‘I Wonder What Became of Me’: Chris Connor and the closet of cool

ABSTRACT

​ ​Obituaries were the first public acknowledgement that renowned jazz singer Chris Connor (1927–2009) had been a lesbian. This article investigates the significance of this posthumous revelation, positioning Connor as a point of entry to a queered useable past, and argues that a combination of factors in her biography and performance style offers audiences a unique way of reading and interpreting performativity and celebrity in relation to queer lives. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorisation of the closet as a framework for enabling or contravening ways of knowing, I analyse coolness, both as a singing style and as a mode of social performance, as a form of closetedness that enabled Connor’s successful career, but required equivocation and diminished agency. I contend that coolness/closetedness as modelled by Connor was a negotiation between convention and subversion, with historical evidence indicating that she had special significance for queer audiences of the past. Moreover, I argue that she continues to have importance for queer listeners, not only for her music, but precisely because her relative obscurity and the lack of details in her biography offer an open-endedness that make her a more adaptable ‘stand-in’ for understanding the lives of queer forebears forgotten by history.

KEYWORDS:

• Chris Connor
• jazz vocals
• cool jazz
• closetedness
• queer history
• cool performativity
• queer celebrity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.​​

Notes

1. Patti Smith has voiced her appreciation of Connor’s music repeatedly over the years, saying that as a teenager she aspired to sing jazz like Connor and Christy. In March 2008, Smith even performed a set of songs paying tribute to the singers at the Rose Theater on Broadway.

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Notes on contributors

Mark Hain

Mark Hain researches and writes on how socio-political contexts affect audience response to celebrities, and how fans find various forms of usefulness through their interpretation of star images. In addition to work on twentieth-century popular music, he also explores the continuation of fan interest in films stars of the silent era, and is working on a monograph analysing how historical fandoms of the actress Theda Bara have influenced cultural memory. His recent work has appeared in The Journal of Fan Studies, Black Camera, and the edited collection Queering the Countryside. Hain is currently an instructor of film studies at Bowling Green State University.