Left to right: Shamir, Perfume Genius, Big Freedia, Anohni

First of all, let’s take a moment to state the obvious: ‘gay’ is not a musical genre. Neither is ‘trans’ nor any of the countless other sexual and gender identities that exist outside the binary, and it’s grossly inaccurate to cram diverse artists of all kinds of genres and identities together under one banner. I’m aware of that. Yet there’s no need explaining that coming from a niche outside the mainstream often makes it all the more harder to gain the recognition you may deserve – and there’s an ever-growing number of phenomenal LGBTI artists, musical and otherwise, who deserve tons of it. Four of them I have compiled here; as an introduction, in case you’re not familiar, or just to revisit their work and keep you up to date on what they’ve been up to. So here it goes!

1. Shamir

“Ratchet” is not only one of the top trending slang terms of the last couple years, it’s also the title of Shamir’s debut album that came out on XL Recordings in May 2015. Yet while definitions of the term, possibly derived from wretched, commonly include words like ‘ghetto’, ‘nasty’ or ‘street’, the LP title doesn’t really seem to reflect what people say about the 21-year-old Las Vegas native: interviewers unanimously describe Shamir Bailey as polite, intelligent – a little nerdy even. But that’s only part of the story; because what’s immediately striking about Shamir is his seemingly progressive gender identity – or lack thereof. “To those who keep asking, I have no gender, no sexuality and no fucks to give,” he tweeted a while back, a statement that’s not unheard of these days. Pansexuality and androgyny are no new concepts in pop music, yet while other boundary-pushing performers such as David Bowie, Grace Jones, Prince, or, most recently, Miley Cyrus make them part of their artistic personas, Shamir’s goal isn’t to bring a message across. “People think my androgyny is a thing or a gimmick, but no, I’m naturally androgynous; I don’t try to be,” he explained to the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica, and it’s hard not to believe him.

His is a liberated and progressive approach to gender, and as outlandish as it may appear to some, is a product of Generation Z: a new study found that only 48 percent of young US Americans aged 13 to 20 identify as completely heterosexual, while the remaining 52 percent placed their gender identity somewhere on the scale from not-fully-straight to fully homosexual (read more about this exciting survey at Vice).

In short, Shamir just wants to be who he is and to do what he loves – he actually started out playing country music and punk rock and admits to having had dreams of moving to a small town. Not so progressive for a young popstar in training, granted, but it’s all just part of the natural eclecticism of this highly talented kid. Meanwhile, Shamir’s debut album, produced by Godmode label head Nick Sylvester, who landed Shamir his record deal in 2014, is a creative and genre-bending affair of flamboyant disco-dance-pop rooted firmly in house music and landed the up-and-comer in several 2015 year-end best lists by renowned publications such as NME, Pitchfork or Stereogum. The record’s bottom line is about finding yourself, staying true to that and loving it. And that, as The Cut’s John Ortved explained back in 2013 in reaction to reappropriation efforts of the term by leading ladies like Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, can be Ratchet too.

2. Big Freedia

Speaking of ratchet, I’m pretty positive the next artist wouldn’t mind being labeled just that: Big Freedia “didn’t come to play with you hoes! I came to slay, bitch!” Wait, where have you heard that line again? That’s right: the Queen of Everything Beyoncé recruited the universally recognized Queen of Bounce for her surprise single “Formation” which everybody and their mother have been talking about since it dropped on Super Bowl Sunday. The bounce rapper from New Orleans is actually friendly with the Knowles family (Solange is a part-time Nola resident) and was brought in last minute to record a short verse and some ad-libs for “Formation”. And even though she isn’t credited on the track and doesn’t appear in the controversial video she has received a lot of attention for her memorable performance on this black power anthem that touches on subjects like police brutality, racism, gender and sexuality.

Without a doubt the unexpected Beyoncé connection put Freedia in the spotlight on a much larger scale, but “Formation” is just the latest highlight in a long list of accomplishments the 35-year-old Freedia has racked up over the last couple of years: since 2013 she stars in her own reality show Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce on Fuse depicting her life as an up-and-coming performer, the fifth season of which is slated for this year, and she has recently published two books, the memoir God Save the Queen Diva! as well as a collection of catchphrases and song lyrics entitled Big Freedia In Your Pocket. Her general out-of-the-box approach to promotion had her set the Guinness world record for group-twerking with 406 participants in New York City in 2014, and her past musical collaborations include RuPaul, Diplo and Swedish pop singer Elliphant. Freedia is currently working on her fourth studio album and, capitalizing on the “Formation” hype, released her own new single “I Heard”, another club-ready party track, back in February.

Bounce music, an energetic and often simplistic hip hop subgenre that originated in New Orleans, is “something that everybody can enjoy, from zero to 99”, Freedia explained in an interview with Vogue. “It’s the music that’s fun and it’s cultural and motivating to everybody. (…) It’s a happy music, so kids love it, adults love it. Hopefully we can get on the whole world loving it.” With an ambassador as charismatic as Big Freedia, that shouldn’t be too hard.

3. Perfume Genius

Charismatic is a description that, in a way, fits Perfume Genius, too. Seattle Singer/Songwriter Mike Hadreas may have chosen a (let’s admit it) slightly corny stage name – his music, though, is far from that. His first two albums Learning and Put Your Back N 2 It mainly showcased introspection, vulnerability and fragility, making Perfume Genius somewhat of a household name on indie blogs, but his artistic output (so far) was crowned by Too Bright, released in September 2014 to universal critical acclaim. The album showed a more confident and fearless side of the now 34-year-old and thus, as Brandon Stosuy wrote in his raving Pitchfork review, “seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who’s ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or ‘other-ized,’ regardless of sexual orientation.”

While he says he doesn’t want to be labeled a ‘gay singer’ (because who does? we all know how hard it is to get out of a certain box once people put you in it), eventually discarding initial plans to record a more ‘mainstream friendly’ album, on Too Bright Hadreas chose to embrace his ‘otherness’ and address controversial topics surrounding homophobia in a more confrontational way. “I’m pretty explicit in my lyrics and I mean it. I feel very purposeful about it,” he told Vice in a 2015 interview. Take the borderline psychedelic lead single “Queen” for instance, a bold statement on gay panic: “No family is safe when I sashay”, he sings, and the drag queen-filled video is gloriously surreal, earning him already over 2.2 million views and counting on YouTube. “With this song it was more of a ‘fuck you’ thing,” Hadreas explained to the Guardian. “I was hoping other people would feel uncomfortable for once, not me.”

This newfound confidence, brought out musically in part by Portishead’s Adrien Utley who helped produce Too Bright, is reflected in a flamboyant public persona who’s not afraid to don high heels and lipstick in order to get a rise out of people, although he admits that on a personal level, he’s “not really matched to the music yet.” Be that as it may, judging from what Perfume Genius has accomplished so far, he’s definitely on a good way.

4. Anohni

You may not know her under the moniker Anohni (yet), a name which she says she has been using privately for some time and which she officially adopted as her stage name in 2015, but the artist formerly known as Antony Hegarty is all but a newbie to the public – and has been very outspoken about her transgender identity for years. Causing quite the confusion with the name change about how to refer to her properly, Anohni has repeatedly expressed a preference for female pronouns, even though she identifies as neither male nor female but explicitly as trans, thus consciously negating the gender binary. “My situation is ambiguous because I haven’t transitioned from male to female. My experience as a transgender person has been to become comfortable expressing my sense of difference within the identity of being trans,” she told the Independent in 2012, and in an in-depth interview with the Quietus’ Cian Traynor she explained that “when people call me ‘she,’ I’m very honoured.”

Now that we got that out of the way – to limit interest in Anohni to her specific gender identity wouldn’t be doing justice to her outstanding work as an artist. With the band Antony and the Johnsons the New York-based British singer has released four critically acclaimed studio albums as well as several EPs and live albums, but with various exhibitions and projects around the world, Anohni has also made a name for herself as a visual artist and doesn’t “differentiate between mediums” (as per the Quietus interview). Her accomplishments are far too many to be named here, so let’s just take a look at some of the highlights: in 2005 Antony and the Johnsons won the prestigious Mercury Prize for their album I Am A Bird Now as the best album of the year by a British or Irish act; Anohni calls the late Lou Reed a mentor who was instrumental in her career as a public artist; she has on several occasions worked with Björk, most recently on the Icelandic icon’s latest album Vulnicura; she is a co-founder of a collective called Future Feminism Foundation and is otherwise very involved in raising awareness of gender equality issues as well as environmental issues.

In February, Anohni caused a stir as the first openly transgender performer (and second transgender person overall) to ever be nominated for an Academy Award for her J. Ralph collaboration “Manta Ray” from the documentation Racing Extinction – but was ultimately excluded from performing the song at the ceremony. In an essay for Pitchfork, she vented her feelings of frustration and disappointment, writing: “The truth is that I was not groomed for stardom and watered down for your enjoyment. As a transgendered artist, I have always occupied a place outside of the mainstream. I have gladly paid a price for speaking my truth in the face of loathing and idiocy.” Needless to say, she didn’t win the Oscars.

But that’s in the past and Anohni clearly has a bright future to look forward to: the 44-year-old recently announced her new album Hopelessness, a solo debut of sorts, to be released in May and in a fan interview described the eagerly anticipated set, which she recorded with Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, as “as different as could be from my previous work” and as “a dance / experimental electronic record with quite a dark thematic undertow.” As the album’s second single, following the 2015 release of the climate change anthem “4 Degrees,” Anohni released “Drone Bomb Me,” a song written from the perspective of a little girl in Afghanistan whose family has been killed by a drone bomb with an accompanying music video starring supermodel Naomi Campbell in a strikingly emotional performance. Other Hopelessness song titles like “Obama”, “Violent Man” or “Crisis” suggest that the rest of the album will follow in a similarly socially conscious lane, thus once more cementing Anohni’s status as a powerful advocate not only for transgender and women’s rights, but for human rights everywhere.