film represents villains as universally fixated on ruining the happy, innocent, “normal” union of the (cisgender) male and female leads, where “heterosexual happiness is the ultimate goal to be achieved in the Disney narrative.”27 Musical symbolism also plays an important role, especially in Disney films. Dion McLeod analyzes Disney villains’ songs 14 as “songs of disruption” in contrast to the heroines’ “songs of desire.” Songs of disruption aim to thwart the destined heterosexual bond within each narrative, and they do so with extravagant theatricality. Their songs are accompanied by larger spaces, staged lighting, and a performative air of artificiality.28 Disney villains display their power through large-scale constructions and awe-inspiring spectacles, and many further appeal to camp aesthetics to emphasize their artificiality. Their existence and ethos function as antithetical to the natural, good, and heteronormative. In many ways, the pipe organ reflects this musical staging to an extreme in terms of its expansive construction, proportions, and timbral scope. I will return to this idea in the next section, but for now, it will suffice to observe the resemblance between the defining qualities of fictional villains and the quintessential features of the pipe organ. Disney literalizes this link in Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, a 1997 animated direct-to-video sequel to 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. The film was a critical flop and has largely been forgotten, but it is notable for its primary villain: Maestro Forte, the Prince’s former court composer who was turned into a personified pipe organ by the Enchantress’s spell. Forte is voiced by Tim Curry and exhibits many of the stereotypes Disney audiences have come to associate with villains: he is snobbish, effeminate, and affected. His metallic face, perched atop the façade of CGI pipes, mimics drag makeup. In human form, he is similarly made-up, even sporting a rosy blush and powdered wig, relics of Benshoff’s notion of queer “European decadence.” Forte’s appearances are underscored by powerful, often dissonant chords on the full organ, demonstrating his affectations of power, performativity, and artificiality. Further, his solo song, entitled “Don’t Fall in Love,” encapsulates a “song of disruption” perhaps better than any other 15 example. He is obsessed with preventing Belle and the Beast from falling in love, representing the highest threat to a Disney coupling. Forte is unmistakably coded as queer, and the fact that he is a pipe organ is part and parcel of this codification. Up to this point, I have surveyed queer associations with fictional villains and monsters, especially through the film genre of horror, in the United States in the twentieth century. The pipe organ has regularly emerged as a recurring motif alongside queered monsters and villains. In the popular American cultural consciousness, the organ has been associated with a queer crowd for over a century. The frightening gothic associations of the organ accompany and enhance the villain as a menace to the heterosexual status quo. While many might identify the organ’s distinctive plenum with connotations of fear or creepiness, it more precisely acts as a culturally coded signal of a threat to the normal or ordinary. As Brown put it, “the minute we hear the organ underscoring we know something is up.”29 That “something” is queerness: its subversion, assurance of instability, and ability to alter our familiar constructions of power and position. Aside from the moralizing intentions behind queer coding evil antagonists, film has occasionally made space for more sympathetic depictions of queer villain identity. The 1980s saw a shift toward more humanized and three-dimensional villains in film and other media. Many gave villains tragic backstories, painting them as outcasts, misfits, and misunderstood geniuses; Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera famously depicts the Phantom (Erik) as “a tragic gothic lover instead of an ugly, murdering (and raping) psychopath.”30 Films attempted to bring their audiences to confront the uglier parts of themselves and identify with the repressed angst of villains and anti-heroes. Vampirism as a metaphor for closeted queerness, especially lesbianism, 16 flourished in popular media.31 Queer people, stigmatized and marginalized by society, are often likely to relate to such portrayals. Ousted from mainstream society as a result of their subversion of norms, queer people may harbor resentment toward their oppressors and experience loneliness from the loss of their communities. Representations of organists track this trend as well. As Charles Miller noted when asked why so many organists are queer, “I can see in many instances if you’re a young child struggling with your sexual identity, you’re kind of off the beaten path anyway, you feel unique or isolated or weird.”32 Brown points out, “in horror movies the organist is typically a weird male loner, with plans to exert some sort of power.”33 In addition to the classic Phantom, the character of Captain Nemo lives up to this image as a brooding, mysterious anti-hero, isolated in his submarine with a built-in pipe organ. In real life, too, organists are often hidden from view, tucked away in the loft of a church. The figure of the organist can exude a certain elusive mystery as the unseen operator of otherworldly sounds. Philip Rice, a composer and music theorist, contends that “the characterization of the organ as an increasingly mysterious space has led to its associations with evil masterminds and horrific villains, always men, and often disfigured or crazed.”34 We have seen how villains’ association with deviance, separateness, and queerness bled into the development of the organ’s image; if Rice is right, the connection runs the other direction as well. That is, the organ’s construction as an enclosure (not only of pipes, but also of the organist) rendered it a particularly conducive companion to shifty villains and misunderstood geniuses. Just as the pipe organ’s complex operation, requiring extensive and esoteric training, lent itself to bolstering the stereotype of the highly-cultured dandy 17 homosexual organist, the very same feature also reinforced the stereotype of the reclusive mastermind organist. Taken together, and in tandem with the queering of villains occurring independently of the organ, the association of the organ with both of these stereotypes may have served to further unite them. Indeed, many organists today pride themselves on the intellectual fastidiousness required for organ technique, a trait which infamously overlaps with stereotypes of gay men. That the organ serves the stereotypic demands of both tortured genius-villains and deviant villain-queers naturally allows for the proliferation of the tortured genius-villain-queer stereotype. Rice further suggests that the enclosed nature of the pipe organ’s construction and performance, which he attributes to nineteenth-century French organ-building innovations and musical Romanticism, serves as an actualized closet for queer organists: at once a cell and a sanctuary nestled within deeply homophobic contexts.35 The closet constructed by the organ provides a protected space for queer innovation as well as erotic expression, while insulating the outside, heterosexual world from any potential queer threat. Rice follows an intriguing line of argument to this effect, pointing to the concealment of the many mechanical, insidiously homoerotic movements working to produce sound from the organ.36 A less far-fetched analysis, however, still yields a queer view of the organ-as-closet, wherein these queered musical spaces, however subtle, allow for a certain degree of acceptable artistic freedom for othered organists. According to queer musicologist Philip Brett, many queer musicians choose to balance a sort of musical respectability politics with the “open secret” of the closet. They realize this, he maintains, through “an involvement in a social contract that allows comforting deviance only at the sometimes bitter price of sacrificing self- 18 determination.”37 In other words, queer musicians operating within conservative musical contexts often choose to remain closeted—and indeed, often nominally renounce their queerness—in exchange for status and the privileges of expressing some kinds of nonnormativity. For Brett, this is due to the narrow, power-driven “construction of musicality” that predominates in the classical music world, which I interpret as the musical specificities of the normative impulsion at large.38 Queer people, who he asserts often flock to music for its aspects of expression and performance, learn to cede some forms of deviance in order to gain space to practice other forms of “comforting” deviance. These musicians, many of whose queerness is an open secret, must display their deviance cautiously, always at risk of being rejected from the institution for an offense gone “too far.” This precarious closet is thus a trade-off for queer organists—especially queer men—seeking status in their communities, which are often coextensive with their churches. Organists have a particularly interesting relationship to the closet. There is perhaps no other queer musician who experiences the burden of the closet so keenly as the gay organist, who must invariably interface with churches to at least some degree. Among classical musicians, gay organists who are employed in churches tread the limits of the open secret at the potential expense of their livelihood. While other queer classical musicians may face the loss of opportunity due to stigma, the queer organist also faces it due to dogma. The organ as a safe closet, almost a hiding place, represents a refuge for queerness. It becomes a place to express oneself—and particularly, via the instrument’s offerings of excess, loudly—from an unthreatened (and unthreatening) distance. The musicologist Laura Wahlfors notes that “queer organists have a long history of embracing 19 the ‘open secret’ of the closet and of cultivating a highly discreet culture of camp in the hidden chambers of organ lofts.”39 The expansive construction of the organ, dating back to the Baroque era, became particularly amenable to modern framings of homosexuality through the metaphor of the closet as they emerged. We must also keep in mind that this refuge is only necessary because of the homophobia queer people still face; the closet is still “the defining structure for gay oppression.”40 Against this backdrop, the organ, especially great achievement on the organ, offers an additional layer of insurance against repudiation for queer people seeking acceptance, respect, and even power in their communities. In this section, I have explored the hidden connections between queerness and organists in American popular culture. My analysis reveals a unique relationship between the organ and the closet that provokes a queer eroticism. Villains are conventionally queer coded, and they often play the organ. Misunderstood geniuses are commonly coded as fastidious queers who, likewise, play the organ. In the United States, the persistent combination of queer-coding, various modes of villainy, and organ-playing has resulted in a fascinating confluence of stereotypes. As I mentioned throughout this section, the place of the organ in horror films, especially Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, has crystallized as a sort of camp cliché. The strong relationship between camp and horror films (especially low-budget and B movies) is undeniable.* I also touched on the idea of the special camp capabilities of the organ to illustrate the queer and erotic. In the next * Jack Babuscio explicitly draws out the camp presence in horror films and specifically names Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Black Cat as being classically camp. Camp horror films, Babuscio writes, “make the most of stylish conventions for expressing instant feeling, thrills, sharply defined personality, outrageous and ‘unacceptable’ sentiments, and so on.” “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 19–20. 20 section, I will examine camp more directly as a cultural and musical phenomenon with regard to the pipe organ. One must, of course, exercise care when attempting to draw out such correlative parallels as I have in this section. Just because queer people and organists have both been coded as villains does not necessarily mean that organists have been coded as queer. In most other contexts, this sort of conflation would be fatal. However, the pioneering queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the dichotomies between normative society and queerness pervade our cultural epistemology; in other words, queerness and queering are nearly always relevant. According to Sedgwick, “the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are . . . indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/homosexual definition [Sedgwick’s framing of the normative versus the queer].”41 She identifies pairings such as secrecy/disclosure, private/public, natural/artificial, same/different, and art/kitsch, all of which condense into the ultimate epistemological dichotomy of the closet versus coming out. The power dynamics of knowledge surrounding openness about one’s queerness are what force queerness to be coded, rather than stated, in the first place.42 For my account, this means it matters that queerness and the pipe organ share a history of coding alongside villains. It matters that the isolation of organists and tortured geniuses can be likened to a queer othering, and it matters that the pipe organ is a locus of both phallic eroticism and oppressive closeting. In keeping with the queer musicological orientation of this thesis, any distinctive challenge to normativity within musical culture deserves a closer look through the lenses of power, gender, and sexuality. As the cultural theorist Sue-Ellen Case eloquently reminds us, “Queer revels constitute a kind of 21 activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny. Like the Phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music.”43 Carefully examining the queer codings of the organist figure can help us bring the queer politics of musical performance out from underground and into the light, giving us insight, in turn, into the ways our musical practices reinforce the overtones of dominant standards of behavior, performance, and performativity. Like the rhetorical appeals of horror, the archetypal organist character confronts each of us, asking: what does this monster reveal about me? What does this monster reveal about us? 22 EXCESS, DRAMA, AND THE ORGAN AS CAMP The famously iconoclastic organist Cameron Carpenter, himself queer, opined that “the history of [the organ] falls within the canon of camp.”44 Camp as a concept is notoriously hard to discuss. Nearly every author writing on camp begins by lamenting the difficulty of defining the term. The earliest well-known examination of camp came in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” in which Sontag classifies camp as a “sensibility” and “one of the hardest things to talk about.”45 Theorists since then, while agreeing about the difficulties of camp discourse, have rightfully critiqued her shallow handling of the integral queerness of camp, arguing that camp is a distinctly queer phenomenon.46 Jack Babuscio views camp as a queer response to the creative “gay sensibility” of being conscious of one’s non-normativity.47 Moe Meyer liberally defines camp as “the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity.”48 Further, David Bergman writes, most scholars agree that camp is at least “affiliated with homosexual culture,” and is a “style . . . that favors ‘exaggeration,’ ‘artifice,’ and ‘extremity.’”49 It should not be difficult to see how the pipe organ might fit this description so far. My aim in this section is to trace the camp narratives of the pipe organ and bring out the aspects of queerness in the context of the United States. The main story of the pipe organ’s camp evolution necessarily takes place within Christian churches. Although the organ has been used outside of religious contexts and continues to be secularized, the major developments in organ building technology and design that bestowed the essential features of camp upon the organ arose in response to its role in Christian liturgy. Carpenter remarks on this relationship: 23 I think the organ is a kind of voice in some ways and, it’s kind of a mythical or mythological voice of empowerment and command, so somehow down the channels of interpretation and tradition perhaps a sort of rivulet opened and appealed to a certain aesthetic branch of personality that was sort of gay. Theaters and churches are traditionally camp. You have myriad controls and buttons that can bring things from the softest whisper to an obnoxious roar. . . . Church, let’s face it, is a pretty innately camp environment where you have men wearing dresses acting out all this ceremony. In some ways, it’s the same as the theater. So where organs exist perhaps somehow appeals to the camp nature of where gay men express themselves.50 Carpenter’s speculation contains a number of conceptually rich avenues for camp analysis. Theatricality, aestheticism, and exaggeration are essential characteristics of camp, while empowerment and self-expression reflect the practical capabilities of camp styles. In an “open secret” culture where closetedness is still the norm, camp offers queers places to take up space. Musical camp is loud but innocuous, allowing normative society to tolerate and even enjoy outrageous panache and nonconformity precisely by dismissing its seriousness. For queer men in religious settings, the organ becomes the prime vehicle for this expressive occupation of space. In my discussion of the organ as camp, I will approach the signifiers of camp enshrined in the organ and demonstrate how each enables certain queer political enterprises through camp’s flippant façade. I argue not only that the organ is camp, but also that it is important that the organ is camp. 24 In addition to artifice, exaggeration, and extremity, theorists have continued to enumerate characteristics argued to be camp essentials. Babuscio lists four features he deems basic to camp: irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humor.51 Others have gestured to eroticism and marginality as core themes in camp aesthetics. These properties, insofar as they constitute a common aesthetic sensibility, relate to each other closely. Theatricality and artifice are clearly tied up together, while connecting to marginal aesthetics of kitsch. The camp hallmark of taking gross exaggeration seriously manifests as both ironic and comical, and its hyperbolized eroticism calls into question normative expectations of decorum while posturing as the aesthetic. All of these characteristics and their socio-political implications bleed into each other, making it difficult to examine them individually. I will attempt to do so while highlighting some of the core social themes that arise in camping the organ. Let us begin with irony, the rhetorical device Babuscio deems “the subject matter of camp.” 52 At its most basic, camp revels in incongruence. Babuscio names the pairs masculine/feminine, youth/old age, sacred/profane, spirit/flesh, and high/low status as common contrasts played up by camp. These juxtapositions recall the queer irony of the odd pairings depicted in American film, which I discussed in the previous section. Irony in camp is meant to accentuate existing dynamics of alterity, highlighting the vast difference between what is “normal” or “natural” and what is “queer” or “wrong.” The irony of the pipe organ in religious spaces appears in the incongruence between the church as a place of god-worship and as a performance space for the (human) organist. As the organ grew in size and scope, the church became a site of opposition, pitting ideals of religious humility and the veneration of God against the organ’s conspicuous attention- 25 seeking facilities. The organ inadvertently introduced the potential for unrestrained individuality into the same spaces meant for human effacement, obfuscating its role as a tool of worship. Closely related to the function of irony in camp is the centering of the marginal. While this can take the form of ironic juxtaposition within an aesthetic entity itself, Mark Booth argues that marginality is essential to understanding camp’s more general obsession with trashy, kitsch, and rejected cultural objects. Those artifacts deemed undesirable by mainstream society are rendered, through camp, “fashionably exclusive.”53 As a gay sensibility, camp views this subversion of cultural refuse as a metaphor for the reclamation of the queer self from social repudiation. By uplifting the beauty and value in styles—and people—shunned by larger society, camping queers pull the margins to the center through disruptive acts of performance. The composer Mia Windsor picks up on this thread in an essay connecting the pipe organ to Jack Halberstam’s theory of queer failure. The pipe organ, Windsor argues, fails to universalize through its rigidity of temperament and mechanistic constitution. Every pipe organ is different, and this idiosyncrasy bars it from fully actualizing the integrative norms that govern most other Western musical instruments. Composing for the organ requires that one navigate the complexity of this norm-resistance.54 Additionally, many see the organ’s mechanical roots as stunting its emotional expression and depth of tone color, a kind of failure against the normative expectations of its musical contexts. Halberstam points out that queer people are defined by their very failure to conform to prevailing norms of gender and sexual behavior. Lesbians and gay men fail at being women and men, respectively, to the extent that they fail to exhibit the “correct” 26 (that is, appropriate heterosexual) desires, scripts, and familial constructions.55 Rather than acceding to a broken, depreciated status, Halberstam and other queer theorists take this failure to be liberating. Where a heteronormative society sees failure, Halberstam sees possibility, politicized modes of resistance, even an art.56 José Esteban Muñoz writes of this “fabulous” queer failure that, used as a mode of escape from inadequate structures, it can become a “queer virtuosity” borne from the performance of failure.57 Perhaps playing the organ is a queer virtuosic act in itself. The triumph of the organ in spite of its failures is a particular queer joy that we can link to camp’s exaltation of marginality. That the organ manages to surmount these failures and preserve its cultural significance, at least to some extent, constitutes an ironic feat of subversion. The organ is queer and yet persists, an analog to the chant popularized by Queer Nation: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” According to Babuscio, a uniquely style-laden aestheticism provides the necessary shape to irony in camp. The privileging of style in camp aesthetics serves to highlight the incongruencies of presentation: “when the stress on style is ‘outrageous’ or ‘too much,’ . . . the emphasis shifts from what a thing or a person is to what it looks like; from what is being done to how it is being done.”58 In camp, then, style is much more than a vehicle for transmitting content; it becomes the content itself. Style is the means through which performance becomes the central focus of queer organists camping the instrument. In ecclesiastical settings, the organ very easily transforms from a tool into the centerpiece; an ostensible focus on the liturgy gives way to a sanctioned arena of performance. For queer church organists, sometimes all it takes to camp is simply playing 27 to perform rather than solely to facilitate worship, and nobody else needs to know the difference. As a medium, the organ is deeply stylistic; of any instrument, it offers perhaps the most distinct timbral and dynamic options for playing the same set of notes. On the organ, one can play a single melodic line on a flute, a diapason, a trumpet, a plenum, in various octaves, in different combinations, and so forth. The breadth and scope of the instrument allow an organist to produce musical liturgical content (often hymns or plainchant), satisfying the organ’s prescribed role in church services, while experimenting with the style and delivery of that content, albeit within certain bounds of propriety (that is, camp’s aspect of exaggeration does not entail unrestraint). The possibility of camping “under the radar” of cis-hetero society means that queers can generate deeply meaningful modes of self-expression largely undetected—or at least perceived harmlessly. The open flamboyancy of camp is often right at home in liturgical scenes. Christopher Moore posits that camp, in the particular context of the Catholic church, has functioned as an “ironic communicative device across the culture of homosexuality during a period when that culture could not afford public visibility.”59 Camp is a means of sustaining community in hostile societies, and the organ is one apparatus of its communication. Queer classical organists might observe an analogous culture of queer music-aided communication in Black church choirs. Within Black congregations, queer men and boys often find themselves drawn to the musical sites of worship, where flamboyancy is authorized under the guise of “catching the spirit,” and “later as a way to signify [one’s] homosexuality,” according to communication scholar E. Patrick 28 Johnson.60 One queer Black churchgoer Johnson interviewed corroborates the notion that churches, which are traditionally homophobic, can actually create spaces for queer expression, remarking, “where else but in the Black church can a queen be a star whether she has talent or not?”61 Through (potentially camp) performance, Black church choirs provide an affirming space for queer people to express themselves in socially allowable terms. Benefitting from subtle self-expression and performance beyond content, the camp style creates space for queer self-affirmation and political subversion. Babuscio writes of the camp aesthetic, “As a means to personal liberation through the exploration of experience, camp is an assertion of one's self-integrity—a temporary means of accommodation with society in which art becomes, at one and the same time, and intense mode of individualism and a form of spirited protest.”62 The aesthetic prioritization of performance places a unique focus on a performer’s choices for conveying textual material, often at the expense of the material itself. For queer organists caught up in a conservative musical culture and often yet more conservative religious settings, camp is freeing: the covert privileging of form over content shifts the organist’s approach from its normative worship origins to a queer-centric (that is, marginal-centering or nonnormative-privileging) production. What was instituted as a means to a recalcitrant, homophobic social order transforms into a progressive end in itself—the aesthetic, and specifically, the camp aesthetic. The aesthetic of “performance-in-itself” brings us to the notion of theatricality, universally indexed as a requirement of camp. Theatricality gives rise to a further element of performance, that of performativity, as well as an interesting relationship to artifice 29 and construction. Sontag comments on camp’s unique brand of theatricality, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” In this vein, following Widor’s crowning of the organ as the voice of God, organists camping the organ understand it in quotation marks, as “the voice of God.” Where Widor saw the organ as a metaphor, camp consciously casts the organ in a role, especially in liturgical contexts. In addition to Carpenter (quoted at the beginning of this section), Moore and Wahlfors also observe the theatricality of Christian liturgy, pointing out that the historically male-dominated and restrained environments of churches also foster extravagant ritual, elaborate costumes, and latent eroticism, and that these features may attract queer “camp performers.”63 Liturgy relies on pretense, and the organ exhibits no lack of pretense. For one thing, organ stops are generally classified based on their resemblance to other instruments: flutes, trumpets, oboes, strings, even the human voice. While many of the stops named after other instruments are not meant to be imitative, organ builders have certainly, at the very least, fashioned roles modeled after them, manufacturing a cast of timbral characters that lend the organ its dramatic range. The development of “orchestral” stops in the nineteenth century only brought this manufacturing process into explicit terms. Camp prizes the ability to shift from one mood to an entirely different mood in order to craft its unsettling juxtapositions. The organ facilitates such exaggerations easily. The accumulation of new standard stops throughout the history of the organ has invoked an almost postmodern agglomeration of contrasting components. On many contemporary 30 American organs, one can find French reeds next to German flutes and English diapasons. There are even a number of “hybrid” pipe organs with both physical and electronic stops. The development of electronic technology has led to modern consoles bristling with pistons and toe studs of various functions. This expansion of possibility is both a camp staple and, potentially, a queer creed. It may be that queers are drawn to the capacity for a certain level of musical freedom to be found in the organ. If all acoustic musical instruments are, to some extent, artificial, the organ capitalizes on this artificiality to truly access the possibilities of human creativity. Besides its timbral palette, the organ epitomizes construction and artifice. No other instrument emulates constructed-ness like the organ. Large organs possess the size and scope of standalone buildings, immobile, enterable, and often requiring years to build and weeks to tune. In contrast with instruments that allow the performer to manipulate the tone through varying their technique, a well-maintained organ pipe will always produce the exact same utterance when a key is pressed. One might criticize this characteristic of the organ for resulting in the production of “artificial” music; yet, this is precisely what binds the organ to its style, as conceived in camp. Babuscio asserts, “Style is a form of consciousness; it is never ‘natural,’ always acquired.”64 The artificial premise of the organ is what imbues it with its defining style. Camping the organ necessitates balancing the insincerity of artifice with the drama of theater, the mechanistic with the animated. Indeed, effective organ construction and performance rest on the idea that an organ should demonstrate an ability to “come alive.”* The organ plays out an interesting * This recalls horror films’ themes of the queer attempting to animate a new human creature through “unnatural” means. 31 relationship to human vitality. The organist Michael Kearney points out the metaphorical terminology of the organ’s “chests” and pipes’ “lips,” as well as the process of “voicing” pipes. The interpretive practice of ensuring the music “breathes” and follows the contours of the human voice is another extension of the bodily parallels found in the organ.65 Even the very name of the instrument, “the organ,” connotes associations with the body and corporeality. Kearney argues for a heavily embodied conception of the organ. An organist (generally) must use all of their limbs to maneuver their instrument, creating a unique bodily relationality. They must also be responsive to the physical environment of their audience and execute a dialogic performance.66 Playing the organ, then, is a particularly intimate act, suggesting a sensual, even erotic, kind of intercourse. The need to exaggerate any emotional expression in order to convey it through the machine reinforces a theatrical sensibility and a physical drive. Organists must become hyperaware of their interactions with the acoustical space and engage in a reciprocal process of responding to their environment. Laboring at the console, they become entangled with the organ and its constructed domain, building tension, heightening the musical narrative, stimulating the room—all to maximize the pleasure of the performance. Moore adds that the dramatized homoerotic iconography in many Christian contexts serves as further inspiration for queer church musicians.67 This is musical camp at its best: exaggerated and performative, elevating the artificial and flirting with the erotic. The performance aspect of theatricality echoes the conclusions of its camp aesthetic. Queer church organists (and certainly queer religious actors at large) perform or “pass” as normative for their congregations, reflecting the politics of queer gender 32 performativity promulgated by Judith Butler. Butler argues that normative expectations of gender and sexual behavior are not naturally occurring, but are rather instituted and reinforced through social imaginings. Queer people conspicuously perform incongruently with these expectations. For Butler, this demonstrates the performative essence of gender and sex. They contend that “the replication of heterosexual constructs in nonheterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of ‘the original’ reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original.”68 In other words, queers paralleling straight gender performance expose the arbitrary foundations straight society takes as given. This angle reflects Meyer’s succinct characterization of camp as “queer parody.”69 Butler goes on to suggest that queers can mobilize hyperbolic, subversive, and excessively parodic performances of gender in order to critique the oppressive modes of performance that currently dominate. Within Butler’s framework, camping the organ includes parodically hypernormative performances. The musicologist Freya Jarman-Ivens points out that performances classed as flamboyant often exaggerate musical structures that imply a strongly masculine narrative or motive, especially the “phallic directionality” of climax and release. Rather than disqualifying such performances from being camp, Jarman-Ivens argues that this practice reflects the kind of exaggeration characteristic of camp. Exaggeration “enacts a sense of performativity in relation to that phallic masculinity,” and this “playfulness with gendered codes is precisely at the heart of camp.”70 33 Exaggeration is practically an axiom of organ-playing, not only in the relatively frequent use of the full organ, but also in agogic accenting strategies, overstated expression shading, and the diversity of tone and timbre that can occur within a single piece. Physically, the organ is a tower of space-taking masculinity, not to mention its aggressive frontage of erect pipes, all lined up together in a homoerotic phallus exhibit.71 Thus, when organists assert the power and presence of their instrument through volume and virtuosity, they at once express a masculine-coded inheritance and play into an overthe-top aesthetic of flamboyance. As Bergman puts it, “for Butler nothing succeeds in subverting the straight like excess.”72 Camp’s unmistakable cult of exaggeration caricatures normative masculine modes of performance, “hyperbolizing [them] to the point of parody.”73 Parody, of course, is notable among modes of subversive critique for being humorous, supporting Babuscio’s claim that camp requires humor. As we have seen, camp presents the self artificially, allowing camping actors more license to explore presentation beyond strict seriousness.74 Through humor, parody softens the critical sharpness of camp performance, facilitating a particularly effective means of subversion. Moreover, we can see the organ as humorous through its ostentatiousness: its scope often comes off as comical—especially in American contexts.* On top of this, the contemporary instrument’s mélange of voices, styles, colors, and mechanisms, from its combination of discrete timbral sensibilities and stops to its various methods of producing sound, can seem absurd. In addition to the different ways of putting air to pipe, organs can include bells, bird-imitating stops (including the Nightingale and Cuckoo), percussion stops, and other toy stops such as the Zimbelstern. In yet another feat of * See, in particular, the Boardwalk Hall Auditorium organ in Atlantic City, NJ and the Wanamaker organ in Philadelphia, PA. 34 comedy, for such a whimsically excessive hodgepodge of an instrument, the organ community takes itself extremely seriously. It is this seriousness which classes the organ as “high camp,” in the parlance of Christopher Isherwood’s character Charles from the 1954 novel The World in the Evening.75 It is essential that the organ produces high camp rather than “low camp,” which Isherwood and other theorists take to signify drag and other self-consciously showy acts. High camp is defined by its seriousness; queer organists taking the organ seriously permit straight society to take organ camp seriously. Camp is as much an endeavor of seriousness as it is one of ludicrousness. 76 The point is to view the absurd in earnest. Our analysis of the individual modes, characteristics, and instances of camp reveals a conceptual nexus grounded in a fundamentally social project. Camp provides queers a safe way to push back against the normalized restrictions forced upon them, to reject the closet, take up space, and establish coded connections with other queers. Meyer sees this process as a sort of rehabilitation of the queer image. He writes, “The queer agent can read him/herself back into the discourse by establishing a dialogic relationship. . . . As a product of queer agency, it is the process of Camp that selects and chooses which aspects of itself will be subsumed into dominant culture.”77 Meyer argues that dominant society will always appropriate the practices of a minority; it is thus a strategic move for queers to encode disruption into aesthetics that will inevitably be taken up by straight people as their own. The organ plays a unique role in this enterprise through its unique capability to infiltrate Christian consciousness and introduce camp’s element of incongruity. It subtly introduces human excess, individuality, expression, drama, silliness, and artifice into spaces which moralize humanity and profess to exalt the 35 divine. At the heart of this disruption is a radical expansion of possibility. As Sontag puts it, camp “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement. . . . [It offers] for art (and life) a different—a supplementary—set of standards.”78 Camp challenges the boundaries of the standards naturalized by a hierarchical society and plants seeds of possibility in sites of collective consciousness. We have also seen that camping can facilitate a queer-specific kind of communication. For queer people, this can simply mean self-expression, the assertion of one’s existence under threat of erasure, an emotional release from a society that devalues one’s agency. Babuscio takes the camp style to grant this kind of emancipation. He views camp fundamentally as an expressive mode of coping with the particular marginalization of queers in American society.79 Camp is the avatar of the queer musician’s contract described by Brett. The “respectable place for marginality” afforded to the queer musician transforms into a stage under the influence of camp. The central motivation for entering this contract, according to Brett, is the chance to perform; camp’s aesthetic of performance-in-itself presents itself as one of the most appealing scenes of queer expression. Sedgwick describes camp as a device for communicating with a queer audience, necessitated by societal conditions that alienate the queer experience and leave its subjects to wonder whether anyone shares their “resistant, oblique, tangential investments.”80 Camp, for Sedgwick, is a recognition signal. She posits that “camprecognition doesn’t ask, ‘What kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle?’ Instead, it says what if: What if the right audience for this were exactly me?”81 In addition to simply depositing queer ideals in straight settings, 36 then, camp transcends the closet in reaching queer audiences. This is important to Sedgwick, because camp recognizes, more than perhaps any other style, its cultural positionality. It takes up this notion as its content, representing the possibilities of queerness at the center, redeemed from degeneracy. Ultimately, camp is an aesthetic of exaggeration, a style of parodic juxtaposition, a mode of queer expression. It inspires critiques of heteronormativity and avenues to queer possibility. The pipe organ has been set up through centuries of history—including its centrality in the Baroque sensibility, its susceptibility to the orchestral movement in the nineteenth century, and its incarnations of American capitalism in the twentieth century—to become a tool for queer communication. Camp helps explain the role of the organ in horror films, its continuing presence on the liturgical stage, and why queer performers have succeeded in mainstreaming its versatility. The pipe organ, the agglomerative beast of the musical world, is a veritable icon of artificiality, drama, and excess. As a parodically masculine symbol of institutional strength, it rules over congregations and audiences in all of its campy glory. Its feats of human construction, both in its build and its musical production, serve as a reminder of the social constructions we are taught not to question. Building and playing the organ engages entire bodies and acknowledges the spaces that contain it, applying pressure to the impersonal, out-of-context idea of “the music itself.” Just as the resonance of a tasteful 32’ pipe shakes the room and rumbles one’s viscera, so camp rattles the foundations of social normality and destabilizes our supposedly solid assumptions. Camp illuminates what queer organists, often caught in the open closet, have known for decades: the King of Instruments, it turns out, is gay. 37 THE KING OF INSTRUMENTS IS GAY: SO WHAT? I have argued that pipe organ has been coded as a queer instrument, which may help us understand why so many organists in the United States are queer. Why, though, does this even matter? In this section, I will discuss some implications of the framework I have constructed, including the specific aspects of non-normativity the queer organ challenges, what it means to acknowledge the organ’s queerness, and how queer organists fit into the picture. It is clear that camping the pipe organ, at least in most cases, does not result in direct challenges to heterosexual romantic or sexual scripts, the ideology of the nuclear family, or hegemonic gender binarism. What, then, does it mean to queer the organ—that is, to acknowledge and perceive the organ as queer—if queering is meant to disrupt taken-for-granted standards of being and creating space for new imaginings? I suggest three areas of normativity that the organ, as queer, destabilizes and in turn, opens up for imagination. First, the organ counteracts the notion of what it is to be a “natural” musical instrument. I argue that the organ goes up against implicit attitudes about the role of the player in producing sound. Additionally, the development of hybrid and electronic organs challenges the supremacy of purely acoustic instruments, even if most everyone still agrees that there are crucial differences in sound quality. Second, the organ challenges assumptions about the appropriateness of musical instruments’ scope. Finally, the organ’s specific relationalities—to the player, to the audience, and to the room—call into question the dogma of “the music itself.” Contrary to the conventional musicological enterprise, playing music has never only been about the music itself; music is bound up, just like any other social creation, in time, place, ideology, and human specificity. This is 38 perhaps the most important of the three challenges. It encompasses the other two, and it reemphasizes the need to critically examine our inherited assumptions about classical music. As I have shown, the camp aesthetic specializes in excessive theatricality in order to parody the artificial constructions of the normative world. For Butler, implying many of the classic examples of gender-bending camp, queer hyperbole mocks the affected performativity of gender norms. The organ, however, more specifically targets notions of naturalness versus artificiality in the foundational assumptions of classical music. Some of the core assumptions of heteronormativity concern what it means to be “natural.” Homosexuality and gender expansiveness, it is argued, are unnatural, while the binary gender system and universal heterosexuality are natural. Of course, such views are, as Butler, Michael Warner, and many others have shown, greatly misguided.82 Similarly, I contend that constructed ideals of naturalness pervade the classical establishment, even if we have moved on from 18th-century aesthetic imaginings of music as imitative of nature. The organ is a prime target of the hierarchy that results from these implicit narratives. In order to produce a pitch on a pipe organ, an organist must depress a key, which triggers a series of levers or a pneumatic action, opening a valve below the corresponding pipe to allow air to flow into the pipe. The player is thus quite far-removed from the location of sound production. In contrast, a violinist manually draws a bow across strings to cause them to vibrate, and changes the pitch through direct manual contact with the strings. Relative to the organ, many instruments such as the violin facilitate dramatically heightened intimacy with their sound. Even more radically, a 39 singer produces music directly through their own body. While pipe organs are generally classified as acoustic instruments, the mechanical intervention between player and note invites accusations of unnaturalness. If, in order to create music, one must engage with such a machine in a quasi-bionic enmeshment, a certain degree of naturalness seems to have been sacrificed—and this is seen as obviously detrimental. As with the debate over whether queerness is “natural,” there are at least two levels to the organ’s challenge to musical naturalness. The first level insists that homosexuality, or gender deviance, or the construction of the pipe organ, are just as natural as heterosexuality, the gender binary, or the violin. This defense of queerness is inappropriate, however, as it presumes that these relations, which are in fact constructed, can be recast as natural. The second level, on the other hand, requires letting go of the notion of naturalness and seeing the putative divisions between the natural and the constructed as nonexistent. This dynamic recalls Butler’s appraisal of parody as a tactic to expose the false foundations of gender and sexual normativity. In calling attention to its artificiality, specifically through camp, the organ draws out our “natural” versus “unnatural” assumptions into the open. We are forced to examine our reflexive criteria for what is “too” artificial. Why should we see the organ as placing more distance between the player and the music, when an instrument like the piano also displays a mechanistic mediation? And if our answer is that the piano allows players a greater degree of (“natural”) dynamic expression within a phrase, why in our assessment do we privilege the volume and forcefulness of the attack (given the relatively quick delay of notes on the piano) over the ability to sustain notes, the importance of articulation, and the variety of timbral color possible on the organ? The real examples we 40 encounter in the organ are far more likely to disabuse us of our musical presuppositions than abstract conjecture, which is prone to obscuring the things we have never been forced to reconsider. Musicians also tend to derive a hierarchy from the distinctions of acoustic versus amplified or electric. I should start by acknowledging that I am not an exception to this tendency; I do believe acoustic instruments, in general, possess the capacity for much more depth of sound than electric and digital imitations. What I want to draw attention to is the a priori boundary between these categories that enables the hierarchy in the first place. In addition to digital instruments (including purely synthetic voices as well as MIDI-playable recorded samples), some organs are “hybrid,” comprising both acoustic pipes and digital ranks projected by speakers. Such constructions blur the lines between authentic and artificial. They throw our stable musical categories into disarray, especially when the digital and physical components are played together. As I discussed in the last section, this collage of disparate parts contributes to the organ’s camp strategy. Hybrid organs, along with other electroacoustic instruments and technologies, transgress the boundaries we have taken for granted in a very queer manner. Beyond this, they unlock a realm of timbral possibility in a fashion consistent with the organ’s historical development and its ties to the queer and impulse for expansiveness. Closely related to the disruption of norms of the natural is the question of appropriate scope. The organ, with its amassed collection of stops, noises, and trinkets, might lead one to ask, how much is too much? Camp aesthetics preclude the question of how much is enough. But even the excess of camp has a limit, above which anything additional is just superfluous—either useless distractions or unnoticed extras. It is a 41 musical truism that spectacle ought to be tempered with tastefulness. I submit that perhaps the organ asks us to reexamine even this; we are left to wonder whether spectacle and taste are as mutually exclusive as we have made them out to be. The confines of musical propriety are by no means universally settled, and they track the tastes of the class of Western, wealthy, white men who have instituted them. These tastes are built upon ideologies of domination and superiority, promoting standards of “better than,” disguised as delicacy, across Western society. Queer excess is a joyful—and indeed, one can argue, tasteful—response to the sinister, taste-veiled excess of capitalism. Each of these sites of disruption gestures toward a larger argument in favor of queering the organ. All musical activities are entangled in complicated relationships: with player, with audience, with composer, with text, with the stage, yes; but also with the locations (geographical and social), genderings, racializations, politics, embodied-ness, and eroticizations of each of these. As a musical instrument, the organ uniquely displays these relationships, both through open expression and discernible enclosure, in ways that most others do not. Organists are trained to notice and respond to the individuating idiosyncrasies of each new instrument and its space. To play the organ is, in this way, to attend to the situatedness of musical performance. Not only that; the liturgical underpinnings of religious music require that organists study and enact the symbolism rooted in the specificities of denomination, location, language, and convention. It is in the job description of church organists to perform with a consciousness of social fit.* It makes sense, then, that queerness, as a praxis of social anti-fit, attaches so acutely to the pipe organ. Within the classical music * Even organists who are not church musicians cannot escape this influence in their training and performance. 42 landscape, it is more prudent to exploit a tool whose positionality is already visible than to express one’s rebellion through a medium in which this positionality is yet entirely unacknowledged. In addition to this enhanced discourse with the acoustical, physical, and social environment, organists’ total bodily engagement with the console reflects a politics of embodiment that dances with the erotic, bringing this unexpressed but nearly everpresent force a little more into view. Of course, this is not to say that all organists, or even all queer organists, possess a radical socializing paradigm. However, the way organists must interact with their instrument carries a high potential for expression of a queer bent. I attribute this to qualities of the organ itself while framing those qualities among the human historical factors that gave rise to them. Indeed, my account of the organ’s challenges to musical normativity is more an inventory of possibility than a description of the world. It should also be noted that other musicians certainly engage in the discursive relationalities embedded in classical music. In particular, singers interact with text, narrative, and gender norms on a significantly more explicit level than even organists. It is no wonder that a majority of the current theoretical discussions of queerness in music revolve around opera, art song, musical theater, or popular vocal music.83 The reaches of power in music, guided by gendered, racial, sexual, and embodied norms, are vast, complicated, and multifaceted. Examining them will inevitably yield important revelations about how music features in social narratives at large. This kind of queer musicology further combats the fabricated ideal of the music itself, allowing due attention to shine through onto its human subjects. 43 To acknowledge the organ’s queerness, then, is to place it at the intersections of its history, image, and cultural associations. It broadens our view of its development and contemporary functions, allowing us to see how multiple stories converge. Not only do these analyses of villainy, closetedness, rejection, and camp shed light on the organ’s queer character, but seeing the organ as queer also enriches our understanding of each of the former discussions. The organ as queer gives us a new perspective on the camp culture of churches, the tropes of villainy, and the hidden dimensions of the closet. We gain explanations that show queerness as operative in and out of musical institutions, contributing to our understanding of queerness itself. All of these revelations are valuable in an academic sense, but they also open our practical minds to queer possibilities. Many queer organists still balance a life in the open secret of the closet. How we code cultural objects matters; such codings enable or disable belonging. In the same way that some instruments are coded as masculine (e.g., brass or percussion) or feminine (e.g., flute, violin, harp) and reinforce their stereotypes as musicians often tend to self-select into these preset groups, the organ’s coding as queer may attract emerging queer musicians. Following Sedgwick’s epistemology of the closet, queer American organists might more purposefully signal their identities through their performance, knowing that the organ is set up as an optimal vessel. Perhaps most importantly, though, through dispelling impersonal notions of “pure” music, the queer musicology of the organ inspires a conscious and liberatory recognition of queer and musical community. Insofar as the aims of queer art include the political disruption of norms, communication beyond the closet, and the freedom to imagine, such an aspirational community is the real-world impetus for this thesis. 44 CONCLUSION I have given a queer musicological account of the pipe organ’s uniquely queer coding, the centrality of camp aesthetics in the pipe organ’s image, and why these perspectives matter. To conclude, I want to turn in explicit terms to the generalized queer political project which inspires and pervades this thesis. In particular, beyond challenging existing norms and disintegrating oppressive measures of the natural, queerness is also about imagining other modes of being and fashioning cultures based on this “worldmaking.”84 I have focused on what queering the organ means for the contexts in which it exists; my current aim is to point at how this practice fits within larger patterns of queer culture creation. I end with the notion of queering as a generative act. The organ provides the accompaniment to the narratives of queer villainy belabored by the American film industry. Return to Case’s portrait of the queer monster, breaking taboos, desiring, “playing its own organ,” and “producing its own music.” The act of queering unleashes a distinct mode of agency, the capacity to produce one’s own music. Halberstam notes that monsters, in addition to serving as challenges to normativity, can also offer a “queer alternative.”85 They show us a way to imagine a different world, one where, freed from the shackles of the normative, possibility rather than boundary is the dominant existence. The monstrous organ provides us with a kind of music-making that is not only non-standard, but expansive. Of all instruments, the organ has been the most extended—through its physical, timbral, and even temporal features— over the course of its continuing development. Producing music on the organ is fundamentally additive, imaginative, alternative. Builders and organists revel in adding stops, playfully inventing combinations, and creating new ways of shaping sound. 45 The presumption of this perpetual growth has propelled the pipe organ into the world of camp, which prizes excess, agglomeration, and cultural object reclamation as a queer aesthetic. Camp is both a form of expression and a parody of the restrictive norms of performativity; the organ manages both with ease. In addition, the intersection of queerness with villainy also engages the camp aesthetic. Horror films often employ gratuitous, cliché, or kitsch aesthetics as a form of irony. The queer-coding of villains, especially in animated films, is frequently bolstered by a campy, over-the-top performance and stylized, gender-bending characterization. Camp is about enhancing and spotlighting the contrast between the conventional and the deviant, where the heroes are approved against conventional standards and the villains are represented as dangerous due to their violation of these standards. The pipe organ, through camp, hyperbolizes the standards of masculinity, piety, and musicality elevated by Western culture, simultaneously calling our attention to the incongruence and forcing us to reckon with it. Organists bring out the role of embodiment and physical environment in musical performance, and organ performances gesture at the erotic undercurrents haunting dominant culture. The organ’s capacity for unrestrained volume should, against ordinary standards, be terrifying, and camp aesthetics augment its awe through exploiting the extraordinary. Camp flags all that is incoherent about the queer existence of the organ— and flaunts it. Halberstam explores the art of the incoherence of queer existence with heteronormative culture, the counter-knowledge queer communities produce, and their influence in popular culture.86 For Halberstam, the creation of queer culture becomes a form of knowledge production, and as social epistemologists have argued, knowledge 46 production is emancipatory.87 Resistance goes beyond critique of dominant systems; it requires the active generating of alternative systems. Queer culture embraces such a reality. Muñoz gestures to “queer horizons,” contending that “there is something queer about the utopian.88 To queer the pipe organ, then, is to resist on multiple fronts. It allows us to expose the hegemony of the normal by acknowledging the ways the pipe organ has been tied to the deviant in popular media. It helps us situate the organ at the forefront of a notable queer aesthetic: camp. And it forces us to attend to the particulars of social knowledge as they relate to community and the closet, embodiment and the erotic. In so doing, we generate avenues to new ways of seeing and constructing our worlds, implicating not only the field of musicology, but also and especially the popular consciousness. Let us shatter the taboos binding queer musicians, let us celebrate camp and queer desire, and let us make room for joyful possibility. For the pipe organ and for our social worlds—queering is imagination, and imagination is resistance. 47 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to extend my deepest gratitude to my thesis mentor, Dr. Haruhito Miyagi. Since the beginning of my undergraduate career, for teaching me about unconventional music theory and harpsichord maintenance, offering helpful career and professional advice, taking an interest in my performances, and humoring my growth: thank you. And, of course, for believing in this project, providing much-needed assurance and guidance as I worked on two honors theses simultaneously, and generously contributing his expertise, experience, and insights, I am truly indebted. I would also like to thank Jaylee Aston, Emma Atkinson, Josie Burke, Naomi Craner, Mickey Gough, Neida Munguia, Sue Bin Park, Brenda Payan, Dr. Paul Sherrill, Dr. Virginia Solomon, and Mykie Valenzuela for reading drafts and offering invaluable feedback. I greatly appreciate Dr. Pamela Jones and Dr. Kenneth Udy for their constant mentorship and encouragement throughout my time in the School of Music. Thank you, of course, to all of the visionary faculty, community professionals, and friends who introduced me to the joys and approaches of queer and feminist theory, especially Dr. Kathryn Stockton, Jack Adams, and Dr. Erin Beeghly. I owe the genesis of this project to all the queer and feminist musicologists, critical theorists, and philosophers whose work enabled me to construct these ideas. Finally, many thanks go to my family and friends for putting up with me throughout this process, including my dramatic moments of discouragement. I am particularly grateful to my mother and my partner for always rooting for me even if they didn’t know how best to help. 48 NOTES 1. Sarah Bryan Miller, “King of Instruments No Longer?,” New York Times, June 30, 1996. 2. “Gay organists,” The Organ Forum, March 17, 2008, https://organforum.com/forums/forum/blower-room/general-chat/6701-gay-organists; “Why are so many organists gay men?,” Quora, July 12, 2015, https://www.quora.com/Why-are-so-many-organists-gay-men. 3. Guest user, reply to “Gay organists,” The Organ Forum, March 18, 2008, https://organforum.com/forums/forum/blower-room/general-chat/6701-gayorganists/page3#post110915; Curtis Lindsay, reply to “Why are so many organists gay men?, Quora, July 12, 2015, https://www.quora.com/Why-are-so-many-organists-gaymen/answer/Curtis-Lindsay-1/. 4. Joey DiGuglielmo, “Pulling out the gay stops,” Washington Blade, February 5, 2010; DiGuglielmo, “A night with the mighty Cameron,” Washington Blade, September 29, 2011. 5. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 492–93. See also Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6. Cusick, “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” 491. 7. Judith A. Peraino, “The Same, But Different: Sexuality and Musicology, Then and Now,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 826. See Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), for an excellent example of this orientation in practice. 8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006). 9. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 67–83. 10. Cusick, “Lesbian Relationship with Music,” 73. 11. Cusick, “Lesbian Relationship with Music,” 74–78. 49 12. Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5. 13. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 60, 182. 14. Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 17–20. 15. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 21. 16. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). 17. Larry Gross, Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 16. 18. Richard Dyer, The Culture of Queers (New York: Routledge, 2002), 108. 19. Gross, Up From Invisibility, 57. 20. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 48. 21. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 60–65. 22. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 46. 23. Julie Brown, “Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror,” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2010), 6–7. See also Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 210–13. 24. See Philip Rice, “The Excessive Machine: On the Queer Construction of the Organ,” (paper presented at the fifth annual Graduate Music Symposium at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, February 14, 2015). 25. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 85. 26. Amanda Putnam, “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films,” in Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, ed. Johnson Cheu (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013), 148–49. Dion McLeod rightly notes that Putnam’s argument “relies on a problematic conflation of gender non-conformity with transgender identity” and characterizes Disney villains as generally queer, rather than transgender. “Unmasking the Quillain: Queerness and 50 Villainy in Animated Disney Films” (PhD diss., University of Wollongong, 2016), 11, https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4802/. 27. McLeod, “Unmasking the Quillain,” 55. 28. McLeod, “Unmasking the Quillain,” 69–73. 29. Brown, “The Organs of Horror,” 1. 30. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 258–59. 31. Sue-Ellen Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” differences 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3-2-1. 32. DiGuglielmo, “Pulling out the gay stops.” 33. Brown, “The Organs of Horror,” 5. 34. Rice, “The Excessive Machine,” 9. 35. Rice, “The Excessive Machine,” 4. 36. Rice, “The Excessive Machine,” 5–6. 37. Philip Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17. 38. Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” 14. 39. Laura Wahlfors, “Cameron Carpenter’s Queer Art of the Organ, Camp, and Neoliberalism,” Music and Practice 6 (2020): 5, https://doi.org/10.32063/0612. 40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 71. 41. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 72. 42. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 68. 43. Case, “Tracking the Vampire,” 3. 44. Richard Burnett, “Cameron Carpenter’s international touring organ,” Xtra Magazine, March 22, 2016. 51 45. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1966), 275–92, originally published 1964. 46. Moe Meyer, “Introduction,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 7; David Bergman, “Introduction,” in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 8–9. 47. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” in Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 19–20. 48. Meyer, “Introduction,” 5. 49. Bergman, “Introduction,” 5; cf. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 275. 50. DiGuglielmo, “A night with the mighty Cameron.” 51. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 20. 52. Babuscio, 20. 53. Mark Booth, “Campe-toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 70. 54. Mia Windsor, “Utopia, Attunement, and Anarchy: The Pipe Organ and Queer Failure” (essay, July 26, 2022): 1, https://miawindsor.com/wpcontent/uploads/2022/07/utopia-attunement-anarchy.pdf. 55. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4, 94–95. 56. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 88–92. 57. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 177–78. 58. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 24. 59. Christopher Moore, “Camping the Sacred: Homosexuality and Religion in the Works of Poulenc and Bernstein,” in Music & Camp, ed. Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018), 75. 52 60. E. Patrick Johnson, “The Gospel According to the Gays: Queering the Roots of Gospel Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, ed. Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 86. 61. Johnson, 86. 62. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 21. 63. Moore, “Camping the Sacred,” 80–81; Wahlfors, “Cameron Carpenter’s Queer Art,” 5. See also Mark Jordan’s notion of “clerical camp.” The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 179–208. 64. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 23. 65. Michael R. Kearney, “The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ,” Phenomenology & Practice 15, no. 2 (2020): 26, https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr29432. 66. Kearney, “The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ,” 34. 67. Moore, “Camping the Sacred,” 88. 68. Butler, Gender Trouble, 43. 69. Meyer, “Introduction,” 1. 70. Freya Jarman-Ivens, “Notes on Musical Camp,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 200. 71. See Rice, “The Excessive Machine,” 6–8. 72. Bergman, “Introduction,” 11. 73. Wahlfors, “Cameron Carpenter’s Queer Art,” 6. 74. Booth, “Campe-toi!,” 69. 75. Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (London: Methuen & Company, 1954), 125–26. 76. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 28. 53 77. Meyer, “Introduction,” 17. 78. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 286. 79. Babuscio, “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” 36. 80. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 156. 81. Sedgwick, 156. 82. Michael Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text no. 29 (1991): 16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/466295. 83. See Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006); Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993); Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022); and Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 84. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 40. 85. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 181. 86. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 19. 87. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 88. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 26. It should be noted, however, that such a radicalizing utopianism is not shared by all queers. The queer paradigm of imagination is meant as an antidote to pragmatic or assimilationist gay politics. 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY Babuscio, Jack. “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” In Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, edited by David Bergman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Bergman, David. “Introduction.” In Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, edited by David Bergman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Booth, Mark. “Campe-toi!: On the Origins and Definitions of Camp.” In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, edited by Fabio Cleto, 66–79. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Brett, Philip. “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 9–26. New York: Routledge, 2006. Brett, Philip, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Brown, Julie. “Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror.” In Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, edited by Neil Lerner, 1–20. New York: Routledge, 2010. Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Burnett, Richard. “Cameron Carpenter’s international touring organ.” Xtra Magazine, March 22, 2016. https://xtramagazine.com/culture/cameron-carpentersinternational-touring-organ-70488. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Case, Sue-Ellen. “Tracking the Vampire.” differences 3, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-3-2-1. Citron, Marcia J. Gender and the Musical Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism.” In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 471–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 55 Cusick, Suzanne G. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, 67–83. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Response: ‘This Song Is For You.’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 861–66. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.825. DiGuglielmo, Joey. “A night with the mighty Cameron.” Washington Blade, September 29, 2011. https://www.washingtonblade.com/2011/09/29/a-night-with-themighty-cameron/. DiGuglielmo, Joey. “Pulling out the gay stops.” Washington Blade, February 5, 2010. https://www.washingtonblade.com/2010/02/05/pulling-out-the-gay-stops/. Dyer, Richard. The Culture of Queers. New York: Routledge, 2002. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. “Gay organists.” The Organ Forum, March 17, 2008. https://organforum.com/forums/forum/blower-room/general-chat/6701-gayorganists. Gross, Larry. Up From Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Isherwood, Christopher. The World in the Evening. London: Methuen & Company, 1954. Jarman-Ivens, Freya. “Notes on Musical Camp.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, edited by Derek B. Scott, 189–203. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Johnson, E. Patrick. “The Gospel According to the Gays: Queering the Roots of Gospel Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, edited by Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley, 81–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Jordan, Mark D. The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Kearney, Michael R. “The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ.” Phenomenology & Practice 15, no. 2 (2020): 24–38. https://doi.org/10.29173/pandpr29432. 56 Koestenbaum, Wayne. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. Maus, Fred Everett and Sheila Whiteley. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. McLeod, Dion Sheridan. “Unmasking the Quillain: Queerness and Villainy in Animated Disney Films.” PhD diss., University of Wollongong, 2016. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4802/. Medina, José. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Meyer, Moe. “Introduction.” In The Politics and Poetics of Camp, edited by Moe Meyer, 1–22. New York: Routledge, 1994. Miller, Sarah Bryan. “King of Instruments No Longer?” New York Times, June 30, 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/arts/king-of-instruments-no-longer.html. Moore, Christopher. “Camping the Sacred: Homosexuality and Religion in the Works of Poulenc and Bernstein.” In Music & Camp, edited by Christopher Moore and Philip Purvis, 73–91. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Peraino, Judith A. Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identities from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Peraino, Judith A. “The Same, But Different: Sexuality and Musicology, Then and Now.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3 (Fall 2013), 825–31. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2013.66.3.825. Putnam, Amanda. “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films.” In Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, edited by Johnson Cheu, 147–62. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013. Rice, Philip. “The Excessive Machine: On the Queer Construction of the Organ.” Paper presented at the fifth annual Graduate Music Symposium at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, February 14, 2015. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. 57 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” In Against Interpretation, 275–92. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1966. Originally published 1964. Wahlfors, Laura. “Cameron Carpenter's Queer Art of the Organ, Camp, and Neoliberalism.” Music & Practice 6 (2020). https://doi.org/10.32063/0612. Warner, Michael. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text no. 29 (1991), 3– 17. https://www.jstor.org/stable/466295. “Why are so many organists gay men?” Quora, July 12, 2015. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-so-many-organists-gay-men. Windsor, Mia. “Utopia, Attunement, and Anarchy: The Pipe Organ and Queer Failure.” Essay, July 26, 2022. https://miawindsor.com/wpcontent/uploads/2022/07/utopia-attunement-anarchy.pdf. Name of Candidate: Samuel Judd Date of Submission: April 21, 2023