Does music have a sexual orientation?
Apparently America On Line thinks so.
Call up their massively popular AOLmusic.com site, scroll through their "musical styles" choices, and right below "soundtracks" and just above "classic rock" you'll find a heretofore undiscovered genre known as "gay and lesbian" music.
If nothing else, this begs some intriguing questions about your CD collection:
How, exactly, would a CD become gay?
To THIS gay man, the absurdity of the question begs the most blinkered suppositions:
Was the CD abused by an LP when it was young?
Did it lack a proper stereo system to guide it while it was growing up?
Or maybe it was the product of some "intelligent design" decision at the manufacturing level - the technological equivalent to the so-called "gay gene."
AOLmusic isn't the only sonically minded company thinking gay these days. Sony/BMG has just proudly trumpeted a new label meant to tout lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered artists called Twist. Its first releases arrive this June.
The label comes complete with a syndicated radio show, which just began spinning "gay music" in New York on WPLJ-FM, Sundays from 10 p.m. to midnight.
On the surface, this all reads as terribly liberated, as if the conglomerates were saying: "Look how gay-friendly we are! We're promoting you guys to the hilt."
Unfortunately for, say, Twist, most gay musicians would sooner be shoved into the "spoken word" category than be ghettoized by their sexual-object choice. It's not that many don't want to be known for who they are. It's that they make music for the same audience any artist does: as large and lucrative a one as possible.
By labeling their music "gay," it sends the message to straight people that they can't possibly relate to what they're singing about.
Is this something tomorrow's Elton John would want to tell his potential listeners?
In the case of AOLmusic, the "gay and lesbian" music section makes assumptions about taste that necessarily stumble into stereotype. Take a look at what AOL considered "gay music" in its debut week:
A show tune (from "Rent"), a song from a fashion-oriented sexpot (Gwen Stefani) and a dance cut from - guess who? - Madonna.
Why not go all the way and throw in something from Judy Garland?
The only two acts included in the pop top 10 of late that have openly gay members are the one-named singer Antony and the Scissor Sisters, who, at least in England, have enough presumably straight fans to have hit No. 1 on the charts several times.
Of course, AOL didn't become a major corporation by being dumb. Stereotypes have some basis in truth. If you go to a Pet Shop Boys concert in New York, it's a safe bet a hefty percentage of those attending have been to a bar named Splash. And, of course, we've all gone to Broadway musicals and found ourselves wondering, briefly, why the line at the men's room is so much longer than the one at the women's.
But AOL's labeling of music as "gay and lesbian" is hardly the benign equivalent to those like-named sections that appear in travel books, city magazines or Internet guides like Craigslist. Those outlets provide crucial information for LGBT people about health, safety and the most likely place to find sex at 3 o'clock on a Sunday afternoon.
What's irritating about the growing "gay" demarcation for music isn't only that it's nonsensical. It's that it purports to be cutting edge while hinging on something as old as the proverbial hills: targeting a market.
Worse, this particular targeting operates on an antique model. For years, gay media sold itself to the advertising world on the strength of the community's uncommon amount of disposable income, generated by having no kids to support.
But with gay couples currently crowding the nation's fertility clinics and adoption houses, it's no longer a sure thing that they can, at whim, spend $300 on a throw cushion.
