ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an autoethnographic approach to explore a particular configuration of European popular music culture and aging – a configuration that is queered in multiple ways. Drawing on autoethnographic and soundscape approaches, it explores two main ideas. The first is that the Yumbo Centre is a distinctive queer space that produces a form of Europeanness that disrupts hegemonic notions of age, sexuality, and the second is that popular music provides the soundtrack to enable this experience. Nearer to the coast of North Africa than mainland Europe, Gran Canaria is the third largest of the eight islands in the archipelago that makes up the Canary Islands. Focused on popular musical classics, the music circulating at many intergenerational parties and certainly in the bars and drag shows of the Yumbo is music that can in some ways be categorised as nostalgic. Thus, within the macro liminality of Gran Canaria, the Yumbo Centre is a micro liminal space.
