Clintonville Books welcomes Arved Ashby

Join Clintonville Books as they welcome Arved Ashby, author of My 1980s Gayboy Playlist.

In this remarkably intimate book, music writer Arved Ashby reflects on the pieces that shaped his sexual and musical awakenings as a troubled, closeted gay adolescent in the rural Midwest.

My 1980s Gayboy Playlist is less memoir than autotheory, written in a literary rather than scholarly style. Ashby reengages with eight musical touchpoints — some old musical flames that still smolder — while drawing on ideas from Roland Barthes, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Michael Warner, and other queer theorists.

Focusing on the decade of AIDS terror, Reaganomics, and the Moral Majority, Ashby explores queer desire as it moved messily yet secretively across different avenues of expression, tracing connections between erotic experience and musical fantasy.

Arved Ashby is Emeritus Professor of Musicology at The Ohio State University.