A few months back I found myself listening to an old gay novelty song. I think it was "Uneasy Rider '88" by Charlie Daniels. Somehow I went from that to other gay novelty songs like "C.B. Savage" by Rod Hart and "Queer Things" by Ruth Wallis. I thought it was strange how easily I could laugh at these otherwise highly offensive songs. I started to wonder why that was. Why was it so easy for me to take them likely? I was also interested in finding out just how many of those songs were out there. That led to me looking for other queer songs. The serious ones. The non-novelty kind. I started to find a whole world of queer themed music that I never even knew existed, and that made me really want to share it. I felt like the majority people out there could only think of a handful of gay music, all of it cliche and most of it disco. And THAT really bothered me. I fucking hate disco. I can't relate to it. Why should I? I'm Gay and I'm happy about that, but if I'm supposed to just cherish "It's Raining Men" as the quintessential song of my people . . . well that just really sucks.
Anyway, I started collecting as much queer music as I could find with the intention of one day blogging about it and sharing it with everyone I could. In researching the music, however, I found someone who had already beat me to the punch. J.D. Doyle. This man runs his own monthly radio show. I found his website Queer Music Heritage and I completely devoured it, listening to everything I could. He really knows his stuff. Through his work, I found a huge collection of music that I never knew about. Queer songs reaching all the way back into the '30s. It's really amazing. To be honest, the website is a bit chaotic and a little hard to follow, but if you have the time, you should really check it out. I think it is extremely important to remember this part of our history--all of our history, and not just that cheesy disco part that we are supposed to stereotypical like. Anyway, I just thought I would share.
Check it out: http://www.queermusicheritage.us/index2.html
Also, I spelled "Heritage" wrong in my heading. Shit!