Book Review: Straight Histories of Queer Music Darryl W. Bullock. David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBTQ Music. London: Duckworth Overlook, 2017. 368 pages. Martin Aston. Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out. Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2016. 592 pages. Chronology is often a blunt and brutal tool. One of its major methodological drawbacks is the tendency to obscure messy and haphazard realities for tidy, linear fictions whose components fit neatly together. This is especially problematic for LGBTQ+ historical work. When they exist at all, queer historical records are notoriously incomplete, ephemeral, and haphazard while our queer ancestors, especially those who lived prior to the 1970s, often toiled in relative isolation, obscurity, or in small, subaltern communities. There are also issues of terminology. As queer critic Heather Love has asked, is it possible, or ethical, to speak of LGBTQ+ identities in eras or cultures for which those terms did not exist or do not apply? 1 Such preoccupations fuel queer theoretical debates, but just as important, especially beyond the white-washed ramparts of the Ivory Tower, is the need to claim queer ancestry, to declare that we were here. Without some sense of a shared queer past, it is very difficult to imagine better queer futures. Chronological history may be blunt and brutal, but in this regard, it is also very effective. LGBTQ+s cultivate a sense of the past to serve the affective and political needs of the present, often divining from cultural objects (books, art, film, television, music) signs of other queer lives. This process, which anthropologist Kath Weston once called “tracking the gay imaginary,” can be slapdash and haphazard and its results uneven. 2 Depending on when or where one lives and looks, a search for evidence of queer existence may yield a treasure trove or nothing of special interest. It can also hinge on how one interrogates the available data; familiarity with historical and cultural codes that may mask queerness in plain sight; and may be at best speculative. In the first case, I am thinking of George Chauncey’s groundbreaking work on the white working-class gay male culture of New York City prior 1. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. Kath Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration,” GLQ 2/3 (1995): 253−77. Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 31, Number 3, pp. 145–150. Electronic ISSN: 1533-1598 © 2019 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1525/jpms.2019.313012 145