Thomas Richard Hilder (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim)
Queer Choirs, European Belonging, LGBTQ Rights

This presentation attends to LGBTQ choirs and the politics of family. Drawing on models in a post-Stonewall US context, LGBTQ choirs have appeared since 1982 in urban centres throughout Europe, employing a range of popular repertoire, adopting innovative performance practices, and enacting powerful public interventions. These choirs offer spaces of queer play and healing, help build local queer communities, and invite wider audiences to learn about queer lives. Queer studies has long articulated a suspicion towards heteronormative institutions such as the family (Warner 1999; Edelman 2004) owing to long histories of rejection of LGBTQ people by their biogenetic families, and exclusion of LGBTQ people from accessing rights vouchsafed through normative kinship structures, e.g. marriage. Nonetheless, notions of “families of choice” have proven to be meaningful in various LGBTQ contexts (Weston 1997) including choirs, not least considering the rise of neo-nationalisms across Europe.

In this presentation, I focus on articulations of “chosen family” within LGBTQ choirs in London and Warsaw: In what ways do LGBTQ choirs propose alternative models of kinship that replace or supplement biogenetic family structures? How have choirs participated in debates about LGBTQ access to the legal privileges of normative kinship structures? What are the potential pitfalls of drawing on the language of family within queer communities? I draw on eight years of transnational ethnographic work with LGBTQ choirs in Europe, as well as my own activism within the LGBTQ choral community. Thinking alongside scholars in ethnomusicology, queer theory, and sociology, I inspect how notions of kinship offer a powerful mode of articulating pan-LGBTQ solidarity as the heteronormative nuclear family becomes revalorised in the 21^st century.

Thomas R. Hilder (he/they) is a writer, teacher, researcher, musician, activist, and professor of ethnomusicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. Following his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London (2011), he has held positions in Germany and Norway. His experiments in scholarship, pedagogy, and public engagement tend to a broad range of topics –performance, community music, festivals, activism, citizenship, music therapy, digital media, memory, autoethnography – shaped by feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. He is author of “Sami Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe” (2015) and co-editor of “Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media” (2017). In 2016 he co-founded the international LGBTQ Music Study Group. During the academic year 2024-25 he is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt University, Berlin.