With coronavirus making large-scale festivals a public health hazard and widespread protests forcing the nation into a reckoning on racial inequality, this Pride season is one unlike any other. And yet, the spirit of a movement itself born out of a protest lives on. As the month of June comes to a close, E! News has asked some of Hollywood’s newest generation of LGBTQ stars to share what Pride means to them in 2020.
Welcome to The New Faces of Pride.
With the independent release of her debut single “I Don’t Want It All” in 2017, German-born pop singer Kim Petras found her name added to the relatively small, but important list of trans musicians sharing their art with the world. While she’s hardly the first to gain recognition, with others like Anohni, Shea Diamond, Sophie and Teddy Geiger (to name a few) serving as contemporaries, but in the few years that she’s been releasing shimmery pop bops—including the recent Song of Summer contender “Malibu,” released under quarantine—she’s certainly become one of the most visible trans performers in the music industry. And though her music rarely, if ever, gets political, her sheer existence in the pop music world is a representational win that can’t be understated.