Ten Queer Artists, one Pride Month

It's Pride Month, which is as good a reason as any to put some artists in the spotlight. Below are ten artists we've photographed who have shaped, and keep shaping, queer music culture: people who are openly themselves on stage, in front of thousands. The story here is theirs. We just got to stand in the pit and document it.

Sziget, the Island of Freedom

Four of these ten we shot at the same place: Sziget Festival, on an island in the Danube in Budapest. Sziget has called itself the Island of Freedom since it started in 1993, just after the fall of communism, and it has put work behind the name. Its Magic Mirror venue has been a dedicated LGBTQ+ space since 2001, running drag, voguing, talks and queer parties for over two decades. That reads louder given where it sits: Hungary has banned same-sex marriage, ended legal recognition for trans people, and made LGBTQ+ content for under-18s illegal. Sziget has held its line anyway, and has twice won the European Festival Awards Take a Stand prize for it. Shooting a queer headliner there is not a neutral act, and the crowd knows it.

Chappell Roan

At Sziget 2025 you could read Chappell Roan's set off the festival hours before it started: Pink Pony Club outfits all over the island, and people working hard for the best spot at the barrier. That is what she has built. Chappell Roan made drag-inspired pop the biggest queer story in current music, and she is blunt about where it comes from. “I'm gay and nothing's actually wrong with me,” she said about figuring out who she was. “Pink Pony Club” and “Good Luck, Babe!” turned that into anthems, full drag looks and all, and she has used her stage to push on LGBTQ+ rights.

Janelle Monáe

Janelle Monáe spent a decade turning identity into spectacle before putting it plainly. “Being a queer Black woman in America, someone who has been in relationships with both men and women, I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker,” she told Rolling Stone when she came out as pansexual. The Dirty Computer era made queerness something to celebrate out loud, and Monáe dresses her worlds to match: the “Make Me Feel” video washed in bisexual-flag pink and blue, her Sziget 2024 stage in so many flowers that the bees showed up. Somewhere in our selects is a frame of one trying to drink from her outfit.

Sam Smith

We shot Sam Smith twice in thirty days in 2024: Sziget in August, Lollapalooza Berlin a month later. Smith came out as nonbinary in 2019 and has used they/them since. “I'm not male or female, I think I flow somewhere in between,” they said at the time. The pushback was loud, and Smith has been open that they weren't prepared for the ridicule that followed. They kept going, from the ballads to the horned, unapologetic “Unholy.” None of that made it to Sziget. We split up there, Colin at front of house, Annelies in the crowd, where she landed next to a group of fans for whom this set was clearly the reason they came. Their excitement rubbed off.

The Aces

The Aces are a band where queerness is the default, not the subplot. Three of the four members are openly queer, and lead singer Cristal Ramirez frames being out as a responsibility: “it's super important to show up as our authentic selves, because I think that saves lives.” Songs like “Girls Make Me Wanna Die” write that life straight into the pop. We knew none of this when we walked to their Sziget stage in 2023; we were there on a tip from another photographer who said don't skip the set. A lot of the best shoots start that way.

Lollapalooza Berlin

Ashnikko

Ashnikko, who is pansexual and genderfluid, built a fanbase that treats the pit as a place to be loud and strange without apology. “Slumber Party,” with Princess Nokia, is sapphic and proud of it. The blue hair and the noise give the crowd permission to be just as loud, and you can see that permission from the pit. We shot her at Lollapalooza Berlin in 2025 knowing little of her music going in, and she is definitely a performer to go watch if you have the chance.

Metropol, Berlin

NXDIA

NXDIA is an Egyptian-British artist whose songs don't simplify anything. “She Likes A Boy” is an unrequited queer love song that moves between English and Arabic, and her own line about identity is the kind of thing you want a teenager to hear: “you're born as yourself, you live as yourself, you die as yourself, so you might as well like yourself.” She brings that same clarity to her own shows: for her Berlin date at Metropol she specifically requested a female photographer, so @alldnr_ shot it for Coda.

Superbloom, Munich

Willow Smith

Willow Smith came out as bisexual on Red Table Talk in 2019. “I love men and women equally,” she said, and has talked openly about building relationships on her own terms, polyamory included, which carries extra stigma for a Black woman doing it in public. That honesty has helped make space for lives that rarely get a mainstream voice. We shot her at Superbloom 2022 in Munich's Olympiapark, back when Coda was months old and festival shoots were still new ground for us. One photo from that set is still one of Annelies's personal favourites: not the one that did best on the account, the one she keeps coming back to.

Off Days

Peaches and Gossip played the same Off Days date in August 2024. We covered that day with the Coda Collective, founders and crew shooting side by side: one festival day, two artists a generation of queer musicians grew up on.

Peaches

Peaches has been a genderqueer provocateur since the electroclash days, making music that treats gender as a costume you get to pick. “Boys Wanna Be Her” flips desire and identity in a single line, and her live show has spent more than two decades refusing the rules. At Off Days we got the full version: more skin and more artistic freedom than we had seen in any show before. Annelies was filming at the barrier when Peaches came down on knees and elbows, right into the lens. Boobs out, entirely on her terms.

Gossip

Gossip turned a protest into a dancefloor. Beth Ditto wrote “Standing in the Way of Control” in response to US moves against same-sex marriage. “I wrote the chorus to try and encourage people not to give up,” she said. “It's a scary time for civil rights, but the only way to survive is to stick together and keep fighting.” As an outspoken lesbian frontwoman, Ditto made room on stage that had not existed before. Some of us knew the song before we knew the face. The crowd did not have that problem: the queer community at Off Days had circled this afternoon specifically, the same bill as Peaches, and followed everything happening on that stage.

Astra, Berlin

Pabllo Vittar

Pabllo Vittar is the most-followed drag queen on the planet, a Brazilian pop star with thirty-five million followers and counting. When KALTBLUT asked her in Berlin about the remix album she had just released, the answer doubled as a mission statement: “all the people that I brought to this project are queer people, Trans people, Black people, gay people.” The tip for this one came early: a friend of Annelies who travels through South America kept saying this was the show to see. She was right. Annelies shot the Noitada night at Astra on 19 August 2023, and KALTBLUT ran the photos alongside their interview.

Why these ten

What these shows have in common is not a genre. It is a crowd that came to be seen. Standing in the photo pit for an artist who is openly themselves, you watch a room give that back, and that is the part a photo can hold onto after the set ends. This Pride Month, these are the artists we wanted to celebrate: people who matter to a lot of fans for who they are as much as what they play, and who we got to point a camera at.

Shot across Sziget, Lollapalooza Berlin, Metropol, Astra, Superbloom and Off Days by Colin Darbyshire and Annelies Vollmuller, with the Coda Collective crew at Off Days. NXDIA was shot by @alldnr_. Full portfolios at coda.photos.