Sasha Geffen’s first encounter with a trans person was listening to Wendy Carlos, the A Clockwork Orange composer who helped develop the synthesizer as a musical instrument. The first time Geffen (who uses “they/them” pronouns) remembers hearing the word “androgyny” was in reference to Annie Lennox, and they were, like the other gay kids in high school, a big fan of the punk band Against Me. Transition (or in Geffen’s words, “figuring shit out”) became possible through music. Glitter Up the Dark is not just a chronicle of the transgressive possibilities of pop music but also a history of Geffen’s listening and a demand that we regard pop culture in explicitly political terms.
As they trace how music acts as a vessel for gender transgression, Geffen connects Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, the early blues singer who they say “set the stage for pop music’s tendency to incubate androgyny, queerness, and other taboos in plain view of powers that would seek to snuff them out” to a long history of musical expression—from Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love to Brooklyn rapper Young M.A. and Björk collaborator serpentwithfeet. As in much queer writing, origin is precious material, and the past informs Geffen’s reading of contemporary mainstream cultural production as well as today’s conversation surrounding gender identity. (“The history of American music is the history of black music,” they write, “and since the gender binary is inextricably tied to whiteness, pop music’s story necessarily begins slightly outside its parameters.”)
The book is also a collage of voices that quietly unsettle the status quo, nimbly linking artists one would expect to see in this sort of anthology (Prince, David Bowie, Missy Elliot, Grace Jones) and others who are more surprising (the Beatles, DJ Kool Herc, Klaus Nomi). If Geffen’s thesis is that “music shelters gender rebellion from those who seek to abolish it,” then the book operates in a similar way, circulating clues about Geffen’s realizations about gender alongside each artist they profile.