Queering Country, Kit Gullis

Country is gay. No ifs and or buts, it is simply gay. You don’t even need to be gay to make country music gay, thousands of straight singers have contributed to the genre, but regardless, it’s a gay genre. So solidified is the figure of country in the queer canon it genuinely baffled me that people where so shocked when modern country cowboy, Lil Nas X, came out as gay in the summer of 2019. However, despite this deeply entrenched connection between queerness and country, in recent years it seems that country music has become more queer, or at least more visibly queer. From Lil Nas (real name Montero Lamar Hill) to Orville Peck, the ‘cowboy’ has seemingly become a character for gay artists to work through and subvert, extending the typically queer tropes of country music to a more visible place. The most challenging concept for people when it comes to queering country is the often insurmountable issue of LGBTQ+ rights in the American south, which the genre is most typically associated with. So challenging is this concept that it has led to many cultural products desperately trying to explore and analyse this connection, from Truman Capote’s queer landscape of the American south in works such as Other Voices, Other Rooms to Ang Lee’s Oscar winning Brokeback Mountain. The issue of LGBTQ+ discrimination in the American south is a deeply problematic one (at the time of writing this South Dakota has passed a bill that would jail any doctors giving puberty blocking treatments to trans teens) so the question of why country or even the ‘cowboy’ has become so popular with gay culture is understandable. However, traditionally, country music has always opposed or contended with the typically conservative environments it has stemmed from. In the early 20th century country music often spoke to the economic and social strife of the South. Following the gothic footsteps of writers such as Faulkner or O’Connor, it dealt with the issues of social deformity with the central figures of songs either in pain over a loved one, saddened over the inability to connect to others, or coming to terms with their own grotesque actions. Thus, it is only understandable that in such conservative communities, queer narratives would make their way into the genre either overtly or covertly. BY KIT GULLIS

There is a truthfulness and honesty to country music that everyone is meant to be able to connect to, not just those belonging to the LGBTQ+ community. But I think that it is this confessional and raw quality to country that makes it relate so perfectly to the frequently hidden narrative of queer people. In other words, country music sings what cannot be spoken. When I think of the archetypal cowboy I think of a man, isolated by his profession and chained to a landscape in which he must perform a certain level of masculinity. However, the incredibly revealing nature of country challenges and subverts this, it seems to liberate the singer from this construct. If we look to Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonely I Could Cry’ or Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’ we find an interesting balance between performed machoism and sensitive depictions of emotion. Orville Peck, whose first album Pony came out in early 2019, extends this notion in his music. Peck plays with both the hyper masculine and erotic qualities of the ‘cowboy’ as well as its visibly campy nature. By incorporating a fetishistic mask with the flashy nudie suits typical of traditional country singers, Peck perfectly blends the masculine with feminine and the campy with the erotic to highlight various layers of queerness. However, this image of the ‘cowboy’ in queer culture is by no means a new phenomenon. From the artworks of Tom of Finland and the characters of the Village People to Ned Sublette’s 1981 ‘Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other’, country and western iconography have continually been appropriated as erotic symbols in the queer cultural canon. Moreover, beyond the aesthetic and visual qualities of Peck’s queer cowboy, his music very much speaks to the same idea. A lot of Peck’s songs harken back to more traditional country and western music, the kind of thing you would hear in an empty bar on the side of a highway after a long day’s work on the ranch. Peck combines the iconic country sounds of twangy guitars, chicken pickin and his own swooning vocals that sound like a mixture of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. Although Peck may not be overtly exploring his queer identity in his music, by being openly gay and writing with such sensuality the ambiguity of his songs lends so well to the country genre as a battle ground between social restraint and emotional confession. His music seems to embody and enact the tenuous relationship between Ennis and Jack in Brokeback Mountain, as previ

ously mentioned. In ‘Dead of Night’, the opening song of his album, Peck sensitively portrays the passion and desire of a relationship. He sings, “You say “go fast”, I say “hold on tight” / In the dead of night / See the boys as they walk on by”. The lyrics seem to subtly engage in the tentativeness associated with hidden love and the chorus’ focus on looking highlights the relationship between desire and the gaze so often identified with queer relationships such as in the case of cruising. In the song ‘Kansas (Remember Me Now)’, which sounds like it’s playing from an old-timey radio, Peck retells the story of the Clutter Family Murder’s made famous by Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood. Peck sings from the perspective of either Perry Smith or Richard Hickcock who were convicted for the murders and furthers Capote’s depiction of the two men as possibly being lovers, “Come and lay down your shoulder / Just know you were always my star / Brother’s gone, do I regret it? / Not a thing, now that Dick’s by my side”. This connection between the grotesque and the romantic is one of the finest examples of how country blends both the confessional and the shameful into the same frame. Peck’s songs highlight the incredibly powerful way that both the musical and the aesthetic qualities of country can examine the conflicting realities between social mobility and internal desire in queer identities.

As an openly queer country singer, Orville Peck is it not an anomaly. Instead his style and sound is part of a long list of queer musicians using the country genre as a place to express themselves and find solace, such as the likes of K. D. Lang and Drag Race star Trixie Mattel. For a genre that is so typically associated with conservatism and lack of diversity, it is wonderful to see that country’s recent upsurge has involved more LGBTQ+ people as well as people of colour such as Lil Nas X and Yola, something I hope only continues to grow as the genre does.