"[L]ike the Picasso of Gertrude Stein’s famous portrait, [John] Cage (who, incidentally, had had relationships with men long before he married Xenia) 'was always working.' His was not a struggle against anything as abstract or clichéd as 'an oppressively heteronormative society' or 'the sanctioned symbolic order' of patriarchy. Rather—and, one might say, more ambitiously,—he seemed to want nothing less than to transform the arts of his time. In this endeavor, there is now no doubt that he succeeded." Marjorie Perloff • LARB

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