Please visit my sites Queer Music Heritage and OutRadio

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Mark Weigle Tribute


Mark Weigle is one of my favorite artists. I've featured his music many times over the years on my shows, and now that Mark has closed down his career I feel I just have to set up a tribute section, to capture just a bit of his remarkable work. 


Mark's First Release, 1990

Friday, December 30, 2011

Masculine Women, Feminine Men



This song has always fascinated me, as it's one of the very first "queer" songs. Now it surely wasn't intended to be that way, but as we look back at it, infusing our own cultural biases into it, well, it's pretty appealing. So I've set up this page to honor it and all the versions of it recorded over the years. You can hear sound clips for 17 of the versions.



My First YouTube Videos....Leaping Lesbians & Maxine Feldman

Also in 2011 I put together my first videos for YouTube...now, I balk a bit of using the term "video" as they are really slide shows with music, but they were fun and not as hard as I had imagined; all the work is prepping the images. So, my first two honor Women's Music.

Leaping Lesbians 


Maxine Feldman...with introduction by Maxine




Queer Music History 101




I want to start off this blog by sharing my project Queer Music History 101, as it is a highlight of my work for the last year. After visiting a university class in LGBT Studies I realized that the music history of our culture is likely missing from almost all college classes, with the likely explanation simply that the resource material is not available and has never been organized for a university setting. Also, academic musicologists and historians of popular culture have almost entirely ignored this topic. So I created my own “lesson,” free for anyone to use and ready to insert into courses, and available in several formats.

The lesson can be taken as a two-hour audio course, which features narration, graphics, and short song clips, 65 of them, covering 1926 to 1985, or read on the website or flipbook versions, with options to hear complete songs. This is not just reading about songs; this is actually hearing them. Hearing all of a song will give a much greater appreciation and understanding of not only its meaning, but also the place of the artist or song in history. So the lesson’s target audience is not only the students but their professors, and it also can provide a broader platform for work done by researchers.

Also built into the lesson is a study guide and links to resources on the internet or my own website, such as interviews with many of the artists. I have inserted questions on various subject areas throughout the lesson. The “flipbook” option was chosen to hopefully appeal to a young internet-oriented audience, adding some “bells and whistles.” From the flipbook version you can also download the lesson in PDF format, though of course without the song clips.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Welcome to Queer Music Heritage -- The Blog

Welcome to Queer Music Heritage – The Blog. Several people have suggested that I start a blog, and I have hesitated as I already heap loads of work on my own plate with producing the radio shows Queer Music Heritage and OutRadio. They probably average three hours of new programming each per month, and some shows require a great deal of research. And my website is always growing, up to over 1700 pages now. I am also always adding new (old) information to other site sections, such as the Female Impersonation and Women’s Music, and other special interest areas.

And all that is probably a good incentive to start a blog. The website is so “deep” visitors would never be aware of some of the gems if they did not know they were there. So, the blog will accent those. Also, I will not leave out “new” music. That’s the stuff heard mostly on the companion show for QMH, OutRadio. I love giving exposure to new artists. Some of this info I already post to Facebook, a wonderful playground, but that wall just moves too fast, especially when your number of friends climbs. I doubt my posts here will follow any regularity, as the radio shows come first, but I hope this blog remains near the front burner.


Again, my shows can be found at http://www.queermusicheritage.com
and  http://www.outradio.com