Rising queer pop star Chappell Roan denounces ‘heartbreaking’ drag bans -TGN

When rising queer pop star Chappell Roan sits down to talk to PinkNews, it’s the morning after her first show in London, and while she’s “very pleased” and “deeply grateful” for the response to Islington’s live music venue The Garage, she admits she wasn’t without reservations about performing in the UK.

“London is not the easiest crowd,” she says. “If they don’t like you… you’ll know.”

So how does the Missouri-born pop princess — real name Kayleigh Rose Amstutz — put audiences to work to allay those fears?

“We had drag queens opening the show,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world — and to her, it is.

“Drag is the most fun to watch,” she continues. “They don’t have to convince you to watch them, so you’re already in the mood of a party. I like having drag performers open because that energy gets everyone buzzing.

That answer alone should give readers an idea of ​​what’s important to Roan: not just strange visibility, but strange joy.

A trademark of any show — inspired, she says, by an Orville Peck performance in 2018 — is to have a local queen or two open the night. In The Garage, it was Crayola the Queen and Mahatma Khandi, both of whom indeed drove the crowd into a frenzy.

“I just remember thinking, ‘This is what I have to do,'” says Roan. “It’s so important to give back to the local gay communities (that I visit).”

However, the idea is not without difficulties. As the “Pink Pony Club” lead singer mentions, “We’re currently struggling with towing bans in the United States, so I’m figuring out how to deal with that.”

She goes on to describe various “confusing” laws being passed across America to ban free speech as heartbreaking, but is not convinced that dragging is the only target.

“It is an attack on trans people. It’s deliberately confusing – and people are p**sed (off).”

Due to Roan’s modus operandi of hiring local drag performers for every performance, the bans have had a tangible effect on her shows. The rising star recalls how a show in Nashville, Tennessee, took place on the same day that the state’s governor, Bill Lee, signed one of those bans into law, though it has since been overturned.

For Roan, who is the “fullest expression of (her) self” while dragging, the stakes are personal.

“It’s very emotional. You just feel the heaviness and the sadness. It’s weird that everyone says, ‘Protect the kids, get the kids out’. I’m not worried though. We will prevail, fight like hell. As usual.”

For Roan, an outspoken and proud queer woman whose songs contain unabashed references to being “eaten out” by a female partner, or leaving a Midwestern town to dance at a strip club, every song and performance gives her a chance to “do her duty” and give back to the queer community.

“Otherwise, to me, what’s the point?” she asks. “This job never pays well. I’ve worked for free for years, and it’s never been for the money.

“It’s just your duty as an artist to do your goddamn part. Especially when you benefit from queer people, the best thing to do is to give back, they are loyal.”

She gleefully points to the times she’s put her money where her mouth is: for example, part of the price of each ticket for a recent US tour was donated to a black transgender charity in New York.

However, it’s not just monetary value that Roan cares about. She considers herself a role model for countless other people who share experiences of a “very Christian” upbringing.

“As a child I thought being gay was a choice, now that I’ve evolved I see how important it is to create safe spaces as best we can…we need that. I need that.”

That evolution has been a great ride. From signing a piece of paper at school, declaring “that (she) would remain abstinent until marriage”, to “save yourself for your husband, or you are unclean”, everything in the singer’s early life led her to push her strangeness away.

Music, she discovered, was a method of expressing her feelings and finding a way out of that spiral of thoughts—and she remembers the turning point.

“The pendulum has just swung. I was like, ‘I need to talk about this’. Even though many of the songs are exaggerated, they are not just stories, they are like drag: the ultimate expression.”

Despite all that, Roan is “grateful for the past” because (she) gets to measure how (she) has grown.

“I’m still working on internal homophobia,” she adds. “If it’s ingrained in you, it’s in your blood. I’m still working it out.”

The image of a Midwestern girl breaking away from her roots to have a gay old time is perfectly captured in Roan’s shimmering “pink pony club— and the inspiration behind the song is as strange as one would hope.

Thinking back to her very first time in a gay club, her eyes sparkle as she talks about the “spiritual experience” that led to the creation of her most-streamed song.

“It felt the same as when I felt the holy spirit in the church. It was the same euphoric feeling. It was the opposite of what I was taught.

“Everyone was laughing and so free, and I was obsessed with the go-go dancers because I had never seen one in real life.

“I was like, ‘I have to do that. I have to go get it.” I wanted to dance, or strip, or experience some form of sexual expression. But I was too scared, so I wrote a song about me as a go-go dancer.”

Despite “Pink Pony Club” now being her most successful song in terms of streaming stats and performance response, the song sat in a vault for “over a year”. When Roan first presented it to her label at the time, Atlantic Records, who she parted ways with during the COVID-19 pandemic, they told her it made no sense.

“I remember they called me and said, ‘You don’t even play guitar.’ I was So crazy. I said, “Ariana Grande has a guitar solo in Dangerous Woman and she’s not touching a guitar.”

“It felt like an escape (from the label), and it was such a pivot from where I’d been in the past, musically. It was a hard song to grow into because they made me feel stupid. For a moment I thought they were right.”

Luckily they weren’t. Roan went independent when “many artists were dropped in 2020”, before joining frequent collaborator Dan Nigro’s Island Records early this year. From that moment on it was non-stop queer joy and songs that Roan could fully enjoy.

When asked what she wants people to feel at the end of a performance or a Chappell Roan song, she has an answer that exemplifies her ethos.

“I just hope they feel less alone in strangeness. I hope they feel more at home.”

Chappell Roan will embark on The Midwestern Princess Tour in September. Tickets are available now.

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