A late nineteenth-century renaissance in French organ building partitioned organist, organ, and audience while expanding the instrument’s size and adding "swell" boxes shuttering pipes from public view. In theater, concert, and church...
moreA late nineteenth-century renaissance in French organ building partitioned organist, organ, and audience while expanding the instrument’s size and adding "swell" boxes shuttering pipes from public view. In theater, concert, and church organs, the organist is hidden behind the console or is seated in an adjoining chamber, under the floor, or high in a loft. Cary Howie’s book, "Claustrophilia" (2007), examines how hermetic cloisters might be understood as erotic spaces in medieval literature and practice. In this paper, I argue that the enclosure of the organ, along with its promise of campy power, made it attractive to gay men in the 20th century, inscribing it as an extension of the closet. According to Cameron Carpenter, "most American organists are gay or at least […] questioning," while Virgil Fox complained that organists have historically been "hiding behind the woodwork." Popular French literary depictions of the organ, notably Leroux’s "Le Fantôme de l’Opéra" (1910) and Verne’s "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers" (1870), portray it as an expressive mode of repressed, reclusive villains. Rops’s etching, "L’Organiste du Diable" (1886), shows a nude woman playing an organ bedecked with penises propped against each other in a homoerotic configuration, while the film adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest’s "Barberella" (1964), introduces the "Excessive Machine," an organ-like musical orgasmatron that houses victims in its bellows, dousing them with lethal sexual energy. These texts and images indicate toward a French-influenced rendering of the organ in the 20th century that registered it as an enclosure for queer mechanisms and episodes.
