Orville Peck

The aptly named “party switch” featured in every room at the Dive Motel in Nashville has four options: SEX, DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL and SLEEP. Orville Peck, in a pair of horse-print tighty-whities, is boogying to the SEX station, which blasts 1970s R&B while a rotating disco ball shimmers in sparkly pink hues overhead. The lack of a television, plus the bright geometric wallpaper and deep shag carpeting, signals that this renovated roadside inn isn’t the kind of place you visit for a family-friendly good time. But on this sweaty Tennessee afternoon the only thing splayed across the bed sheets is Peck’s collection of handmade lace-up masks. Gold fringe, long red fringe, short cream fringe, mid-length pink fringe. Fringe galore, yee-haw, amen.

Peck fastens on one of his masks—which he hopes never to be seen in public without—pairing it with an embroidered Nudie-style suit. Someone suggests we crank up the party switch to DRUGS, which features trippy lights and sounds by hip-hop forefather Grandmaster Flash. The country artist is pleased, mostly with his outfit.

“I do like the Porter Wagoner look,” Peck says, referring to the 1960s twangy crooner who made sparkly, chain-stitched getups part of his signature look. Wagoner, however—at least as far as we know—never cracked a whip while listening to “White Lines.” The musician moves to another bedroom, this one featuring side-by-side bathtubs and more shag, to snap additional photos. He stands on a bed and gives a hearty crack to a long, vintage-leather lasso.

“I’m good with a whip,” the superhero-like figure announces, an innuendo that would no doubt cause fidgeting across town on Music Row, the epicenter of Nashville’s commercial country-music industry. While fluid sexuality has long been embraced in pop music, the naughtiest images to ship out of this town tend toward a tightpantsed Luke Bryan singing about “knockin’ boots.” For someone like Peck, who is openly gay, a career in mainstream country has almost always been out of reach. Just seven years ago, in 2013, country radio penalized Kacey Musgraves for alluding to kissing girls on “Follow Your Arrow”; the song never charted higher than 43 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart despite being named song of the year at the 2014 Country Music Association Awards. The genre, conventional wisdom would like you to believe, is conservative, and the only viable path for an aspiring artist who happens to embrace gayness is country-adjacent. But times are changing. Nashville is starting to demand a party switch.

“See,” Peck says, flicking the whip in an impressive wave motion with a controlled snap of the wrist, all cowboy confident, “I told y’all.”

Peck, who put out his debut LP, Pony, on Sub Pop in March, sings about relationships with men because that’s who he is, not because he has an agenda. The sexiness in his songs comes more from a sonic palette that sometimes sounds like Chris Isaak than from character-playing. Much has been murmured about Peck’s sexuality and his “subversive” role in country; almost as much has been made of his masked anonymity. All three aspects are captivating, for sure, but they represent a fraction of the whole: Peck speaks about being a gay man in country music not to spur a revolution but to find a role for folks like him in a genre that, historically, hasn’t been welcoming. If anything, he’s a traditionalist at heart. Dolly Parton and Wagoner are his North Stars in a cosmos that also includes Merle Haggard. And no, Orville Peck isn’t his real name, but no one makes a stink about Eilleen Regina Edwards, the woman we know as Shania Twain.

His photo shoot done, Peck, now in a T-shirt on the hotel patio, smokes a cigarette through his fringe, which is parted down the middle like a set of curtains. “I’m not setting out to be an instigator,” he says. “In fact, my songwriting is probably more in line with traditional country than a lot of country now.”

He’s not wrong: Peck’s songs don’t imitate Haggard’s per se, but neither do those of the subgenre that includes Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line crooning about women, pickup trucks and beer. When compared toe-to-toe with the bro-country groups that dominate popular radio, Peck is no more indie rock than they are hip-hop. But a fear lingers that queer singers like Peck are trying to warp country into another liberal bastion. Peck doesn’t see it as a changing of the guard so much as an opportunity to be a part of what’s been built.

Country’s queens—Parton, in particular—were Peck’s inspiration and role models, but he soon realized the genre as a whole wasn’t ready to invite him in; it’s an experience that’s relatable for many people whose stories have been excluded from the country canon. It’s not that people of color or queer people haven’t had a role in Nashville’s understructure; it’s that their impacts have been diminished and muted. This isn’t entirely the fault of country music itself. As Nadine Hubbs discusses in Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, classism has resulted in the dismissal of country as the province of unsophisticated hillbillies.

“Even just a few banjo or fiddle notes,” Hubbs writes, “can suffice to convey qualities including rusticity, Southernness, stupidity or lack of sophistication, and violent bigotry, especially racism and homophobia.” When the middle and elite classes use the refrain “anything but country” to describe their musical interests, they’re signaling not just personal taste but economic background and political affinity. Classifying country music as the antithesis of sophistication promotes the idea that it can’t be appreciated by anyone who lacks white skin and a blue collar.

“I think the stigma that country music is made by a certain type of person, and is only for a certain type of person, is something perpetuated by big-wig old white men who run record labels and feel like that’s how they can keep in control,” says Peck, stubbing out his cigarette. “But look at Willie Nelson. That guy’s a weed-smoking gay-rights activist.”

“The problem is less about homophobia. It’s a chauvinist problem.”

The issue of otherness in country is further highlighted in the case of Lil Nas X, who came out as gay following the success of his 2019 hit, “Old Town Road.” After he was nominated for a Country Music Association Award (for musical event of the year), a flood of national headlines erroneously declared him the first openly gay person to snag such an honor. In the past decade, openly gay artists Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark have been recognized by the CMAs. The media’s lazy assumption speaks to the view of country as a “hillbilly” home where there can’t possibly be space for queer folks, resulting in erasure by accident. Country’s gay community hasn’t always been heard, but it is rich, and critics often confuse the Music Row machine and country radio—where queer voices are indeed silenced—with the music makers themselves.

As the world considers more interpretations of sexuality and gender, and country music becomes a global commodity that needs to react to those trends, there’s space in the expanding universe for a star like Peck. “Whether they even recognize the reasoning, I think a lot of gay people feel detached from country music,” he says. “But marginalized people of any kind have to bushwhack and blaze our own trails a lot of the time. Those paths aren’t there for us, and it’s usually in the face of a lot of adversity or a lot of judgment.”

It’s a complicated balance to recognize the role queer people have played in country music and also acknowledge how they’ve been curbed. Peck knows this history well, from Lavender Country, the band credited with releasing the first gay country album in 1973 (Peck has sung with them), to Willie Nelson’s 2006 version of the cowboy-lovin’ anthem “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” (Peck has covered it). His mask is reminiscent of Jimmy “Orion” Ellis, a 1970s and 1980s country singer with Presleyan vocals and an affinity for obscuring his face. Peck’s masks are more SM than bedazzling like Ellis’s, but a mask nonetheless signifies a love of showmanship.

“My introduction to country music was Dolly Parton when I was a kid, and I didn’t know she was a real person,” Peck says. “I thought she was like Elvira or something, because she was this larger-than-life character. That’s the country music I love. People always think I’m playing a character, but that’s not it at all. It’s about a super-heightened version of yourself to tell the story better, which is what Dolly does. She wears wigs—she’s a drag queen, basically—but she sings these sincere, heartbreaking songs, and it’s all very genuine. That’s kind of what I try to do.”

Although Peck maintains his mysterious persona, he hasn’t made up a past that doesn’t exist. He’s an entertainer, not a myth. Peck grew up all over, with a father who was a sound engineer for glam-rock bands including Suzi Quatro and a mother who valued creativity; he has two brothers. A trained ballet dancer and singer obsessed with David Bowie and cowboys, Peck had started performing by the age of 10. He taught himself to play guitar, performed in punk bands and studied the art of mask-making before recording Pony on Gabriola Island in British Columbia.

“I think most people want to discount me as a hipster who’s dipping my toe into this yee-haw agenda,” Peck says. “But the reality is, this has been me for a long time. This has been a dream of mine my whole life.”

His country dream is coming to fruition at a time when change is increasingly unavoidable, at least in terms of integrating queer voices and supporting LGBTQ people. Miranda Lambert dedicated her song “All Kinds of Kinds” to WorldPride 2019, which she attended in New York City; Carrie Underwood’s “Love Wins” hints apolitically at equality; and Maren Morris is a fierce and outspoken advocate, as are Musgraves and Margo Price. Nashville is also evolving: Its music community rallied fast and hard when former Arkansas governor and vocal homophobe Mike Huckabee joined the CMA Foundation’s board in 2018. He resigned in less than 24 hours.

Newer artists like Brandon Stansell are leaning in to mainstream careers as queer people, following in the path of Ty Herndon and Chely Wright, who both came out years after their debuts but whose careers never benefited from their truths. On the indie end, acts such as Karen & the Sorrows, Trixie Mattel and Little Bandit are breaching the genre to make it more inclusive. Brandi Carlile, a queer artist and 2019 Grammy nominee for album of the year, is doubling down on her commitment to the genre, producing country records, singing duets with Dierks Bentley and forming the female supergroup the Highwomen.

“She’s really changing the narrative,” says Peck, who sees a link between how country music has historically sidelined women and how it currently treats the queer community. “I feel like the problem is less about homophobia. It’s a chauvinist problem,” he says. “Female musicians go through this all the time. The gatekeepers of country, as is the way with everything on this planet, tend to be conservative, straight white men. I think that’s kind of ending. I really do believe it.”

Peck has dreams too: of performing at the CMA Awards, singing at Nelson’s ranch and, of course, appearing at the Grand Ole Opry. He thinks they’ll all come true, because despite the mask, he has never been less hidden in his life.

“I genuinely feel like I’m on a horse riding into the sunset, on my own terms,” he says before disappearing into the hotel room with his bed of masks. There’s a cowboy battle raging in Nashville, and Peck has been practicing with his whip.