It is difficult to overstate music's persistent and uneasy relationship with homosexuality in Western society. Associated with femininity for centuries, particularly in North America, participation in music has been believed to emasculate and thus homosexualize men and boys. The linking of music to women and emotion (as opposed to men and reason)…

The radical outside claimed by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith nearly 30 years ago was comprised of black feminism and feminist race theory in the context of black lesbian studies, which had no academic precedent. What today makes their actions, words, and meaning-making brave is material realization of their subjectivities.…