What I learned reading Wayne Koestenbaum's "The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire" is that I really enjoy reading someone eloquently writing about their passions from a personal but informed perspective.
I also learned that associating fandom with identity is not a new thing.
I don't know if it would be as interesting a read for someone who doesn't also have an interest in opera, but Koestenbaum writes about the "opera queen", a stereotype that even at the time of writing was fading in relevance both with the decline of interest in opera, despite its increase in accessibility, and the 'decline' of the older gay aficionados of the medium due to, well. The book was written in 1994. It's only addressed directly a few times, but AIDS winds its way through the book. Most of the operas discussed are tragedies, full of deaths that are violent or diseased, all untimely and devastating and enormous in the way you know opera deaths are even if your only reference point is "What's Opera, Doc?"
Koestenbaum links his discovery of his sexuality with his discovery of opera, each recognized as outside the norm, inappropriate in the enthusiasm, the powerful emotions invoked and provoked by music at odds with the expectations of baby boomer masculinity. Why, he asks, are gay men so drawn to opera, while simultaneously recognizing that perhaps the reality is that he, as a gay man who is drawn to opera, recognizes in opera and its audience things he has come to recognize in himself.
There's a section about being a fan of something properly that struck me as significant and succinct in understanding some of the roots of gatekeeping: "We don't have much choice about our sexual feelings. Nor can we choose our race. Nor, in most cases, our class. But for the collector, the drama of choice is supreme. (...) The collector dismisses poor taste, even considers it diseased. (...) The collector must enforce these standards and uphold them with imagery of contamination; the collector must believe that the beloved object is pure and that the 'wrong' choice is contaminated. One would think that opera were a sterile solution infected by the desires of gay fans." Koestenbaum is specifically citing an opera review from /1961/ deriding a recording with a handsome young tenor in the lead, making particular note of his 'lisping consonants'.
The wrong kind of people can't like something you like, because that ruins it and you run the risk of being associated with something disgusting unless you strive to make clear your contempt and wider reject for those things.
It makes sense why a young gay boy seeing a coded but clear rejection of a representation of his own self and desires by the authorities on something he loves would find himself with two choices: accepting the rejection and denying his love for this art for being loving wrongly or refusing the rejection, clinging to his love harder and finding more not only to love but to show that people like him, with passions like his, belong and are represented in that art.
Kudos is also due to Koestenbaum acknowledging, even in his appreciation and association of opera with self, the whiteness of opera, its orientalism and colonialism and racism (there are still opera companies putting on productions with blackface and yellowface in the 2020s, let alone in the 1990s). It's not what his book is about and it could be easily glossed over, but simply acknowledging it, and things like the number of Black women setting the gold standard for 20th century opera performances, add an honesty to the parts of the book that are personal and an air of trustworthiness when he delves more into the history and facts of the medium.
Sometimes a piece of art or a medium or a genre comes into your life at a certain point and it becomes inextricably linked to that point and that's part of how and why humans interact with art. Let people enjoy things, perhaps, but be honest in your understanding of why you enjoy certain things, because there is no final universality in opinions on art, for all the tier lists and rankings and box office receipts in the world.