#planningtorock

LGBTQ musicians are making mainstream moves. Halsey’s “Bad At Love,” which features bisexual lyricism, found its way to the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. Troye Sivan gyrated his way through a Saturday Night Live performance. Kehlani has collaborated with everyone from Cardi B to Charlie Puth and her queer soul sister Hayley Kiyoko. And Big Freedia has been sampled on tracks by megastars Drake and Beyoncé.

Sharon Topper queer experimentalism in the margins

co‑founder of the avant‑garde performance/music duo God Is My Co‑Pilot, occupies a different queer musical lineage:

Fiercely DIY, anti‑commercial, and rooted in New York’s experimental scene.

God Is My Co‑Pilot explicitly foregrounded queer identity, gender fluidity, and anti‑normativity in their lyrics and performances.

Topper’s work is part of the queer feminist noise/experimental tradition that includes artists like Lesley Flanigan, Pamela Z, and the riot‑grrrl‑adjacent no‑wave diaspora.

Kate Pierson, co‑founder of The B‑52s, is one of the most visible queer women in American music history — even if the band’s queerness was, for decades, an open secret rather than a declared identity.

The B‑52s were formed by a mostly queer group of friends in Athens, Georgia, in 1976.

Pierson herself later publicly affirmed her queerness; she married artist Monica Coleman in 2015

Peaches — the electroclash gender‑destroyer, feminist shock‑priestess, work fuses punk, synth‑pop, performance art, and explicit queer sexuality

Peaches (Merrill Nisker) is a Canadian electroclash musician, producer, and performance artist, widely recognized as a feminist and queer icon

Even when not explicitly framed as “queer artists,” both Flanigan and Pamela Z inhabit a lineage of women who use sound to destabilize norms:

Pauline Oliveros → deep listening, queer attunement.

Diamanda Galás → voice as transgressive force.

Joan La Barbara → extended vocal technique as identity rupture.

Pamela Z → voice + gesture + machine.

Lesley Flanigan → voice + handmade electronics + physical resonance.

Peaches → sex‑techno‑punk insurgency, the body as weapon, joke, protest, and ritual

Planningtorock (Jam Rostron) — vocal androgyny, slow dance, explicit queer politics.

Karin Dreijer (Fever Ray / The Knife) — queer, masks, distorted voice, Nordic ritual.

JD Samson (Le Tigre / MEN) — electro-feminism, activism, lesbian body in motion.

Mykki Blanco — not a woman, but essential in the queer-performance constellation.

Arca — trans, Venezuelan, body-machine, glitch as mutant identity.

Cosey Fanni Tutti — industrial, performance, sexual body as a conceptual weapon.She does not explicitly identify as queer; her entire work operates within profoundly queer aesthetics, politics, and strategies: transgression, body as text, sexuality as a conceptual weapon, refusal of normativity, collapse between art and life.

Lydia Lunch — not openly queer, but with a totally queer-coded aesthetic.

HALSEY: Pop as an insurgent bisexual body

Identity: Halsey is openly bisexual and has been vocal about mental health, LGBTQIA+ rights, and bodily autonomy.

SOPHIE 1986- 2021,The trans goddess of hyperpop, the architect of the future was a trans woman; one of the most influential figures in 21st-century electronic music.

SIO: The queer priestess of South African electronic soul

Identity: Sio (Sióbhan) is a South African queer artist, writer, vocalist, and performer.

JANELLE MONÁE: The pansexual android, the futurist of freedom, identifies as pansexual and non-binary.

SHEA DIAMOND the trans voice that breaks the silence

(trans, Black, soul/R&B, activist)

FLETCHER the emotional and fluid queer pop

(queer, alternative pop, confessional) an openly queer woman, known for her emotional honesty and the way she explores desire, identity, and vulnerability

CUPCAKKE the radical libertine of queer-coded rap

(does not identify as queer, but is queer-coded and central to queer culture)

SIA (Sia Furler)

Australian singer and songwriter

DAWN OF CHROMATICA

Planningtorock by Tim Walker

Photographed for W Magazine in March 2020. Styled by Sara Moonves.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's 'Queer and Now' highlights a key difference between the expectations of a sexual identity and the expectations of 'queer'. The epistemology of a given sexual identity, say homosexual, assumes a series of elements such as biological sex, gender, procreative choice, and sexual fantasies. In comparison, the identification with the term 'queer' can point to an 'open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning" (Kosofsky Sedgewick 8). This isn't to say that there isn't a merit in identifying with a given sexual identity, but rather that the term 'queer' provides more flexibility in the expectations it carries. However, in the subversive realm of hyperpop, both 'queer' and 'sexual identity' take on different meanings.

Catalan artist Arca, known for her collaborations with Kanye West and Björk, has made the exploration of her gender and sexual identity public with the release of her five-album 'Kick Cycle', comprised of KiCk i, KICK ii, KicK iii, kick iiii, and kiCK iiiii. Each of the five albums explores the evolution of Arca's identity, which is perhaps most apparent in 'Nonbinary' from KiCk i, and 'Queer' from kick iiii. 'Nonbinary' assumes the labels associated with a concrete identity for most of it's run-time, acting as a confident anthem of gender euphoria, but the closing verse reveals a different side to the titular identity. "I can be friendly or I can be fake/I can be real or I can lick a taste/What's it gonna take?/I can be sexy or I could be sad/Act bad just to be sweet" sings Arca, displaying a level of complexity in her gender that isn't contained in a single word. This rejection of the epistemology of identity reaches a head in 'Queer', a collaboration with legendary queer producer Planningtorock, with a refrain of "I got tears like a queer/Queer power" (Arca). This rejection of a single term and adoption of 'queer' as a qualifier mirrors Kosofsky Sedgewick's argument in the power of queer as a label, displaying a gain of personal power.