Immerse yourself in this charmingly eccentric playlist. Arved Ashby offers a queer musical mystery tour that changes forever the way that queer theory sounds.

~ Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure; Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

Of all the humanities, musicology stands out for its squeamishness about things corporal. Those who study a medium crucial for seduction, arousal, and dance avoid like the very plague addressing any of these qualities. Indeed, it has erected methodological walls — ineffability, objectivity, transcendence, “absolute music” — that guarantee in advance that sex will not raise its ugly head. In My 1980s Gayboy Playlist, Arved Ashby dives gleefully into these forbidden waters to grapple with his own erotic engagements with musics of all varieties: Beethoven and Kurt Cobain, Bruckner and Prince, Tchaikovsky and Tom Petty. He explains with powerful, irreverent prose how all of these informed his development as a queer adolescent growing up in the Midwest. Ashby demonstrates brilliantly and courageously how music can shape the most basic aspects of identities.

~ Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, and Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist

by Arved Ashby

FORTHCOMING Winter 2026

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist centers on eight musical works that impacted the author’s sexual and musical awakening as a troubled gay adolescent, including pieces by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, Alban Berg, Prince, Kurt Cobain, and Tom Petty. Preferring Alban Berg over Van Halen in the 1980s was a serious aberration in the small Midwestern town where Ashby grew up. Attempting to understand Tchaikovsky’s melodic beauties and Prince’s and Chopin’s musical intensities, he found it easier to grasp his own fetishes and sensual pleasures. His lack of success in becoming a proper musician taught him the limitations of the body, but also showed him the viability of queer failure. Ashby’s book doesn’t just explore musical and sexual jouissance so much as it speculates on music’s capacities for love, abjection, pleasure, pain, eros, power, and obsession, while reflecting upon the liaisons between music and desire, aural gratification and the body.

Ashby shares memories both intimate and far-reaching, but his book is not a conventional autobiography, disavowing as it does obligations to factuality and argument. In their stead, he offers the liquid self-reflexivity of Proust and the auto-theory provocations of Maggie Nelson, Paul Preciado, and McKenzie Wark. Without letting go of his scholarly expertise as a musicologist, Ashby writes poetically and playfully, outing himself in and through his work, with a humor and radical intimacy that are taboo in academic musicology.

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist ultimately illuminates what queer theorist Leo Bersani has called the gayboy’s inelegant “apprenticeship in desiring.” Ashby grew up queer, secluded, and music-dependent in the rural Midwest, and he found his awkward bliss at the start of the era that witnessed AIDS and the rise of the Moral Majority. In Ashby’s exurban outskirts, gayness was a thing feared, because unseen and unfathomed, but his musical intimacies made his own, personal closet endurable. They also helped him to survive his mis-education, to overcome failures of expression, and to craft a sexual awakening into something more rich and more strange.

About the Author

Arved Ashby is an award-winning musicologist with a PhD in Music History from Yale University. He has been on the faculty of the School of Music at Ohio State University since 1995. Ashby is the author of five books, including Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (California, 2010) and Experiencing Mahler: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He has also edited and contributed to Popular Music and the New Auteur (Oxford, 2013), an essay collection on filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, and Wes Anderson, who all tell stories with needle drops. My 1980s Gayboy Playlist is the first time Ashby has written from a personal and sexual, even confessional, perspective.