Written by Ben Oxley | @benoxley1

Growing up in rural Bedfordshire, queerness was an ideal, not a reality. 

There is such loneliness growing up gay in a village in the countryside, that cannot be truly explained to anybody who has not experienced the same phenomenon. No matter how hackneyed the tales of rural queerhood are, it does not turn the realities into myth.

The clichéd truth of being the only gay person in your school and not knowing what that label truly meant when someone said you were. The heartbreak from watching friends fade into foes, as they side with the people who penalised you for being gay because it is easier to blend in with the heteronormative expectations in British secondary education than it is to stick up for you. 

I didn’t see myself as being gay, I saw myself as the authentic version my parents supported and encouraged me to be. I will never understand why anger and detestation came as a result. One statement that sticks with me in particular, is being labelled as a clown: someone freakish, somewhat unnerving, but above all else, someone people laugh at. 

When searching for representations of LGBTQIA+ people in the media to make myself feel seen, they were often pessimistic at best, focusing on despair and loneliness rather than the joy that came from liberation.

The closest thing I had to liberation in my village was when the local supermarket changed its logo to rainbow colours for Pride Month, only for it to fuel uproar and division. During village life, how are you meant to find a home when the feelings they house attack your existence? 

In the search for solace, music has been the peace amongst a storm of feelings. Looking out of my bedroom window, I see the houses in the distance that fade into the clouds, which harbor the noises from the roads beyond in the world I inhabit. I don’t just embellish my life with music; I center my life around the notes, the melodies, and the lyrics.

So, when I became old enough to venture into the city by myself, I began experiencing the palpable magic of hearing my favourite artists live, surrounded by fellow fans.

Music venues allow for collective gatherings of bodies in shared spaces. When bodies gather in these spaces, communities are created due to a shared adoration of a particular artist. In turn, music venues are sites of utopias that create moments of possibility for social and political change.

These spaces are arguably more important when queer bodies gather in a shared space. If music venues act as loci in cities and urban areas, the bodies from individual queer experiences in rural isolation transcend into a collective possibility for freedom in a space that celebrates joy and self-expression. In this sense, many queer artists can act as facilitators of queer joy by inviting fans to gather in venues.

For me, this experience of utopic, queer joy came last September when the O2 Academy in Brixton became the Pink Pony Club. Pink cowboy hats, rhinestone bodysuits, leather, and camo took over the Victoria Line when Chappell Roan brought her Midwest Princess Tour to London. 

It went beyond a concert. The crowd had travelled across counties, and even countries, to revel in the unashamedly queer persona of 2024’s breakout star.

Roan can harness the isolation and the loneliness in her lyrics, but she can also find the joy and the liberation that often is excluded in portrayals of queerhood in popular media. Take Femininomenon as a prime example. Roan takes the monotony of rural living (“Stuck in the suburbs, you’re folding his laundry/Got what you wanted, so stop feeling sorry”) yet, underpins it with a maximalist, synth-pop beat with the extreme, camp absurdity from her conceit as the femininomenon. 

The one moment of the show that stuck with me, above all the music and all the dancing, is when Roan posed the question to her high school bullies: “Who are the clowns now?” It took me back to the times when I was shamed for my sexuality and was made to pity myself and my existence in those moments when I looked out my bedroom window, with tears in my eyes, and wondered what else was out there in the world. 

The Midwest Princess Tour at O2 Academy Brixton taught me that queer joy goes beyond a rainbow supermarket logo. Roan’s music led me to a land where boys and girls can all be queens every single day: a land where friendships support each other rather than cave into the homophobic views in my village school. And despite having never been there before, I had never felt closer to home.