Abstract
The 1990s produced a radical new paradigm in film, marked by an increase of queer characters and stories, known as New Queer Cinema (Rich 2013). Come the new millennium, this trend would only gain upward momentum. The explosion of original content from streaming services, each vying for their key demographics, fulfilled interest in films attending to the intricacies of local, global, diasporic, and transnational experiences. Resultantly, the film industry stands on a precipice. Telling the stories of marginalized subjects will require close(r) collaborations across power and Difference. In 2020, I had the privilege of scoring my first-ever feature film, When Men Were Men, which speaks into the New Queer Cinema canon. The film profiles a trans teenager living in rural Ireland. Marshaling my training as an ethnomusicologist, I crafted a film score that attends to the story’s geocultural specificity, religiosity, queerness, and transness.Although ethnomusicologists have seldom written about their experiences as film consultants, it is my observation that filmmakers usually call upon them only when creating exotic sound concepts or to circumvent egregious instances of cultural appropriation. Rather, I assert that process-oriented filmmaking (Terada 2013) makes proper use of the ethnomusicologist’s expertise, skills, and methods. In support of these assertions, I collaborated within my sphere of trans collaborators to center their experiences in my compositional approach. I applied my ethnomusicological training to all levels of the filmmaking process, culminating in the creation of a public-facing research deliverable in the form of a companion featurette, discussing some of the key themes broached by When Men Were Men, and featuring conversations with LGBTQ+ filmmakers and scholars, who address the triumphs, setbacks, and overall politics of queer representation both in front of and behind the camera.