Calling Names, Taking Names

Among the greatest inconveniences for historians interested in the study of sexuality is its permanent definitional slipperiness. Enough incidents of same-sex activities and relationships across time and space have been documented that homoerotic activities and sentiments seem to be a frequent component of human societies. In the case of LGBT studies of music, here, Morris narrates that the personal investment, the quest for some kind of historical presence, increases those satisfactions in abundant if unpredictable ways. And happily, many of the plots they favor in musicology could accommodate these historical riches with little problem. One story musicologists like to tell concerns creative musical responses to difficult conditions, for all its particularities, is not much different in the basic plot.