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The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
This passionate love letter to opera, lavishly praised and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was first published, is now firmly established as a cult classic. In a learned, moving, and sparklingly witty melange of criticism, subversion, and homage, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates mysteries of fandom and obsession, and has created an exuberant work of personal meditation and cultural history.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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932 people want to read
About the author
Wayne Koestenbaum
82 books173 followersWayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
June 3, 2009
Full disclosure: I am a gay man. I enjoy opera, find certain operas to be truly sublime. But I am not an opera queen
Koestenbaum writes with a kind of feverish elegance that is impressive. But this book - a set of highly idiosyncratic meditations on opera - just bristles with cringe-inducing stereotypes. In particular, his apparent willingness to embrace the 'gay man as ostracized outsider' role is distinctly unappealing.
I enjoyed two of the book's seven chapters - Koestenbaum's reflections on "The Callas Cult" and the final chapter, in which he singles out moments in opera which he finds particularly affecting, and attempts to explain why. (Though he's not always able to provide a particularly coherent explanation, his passion does shine through, and it's always interesting to hear about other people's favorite opera moments.)
I found the remaining five chapters to be a curious melange of the weirdly fetishistic and the worst kind of deconstructive excess. The following excerpt exemplifies these two problems:
"I've always been fascinated by the spindle hole. Everything on the record's face conspires to highlight it: the price circles it; the label and the round window in the protective paper envelope echo its shape....
The hole makes no single anatomical allusion. It makes many. It isn't reductively equal, even in the listener's unconscious, to any part of the human body. But it has always spoken to me of the emptiness at the center of a recorded voice and the emptiness at the center of a listener's life and the ambiguities in any sexual body, including a homosexual body, concerning the proper and improper function of orifices."
He goes on, I regret to report, to devote even more space to the contemplation of a record's label, its grooves, the turntable, and a myriad of other objects remotely associated with opera. I'd like to say that his passion for opera shines through, but for the most part I found his ruminations oddly detached. The musings of a collector, and not of a lover of opera. Had he focused more on the music itself, and not the trappings that surround opera, this would have been a better book.
But if you like the kind of drivel exemplified by the paragraph quoted earlier, then this is the book for you. I was disappointed.
Koestenbaum writes with a kind of feverish elegance that is impressive. But this book - a set of highly idiosyncratic meditations on opera - just bristles with cringe-inducing stereotypes. In particular, his apparent willingness to embrace the 'gay man as ostracized outsider' role is distinctly unappealing.
I enjoyed two of the book's seven chapters - Koestenbaum's reflections on "The Callas Cult" and the final chapter, in which he singles out moments in opera which he finds particularly affecting, and attempts to explain why. (Though he's not always able to provide a particularly coherent explanation, his passion does shine through, and it's always interesting to hear about other people's favorite opera moments.)
I found the remaining five chapters to be a curious melange of the weirdly fetishistic and the worst kind of deconstructive excess. The following excerpt exemplifies these two problems:
"I've always been fascinated by the spindle hole. Everything on the record's face conspires to highlight it: the price circles it; the label and the round window in the protective paper envelope echo its shape....
The hole makes no single anatomical allusion. It makes many. It isn't reductively equal, even in the listener's unconscious, to any part of the human body. But it has always spoken to me of the emptiness at the center of a recorded voice and the emptiness at the center of a listener's life and the ambiguities in any sexual body, including a homosexual body, concerning the proper and improper function of orifices."
He goes on, I regret to report, to devote even more space to the contemplation of a record's label, its grooves, the turntable, and a myriad of other objects remotely associated with opera. I'd like to say that his passion for opera shines through, but for the most part I found his ruminations oddly detached. The musings of a collector, and not of a lover of opera. Had he focused more on the music itself, and not the trappings that surround opera, this would have been a better book.
But if you like the kind of drivel exemplified by the paragraph quoted earlier, then this is the book for you. I was disappointed.
January 29, 2016
Insightful, incisive... and ultimately more than a bit of exhausting. I'm drawn to the structure and style, which is primarily made up of reflective fragments that are arranged in associative clusters of memories and content, but the text's greatest quality—the deep immersion into the author's psyche and his personal obsessions and desires—is also, ultimately, its greatest drawback (after a while one pines for some critical distance).
But as someone like myself who is interested in opera in a cursory manner, it's a nice crash-course on its history and many of its major figures and works, presented in a manner that is accessible through Koestenbaum's almost excessively personal and often very witty approach to the subject. And of course, as the title indicates, this is all intricately intertwined with discourses of queer sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it leads to some really beautiful connections and observations.
"When I as a gay person go backward to find or write the story of my sexuality, I am making it up, because sexuality has no absolute origin or motivation, though because sexuality is structured like a narrative, with crux, climax, and denouement, we are always hoping to unknot its beginning. Playing a record, I move backward in time to the imagined scene of recording... playing a record is like playing the Ouija, speaking to the dead, asking questions of an immensity that only throws back the echo of one's futile question, a repeated 'myself, myself...'"
But as someone like myself who is interested in opera in a cursory manner, it's a nice crash-course on its history and many of its major figures and works, presented in a manner that is accessible through Koestenbaum's almost excessively personal and often very witty approach to the subject. And of course, as the title indicates, this is all intricately intertwined with discourses of queer sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it leads to some really beautiful connections and observations.
"When I as a gay person go backward to find or write the story of my sexuality, I am making it up, because sexuality has no absolute origin or motivation, though because sexuality is structured like a narrative, with crux, climax, and denouement, we are always hoping to unknot its beginning. Playing a record, I move backward in time to the imagined scene of recording... playing a record is like playing the Ouija, speaking to the dead, asking questions of an immensity that only throws back the echo of one's futile question, a repeated 'myself, myself...'"
January 15, 2023
Interesting but hard work and not one I'll be hanging onto.
July 27, 2007
There's a certain variety of essay writing which I find both eloquent and assertively readable, much harder to come by than you might think. (And by "assertively readable," I mean that it's the kind of book you would happily read all day on the couch with a big glass of ice water and some cigarettes, postponing all obligations.) Wayne Koestenbaum writes a lot of these essays. (I hear that an article in the Believer called them "lyric essays," but the term "lyric" is overwrought enough that I don't really want to bother it anymore.) In this book particularly, Wayne deals with opera and opera fandom in a non-showy but relentlessly intelligent, even academic, way. It's often very personal, chronicling his relationship with opera divas and record collections, but he manages to balance the theory-level speculation so nicely. I'm only fifty pages in and already I feel compelled to write a review, and that alone should speak volumes.
May 15, 2013
Another one of those books that just seemed to come along at the right time and teach me something I didn't know (certainly about opera; also about gay identity) but mostly just left me agog at the THINKING and the WRITING. I've been a fan of Wayne Koestenbaum ever since.
November 20, 2025
Because James McCourt’s operatic fantasy Mawrdew Czgowchwz (introduced by Koestenbaum for the NYRB edition) is one of my favorite novels, and because I enjoyed Koestenbaum’s own novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, the mad notebooks of a burnout concert pianist, I expected to love this. In spite of its many beautiful insights and inspired readings (of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, of Il Trovatore and Massenet’s Werther, especially), I found much of The Queen’s Throat a slog, a very particular kind of slog: wannabe-Barthesian, pseudo-sprightly. When at the outset Koestenbaum called it a scrapbook, I should have believed him. It’s a real fan’s scrapbook, not a droll capriccio mimicking the effects of one. All that said, a singular book, one that I'll keep on my shelves.
July 14, 2024
I love love love love loved this but did grow weary of the vignette style by the end. But wow
June 1, 2025
Really enjoyed this. I think in 2 years or so when I know more about opera as opposed to just working opera I will come back and reread this.
June 22, 2020
Truly one of the most luscious, mouth-watering books I've ever read. Koestenbaum's use of language is sensually thrilling, evocative and excruciating almost to the extent that an aria can be. I would record myself reading sections and send it to friends, desperate to share the experience.
I could only make my way through each chapter with a pencil and paint chip to underline phrases, ideas, new words... I learned so many new words through this book! And refined so many of my existing ideas about how queer identity intersected with the high mystery of music.
When I was a kid, I learned about the 'opera queen' figure through films that slipped around the Hayes code. They filled me with a sense of romantic rapture; all I wanted was to live alone in an apartment someday in a kimono, playing records, pining artistically... but Koestenbaum really cut through that childish illusion and illustrates the anguish of being isolated within opera and society at large.
This is one of the few books for which I purchased a 'lending copy' knowing that I'd marked up mine too much to share. Even though I'm a modern queer woman and not a pre-Stonewall gay man, I just start to cry when I think how grateful I am to have found a book that SAW me so clearly. That made me feel real, and not ridiculous. My overwhelming sense of spiritual rapture in the presence of opera is regarded as absurd or cringey by some. Probably be some of the people who left negative reviews for this book. Koestenbaum understands that something beyond flesh and yet purely flesh is happening when we receive the vibrations of opera, and gave dignity to my ecstasy.
I hope I can meet him someday to thank him for a book that inspired so much of my writing, personal understanding, and feeling like I--in at least one context--make sense on this planet. When I walked into Glad Day Bookshop, I had no idea I'd find the most perfect book to complete something unfinished and unarticulated within myself.
I could only make my way through each chapter with a pencil and paint chip to underline phrases, ideas, new words... I learned so many new words through this book! And refined so many of my existing ideas about how queer identity intersected with the high mystery of music.
When I was a kid, I learned about the 'opera queen' figure through films that slipped around the Hayes code. They filled me with a sense of romantic rapture; all I wanted was to live alone in an apartment someday in a kimono, playing records, pining artistically... but Koestenbaum really cut through that childish illusion and illustrates the anguish of being isolated within opera and society at large.
This is one of the few books for which I purchased a 'lending copy' knowing that I'd marked up mine too much to share. Even though I'm a modern queer woman and not a pre-Stonewall gay man, I just start to cry when I think how grateful I am to have found a book that SAW me so clearly. That made me feel real, and not ridiculous. My overwhelming sense of spiritual rapture in the presence of opera is regarded as absurd or cringey by some. Probably be some of the people who left negative reviews for this book. Koestenbaum understands that something beyond flesh and yet purely flesh is happening when we receive the vibrations of opera, and gave dignity to my ecstasy.
I hope I can meet him someday to thank him for a book that inspired so much of my writing, personal understanding, and feeling like I--in at least one context--make sense on this planet. When I walked into Glad Day Bookshop, I had no idea I'd find the most perfect book to complete something unfinished and unarticulated within myself.
June 6, 2018
You had me at 'cult classic.'
I wanted to read The Queen's Throat based on my curiosity of what makes musical theatre such a historically femme space for (queer) men and women. Then two recently read authors, David Shields and Susan Sontag, mentioned and co-signed this text. It answered many of my questions, and shed light on a world of detail and intrigue I didn't expect.
Zigzagging from personal observations to thematic generalities, the author cuts through history and biography to lay bare the anatomy of opera and obsession, of hetero- and homosexuality, and how the aesthetics of presentation, expression, and exaggeration define these territories.
The style and subject(s) were all so idiosyncratic and terse that it's a book I'd consider reading again or even buying. It's easy to pick up and put down, always feeling like you came away with a bit of poetry, insight or comedy from reading just a page or two.
I wanted to read The Queen's Throat based on my curiosity of what makes musical theatre such a historically femme space for (queer) men and women. Then two recently read authors, David Shields and Susan Sontag, mentioned and co-signed this text. It answered many of my questions, and shed light on a world of detail and intrigue I didn't expect.
Zigzagging from personal observations to thematic generalities, the author cuts through history and biography to lay bare the anatomy of opera and obsession, of hetero- and homosexuality, and how the aesthetics of presentation, expression, and exaggeration define these territories.
The style and subject(s) were all so idiosyncratic and terse that it's a book I'd consider reading again or even buying. It's easy to pick up and put down, always feeling like you came away with a bit of poetry, insight or comedy from reading just a page or two.
May 17, 2019
The music of opera invades the music of Kaestenbaum's writing. One of the better examples of queer writing and literature that I've found.
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January 28, 2025nowhere near as laborious as the time it's taken to finish wld suggest, i just spent far too long listening to recordings of the twenty eight pieces that make up the final chapter, his pocket guide to queer moments in opera. anyway, i am not and have never been an opera queen, and if anything, found myself avoiding the opera i grew up around bc i was so easily overwhelmed by its intensity, how close to hysterical i felt when the orchestra and voices just kept swelling and piercing and pouring out. and i think, in reading this, i took tony kushner's lead in wearing the identity of opera queen like a sort of costume -- when i shed it i'm not sure if i'll ever pick it up again?
but fr the last couple of weeks, what a gorgeous time i've had w it ! this is, to me, a triumph of obsession and elegy and sensuality !
also appropriating the following passage fr my own nefarious purposes (mostly thinking about ballet again):
'opera makes me feel two-gendered, the idea of heterosexuality blooming inside my head. [...] opera doesn't arouse me (opera isn't an aphrodisiac), but it presents me with an illusory heterosexual feast which i greedily eat, containing, mastering, and overpowering it. a queer person may occasionally want his or her emotions to be public and statuesque as heterosexuality, that fictive, distant, civic-minded plateau. [...] listening, the source of love in myself smiles at me like a stranger, a masked guest, and i'm assaulted by the oddest sensation of division; i become heterosexuality itself, my meek gay body hums with the magnet-sensation we call "heterosexual" because it is the dance of opposites, though is it still heterosexual when one body plays both parts?'
but fr the last couple of weeks, what a gorgeous time i've had w it ! this is, to me, a triumph of obsession and elegy and sensuality !
also appropriating the following passage fr my own nefarious purposes (mostly thinking about ballet again):
'opera makes me feel two-gendered, the idea of heterosexuality blooming inside my head. [...] opera doesn't arouse me (opera isn't an aphrodisiac), but it presents me with an illusory heterosexual feast which i greedily eat, containing, mastering, and overpowering it. a queer person may occasionally want his or her emotions to be public and statuesque as heterosexuality, that fictive, distant, civic-minded plateau. [...] listening, the source of love in myself smiles at me like a stranger, a masked guest, and i'm assaulted by the oddest sensation of division; i become heterosexuality itself, my meek gay body hums with the magnet-sensation we call "heterosexual" because it is the dance of opposites, though is it still heterosexual when one body plays both parts?'
December 23, 2024
ultimately a better disidentifications because of the narrower subject matter. love the necessity of the closet to enable certain experiences--experiences of absorption and self-mutilation, for sure, and of singing where speech fails (was made or given to fail), but also that particular imaginary quality of being gay that can want things non-sexually and so homosexually. some form of wanting (& enacting) outside of reality. my problem with books like these is that when you love something enough, that thing can be everything. the truth of love is that we are always falling short of it in these ways. but koestenbaum can brave it
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January 19, 2020High faggotry at its finest... a marvelous book
May 28, 2025
In shame I will find paradise
July 11, 2025
"opera is dead, and all we possess are these discs, fetishes, remnants."
April 26, 2022
I was ready to really love this academic free associative fantasia on opera and the gays, but it was 3x as long as I would have enjoyed that for. Still my most highlighted book, but after a while I felt like I got the picture and still had to slog through the rest. Recommended only for the narrowest of audiences.
May 8, 2015
"There is nothing prosaic about a diva. But diva prose is often banal: an ordinariness touched by sublimity. The diva writes to amplify herself, to state the obvious--floridly. (When a nondiva writes diva prose, she writes to admire or to impersonate.) Diva prose is amusing and pathetic because the divas who writes about themselves so grandly are often dead, no longer household words. Because a diva is rarely a dictator, we can afford to be charmed and transported bu the tragicomedy of diva prose, and not insist on greater circumspection." ("Codes of Diva Conduct", p 85)
As an opera lover I found this to be a delightful book aimed directly at all of us who love opera. Unique in his presentation and passionate in his approach to the subject, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates the queer and queerer aspects of Opera in a way that is both intriguing and fascinating. Using opera as metaphor for gay life the divas of the past take on a melancholy patina that is affecting in its ability to communicate an earlier age of gay culture. The divide marked by Stonewall and the ravages of AIDS lends the book a haunting aura in spite of the morsels of operatic trivia that are otherwise still scandalously funny. The high point of the book for many will undoubtedly be the obligatory paean to the revolution known as "The Callas Cult".
"Luchino Visconti, in a photograph, kisses Callas's cheek, which makeup foundation has made unnaturally pale; Leonard Bernstein exclaims, "Callas? She was pure electricity." Visconti and Bernstein loved Callas not because they were gay but because she was a genius;" (p 136)
There are more details than could have been imagined about opera, from divas to opera queens, including musical trivia galore for those interested in the lives of Callas or Ponselle or Patti. The almost fifty pages devoted to "A Pocket Guide to Queer Moments in Opera" may be alternatively revealing or nostalgic depending on the readers' personal experiences. The result is a unique combination of reflections on camp, glamour, spectacle, privacy, identity, coming-out and more. For those who want to go beyond the basics of the music and drama of opera, who want to delve into the world of gay culture and the desires built upon the lore of Opera divadom, this is the that book takes them behind the scrim and into 'never land'.
As an opera lover I found this to be a delightful book aimed directly at all of us who love opera. Unique in his presentation and passionate in his approach to the subject, Wayne Koestenbaum illuminates the queer and queerer aspects of Opera in a way that is both intriguing and fascinating. Using opera as metaphor for gay life the divas of the past take on a melancholy patina that is affecting in its ability to communicate an earlier age of gay culture. The divide marked by Stonewall and the ravages of AIDS lends the book a haunting aura in spite of the morsels of operatic trivia that are otherwise still scandalously funny. The high point of the book for many will undoubtedly be the obligatory paean to the revolution known as "The Callas Cult".
"Luchino Visconti, in a photograph, kisses Callas's cheek, which makeup foundation has made unnaturally pale; Leonard Bernstein exclaims, "Callas? She was pure electricity." Visconti and Bernstein loved Callas not because they were gay but because she was a genius;" (p 136)
There are more details than could have been imagined about opera, from divas to opera queens, including musical trivia galore for those interested in the lives of Callas or Ponselle or Patti. The almost fifty pages devoted to "A Pocket Guide to Queer Moments in Opera" may be alternatively revealing or nostalgic depending on the readers' personal experiences. The result is a unique combination of reflections on camp, glamour, spectacle, privacy, identity, coming-out and more. For those who want to go beyond the basics of the music and drama of opera, who want to delve into the world of gay culture and the desires built upon the lore of Opera divadom, this is the that book takes them behind the scrim and into 'never land'.
October 29, 2007
This book appeared in the early 1990's and I have just now gotten around to reading it. It is superbly written and an elegant traversal of opera and its cult and audience from the perspective of a very sophisticated gay man. The strongest chapter is a reminiscence of Maria Callas as soprano and legend. It takes operatic experience as paradigmatic not only for aesthetic experience in general but also as a system of signs in which the definition of sexuality and identity can be located. This is all very in keeping with the thought style of poststructuralism which dominated American academia from the 1970's through the early 1990's. For gay readers today what makes this book mildly poignant today is that it comes at the highpoint of the gay rights era: just at the moment when a growing readership could embrace it, a vastly expanded set of life and identity choices implied by "mainstreaming" of gays pushed the traditional preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic experience to one side. Nevertheless this is a must read for anyone who loves opera.
February 6, 2008
Long story short -- out looking for books on opera -- found this. Stars? Well, they're as they need to be but may or may not reflect an accurate measure of the book for technical reasons, shall we say? I plan to finish this one day when I have the time while listening to Gounod's Faust on a repeat loop. Inside joke, that.
December 13, 2016
I didn't know whether to love or hate this book. Interesting facts are buried in overwritten, and overwrought purple prose. The prose style may have been purposeful, but keeping the prose at that level made me want to either laugh or throw the book accross the room. The arch tone has not aged well.
January 8, 2013
Interesting thoughts, but so clogged up with pretentious prose it was a real slog to get through. To be naughty and paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, if you gave this book an enema it would end up a pamphlet.
June 21, 2010
opera and gays. gays and opera. thoroughly entertaining even for the non-opera buff. or the non-gays.
January 4, 2020
Interesting and often hilarious
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October 27, 2021more like The Queen's Thrussy!!
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews