Gender Confusion

Since I spent the day writing a paper for my sexual behavior class, my brain is a little beat. Luckily for you though, what I was writing about was music related enough to include here. My paper was on the lyrics of Stephin Merritt and his usage of gender confusion in his songs. Naturally there was a lot of Magnetic Fields quoting and analysis (also a nice little section on gay marriage). When I figure out how to post documents on this page I will put a link to the whole paper. Until then, here is an excerpt:


There are other instances of gender switching on 69 Love Songs. On the song “Come Back From San Francisco”, guest vocalist Shirley Simms sings “Should pretty boys in discos distract you from your novel/remember I'm awful in love with you.” It is not clear as to what gendered person she is singing to. Similar to “Acoustic Guitar”, the nature of the narrator is unclear. She could be gay and singing to a straight girl that she is in love with. The girl in San Francisco could be bisexual, or a gay man, or a bisexual man. This of course is looking at the song’s interpretation through the conventions of male and female. Merritt is entertaining the idea of this love story going beyond the norm. He does so earlier in his career on the album The Charm Of The Highway Strip on the song “Two Characters In Search Of A Country Song” where Merritt describes himself and the other character as Daniel Webster and William Tell. Later in the song he switches the names with Calamity Jane and Wild Bill respectively. This type of gender switch off is done vocally in the 69 Love Songs track “Papa Was A Rodeo”. The song features Merritt singing to a man (this we know because he addresses the person he is singing to as “Mike”) about how he cannot give in to falling in love with him because he is part of a traveling rodeo, and that this lifestyle is all he knows.  The song appears as though it’s a gay country ballad of a man singing to another man. This changes though when we reach the last chorus and guest vocalist Shirley Simms unexpectedly chimes in and takes over the vocal.  Merritt finishes the song with the line, “What a coincidence, your papa was a rodeo too”. This concluding line would indicate that Simms is singing as “Mike”. This would then raise the question as to what the genders are of the two characters. It’s possible that one of or both of them would fall into one of the three other sexes described in Fausto-Sterling’s article.

...taken from "Not For All His Little Words - An observation of gender displacement and gay rights through the lyrics of Stephin Merritt" by Douglas Bleggi.