[Editor’s note: This is a follow-up piece to Duane’s Ethel Cain review last week – read that piece here.]
‘Are you a boy, or are you a girl?
With your long blond hair, you look like a girl.’
–The Barbarians, 1965
‘Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
Except for Lola, La-la-la-la Lola.’
– The Kinks, 1970
“Cruelty is the Point,” –Adam Serwer, Atlantic Magazine
One of Donald Trump’s first official acts after taking the oath of office for his second Reign of Terror… oops, I mean, second term of office as President of the United States, was to sign an Executive Order titled, ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.’
Section 2 of this document states, ‘It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.’
The stated purpose of the EO is to ‘defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience,’ though it will, of course, do little of that. Its most obvious purpose is to embarrass and humiliate a group of our fellow citizens, our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, our brothers, sisters, and, yes, mothers and fathers, who place themselves at differing points on a variable, shifting spectrum of gender. This shifting spectrum may run from male to female, but is not confined to the absolutes of gender identity that Donald Trump and his fellow ideologues believe they can mandate by fiat, by a dab of ink on a piece of paper.
I don’t want to step too far out of our lane here: Wax Trax is just a record store, a good one I believe, but, still, just a brick & mortar retail operation selling recorded music to whoever chooses to walk in our door.
But the thing that bothers me is that word in the description above, ‘music’: that music has been made for us, for all of us, by individuals, by themselves or in consort with others, of a staggering diversity: an infinite variety of genders, an infinite variety of colors and shades of color, an infinite variety of intents, desires, motives and range of talent and means. Music may be a universal language but it’s sung and performed by particular people who sometimes choose but are often compelled, literally, inexorably, by the forces residing, sometimes at peace, sometimes at war, in their hearts and souls.
Trump’s attacks on the LGBTQ+ community are not just cold paragraphs in an executive order; they are weapons aimed directly at the very people who have built much of the soundtrack to American life. Every drag performer silenced, every trans painter erased from grant opportunities, every queer playwright excluded from the institutions of culture—this is the collateral damage of “biological truth.” It is an attempt to excise from our collective imagination the possibility of multiplicity, of play, of reinvention. If art thrives on freedom, then censorship dressed up as “restoring order” is a calculated form of suffocation.
For creative people in the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes are not abstract. Are galleries worried about opening their doors to works deemed “gender propaganda,” are schools and libraries pulling books by certain authors, and are venues fearful of booking openly queer or trans artists? Do record stores fear defending the artists that line their shelves?
These are not isolated worries; they are the logical ripple effects of top-down bigotry. When the most powerful office in the land uses its authority to declare a person’s very identity a legal fiction, it tells the world that exclusion and cruelty are permissible, even patriotic. For the poet, the painter, the musician—those who live by transforming their own lives, their joys and their sorrows, into something that uplifts others—such policies are an existential threat–one that can threaten their very livelihood.
And because music has always been on the front line of identity. LGBTQ+ artists—from Little Richard’s sweaty twitch and grind, to disco pioneers to today’s trans indie troubadours—have carried stories into the mainstream that today’s leading politicians would rather bury. Trump’s policies don’t just threaten their legal rights; they endanger their ability to create and share freely, to step onto a stage without fear. To shrink that space is to impoverish us all, to rob the world of the kaleidoscope of sound that only comes when every voice is allowed to sing. In trying to silence LGBTQ+ musicians,
Trump is trying to silence music itself, and that is why resistance must be as loud, defiant, and unapologetic as the artists who refuse to disappear.
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