As it speaks to our hearts, as it offers an glimpse of the freedoms implied by the sublime, a shackle is bound – a consciousness of our complicity with unforgivable sin. It is a music which carries the body of a man. It is Christ like – metaphor and beauty which is impossible to separate from the evils of the world. Eastman’s work is a conscious act of intervention, plowing into a context defined by heterosexual whiteness, attacking its unjust demands from within. It is music, doubling as the voice of a man, which, because it refused to be oppressed, was suppressed or ignored. The concept started in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1990s when the queer community wanted to experience new clubs that arent gay venues, said Serpe. The object in your hands contains some of the most striking and important music composed during the later decades of the 20th century - music which remained lost and unheard for years, not because of what it is, but because of who its composer was. Guerrilla Gay Bars are not unique to York. Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds. He knew exactly what he was doing, and to whom he spoke. Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music. Eastman’s audience was largely heterosexual and white. ![]() ![]() What Eastman was early to recognize, was that there is a fundamental difference in what happens when these words are spoken by white people toward people of color, and when people of color deploy them toward a white audience. ![]() His response was a flamboyant foreshadowing of the sentiments toward bigoted language which later arose within hip-hop culture – to publicly take back these words, assert ownership of them, and deploy their power for positive change. When the composer was asked to perform the series at Northwestern University in 1980, due to protests by African American students, their titles were censored in the event’s program. Some of themost challenging and beautiful works composed for piano during their era, they double as a window into the intricate thought process and contentiousness of their creator. Gay Guerrilla and Evil Nigger, both composed in 1979, with a third work, Crazy Nigger, make up what Eastman called The Nigger Series.
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