Wednesday morning’s Good Morning America aired a segment featuring a “queer” band called MUNA - which, in Arabic, means "hope" or "desire" - focused primarily on how awesome it was that the band intends to bring "queerness" to the music industry.
Based in Los Angeles, California, MUNA met in college at the University of Southern California nearly 10 years ago. More recently they opened for some of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows across the country and also released a new self-titled album.
In speaking about their experience with Swift during a GMA3 "What You Need to Know" clip posted to Twitter, one of the band members, Josette Maskin ("she/them") said how grateful she was that Swift “took a chance” on her and her bandmates.
“We’re a queer band and not everybody has the courage to be like, ‘I’m gonna support a queer band and put them out on the stage,’” she told hosts.
And GMA host Michael Strahan predictably raved about them.
“The last album received so much acclaim,” Strahan began. “Critics talking about [how] you embrace queer joy. Why is that so important to you?”
“We started our band in college. We were just three queer kids at USC in 2014,” lead singer Katie Gavin began. “The landscape has changed a lot but it's very important for us to just spread the message that we’re really really happy being out and being queer and it made our lives better.”
Living a lie made your lives better? How’s that?
“I think that there’s a lot, in the media, that supports messages that [being queer] can make your life really hard or its not the road that you want to go down,” Gavin said. “For us, we’re just really happy to be who we are so we wanna spread that message.”
When Gavin passed the torch back to Strahan, he mentioned that he has a daughter who is currently attending the University of Southern California, and said the queer MUNA band is “making her proud.”
“This is fantastic, we’re so excited,” Strahan added before MUNA broke out into song.
During their performance, there was a significant amount of hip-thrusting, and I personally was worried the mini skirt on the main girl posed a significant risk of making the segment rated R.
Ultimately, this begs the question and makes me wonder why it matters that these girls are queer? Why doesn’t GMA feature bands who are just straight-up talented, not ones that simply conform to some social ideology? I don’t see the show inviting Christian bands to come play, so why is it that the LGBTQ mafia gets to?
What a waste of air time if you ask me.
