By Michael Bronski, Z Net

Although I've only been teaching gay and lesbian studies for eight years, my involvement in writing about it (and participating in it) stretch back almost four decades. I have learned innumerable things during that time—and engaging with younger queer people has changed my mind about a number of issues. One of the most important changes has come from my realization that teaching "history" is a lot harder than teaching about social issues. Students have no trouble comprehending and grappling with complicated legal issues and political theory. They have no problem figuring out a causal historical timeline, but they often have no real sense of what this recent history felt like, or the extraordinarily high level of emotional content that fueled it or the emotions that emerged from it.

This past winter I taught a course on post-war queer film with a historical bent. Titled "Queers, Queens, and Questionable Women: How Hollywood Films Shaped Post-War GLBT Politics and Vice Versa," it attempted to give the students a sense of how film was integral to the enormous social changes that happened with the birth of the gay movement. Within the first week I realized that while they had no trouble grasping the connections between visual representations and politics—Some Like it Hot, for example, marked a turning point in how masculinity was conceptualized—they were not getting the deeper emotional content of this history.

I wasn't sure how to transmit this information. When I thought about my own relationship to this material the image that kept coming back to me was standing in gay bars all those years discussing movies and politics. Bars were, in so many ways, the heart of my community and vital to helping shape how we thought and did politics. Obviously I couldn't take students to gay male bars, so I decided to do the next best thing: begin every class with a song popular on the gay bar jukebox during the year the film we were studying was released.

I began with the great gay bar song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland. They all knew it, of course, and we discussed how the yearning in the lyrics might have resonated with gay men and lesbians in the 1940s when social stigma was so strong and the repercussions so drastic. We also discussed how in each decade of fighting for gay liberation the notion of where the rainbow was and what was on the other side was always changing.

I asked older gay men and women I knew what songs were played in the 1940s and 1950s (before my gay bar time) and we listened to the Andrews Sisters hit "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" (1941) that presented a sexy image of a man in uniform (it later became a camp hit with Bette Midler). This was followed by the Lee Wiley jazz standard "Down With Love," popular because it mocked the traditional conventions of heterosexual romance and left open the option of a more sexually free view of life.

In the 1950s when jukeboxes really were installed in all bars, the choices were obvious. "We Kiss in the Shadows" (from the 1956 film version of The King and I) was a huge gay bar favorite for obvious reasons. I coupled this with Doris Day's "Secret Love" from the 1953 film Calamity Jane. This led to a discussion of how mass popular culture, through a series of intersections between commerce, art, and politics, can actually take on specific meanings for distinct minority groups.

We also listened to Johnnie Ray's 1954 "Hernando's Hideaway" (a cover of the hit song in Pajama Game) that sounds like it was written about a gay bar. I rounded out the mid-1950s with two Eartha Kitt hits: the 1956 "Ces't Si Bon" and the 1957 "Guess Who I Saw Today, My Dear." Kitt's breathless artificiality and her campiness marked a unique moment of gay culture. The students immediately understood how Kitt's deliciously bizarre sensibility made complete emotional sense to 1950s queers.

I introduced the idea of vocal androgyny, which was very important in the multi-gendered world of a gay bar, with Chet Baker's 1961 "My Funny Valentine" paired with Chris Connor's 1958 "Blame it on My Youth." Since both sound neither distinctly male nor female, it made a great example.

We covered the early 1960s' girl groups, of course. "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow," sung by the Shirelles is the perfect gay bar song for an evening of hooking up. The Shangri-La's 1964 "Leader of the Pack" with it's tale of tragic, rebel, motorcycle love was also very popular for obvious reasons. The 1963 "He's So Fine," sung by the Chif- fons, was included for the line, "If I were a queen and he asked me to leave my throne," but also because it was such a perfect example of how commercialized teen culture can articulate that desperate degree of sexual desire and romance that the queer world could not yet openly articulate.

As each week progressed the students began to discuss the songs in relationship to the readings we were doing, as well as to the films. The music in films like The Gay Deceivers and Boys in the Band made more sense to them as they had begun to understand how this music had specific emotional, historical content for women and men of this period. Films like The Children's Hour or Advise and Consent, coming in the early 1960s, were fleshed out in a new way for them as they heard the cultural sounds that existed in a broader context. By the late 1960s we began getting to songs they knew—Aretha Franklin's 1967 civil rights anthem "Respect" and Janis Joplin's 1968 defiant "Piece of My Heart." It was the first time they could bring their own histories into the classroom and we discussed how the music may have been heard very differently four decades earlier and what the similarities were as well. To these female hymns to survival I added Piaf's "Non Je Ne Regrette Rien," which she recorded in 1960 and we discussed how all three songs fit together and how they carried enormous potency for women and men in the early days of gay liberation when black power and radical feminism began to offer a glimpse to other groups of what might be over that ever-elusive rainbow.

The "over the rainbow" world of gay liberation was captured on the Kinks's 1970s "Lola" about a straight man who has an affair with a drag queen. "This was actually on the radio?" they asked after hearing the line "and then I got down on my knees." This was followed by "Friends," sung by Bette Midler at the 1971 gay pride rally in New York. We discussed how the very idea of friends, or more properly, comrades, changed after the gay liberation movement started and how Midler managed to hit exactly the right tone between a knowing enthusiasm, a hint of the closet (referring to one's lover as a "friend"), and an all out celebration of togetherness. We listened to "A Woman in Love" by Barbra Streisand from 1980 because, well, you have to have at least one Streisand song in a series of gay bar songs.

Rather than cover disco as disco—an important historical moment for a number of reasons—I decided to use Gloria Gaynor's 1978 hit "I Will Survive" for what it eventually became in the queer world: an AIDS anthem. The students knew the song, but were shocked that it had a whole other life at AIDS benefits and for the hundreds of thousands of men who had struggled with sheer physical survival. We watched films like Parting Glances, The Living End, and Philadelphia, which give distinctly different glimpses of AIDS and all benefited from Gloria Gaynor's exuberant celebration of survival at any cost.

As the gay movement progressed there were women and men who were "out" queer performers—don't forget, these students had all grown up in a world in which this was possible—so I played k.d. lang's "I Wish I Didn't Love You So" from 1988 (the year in which many of the students were born) and explained what it meant to have an open lesbian singing love songs that were played on mainstream radio stations. The idea that some version of queer love could exist on the airwaves was important to them and also put into perspective the emergence of a new queer cinema that heralded a new wave of artistic honesty.

We were at the last class and I was confused about what to do. I wanted to be sure to bring this to a proper and pedagogical close. I decided to begin the last class with a reprise of Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and we discussed how much that rainbow had changed over the years, how important the rainbow symbol had become to the gay movement, how many different women and men had taken the song to their hearts and made their own interpretations—this was, after all, a song that most people knew from childhood. After all class discussion was over, I played the song again only this time the new version by openly gay artist Rufus Wainwright in his recreation of Garland's famous 1963 Carnegie hall concert. We didn't have time for discussion, but I said a few words about how the song changed with an openly gay male singer and how, in many ways, it also remained the same. It was the perfect ending for the term and I think was useful in helping them understand a history to which they otherwise had little or no access.

For me, playing the songs each class was increasingly emotional. I can remember when I first heard the songs, who I was with, what they meant to me. In many ways the songs were, to me, far more evocative of the past than the films were. I often had more visceral reactions to sharing the music in the classroom, than when I played the DVDs in my office before class. There was something very real about it, more rooted in specific emotional and psychological experiences than any of the materials I usually teach. It made me rethink the music and the films even as I was teaching them and I felt, as I hope the students did, that in some way this was the key to the changes and the progress of the last four decades.

Z

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Michael Bronski is a teacher, activist, and writer covering culture and gay and lesbian politics. His latest book is Pulp Friction.