Classical Pride: Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerilla

Heard here in an arrangement by US composer Jessie Montgomery, Gay Guerrilla is the last in Eastman’s deliberately provocative N***** Series of pieces from the late 1970s. Gay Guerrilla is an improvisatory, minimalist take on Martin Luther’s 16th-century hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, recast as a manifesto about being a gay, black man. As Eastman wrote, ‘What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest – Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.’