Glitter Up The Dark

Sasha Geffen In conversation with Thora Siemsen With DJ set by SHYBOI Launch of Glitter Up The Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary Co-presented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? How did the question “is he musical?” once become code for “is he gay?” In a straight, cisnormative culture, why is music so inherently queer? Join us for an evening of discussion and DJ’ing to celebrate the launch of Sasha Geffen’s Glitter Up The Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary. This sharp, insightful, wide-ranging survey of the queerness inherent to pop music’s history starts with early blues and the Beatles and continues with David Bowie, Prince, and Missy Elliot. Geffen explores how artists have broken out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and set the stage for today’s conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. This evening looks at music’s ability to melt rigid social roles in a subliminal and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener, and puts that theory into practice. Writer Thora Siemsen joins Geffen for a moderated conversation, followed by a discussion with the audience. We then open the floor to music and dancing, with a DJ set from SHYBOI.