thats what you say to get the queer listeners talking about them ahhahahaha
(im nonbinary btw here is my soundcloud: 
)
He is right though, I dont think it matters… The most important thing is expression in music. Burial made like his whole album about trans but I don’t think of him as a “queer” artist…
Especially in dance music, gays have always been ahead of the game and made tons of hits, for a long time it worked because people who dedicate their lives to dance music never fit the mold. How can i be a career dance music producer when i have to find a wife and raise kids and stuff. Gay lifestyle, esp in the 70s-2000s was set up for them, I think dance and electronic music is above modern discourse on LGBT stuff… and almost always if someone explicitly advertises that they are ‘queer’ or something unless it is overwhelmingly obvious, it is a marketing tactic…
Here is a ‘queer’ electronic dance song from russia, where there are no gays 
Голубая = blue = in russian blue means gay
Label here, hello! Albeit not a very big one
9 Likes
You started the discussion by drawing a line between queer labels and straight labels. I’d like you to explain whether there’s actually a different sound, or any deeper messages hidden in the music. I’m not very knowledgeable about this topic: should I be more interested in “queer music” for artistic reasons? Is the “queer music” really a thing? Yes, this is a genuine question.
If your interest in queer labels is political, or simply a way to support the non-binary community, then I’m absolutely with you.
3 Likes
Unlike some others here, I think this is an absolutely legitimate question.
If it’s an actual song (with someone singing lyrics) it’s going to have some verbal content that touches on queer topics in some way, whether that’s gender expression, sexuality, reconsideration of the body or whatever. If it’s instrumental music it could be that the artist chooses to present a persona or marketing materials exploring those ideas, like the Aphex Twin packaging/video for Windowlicker, or someone doing album liner notes inviting the reader to get familiar with William Burroughs.
So if the artist is explicitly seeking your attention to say ‘listen to/look at these ideas’ it’s pretty straightforward. It’s less clear if the artist opts to not make any such statements. For example is [random acid house record] ‘queer music’ if the artist happens to fit in some category but doesn’t bother or actively avoids sharing such personal information? That brings up political questions like 'was [historical artist] queer;, with proponents perhaps arguing ‘definitely, but due to social and political reasons [artist] had to conceal it’ or debates about what is or isn’t queer, or to what degree, whether music and art in general should be categorized in terms of origin or intentionality.
At some point such discussions end up in a gray zone where musical opinions get mixed up with social critique. I’m reminded of a discussion I read a while back on Japanese Twitter where a music teacher mentioned a parent objecting to her daughter learning anything by Debussy because he was notoriously promiscuous, with other people saying ‘you don’t write chords like that if you’re trying to be respectable’ - alas, the chords in question were never specified. Now that comment was likely meant as a joke but it’s not hard to come across musicologists and social theorists who argue things like 'you can only understand [artist]‘s work by considering their [identity]’ without ever articulating how the two are related.
In ways, art critics pursue social professional authority and social standing by declaring artists and their art to fit into this or that categorical box and assigning meaning thereto. Critics are imho the politicians of the art world and I am rather suspicious of this. At their best they can make people aware of new or overlooked art or point out interesting things about the artwork that deepen appreciation, but at their worst they can just use art as an excuse for pushing their own opinions, as a sort of intellectual trojan horse. So sometimes you have artists putting a musical or visual idea out in the world and wanting people to engage with it on its own terms (ie listening to or looking at it rather than translating it into words or categorizing it) vs critics who think artists need to have their work described and categorized so the public understands how to think about their work.
So I think your question bring up this issue of 'is there something specific about the music that is distinctive enough to serve as an identifier that we can slap a label on vs ‘here’s a label for an existing social group/behavior pattern/outlook, what can we apply it to that expands the scope and thus the importance of that idea?’ It’s the same conflict you see between individual effort and achievements that are unique and very personal vs the nationalistic impulse to claim those achievements on behalf of the group within which they originated, or to reject others that don’t align with what the group curators like.
5 Likes
Writing six paragraphs in response to “here are some LGBT musicians” is a great demonstration of why queer record labels exist. We wanna hang with people who get us and not people who do… That.
Belgian techno label → I sleep
Queer techno label → intellectual Trojan horse, I demand you justify your desire to discuss this
13 Likes
Boy Harsher was in my playlist for years before knowing more about the band, and they are still in my top 5 rotation every week.
No idea what gear is used, but sometimes I think I’m hearing stock DT sounds with just enough fiddling to get the sound you want to go with the tracks.
3 Likes
I‘m not sure I did that; I started the conversation asking for queer artists and labels which actually already implies their existence, same for the sound if you look at my example of deconstructed club music.
So here goes my explanition, bear with me:
If you deconstruct music into soundwaves, then yes, a sound will always be a sound and there will never be such thing as a queer sound, but also no heavy bass, screeching highs or whatever.
On the other hand, art never existed without reference, at least not to my knowledge. So if you have a certain established ‘standard’ you could challenge it by deconstructing its conventions and recontextualizing its core elements.
This way of organizing sound has history and can be seen as a kind of a selfreferential system. Given this background, there is defenitely ‚sounds’ I would classify as ‚queer‘, which, again, is highly dependend on context. Take SOPHIE‘s album Oil of every Pearl‘s Un-Insides, listen carefully from front to back and tell me there‘s not a single thing you could identify as queer. I would be baffled and maybe it says more about me than it does about you, I don‘t know.
I hope I didn‘t come of as harsh with my first comment, I was (still am) tired and overstimulated. Also with all the questioning it gets a little tiresome, especially being queer myself.
Would love this to be more focussed on the music side of things, but I guess it‘s what I get from formulating this whole thread so openly.
10 Likes
so this is a political post, not a music post…
Second time you‘re talking from my heart, I really appreciate it 
1 Like
That was not at all what I wrote.
I said there was no ambiguity when artists or labels say ‘this is what we’re about, check it out’. Rather that questions arises when people like music critics (who are not participants in the original creative work, either by making or publishing it) set themselves up in the position of deciding what is or isn’t queer (or any other category). Sometimes their artistic criticism is just a trojan horse for the critic’s political biases. This could be inclusive or exclusive, eg conservatives have a habit of denouncing things as ‘degenerate art’ just because they don’t like or a particular style regardless of what the artist might have been trying to express.
In short, I’m saying that confusion about what is or isn’t a musical category is often because critics insert themselves between artists and audiences.
what up I just got the batsignal
It’s me! I am super gay/queer and I run a small record label that just celebrated 20 YEARS and will be hosting a lot of other bands in 2026!
me:
label:
(currently just a bandcamp site)
16 Likes
I think thats not the argument. Dance music has always had people from influencing it from all walks of life and cultures. I think people are just trying to avoid this kind of political discussion on a gear forum. I posted some gay tracks above you can listen to.
I think when anyone makes their sexuality part of who they are and their music, its annoying and passe.
It REALLY doesnt matter when it comes to dance music
. Dance music industry leaders have never locked up gay people… This is probably one of the least judgemental communities for stuff like that, and always has been.
But for me, its about identity as an artist. Everyone likes what they like sexually but imagine how annoying it would be if I had to remind people what I like sexually all the time, and it was part of my music and who I am. Its not classy to discuss.
1 Like
Y’know I’ve never once been sat in a gay bar, overpriced sugary cocktail in hand, sharing suggestive glances with a girl across the room I’ll never actually speak to, and thought: “gosh, isn’t this all just an intellectual Trojan horse? How passe.” But maybe I’m just not smart and classy enough.
3 Likes
Why do you keep misrepresenting what I said? The fist time could be a misunderstanding, but I wrote to clarify that I was talking about music criticism sometimes being an intellectual trojan horse, not queerness or queer music artists.
1 Like
Aaron-Carl, definitely queer and definitely music.
3 Likes
And this here is more to my taste.
2 Likes
Bored Lord. Good stuff.
(Edit: just so you know, I‘m well aware the same people who try to depolitice art or gender are usually the ones who try to uphold the status quo – and It‘s quite frustrating to see this going on in a thread which was meant to bring positivity to this place and represent a marginalized group. So please, for the sake of the topic and my piece of mind, let‘s look at what‘s actually intresting: the art, the music, the culture. If that‘s not your thing, you can always post somewhere else.)
5 Likes
2 Likes
The vast majority of the last 70+ years of popular music where I’m from (US) has been straight cis people doing exacty this though. It’s wild to me when people are like “I don’t get why queer people would want to do that too”
12 Likes