The Church of Our Saviour (COOS) is an Anglo-Catholic parish within the Episcopal diocese of Atlanta, GA. Founded in 1924, the parish has been an outlier for its preferences for historical liturgy, early music, and orthodox theologies. The mass style for the parish emphasizes a “high church” experience, pairing pre-tonal music with incense, Latin chant, and an East-facing altar. A significant portion of parishioners at COOS identify as queer and/or neurodivergent. Anglo-Catholicism has historically attracted gay men for its campy aesthetic and incarnational theology of the body (Stringer 2000, Bethmont 2006). Alongside queerness, neurodivergence is also prevalent among worshippers at COOS. Drawing from congregational interviews, archival materials, and music survey data, this paper argues that these worshippers have musical/liturgical preferences which are marginal outside COOS. Further, it demonstrates that these preferences have drawn together an emergent community of worshippers that would otherwise be marginalized elsewhere. Taken together, these data suggest that the worshippers’ attraction to the highly-ritualized mass at COOS demonstrates the convergence of multiple marginalized groups that would otherwise not have a worshipping home. Worshippers within the Episcopal Church and Roman Catholic Church honor queerness and neurodivergence in different ways; within both congregations, queer and neurodivergent people can be welcomed more both as separate groups and at their intersection. Ultimately, this paper offers insight for fostering musical communities of welcome for queer and neurodivergent people that would be marginalized elsewhere.

In June 2023, a previously obscure young Roma singer named Vojtik broke into mainstream culture in Slovakia. Drawing on alternative pop and visual aesthetic of Ethel Cain, Lana del Rey, and Marina Diamantis, he stunned Slovak society with his explicit queerness, being a Roma teenager from the industrial Slovak town of Detva with a prominent neonazi scene. "I listen to the city radio, I lie there roaring until I fall asleep. I'm terrified of the future, born to perish..." he sings in Detvian Dream, the viral song that brought him to the limelight. After gaining public acclaim, he stated that he does not enjoy success and will always be "a Rat King". Based on ethnography and media analysis of Vojtik's performances and engagements with his audience, this paper will analyze the various elements of his emancipatory poetics, using frameworks of intimate politics (Stokes 2010, 2023; Stirr 2017), autonomous art (Ranciere 2006), and affective impropriety (Stover, 2020), arguing that Vojtik's interplay of Slovak and Romani folklore, American gothic, alternative pop and subversive appropriation of Slovak national and neo-Nazi references is employed to move beyond representational discourses and to stage a counter-discourse to both ethnonationalist and liberal narratives, the latter viewing Detva (where he developed his unique style and which he significantly never left) as a place of post-socialist decline, from which an outstanding queer pop singer, a Romani one at that, would be unthinkable to emerge.

This paper examines how ‘spliced collage’ serves as a transcoded tool in drag performance, constructing a trans and queer storyworld, demanding audience co-creation, and reflecting the ephemeral, fragmented nature of trans existence. Using ethnographic material from Bristol’s drag scenes (U.K.), I build on queer ethnomusicological approaches (Barz & Cheng, 2020; Garcia-Mispireta, 2023; Maus & Whiteley, 2022) to explore how drag performers engage audiences in collective gender play, making them complicit in constructing a collective, temporary, storyworld. The technique I term ‘spliced collage’ pulls from multiple genres, sound bites, and pop culture references, fragmenting and reassembling them onto a core musical text. Contributing to scholarship on trans cultural production (Rosenberg et al., 2021; Stryker & Curran, 2014; Tourmaline et al., 2017), I explore ‘spliced collage’ as a distinctly transcoded technique which demands audience co-creation for three reasons: Firstly, the compositional process emphasises DIY culture, fostering resistance and community. Secondly, its referential nature, which invites collaborative acts of recognition, interpretation, and play. Finally, it conveys a multiplicity of meanings, containing structural fragility through its bold, fragmented form. This requires audience participation to fill gaps, making worldbuilding a collective, co-authored experience. Using participant observation and interviews, I reconstruct a number deploying ‘spliced collage,’ analyse how musical texts compete and interact, and examine audience responses to the original performance, building on music and drag scholarship (Blackburn, 2024; Heller, 2020). ‘Spliced collage’ represents both individual and collective transness through the storyworld co-created during the performance, expanding discussions on trans methodologies in ethnomusicology and participatory performance.

The aspect of my queer disposition that I have struggled most to understand is not that of my categorical identity (“gay”) but rather how I make sense of myself geospatially as a homosexual living in Texas (Brubaker 2006, Cusick 1994). I feel conflicted by my attraction to the subtle beauty of Texan landscapes and my relative disdain for its politics. On camping and hiking trips, I frequently pair my surroundings (the Texas Hill Country) with the music of American singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens—whose queering of genre, as a queer artist himself, sonically eases my turbulent relationship with Texas.
In this autoethnographic project, I analyze some compositional qualities of three indie-folk songs by Sufjan Stevens to reveal their potential resonance with queer listeners. I draw on Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974) and Leonieke Bolderman’s (2020) theories of topophilia and musical topophilia—affective relationships between people, places, and music. I conclude that the act of travel, in conjunction with Stevens’s music, provides a mental space and romanticization of a Texas where my queer self can flourish privately and peacefully.
Effectively, these cathartic escapades have established a symbiosis between my consumption of music and experience of place, where each now inspires and enhances the other. I illustrate how playing with affect can foster an empowering and reconciliatory sense of queer embodiment and self-reckoning in a frequently turbulent twenty-first-century U.S. Musical topophilia has become the foundation of my ethics of care; I can now bolster my own everyday mental health through music—and this is my favorite way of “being gay.”