Masks, Sincerity, and (Re)Claiming Country Music

The book closes with chapter 5’s exploration of six queer country groups who have been successful in the latter part of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Three cisgender gay male musicians use drag, masking, and cowboy costuming as strategies for developing queer sincerity in the face of a history of exclusion from the mainstream industry. In 2020 Trixie Mattel’s, Orville Peck’s, and Lil Nas X’s embrace of gay camp humor, fashion, and irony has allowed them to forge a sincerity with their audience, one that is framed through the understanding of postmodern critique of essentialism and its ties to identities and musical categories, and one that follows in the footsteps of the truthfulness of the early pioneer of gay country and activism Patrick Haggerty. The chapter then compares three vulnerable recent songs by lesbian musicians Amythyst Kiah, the Indigo Girls, and the Highwomen that make courageous statements through female camaraderie. The book closes by figuring queer country as an “audiotopia.”