I’ve been trying to find the perfect queer holiday CD and it’s not been easy. I’ve listened to George Michael’s “Last Christmas” way too much recently, and I usually spend this whole season trying to avoid things that are too overtly merry. The obvious solution, then, would be to find something that signifies an honest spirit of the season without making me want to hang myself on a giant candy cane.  I keep coming back to Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

John Cameron Mitchell’s story of a transgender German woman who molds a young Midwestern boy into a rockstar, loses him, and spends her life trying to get him back (in every sense of the word) can easily sound  like a Lifetime movie on paper. However, there is so much more about it that fits a dark December night. It’s humor is subtle, its production design loud, and quasi-feel good ending is actually earned. But none of this is what qualifies it as an all-time queer classic. 

Instead, it is the music. Influenced by 70s glam and other rock of days past, Hedwig creates instantly memorable tracks out of her own pain, frustration and fleeting love. I always want someone to cuddle with after I watch this movie, not because I’m crying (which I might be) but because I want someone to appreciate just how harrowing a journey we have both been through together. Much like the Holidays. Full circle!

I like to think that the trajectory of Patrick Wolf‘s career follows a path of awakening that mirrors the typical coming out process of queer youth all over the world. The bisexual young Englishman first hit the public consciousness with albums like Lychantropy and The Magic Position that had a mix of whimsy and overwrought introspection that called to mind Kate Bush’s teenage diary.

His live shows — a dramatic mix of sincere emotion and formal wear — echoed this as well, like a living embodiment of a queer teenage boy’s idealized vision of what gay life will be like outside his parents attic. On Patrick Wolf’s most recent album, this year’s The Bachelor, he seems to find out that not everything is cummerbunds and violins. His aesthetic touch-points shift from YM Magazine to Nylon. “Wind in the Willows” fairy tale flourish gives way to a near-electro sheen and an overall sense of someone, as they say, getting what they want and never wanting it again.

The albums first single “Vulture” captures this perfectly in production, lyrical content and video imagery as you see below. I don’t know where Patrick Wolf is headed now that he’s been tainted by the world, but I am assured that his journey will be an intriguing one.

In some bands, the many different members unite to form such a tight hybrid of sound and style that there are no individuals, just a unit of sound. The Gossip is not one of those bands. Though every member of the post-punk/rock/R&B fusion trio rocks in their own way, they are carried by one of contemporary musics most kick-ass queer frontwomen. Beth Ditto sings like Robert Plant, commands an audience like Santogold and stage dives like a drunken soccer fan.

When you listen to her band’s newest album Music for Men you won’t get the full experience of Ditto in a negligee being passed around by adoring audience members, but you will get to hear the music that draws people to her shows in the first place. From the bluesy drawl of “Dimestore Diamond” to the 80s-infused “Four Letter Word,” through the balls-out dance numbers “Heavy Cross” and “Men in Love,” Ditto’s music practically begs to be swaggered to. A couple listens to this and you’ll feel like full equal rights are just in reach, and we’re getting closer one high note or guitar solo at a time.

While short-statured, muscly gay Jewish boys aren’t usually associated with music that moves the booty, everything about P.D.A. is designed either for dancing or making love. The former member of “Yoo hoo“-makers Imperial Teen covers Architecture in Helsinki (“Heart it Races”) or busts a Timbaland-worthy ode to doing it (“Double Fantasy II”) with equal aplomb. In respect to the latter track, its always a blast to hear standard R & B when you know that its sung from one guy to another. No homo.

The albums stand out, and my third most listened to song of 2008, is the single “Hundredaire.” An unfailingly sunny ode to the fact that one must either dump or be dumped, and neither solution is tenable, the song welds a “hey hey hey” chorus into a danceable, singable, hummable little four minute burst of queer music joy.

Though gay Hidden Cameras‘ frontman Joel Gibb has a wry, basso voice that can sometimes remind a guy of Stephin Merritt, the desires he sings of reside about 18 inches below a person’s heart. It can be easy to lose in the band’s stage persona – a Polyphonic Spree-esque folk/druid revival — or catchy pop melodies, but there is a whole lot raunch to be found throughout their back catalogue. I’ll simply leave you with the title “I Want Another Enema” from an earlier album as an example of all that.

His newest work, Origin:Orphan retains that ability to excite the genitals in songs like “Underage,” but there is a nice variety throughout it as well. As its highest praise, some of the albums harmonies are so catchy that you might not even realize the lyrics are there until the third spin. “In The NA” nearly requires an exorcism to remove from your lobes, and “The Little Bit” builds an earworm by seemingly adding lyrics to the “Hhmmm, Hmmm” bridge of “You Can Call Me Al.” It might sound unlikely, but you”ll believe me when you hear it.

A mark of a good CD is the fact that a potentially salacious or marketable backstory doesn’t get in the way of the music’s intended purpose. 2009′s Dance Mother LP, by Brookyn duo Telepathe, is by all accounts a icy testament to synth pop’s ability to make a person dance. Songs like “So Fine” and “Chrome’s On It” do a nice job at mixing Ladytron detachment with Santigold hyperstyle to make a perfect soundtrack for someone to grope someone else on a darkened dance floor. This is a compliment. 

What the average fan might not know, however, is that Telepathe’s members, Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais, used to be an item. Their nonchalance at this fact haven’t given them as much purchase in the queer press as one might expect (one superior interview notwithstanding,) but finding out a band’s sexuality through a casual sentence in a Pitchfork review carries its own kind of visibility too. 

Though I think that the mainstream media usually gets excited about bands with histories like Telepathes’, it’s also nice that their disc was largely reviewed on its own merit. I hope you check it out, and enjoy.

The Blow, really Khaela Maricich, doesn’t explicitly wear its queerness on 2006′s Paper Television. But when you do find out that Maricich is an out lesbian something about the rest of the album shifts into focus. Rather than a collection of over-arching anthems to love and loss, the album charts the trajectory of a relationship through a series of moments and observations that suggest they come from a uniquely different perspective.

“Pile of Gold” compares ones’ sexual attractiveness to an economic force. “Fists Up” plots a break up as a political revolution, albeit a losing one. And most importantly, the album’s standout track (and my favorite homo love song of all time) “Parentheses” creates both the image of a lover’s embrace as protective punctuation and the idea that it’s OK to cry in the deli aisle. That when your partner is OK with this display of emotion you’ve found something really special.

When I saw The Blow live, Maricich made a special point of announcing that it was her anniversary with her girlfriend, which the crowd went crazy for. But the best part of this album is that it is universal – as all great love/break up songs tend to be – but at the same time it’s just for us.

Though he’s not often heralded in the gay canon with contemporaries like Sylvester, Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed released the best, and queerest, album of his solo career with 1972′s Transformer. No one glamorizes the underbelly quite like Lou does, and the New York he creates in Transformer is one of drugs, parties and more kinds of sex than I could print here without being brought up on obscenities charges. While his career with the Velvet’s hinted at gay themes in songs like “New Age” and “Candy Says,” that theme of his writing explodes throughout Transformer’s blacklit halls.

Starting with the fact that David Bowie holds a producer credit (and some say wrote the gospel-tinged “Wagon Wheel,”) the discerning queer music fan can find many echoes of their own life in Transformer. The most overt examples are on the album’s best known song, “Take a Walk on The Wild Side,” which means a lot more to me now than it did when I was ten. Then, I was distracted by the background ditty and what I thought was an allusion to “Where The Wild Things Are.” Now I recognize it as an ode to hustling, cross-dressing and giving head in back rooms. (Basically, how Larry Craig spent his summer vacation.) There are an unsung number of camp flourishes throughout as well, like Lou’s gossip girl precursor “New York Telephone Conversation” or the baroque, cabaret-style closer “Goodnight Ladies.” All of this conjures up a time and place that most of us probably weren’t able to visit, but damn well wish we could.