“A love for opera, particularly on record, is a nostalgic emotion, and gay people are imagined to be a uniquely and tragically nostalgic population--regressive, committed to dust and souvenirs. A record, a momento, a trace of an absence, suits the quintessentially gay soul, whose tastes are retro and whose sexuality demands a ceaseless work of recollection.”  
- Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat

Wayne Koestenbaum in his beautiful personal ethnography of opera and gay culture, The Queen’s Throat, connects the importance of opera-on-record for opera culture not to consumer culture, like Evans, but to gay culture, itself a nostalgic or archivist culture. But as much as gay culture is nostalgic, since [[KOESTENBAUM THING ABT LOOKING FOR ORIGIN]], it is also performative, and the record is not the only place where traces of absence can be found. Another is the stage.

In other words, opera culture is archival, but so, in fact, is opera performance. In the sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting relationship between recorded sound and performance, an opera emerges that is archived and archival, with, often, the more successful, less commercial work of recollection happening not on youtube or on the turntable, but on the stage.