By Kristi Alexandra
@kristialexandra
As the old Yorkshire proverb goes “There’s nowt so queer as folk.” That is to say, there’s nothing as strange and varied as people and their behaviour. Vancouver band Queer as Funk adapts the adage to the stage, smashing all the rules of the cis-hetero gender binary.
When trumpeter and band manager Alison Gorman assembled the nine-piece motown and funk group, she knew the name was more than a clever double entendre.
“Within the band, there’s a lot of diversity in terms of our backgrounds, our ethnicities, our sexual orientations and our gender expressions,” she tells Loose Lips Mag. “The same goes for our audience. I feel like we mirror what our audience looks like in a lot of ways. The nice thing about our shows is we have all genders that come to see us: all different expressions and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s the music that brings us all together.”
Gorman is joined by vocalists Connie Buna (she/hers) and Jocelyn MacDougall (she/hers), Luis ‘Babyface’ Melgar (he/his) on keys/trombone, guitarist Marc Van Rosi (he/his), Dan Shook (he/his) on tenor sax, Sally Zori (they/theirs) on drums, John Walsh (he/his) on bass, and Fiona MacDougall aka DJ Slade (she/hers).
Together, the members of Queer as Funk have a whole lot of love for the music, Vancouver PRIDE, each other and their fans.
“[The music] totally has this way of making the division of age and demographics go away, and we’re kind of all standing together and that’s a really magical experience, I think,” Buna says, eliciting agreeing nods from bandmates MacDougall and Gorman.
“I have always really loved motown, soul music and pop music. [It’s the] music of the people. It’s the stuff that you can play at a show, and it doesn’t matter what your age is – everyone is going to know it and everyone is going to love it, it’s just such a beautiful, universal style of music,” Gorman chimes in.
“When I was starting to bring in charts for the band, I started to pick tunes that would fit that bill: that people would know the words to, and it didn’t matter if it was your grandma getting up on the floor, or if you were 20-years-old and getting up on the floor. Everyone can dance to Stevie Wonder!” she exclaims.
“What I love about what we do is that there is this beautiful performative element to it,” MacDougall reveals. “For me, there’s this beautiful energetic exchange. It’s one thing to communicate the music by playing it, but another to communicate the music through the way that we perform it to the audience, and to have them gift us that energy back.”
And speaking of giving back, that’s a value deeply instilled into the band’s every performance.
For every self-produced Queer as Funk show, the band makes sure to give a donation back to the community. Some organizations they’ve supported include Qmunity, Black Lives Matter, Broadway Youth Resource Centre, Friends Help Friends, and Urban Native Youth Association.
“One of our first large shows, we partnered with Friends Help Friends, a local non-profit that helps support folks in the community who have are suffering from illness and need some money to fill the gap. That opportunity brought about a conversation that has been an evolving conversation amongst our collective around how we can sincerely give back to the community that supports us so beautifully. Also how we as people, individually, many of the folks in the band, also have a personal stance about being in action around the way that we can impact our communities. So that has created a template around an example that we look to – if we have a show, who will we be partnering with or supporting?” Buna explains.
“It also means that because we live our values in that way, and we live them out loud in that way, we also get hired by folks that have similar values,” MacDougall adds. “We occupy a very particular place in our community that we believe that giving back is a crucial part of being involved in the community.”
This Friday, August 3rd, Queer as Funk will be making the Commodore Ballroom—a predominantly straight space—all-inclusive for the community in celebration of Vancouver Pride Month.
“We’re really looking to queer the Commodore and looking to create an opportunity to include anyone who wants to come be a part of that environment and celebrate queerness in all of its diversity; to be a family member, a friend, an ally or anyone who doesn’t identify as queer but who wants to come be part of it. Not only are we queering the Commodore, we’re also queering Granville Street, and that is a huge deal because Granville Street can be very threatening to folks who identify outside of the gender binary,” says MacDougall.
“To be able to reclaim public space as welcoming and safe for queer bodies is what pride is about. To be able to contribute to the queering of Granville Street for five hours on the Friday night of PRIDE is a big deal and we’re really excited about it.”
Queer as Funk performs the Commodore Ballroom this Friday, August 3 at 8 pm. Snag your tickets here.
Kristi Alexandra is an unabashed wino and wannabe musician. Her talents include drinking an entire bottle of cabernet sauvignon, singing in the bathtub, and falling asleep.
