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Queer in Your Ear

Queer in Your Ear is an unorthodox gay music column. That's "gay music column," not "gay-music column." If all I wrote about were Melissa Etheridge and Elton John and K.D. Lang, would life be worth living? Nay. So I write about whatever bands merit coverage – including musicians working in rock, folk, rap, and other ostensibly gay-hostile genres. Sometimes there's an overt queer angle, most times not. This, in my opinion, is the only responsible approach for an out music writer to take.

Queer in Your Ear started out in 1992 as a monthly column in Xtra, an homosexualist fortnightly in Toronto. I wrote 56 instalments of the column for Xtra, constantly battling editorial subterfuge and typographic and copy-editing incompetence at every level. My February 29, 1996 column on "Laura" Ashley MacIsaac was apparently too much for the very sophisticated editors of Xtra to handle, and I got canned. But no matter: By publishing on the Web, I have a worldwide audience.

Now that you're all up-to-date, select this link to look at a current list of the Queer in Your Ear columns I've managed to upload. All the old columns for which I still have computer files have been loaded.

As of this update, I doubt I will ever write another Queer in Your Ear column. What you see in the article list is what you get.