For Gray Lianghui Huang, it’s all about sound — the physical relationship between the vocal chords of a performer and the ears of the audience.
In 2018, Huang performed in two different national Chinese singing competitions. Now at Binghamton University, he uses this experience to inform his research as a PhD scholarin comparative literature who studiesqueer cinema sound and the artistic expression of queer and trans individuals in East Asia and the Americas.
A nationally recognized voice
Huang’s television debut took place in the spring of 2018, during the third season of the national Chinese television show Come Sing With Me in an episode featuring Hong Kong pop star Karen Mok. The show offers unknown singers and fans the chance to perform for and meet their idols, with one lucky contestant being chosen to sing the closing song alongside their hero. Huang won his episode and sang the duet “Love” (爱) with Mok.
Huang followed up his debut with an audition performance on The Coming One season two, a national competition of young performers often compared to American Idol. After these televised appearances, he went on to perform in New York, Hong Kong, and across China and Vietnam.
Of his experience on these shows, Huang said, “I was grateful for the opportunity to sing jazz songs in China. All of these TV shows and programs nurture me, nurture my research, and my teaching.”
Across these performances, Huang has been recognized for his unique “androgynous” voice and his inclination towards jazz, an under-explored yet admired genre in Chinese music culture.
The research
These experiences have largely influenced Huang’s own research into queer sound and cinema, as his distinction of an “androgynous” voice has raised questions of how we perceive gender and sexuality through sound.
Huang’s first published paper, titled “‘I can’t see myself, even with my eyes closed, but I can see you’: Queer Listening and Fluid Aesthetics in Blue Gate Crossing,” was published in June 2025. The paper closely examines the film Blue Gate Crossing (2002), a Taiwanese coming-of-age film by Yee Chin-yen. Huang examines how sound shapes the film’s portrayal of queer adolescence, examining it through the queer perspective, considering conformity, survival strategies, and artistic self-expression.
“I connect the voice and breath [of the researched movies] to my personal experience on the stage and the interaction, the invisible dynamic in the air, between me and the audience,” Huang said. “My voice and the audience’s ears are connected. So in the film, I can feel the interaction between me as a spectator and the queer characters in the film.”
Using multidimensional composition, Huang crafts his research into not only a literary experience but an auditory, sensory one, inviting readers to truly experience his research as fully as he has.
Practice and theory
Going forward, Huang plans to continue strengthening both his practical skills as a performer and as a researcher.
“I want to be an artist and a scholar,” he said. “They are not separate for me. The practice and theory, performance and research, I want to combine them together to be a unique research direction.”
Huang’s second paper, preliminarily titled “Hearing Queer Voices: Androgynous Vocal Timbre, Sonic Resistance, and Queer Breath,” is forthcoming. It will focus on his own voice, as well as what makes an androgynous timbre and breath. Additionally, Huang’s article “Acousmatic Margin and Trans Breathing in Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers” is forthcoming in the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image from Liverpool University Press.
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