Queer women rule pop, on All Things Go and in the current cultural zeitgeist

NEW YORK – Venue staff wore heart-shaped stickers in rainbow colors. LGBTQ+ pride flags doubled as capes. Pink cowboy hats, a calling card for Chappell Roan fans, reached critical mass at pop-ups like Dave’s Lesbian Bar. Nearby, at a booth run by online sexual health company Wisp, attendees posed in front of a glistening vulva.

At New York’s Forest Hills Stadium this weekend, thousands of concertgoers flocked to All Things Go, an independent Washington-area music festival that came to Queens for the first time amid incessant rain. But no matter: The dedicated trudged through puddles in Doc Martens and ponchos to see their favorite artists, a sonically cohesive lineup of mostly major label acts with indie-pop sensibilities who, perhaps remarkably, were almost entirely women.

All of the New York festival’s top acts were women who also identified as transgender, queer, bisexual, pansexual or lesbian – Julien Baker of Boygenius, Ethel Cain, Muna, Janelle Monae, Reneé Rapp and previously Chappell Roan, who opened the festival on canceled on Friday. This was best expressed by the pop band Muna, who flashed the phrase “LESBOPALOOZA” on LED screens before their performance on Saturday evening.

“It is by no means unusual or unusual for a music festival to feature exclusively queer musicians,” says Nadine Hubbs, a professor of women’s and gender studies and music at the University of Michigan. “But the category of (this) music festival makes it groundbreaking.”

She refers to the women’s music movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which included artists such as the indie folk band Two Nice Girls and Melissa Etheridge. “It was a movement made up specifically of queer women,” she says, “a result of the second wave feminist movement and then the gay politics of that time.” Then there’s the feminist punk movement of the Riot Grrrls in the ’90s or Lilith Fair. “But this is different,” Hubbs says of All Things Go.

“These artists are heard by a lot of people, not just women who identify as lesbian or queer, and not just women. They hit the top 40 charts and play on stages like ‘Saturday Night Live,'” she says. “What’s new about it is how much it’s at the center of pop music right now.”

According to Hubbs, the dominance of queer women in pop music is partly due to more stars coming out and “offering community and solidarity to other young women in the spotlight.”

In addition, they write songs about their sexuality, explicit and consensual, as in Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” or Billie Eilish’s “Lunch,” which are fun and sophisticated – which raises the quality, she says, for all to enjoy.

The mainstream popularity of music by queer women feels new, but these artists — and others like them and the smaller acts on the All Things Go flyer — have been celebrating their community for years.

All Things Go began as a music blog founded by Will Suter, Stephen Vallimarescu, Zack Friendly and Adrian Maseda, and evolved into a music festival at Washington’s Union Market in 2014. It grew in size and eventually moved to the much larger Merriweather Post Pavilion in nearby Maryland. This year, the festival was held simultaneously in Maryland and New York to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The line-ups were similar but not identical: they shared some artists in Monae, Rapp and previously Roan.

“We have special safety meetings for Chappell Roan’s performance and what we’re going to do in both markets to make sure we can take care of the audience, to make sure we can take care of the fans,” Suter told the Associated Press a few Weeks before the breakthrough artist, who experienced an exponential rise in fame and attention, dropped out due to health reasons.

In Maryland, Roan was replaced by Muna. In New York, drag queens lip-synced their hits and sang along to the entire arena.

What may seem like a milestone in 2024 actually dates back to 2018, shortly after the #MeToo movement took off. This year, All Things Go partnered with the Women’s March, initially booking a women-only day, orchestrated by musician Maggie Rogers and Lizzy Plapinger of Neon Gold Records, as an alternative to male-dominated music fests.

It was a “commercial success,” says Suter, and so they started asking fans who they would like to see in the future. “And what did the fans want to see after 2018? A lot of them were female artists. And so we kind of carried on.”

There is a real economic interest in booking more women: “There is extreme demand,” he says. “We sold out immediately.”

“It shouldn’t be difficult to book a cast that’s at least 50-60% women,” says Carlie Webbert, a manager at All Things Go who focuses on partnerships and marketing. But what sets this festival apart, in her opinion, is that their lineup showcases “a fan’s whole world,” bringing their favorite artists together in one place, rather than just booking the biggest acts from the biggest genres.

So what does a festival like All Things Go, which reflects the pop zeitgeist, say about the current times?

“It signals perhaps not so much that our culture has changed, but rather that it will change because of it,” Hubbs says. “We now have a generation of young women who are not ashamed in certain ways. They are more enlightened than any generation before about the sexual, social and interpersonal abuses that women and girls have long been subjected to. And they understand these structural problems better.”

This is reflected in the music they listen to and make.

Long before Monae closed the festival and brought her larger-than-life ode to pleasure to the stage (at one point, she wore a vulva headdress), fans lined up to vote for next year’s headliners — a list that included ten artists in total, all women.

Two fans in matching pink ponchos rushed past. One turned to the other for his assessment. “It’s All Things Gay,” they laughed and disappeared into the crowd.