Personal experience is often at the forefront of songwriting, and many musicians pour their hearts and souls into their creativity. This is no different for trans and nonbinary musicians. Five trans and nonbinary Iowa musicians shared with IPR how their journeys with gender expression have informed and influenced their craft, and how they see themselves in their work.
Aaron Longoria
Aaron Longoria is a nonbinary multimedia artist based in Iowa City.
A Texas native, Longoria relocated to Iowa in 2015 to enroll in the University of Iowa. They’ve released solo music under the name Tomato Boy before, but their current main project is Early Girl, a three-piece power pop band. Longoria is the frontperson.
Both Early Girl’s music and costuming have allowed Longoria to experiment with gender performance and has pushed them in new ways.
“Not only is gender a spectrum for myself, I really find it as kind of like a tapestry — whether that be where I am on the spectrum between masculine and feminine, but really, I’m just pulling what I like and really relishing in that absence of gender and playing with performance,” Longoria said. “I feel like with the band, [...] it feels like Early Girl can kind of really wear whatever and it works. And that's kind of how I feel like with my gender — I operate like I have all these different influences and being able to weave them together on my body or my music [...] it’s all just kind of what whims me.”
Early Girl was a project that arose from the pandemic. Since its founding, the band has released two EPs, started their Garden Songs performance video series starring other local musicians, and is now organizing an all-trans compilation album benefitting the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund. Early Girl is asking trans and nonbinary people with ties to Iowa to send their music, noise or poetry submissions for the compilation to their email address. They're offering to help with recording and producing those tracks for the album.
"Not just being a trans person, but also being queer and being brown — I'm Mexican in a very white place — there's a lot of times where I feel compelled or obligated to do or say something, but I’m not feeling like the most equipped,” Longoria said. “[The compilation album] was something like, I feel like I'm connected, I feel like I know how to do this and this is something that I can do.”
Tara McGovern
Tara McGovern is a nonbinary folk musician living in Coralville.
They currently play in three projects: Kerak, a world music three-piece where they’re on fiddle and vocals, The Soft and Low, a folk rock duo where they also sing and play fiddle and Freegrass, a trio where McGovern plays the fiddle while Blake Shaw sings and plays cello and bass.
McGovern believes they bear a social responsibility as a trans musician within their genre.
“I don't believe you can be a folk musician without also being a voice for unamplified voices,” McGovern said. “I think that's part of the purpose of being a folk musician. And so something that I think is very present in the trans community and very pleasant and very really beautiful here, especially in our local community, but in general, is a real recognition of how underrepresented communities are all connected and that we are strongest when we are uplifting each other."
McGovern made headlines statewide last year when they went to trial and were acquitted for protest-related charges. Every other person arrested at that protest took a plea deal, but McGovern wanted to challenge the precarious nature of these charges.
“Seven trans people were charged for participating in a protest on the University of Iowa campus last October. Nobody did anything illegal in the protest and there was lots of people there that were known to law enforcement, but the only people who were charged were trans people,” McGovern said. “We know this is factual because in the deposition for my trial, we learned very specifically how the people who were charged were identified and sort of researched by the lead detective using our social media accounts."
McGovern continues to focus on their activism following their acquittal. On March 14, their band Kerak played a benefit concert at the James Theater in Iowa City in support of IC Compassion, a local nonprofit that serves the immigrant and refugee populations in Eastern Iowa.
Emma Denney
Emma Denney is a trans woman who lives in Iowa City and creates experimental music as “.em.”
She came out as transgender in 2020, around the time she relocated back to Iowa City to pursue her PhD in composition. Her musical background is jazz guitar, but she's now very involved in the experimental and punk scenes in eastern Iowa. The .em project includes a lot of live sampling, auto-tuned improvised vocals and harsh drones contrasted with more melodic sounds.
Denney said that her experience as a trans woman has heavily impacted her art.
“I make music and write poetry and make art that's very specifically about my experience as a trans woman, and I found the experimental music scene to be an amazing place where I've been able to explore that. I make improvised music, and so what I do is [...] I have to jump off a cliff and learn to catch myself on the way down,” Denney said. “I found parallels to that experience of being in with my sort of transness and being unmoored, and having to find things to ground myself and to hold on to — which has been a beautiful process, right? It's this wonderful process of discovery and of questioning, and I found it really beautiful.”
Denney is also very involved in legislative and LGBTQ advocacy, especially in her new role as the Community Resource Navigator for the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library.
“Someone once joked to me that I'm one of like, three people in Iowa who actually knows how the Legislature's website works,” Denney said. “I sort of just make sure that people in our community, in Iowa City especially, are informed about what's going on as quickly as possible so that people can organize and speak out and take action and just be really aware of what the state is trying to do to us.”
Allegra Hernandez
Allegra Hernandez is a nonbinary musician and music educator based in Des Moines.
Hernandez’s journey as an artist and as a queer person is closely intertwined. They began playing music at nine years old and came out as gay at 12, around the same time they started to learn guitar. They came out as nonbinary at 15, around the same time they started trying out the bass and drums.
They’ve played in various bands over the years, but now primarily focus on their work as a solo musician. On their 2022 debut album Gift Exchange, Hernandez unapologetically insisted that people “Use My Fkn Pronouns.” Their queerness continues to influence their identity as a songwriter, but does not define it.
“I play a lot of different styles of music and I'm just really passionate about putting music first,” Hernandez said. “But of course, being a queer individual, a lot of my songs definitely reflect my experience. I like to say, first and foremost, I'm an artist and musician who happens to be queer, rather than saying like, ‘I'm a queer artist,’ because to me, music is like what the core of my identity is, and then queerness is just something that is part of my experience.”
Hernandez has mastered multiple instruments and shares that expertise with others as a music instructor. They have worked with Girls Rock! Des Moines for years now, teaching youth how to perform and bringing their music to life through recording as the director of GR!T Records.
“As a queer adult [...] I’m really passionate about working with youth, especially queer youth,” Hernandez said. “I always like when I work with youth in that educational learning environment. I really strive to be a mentor that I wish I would have had when I was growing up and younger, and so I really like to think of that as my project.”
Hernandez is in the process of recording new music with local engineers to be released soon. They’re also preparing for their appearance as part of the Made in the Midwest concert series at the Temple Theater in Des Moines on April 25, where they plan to perform some of their new music.
Keenan Crow
Keenan Crow is a nonbinary musician and LGBTQ advocate living in Des Moines.
They play guitar, keys and vocals in the local dreampop/shoegaze band Ariias. Crow also released their debut solo EP, Ambient Anachronisms, last May.
Crow found that they have grown as a creative as they've explored the intricacies of their gender expression.
“I think as I have come to acknowledge my gender and my feelings, [...] my musical tastes, and therefore the music that I've made, has kind of expanded dramatically,” Crow said. “I would say when I was younger, it was kind of like, very aggressive, very masculine-focused music. And as I have realized that that is not a great fit for me gender-wise, so too has the music kind of changed and morphed and done different things. I mean, I can still get to aggression, but it's not like, required.”
While Crow has been playing music for many years, their coming-of-age when it came to gender occurred later in life, during their late twenties.
“It took me a long time to kind of figure out where I fit, just because, as somebody whose sense of gender is not really there — I don't ‘gender’ as much as possible,” Crow said. “I always just kind of assumed that everybody else was just kind of playing along in the same way I was. And so it took me a long time to come to the realization that [gender] is just not something that I feel generally, compared to other folks who have a very strong sense of gender identity. I put myself on the very weak part of that category, and I think that's part of what took me so long to realize it.”
Outside of music, Crow is director of policy and advocacy at One Iowa, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ rights statewide. They have been a very visible figure in the recent protests and lobbying efforts against anti-trans legislation at the Capitol.
