NEWS
Renowned songwriter Justin Tranter still remembers a less-than-pleasant email exchange they once had with the team of another queer artist.
“They said to me, ‘We’d love to get Justin and X artist’ — I won’t say their name, but they were queer — ‘in a room, but we’re worried that it just might end up being too gay,’” they recall with a grimace. “Their management actually said to me that it might be too gay if we were on a song together, because the mainstream would just never digest it. It’s exhausting.”
Reactions like this may come as a surprise to some. Over the last decade, LGBTQ artists have slowly gone from being oft-sidelined talents, waiting for a modicum of interest from the major label machine, to chart-topping hitmakers helping redefine what it means to be a popular artist.
But in roles that don’t face outward, Tranter and other professionals within the industry agree that representation is, at best, lacking — and at worst, nearly non-existent. “It feels like there are a lot more of us,” Tranter says, referring to LGBTQ songwriters. “But it’s still not nearly enough.”
Brandon Colbein, an up-and-coming queer songwriter and artist signed to Tranter’s label and publishing company Facet Records, agrees — and it doesn’t help, he argues, that much of the industry doesn’t even see the lack of representation. “To a lot of people who aren’t queer, when they’re staring at it from a third-person perspective, they’re seeing the top queer songwriters,” he explains. “It’s amazing that they’re there, but it is just that. It’s counting eight on a table of tens of thousands of people. And then you get even deeper into it and look for queer people of color, and it’s basically non-existent.”
For queer event producer Ladyfag, the creative mind behind Brooklyn’s premier queer music festival LadyLand, there never seemed to be an option for her to join a major event production company when she was coming up in the mid-2000s. So, she decided the best thing for her to do was to strike out on her own.
“I think what’s missing is the actual seat at the table,” she says. “And that goes for everything that’s behind the scenes — producers, promoters, booking agents — we’re not always invited to a seat at the table. So, I didn’t wait for my seat, I created my own table.”
That mentality helped Ladyfag become a staple in New York’s nightlife scene, where she curated and put on club events like Holy Mountain and Battle Hymn before ultimately deciding to throw her hat into the ring of live music with LadyLand in 2018.
It’s a tough business, Ladyfag will attest — especially when, as a queer person, you’re doing your best to put on a good show while also dealing with the expectations of fans who don’t want to see you “sell out” to a corporate idea of Pride. “If you want to really be a businessperson that can actually give back to your community, then you are doing a disservice by being so proud that you don’t work with corporations,” she says.
Meanwhile, in the corporate world of music labels, Tiffany R. Warren, Sony Music’s executive vp, chief diversity and inclusion officer, says that change is happening. “Representation on the executive level has actually been very prolific in recent years,” she says. However, she adds that more can still be done, especially when it comes to the environment that is created surrounding executives who may not yet be out. “We have a responsibility to create the culture where people feel comfortable, or better yet have the choice to decide they want to come out.”
If LGBTQ representation is still lacking behind-the-scenes in the music industry, what can be done to help bring more LGBTQ people into different roles?
One common solution to promoting diversity, both in the music industry and elsewhere, has been the idea of diversity quotas — corporate mandates requiring a certain number or percentage of the hired workforce be members of marginalized communities. Tranter, for one, thinks that if that’s what it will take to get more LGBTQ songwriters in a room, then that’s what should be done.
“If you have the realization that you don’t put queer songwriters in sessions and you don’t change it, then yeah, maybe a diversity quota is needed,” they say. “I think they’re important for the companies that just aren’t doing anything. But you would hope that people who claim to be progressive in entertainment could just take it upon themselves to just do better. But if they won’t, then maybe we need a f—ing rule.”
Warren, who has worked in diversity and inclusion for the better part of the last two decades (including her current position as a board member at GLAAD), takes issue with the idea of diversity quotas for their own sake — if a music label or publishing group’s corporate culture is not trained to handle having a diverse workforce, then adding more employees doesn’t actually solve the problem.
“We’ve come into an era of active accountability,” she says. “What’s really important is if a company decides that’s what they want to do, that’s great, but they need to make sure the culture is ready for whatever goals need to be set. Those data points can be part of the strategy, but not the whole strategy.”
For Colbein, the sudden support of labels, publishers and music groups that takes place only during Pride Month — an action commonly referred to online as “rainbow washing” — is a problem that needs to stop. “I would prefer if that business mentality actually ended. That is so disruptive of any positive forward motion, because it looks like a ploy,” he says. “There is no way that you can look at a business making their logo rainbow for a day as a queer person and be like, ‘Oh my god, I feel so represented!’ No! If you want to represent us, then you need to be doing that every day of the year, 365.”
In her experience, Ladyfag says that the most effective strategy for creating positive change in the industry is just meeting people where they are at and making sure that they have the tools and the education to create safe spaces for queer voices.
As someone who has created her own space to work in — and one that regularly employs queer folks, women and people of color — Ladyfag says that she sees it as her responsibility to make sure that when she does interact with spaces predominantly controlled by straight white men, she does her part to educate them on how to make live venue environments that queer people can feel safe in.“There is no such thing as a 100% safe space because the world isn’t a safe space, you know? But it’s my responsibility to make sure our teams know what to do to make this space as safe as we can,” she says. “So I give this speech whenever we start working with new venues, where I tell everyone on staff, ‘We run a festival, we run a party. You might not understand everything, but we want you to open your hearts and open your minds. We appreciate you being here, and if anything I’m saying makes you uncomfortable, I don’t think you should work at our event.’”
Tranter, meanwhile, has a very simple objective for executives looking to pair up songwriters and artists — if you’re going to have a queer artist put out a song, then make sure that there is at least one queer songwriter included in the process. But even this concept, they say, has its limitations.
“Even though queer artists are getting a little bit more love than queer songwriters today, there still are not enough queer artists to make this your one and only way of improving diversity,” they say. “So, I would like executives to look past and go further and understand that queer people make great things together because we understand each other. Try to put us in a room together, because we’re gonna understand those narratives a lot better than a straight person.”
One thing that Warren is particularly proud of from her time at Sony is the way that she and her team have gone about picking specific trainings for the company. Instead of simply choosing an issue, like LGBTQ treatment in the workplace, she and her team decided to look at what specific goals they wanted to accomplish with their trainings.
“We ended up asking ourselves, ‘What’s the end result?’ We wanted a stronger culture that invites mobility, impacted leadership and equity, and most importantly safety and support,” she said. “Now, we’re able to have this very empathetic training that invites everyone to be speaking the same language in terms of supporting our LGBTQIA+ community members.”
While Colbein asserts that diversity and representation for LGBTQ people is still woefully low in the industry, he points to Facet — Tranter and Katie Vinten’s record label and publishing company, established in partnership with Warner-Chappell — as a point of hope for the future of representation in this industry.
“People like Justin are creating full publishing companies, full labels that are dedicated to creating queer space for everyone,” he says. “We need more of that, and the ones that exist need to be bigger.”
Creating that space is a point of pride for Justin, and one that they hope to see continue on past them and across the industry at large. “It’s about bringing your community with you,” they say. “Like, yes, we want to create great music. Yes, we want to help everyone make money so they can pay their rent. But we’re also trying to create something really good. As Billy Porter told me, we’re making Queer Motown.”
