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.

Mary Gauthier: It Gets Better

I'll admit, I haven't followed the "It Gets Better" campaign as closely as I should. I'm kind of torn on how I feel about the project in general. I love the idea behind it, and that give a generation of kids hope that there's life beyond high school bullying, but unfortunately, for some people it won't get better. And those kids need more than encouraging words.



However, I'm glad to see Mary Gauthier contribute a video. One, she's an out country artist -- which is rare to begin with -- and two, she's not so famous that she's not relatable. I really like this.



And that someone finally posted her song, "Goddam HIV," one of the most honest songs about AIDS ever written.

Rewind: Mary Gauthier - Dixie Kitchen

Named after a the restaurant she opened in Boston's Back Bay, Dixie Kitchen is singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier's criminally overlooked first album. The centerpiece of the record is a intensely personal ballad called, "Goddamn HIV," sung from the perspective of a young gay man during the early days of AIDS. Unfortunately, I cannot find a stream or video of the song anywhere online, though it is in last.fm's catalog. (You can listen to a thirty-second sample there, or, if you have a last.f, account, add the song to your playlist.)

In case you're wondering, she sold the restaurant to fund her second album, 1999's superb Drag Queens in Limousines , but Dixie Kitchen remains a lost classic.

Further Reading:
Q&A with Mary Gauthier (American Songwriter)

Lost and Found (Song): Mary Gauthier - Drag Queens In Limousines

The sound on the video isn't the best, but here's singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier explaining how she came up with one of the coolest song titles ever, "Drag Queens In Limousines." (A clearer version of the song can be heard here.)



And Mary on the whole "tortured artist" myth from an interview with American Songwriter:

"I don’t think all artists are tortured – that’s a myth. I think the human condition involves suffering. I think a lot of artists torture themselves. They, we, generally have a lot of fragility. But fragile and tortured are different. A lot of the tortured artist clichés comes from addiction. A lot of us haven’t dealt with our addiction yet.

But it’s a different time now. Many of us are dealing with it. I certainly have, and I’m open about it. In the songwriting groups I’ve done, there’s always five or six people in recovery. They’re not tortured. They’re joyful. There’s pain, there’s sorrow. But if you look at their faces, they’re not tortured."