This Pride Month, Billboard asked artists to write a series of love letters to their LGBTQ fans, highlighting what the community means to them, as people and as artists. Below, MUNA‘s Katie Gavin expresses her affinity for a community that can “bend and transcend” barriers.
My Dearest and Queerest,
This love letter won’t be long enough. There’s too many things I want to say and not enough of a permitted word count. In fact, I wonder how I can express my love for this community in words at all, when words are so often what we strain and rage against — what we bend and transcend. One of the things I love most about us is the way we play with language and identity as if we can change the world that we inhabit, because we can. I delight in our late night living room conversations, where we debate over which words belong to whom, where our belief systems are challenged, where we reinvent our community over and over.
My love for us spills into all the different corners and crevices of the city under our colorful canopy. I love the twinks, the pillow princesses, the stone butches, the leather daddies, the bears, the gold stars, the transmasc lesbians, the closeted queers. The asexuals. The bisexual cis girls with armpit hair. The dolls. The black trans women who unceasingly create a culture and a beauty to which we all aspire. The nonbinary bois who don’t want top surgery and the nonbinary bois who do. The passing and the proudly clockable. The promiscuous and the celibate. The neuro-divergent and the neurotypical. The monogamous and the polyamorous. The queers that are in states and countries where they are safe to live freely, and especially the queers that are not.
One of the things I’m most thankful for about being queer is that it liberated me from fulfilling others’ expectations of me, and forced me to focus on what gives me joy. It also forced me to rely on others’ love and affection, to stop seeing myself as terminally unique. If we are going to survive the sixth mass extinction and live to know the next chapter of this world (lol), I believe it will be partially because we as humans learn how to follow and protect our joy, and how to cherish and invest in community. Ours is not perfect at this yet, but I still think the straights have a lot to learn from us.
What did I say — not long enough. I was just getting started.
Happy Pride. I love you.
– Katie
(P.S.: “F-ck the cops” – Naomi)
(P.P.S.: “Eat a–” – Josette)
