How the Covid Shutdowns Launched a New Wave of Queer Community
Social isolation, pandemic threats, and the last year of Trump put a new emphasis on being authentically yourself
For the past five years, the members of the pop synth band MUNA, who toured with Harry Styles on his first solo run, identified as queer. They’ve deliberately avoided being more specific about their identities, going so far as to omit pronouns from their lyrics and insist on the most inclusive of terms in interviews. As recently as March, MUNA’s Twitter bio solely promoted the band’s newest album; then several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, it was updated to read, “we are gay and a band.”
With the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in 2015 and, more recently, ruling that transgender people are federally protected from discrimination, coming out as not straight or not identifying with one’s gender at birth comes with less risk than it used to. Many have taken advantage of newfound security to live openly outside of the handful of urban centers that once served as havens for gay people across the country. Such a mainstreaming of queerness in American life rearranged people’s personal lives, to a point where solely queer spaces could be more supplemental than essential. But as the world went into lockdown and such…
