47 Queering the Pipe Organ

Faculty Mentor: Haruhito Miyagi (School of Music, University of Utah)

The overrepresentation of queer organists (especially gay men) in the United States pipe organcommunity has long been anecdotally acknowledged. While a causal relationship is hard toestablish, American narratives of the pipe organ over the past century can offer insight into therelationship between the pipe organ and queerness. I demonstrate that the history of the pipeorgan in the United States is laden with queerness in fictional portrayals, through its associationswith camp developments, and as a result of its relationship to the closet. The pipe organ hasgarnered associations with flamboyance, camp, fastidiousness, and secrecy, all of which bear aclose relationship to queerness. These patterns are nuanced by the pipe organ’s association withChristian churches, pointing to a picture of the pipe organ’s queerness as subversive in someAmerican liturgical settings. Following a queer musicological approach, I argue that the pipeorgan has been uniquely coded through American cultural associations as a queer instrument, theimplications of which I discuss.