Composed about a year before AIDS was first clinically observed in the United States, on the tenth anniversary of Stonewall's riots (a coincidence?), Gay Guerrilla (1979) is not Julius Eastman's first piece to make reference to homosexuality. Neither is it the first of Eastman's compositions in which the word “gay” is used in the title. Yet if all of Eastman's music but this one were to disappear, Gay Guerrilla would still be enough to guarantee him a firm place in the history of twentieth-century music.

Considered thirty-five years later, and thus observed from a more historically advantageous perspective, this piece in fact constitutes at once Eastman's most powerful tribute to the modern fight for gay rights and one of his most compositionally memorable—and moving—works.

Other Eastman “queer-themed” pieces:

Since the moment they hit the scene, titles like the ones above, and a handful of others also including the word “nigger” (Eastman notoriously composed a whole “nigger” series of works), have raised many eyebrows. They still do, which somewhat inconveniences concert producers who may be willing and able to program what survives of this music. But if the titles still makes us uncomfortable in 2015, one should then try to imagine just how outrageous they must have sounded in 1971: prior to Richard Pryor, prior to N.W.A., prior to Philadelphia, prior to the Bravo Channel.

Eastman was obviously conscious of the potentially controversial implications of his titles, and he even addressed the controversy in public in the opening remarks to the formidable concert he gave at Northwestern University in January 1980. Here, he proceeded to explain to an uneasy audience what he meant by the word “nigger” and what he meant by “gay guerrilla”: all this without necessarily helping to shed much light on the correlations between the titles and the actual pieces.

Had Eastman's music not been as relevant as it is, I probably would not have been able to go beyond the provocation of these titles, which seem to aggressively beg for our attention. The remarkable quality of the musical construction, however, requires a critic to observe the work with special patience and care.