That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

This is technically more a trans thing than a gay thing, but here’s a video I recently found of Wendy Carlos demonstrating the Moog synthesizer on the BBC. And, by an extraordinary coincidence, this happened around the same time she as scoring my favorite film of all time:





Two things immediately strike me: first, she does an amazing job of explaining how the synth works, as well as electronic tone generation as a whole, and it’s kind of sad to find that she stayed a recluse even after she had fully transitioned. And it’s especially impressive when you’re familiar with how bizarrely complicated the Moog interface was. Hell, I have the mini Moog app on my iPad, and while it’s still a watered down version of a watered down version of the modular synths she was using at the time, it’s still bewildering to imagine how the thing even works with all those knobs.

Second, she has this very uncanny appearance. Well, thereby hangs a tale. Around the time she recorded Switched-On Bach, she was undergoing counseling and had even started to do hormones. The album became a big hit and eventually gave her the money she needed to finally get the chop. Unfortunately, all the fame went to Walter Carlos, not Wendy. Eventually, she was contracted to perform excerpts from the album live with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (and given that the album required a shitton of multi tracking just to work, I’m also curious how doing it live would have worked.) But by that point, not only was she finally starting to accept her new identity (one which contradicted the record company’s idea of her), but she had progressed to the point where she actually had to take effort to pass for male again. So, after crying in her hotel room, she wore that same wig and fake sideburns and went on with the show. She even did it when she met with Kubrick to score His movie A Clockwork Orange. And then, she finally came out in 1979 (apparently record company politics played a role in delaying this announcement) and nobody seemed to care too much. So all that effort she put into pretending to be Walter for over a decade wound up being for nothing.