Queering Country

I've wanted to do a post about queer country artists since Chely Wright's coming out last year. In fact, I've had the title sitting in my drafts folder for just as long while the body remained blank. I simply couldn't think of many out country artists.



k.d. lang is an obvious choice, and the first openly gay country performer to garner a commercial audience. She broke a lot of ground, but surely she's not the only one. Right?



Mary Gauthier is another well-respected singer-songwriter, but is largely unheard by the mainstream music listening public. And it's a shame, because "Goddamn HIV" is probably one of the most powerful songs written about AIDS.

About a year ago, Autostraddle published a story on bisexual and lesbian country musicians (both k.d. lang and Mary Gauthier were named, and later did a feature on country-rocker, Jennifer Corday, but in the year since Chely Wright, probably the most high-profile country artists to come out in recent years, country has gone back in the closet, so to speak. And I don't know if this says something about country music, or just my taste in it in general, that although I could come up with a handful of lesbians in country, I could think of no gay men. I hope this is just an oversight on my part, but country music -- even the supposedly progressive wing known as "alt-county" is still steeped in  conservative America. The stakes may be still too high.