The queerPassion production at the 2025 Bachfest Leipzig sheds light on contemporary European values of musical heritage, authenticity and sociality. A contrafact of the St. John Passion, queerPassion resets Bach’s music to a new libretto by Thomas Höft, highlighting tragic stories of homophobic violence in the eighteenth century (1730 Utrecht sodomy trials, a Prussian trans man) and recent times (Orlando, Chechnya, Lagos). At Bachfest, queerPassion featured under the festival theme “Transformation”: the project incorporated the professional Baroque orchestra Ārt House 17 and soloists, with a local women’s choir and gay men’s chorus singing the chorales. Leipzig thus presented a provocative context where Bach “superfans,” historical performers, the LGBTQ+ community, professionals and amateurs would intersect. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in Leipzig, including observations, musician interviews, and an audience survey, I situate the queerPassion at the intersection of scholarship on participatory musicking (Turino 2008, Reily & Brucker 2017, Bartleet & Higgins 2018), queer music studies (Attinello 2006, Barz & Cheng 2020, Maus & Whitely 2022, MacLachlan 2020, Hilder 2023), music revivals (Bithell & Hill 2014), and festival studies (Falassi 1987). My study explores how the utopian vision of the funder Creative Europe to “safeguard, develop and promote European cultural and linguistic diversity and heritage” played out in Leipzig: while fostering tolerance and understanding among participants and audience, the queerPassion also exposed sometimes competing artistic and ideological values (professionalism vs. amateur community-building; queer pride and identity vs. Bach reverence and historical authenticity in performance) with lively, but not always harmonious, results.