If you listen to enough early jazz and popular music from the 1920s and 1930s, the queerness in the songs is unmistakable. Hundreds of recordings survive that feature male vocalists pining over men, female singers telling lustful stories of beautiful women, and lyrics that altogether complicate a gender binary.
Though the reasons these songs exist are complex, the following five aspects of US and UK social and performance culture are key. Each contributing cause corresponds to an exhibit below:
From oopsie gaysie songs that were certainly intentional, to those that played with gender for comic effect, to others that were largely incidental, each tune tells us more about the era. By placing the recordings in the context of history, we can discover how these sometimes sonically surprising songs were once possible and plentiful, and why their wide acceptance would fade into the past.