Gary Thomas, a University of Minnesota cultural studies professor and author of Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, writes that gay liberation means that "manliness, that always vulnerable plenitude in constant need of discursive renaturalization and reinforcement, that illusion on which modern patriarchal control is so utterly dependent, will be finally unmasked as the truly 'unnatural' and 'perverse' image that it is."

Thomas also wonders whether the great baroque composer George Frideric Handel was gay: "Handel, whose life coincided with these revolutionary paradigm shifts, whose texts are in many ways complex and eloquent negotiations of them, and who is therefore the first modern composer whose sexuality could pose a 'problem' in the terms that it did, strikes me as an [example] of this coercive double-bind. Like the oratorio whose musical 'body' betrays the masks of its ideological appropriation, and the masculine persona whose mythic solidity belies its neurasthenic vulnerability, Handel's physical and musical bodies impede the suture required to maintain the safe and comforting, disciplined object we've come to know as his image."

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