A QUICK GLANCE AT BILL-board’s country music charts might suggest the genre is a bastion for white, cisgender men and conservatives without any room for LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender musicians.
But not only do transgender country artists exist, they are making music and building audiences even as some claim the political and cultural climate in the U.S. increasingly places a target on their backs.
Musician Eli Conley ran a queer country night in San Francisco where “so many people could be unapologetically queer, but also unapologetically into country music because I think a lot of times their idea is that country music isn’t for us,” because, for many, it’s associated with the rural South.
He tells people were “explicitly looking for” queer country music and that was better than “coming in the back door and saying ‘I’m a trans guy doing country or folk music’ and having
