Some of the ones I would have loved to tell, personally, didn’t make it-like Gary Floyd of the Dicks, whom I’ve written about before for Pitchfork, or the endlessly talented Dee Palmer of Jethro Tull, who, like me, is trans and intersex. Instead, we’re trying to tell as many stories within this community as we can. But this is not in any way meant to be a definitive list the field is just too wide to narrow to 50 songs. Most of the songs here are by LGBTQ+ artists, with a few exceptions we included because they were too notable not to most of our critics who wrote these entries are LGBTQ+, as well. This Pride month, Pitchfork editors and contributors have assembled a list of 50 songs from the past 50 years, post-Stonewall riots, that speak to the impact of LGBTQ+ culture and perspectives on the mainstream. lang, the Indigo Girls), all the way to today, a moment that young pop star Hayley Kiyoko teasingly refers to as “ #20gayteen.” And so it has evolved, with the late ’80s and early ’90s giving a particular showcase to lesbian and bisexual women in pop (Meshell Ndegeocello, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. Undergirded by punk’s jagged energy and the electric, over-the-top styles of glam and disco, new wave made space for unconventional queer personalities and for pop to address the AIDS crisis. Despite its great appeal to many a very hetero man, many of punk’s early groundbreakers were LGBTQ+, from Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, who was never shy about his sexuality, to Darby Crash of the Germs, who was sadly closeted during his short life. The ’70s brought glam and disco, gender play, and explicitly queer nightlife back to the mainstream we can’t forget that decade’s great gay pop icon, Elton John, and its great bisexual ones, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury. In fact, Springfield was one of the first pop icons to come out to the public (as bisexual, in 1970)-and, notably, she covered Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me,” as subversive a song as there ever was, on her debut album. Even in the prescriptive world of ’60s pop, where teen rebellion was anticipated and pre-packaged, there were artists like Lesley Gore and Dusty Springfield. Jazz can’t be imagined without the contributions of giants like Billy Strayhorn (of Duke Ellington’s band), who was openly gay, and, later, Cecil Taylor, who found that three-letter word was too limiting. This didn’t stop LGBTQ+ musicians from shaping American pop culture.
The closet door, which hadn’t even existed as we know it now, slammed shut.
In the mid-’30s, at the edge of the Great Depression, moral backlash-sometimes disguised as economic conservatism but usually explicit in its bigotry-shut down many of these clubs and formally criminalized gay sex at a scale that had never before been seen. In the 1920s and early ’30s, Prohibition’s end gave way to the “Pansy Craze”: cabaret drag performances that brought gay nightlife to the masses and carried their aesthetics into mainstream musical theater. Blues originators like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both openly bisexual, helped form the foundation of what would become R&B and rock‘n’roll. LGBTQ+ people have always been at pop’s vanguard, as performers and audiences the history of pop music is queer history. The Rainbow Is a Prism: The Many Facets of LGBTQ+ Pop Music History By Jes Skolnik