With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. Bullock covers the history of recorded music by and for the LGBT community, and shows how those records influenced the evolution of the music we listen to today. He discusses how gay, lesbian, and bisexual performers influenced jazz and blues; examines the almost forgotten Pansy Craze in the years between the two World Wars; chronicles...

"Is our love of pop music innately queer? That's the question Sasha Geffen answers--with a "yes," of course--in this book. Beginning with the Beatles and moving to the present, Geffen identifies artists of all stripes who performed "outside the limitations of their assigned genders." This includes not only trans artists like Wendy Carlos, or openly gender-bending artists like David Bowie and Prince, but ostensibly cis and hetero artists whose work...

"Musicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical's obsession with burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators-every time the musical bursts...