Queer artists have often powered Georgia’s innovations in music. “Mother of the Blues” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886-1939) was one of the first recorded blues singers and became a bisexual icon thanks to her song “Prove It On Me Blues,” which flaunts encounters with women. The advertisement for the song depicts a woman resembling Rainey in a man’s suit, hat, and tie, chatting up women on a street corner. The song was rumored to be inspired by Rainey’s arrest in 1925 for hosting an “all-female party-turned-orgy.” Athens’s own B-52s has created a legacy in the LGBTQ+ community for a variety of reasons. Four out of the group’s five founding members have come out as gay or bisexual during their careers, and singer Kate Pierson has attributed part of the band’s appeal to its inclusivity and “gay sensibility and sense of humor.” Several popular queer artists began their careers during or shortly after their time in Georgia colleges: the B-52s’ Fred Schneider and Ricky Wilson were University of Georgia (UGA) alums, and UGA was also the meeting place for R.E.M., whose lead singer Michael Stipe publicly identified himself as a “queer artist” in 2001. The Indigo Girls first met in elementary school and eventually reunited at Emory University before they began playing at Atlanta clubs. That same year Janelle Monáe, who had been attending Georgia Perimeter College (later Perimeter College at Georgia State University), debuted her self-financed demo album The Audition. Lil Nas X, a recent powerhouse of queer representation in music, was born in Lithia Springs and spent 2017-18 at the University of West Georgia before recording the country-rap hit “Old Town Road” at CinCoYo Studio Atlanta.

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