Scholarship on nostalgia examines the sometimes adverse impact of romanticizing and longing for a past that existed differently from our memories (Geniusas, 2024). Working with gay choruses, nostalgia appears to emerge as a necessary component in recalling painful memories — for instance, the AIDS crisis. As communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), choruses are entertainers, activists, and de facto families for their membership. Since the late-1970s, LGBTQ+ choruses have contended with social, cultural, and political factors sustaining homophobia, impacting singers collectively and individually. As the singers in these groups work to effect change for the queer community, their recollections of navigating periods of turbulence, the pain of loss and the frustration in countering homophobia are often accompanied and tempered by nostalgic memories. These memories are exemplified by positive, loving, and affectionate reminiscences of specific songs, rehearsals, concerts, events (such as touring politically “red” locales), interactions with one another, and more. Drawing from interviews and fieldwork, I argue that nostalgia, in this case, isn’t merely a romanticized longing for the past. Rather, nostalgia here acknowledges the painful realities of the past and becomes a necessary part of choruses’ and individual singers’ stories of survival and transcendence. Nostalgia frames memories with a multidimensionality, providing stories that can guide LGBTQ+ choruses in navigating a current socio-political climate riddled with homophobia and transphobia. Where choruses and other similar communities of practice are concerned, such studies carry strong implications for ethnomusicology.

Ventura Profana (Unholy Venture) is an Afro-Indigenous Brazilian performance artist, missionary, pastor, and advocate for trans and queer Afro-Brazilian individuals. In this paper, I will discuss how queer religious futurities are enacted through photomontage, music, and mission work. I argue that Ventura Profana uses both their religious background and the teachings of contemporary Christians to situate themselves as portraying the “devil” in liberatory ways. Engaging in both necropolitics and nihilistic futurities, Profana’s music and teaching offer a sexually reimagined religious reality, that encourages disobedience and disorientation. In confronting religious colonization, I argue that Profana’s textual analysis offers an opportunity to both use and decolonize religious-colonial projects through expressions of self, sexuality, and spirituality based in queer Black, Brown, and Indigenous futurities.

Creating narratives of refusal borne from their interpretations of “recolonized” text, Ventura Profana addresses coloniality through biblical interpretation. Profana missionizes to their followers and community the divinity found in transness, based on reinterpretations of neo-Pentecostal biblical texts and teachings. Following the model of evangelization and missionary work, they hope to spread a message of anti-colonial anti-capitalist knowledge. By analyzing their music like in the co-written and performed “Python”, I argue that Profana preaches resistance, sex, sensuality, and decoloniality using neo-Pentecostal and contemporary Christian stylizing. Carefully critical of liberation theology, Profana does not discard prospects of Christianity but uses theological arguments to provide a critique of the capitalist, cis-heterosexual, and white narratives within the Bible.

Bluegrass lyricism is well known for a consistent set of tropes: love, loss, home and religion. Prominently written from the perspective of a man who has left his rural home to work in the urban city, traditional bluegrass standards enact what Boym (2007; 2008) terms “reflective nostalgia” through a heteronormative lens; the writer reminisces and romanticizes their past life in comparison to their current perspective, recognizing that the past cannot be fully recreated or relived either due to the passing of time or changes in society. Only through the possibility of a heavenly reunion can said past be restored. However, bluegrass is not a static genre, and the songwriters of today blend their current experiences into the tropes of the past. Through both lyrical analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine the songwriting of today’s queer bluegrass artists who reframe reflective nostalgia, recognizing that the “old home place” is not always a place of acceptance, love and loss is influenced by discrimination, and religion can be a topic of hurt rather than hope. Nostalgia, rather than abandoned, is queered. Examining this queering of nostalgia in bluegrass through the analysis of local songwriting, I demonstrate that these queer songwriter extend and expand on the traditional bluegrass canon, rather than separating from it.