I have spent the past 3 decades navigating the music industry as an out, gay man who writes and releases songs and videos about life and love as a queer person. I first got signed in 1999 and suffice to say, they weren’t ready back then. When my major label debut came out 10 years later, they still weren’t ready.

Fast forward all these years later and, while the landscape of music has changed and a lot of things have gotten better for a lot of us — myself included — most of the same barriers that LGBTQ+ bands and artists face still persist (and some fun new ones have arrived!)

During this time when queer and trans people are being silenced, while our communities are under attack by the systems in place to protect us, as the robot overlords threaten to replace us and our government attempts to erase us, I am dialing my mission to platform LGBTQ+ voices ALL THE WAY UP.

Queer and trans art is the antidote. I am not going to shrink away because they want me to. I will not die because I am told my life is an inconvenience. And I refuse to let these motherfuckers take the culture.

Queer and Trans people belong in the music industry.

QUEER AND TRANS PEOPLE BELONG.

“Participating in the arts, as an observer or creating it, can be a way to touch and heal and recontextualize and bolster and imagine and be excited by and to be let loose which, for someone whose very self is at odds with the world around them, can be the literal difference between life and death. It is important for the well-being of all people but I think it may have a slightly more significant place for LGBTQIA+ people or for any group or individual who faces an excess of scrutiny, bigotry, violence, or ostracization for who they are. It is a place to turn negative experience and negative feeling into something other than oppression or pain.” – Jamie Stewart, Xiu Xiu

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JAMIE STEWART x LOGAN LYNN
for DotGay Blog (2021)

(Interview posted at OhHey.gay and LoganLynnMusic.com)

#XiuXiu

(Photo by Jeremy Lange)