“I’ve always wanted to be the Black Elton John,” Roderick says with palpable enthusiasm. “I wanted to be this huge pop star. I wanted the campy outfits. I wanted to be the one sitting down at the piano sometimes, the one prancing around the stage at other times.”
What makes Elton John such a compelling template for Queer artists? Born Reginald Dwight in 1947, Elton emerged during an era when being openly gay could destroy a pop career. Yet he managed a remarkable balancing act—pushing boundaries with increasingly flamboyant performances while maintaining enough plausible deniability to keep his mainstream audience.
For Roderick, Elton represented something profound: “Elton was one of the first Queer people on that scale that I really knew about.” This visibility mattered enormously, especially for a young boy growing up in Detroit’s church choir scene where expressions of Queerness were often condemned from the pulpit.
But Elton’s appeal to Roderick is also his ability to transcended categories—merging classical training with rock and roll, composing for Disney films and Broadway musicals, collaborating with everyone from Lady Gaga to Eminem. This genre-defying path resonates with Roderick’s own multifaceted ambitions: “I want to have a pop career, but also eventually compose for musical theatre as well.”
Between Worlds
For Black Queer artists, navigating the music industry has historically meant confronting multiple layers of expectation and exclusion. Black male musicians often face pressure to project hypermasculinity and heterosexuality, particularly in genres like Hip-Hop, R&B, and Soul. Meanwhile, the more openly Queer spaces within music have frequently centred white artists, from Elton and Freddie Mercury to George Michael and Boy George.
This double bind has meant that many groundbreaking Black Queer artists—from Little Richard to Luther Vandross—faced enormous pressure to code their Queerness, hide it entirely, or face career limitations if they expressed it openly.
New Generations Breaking Through
Recent years have witnessed a remarkable shift as artists like Frank Ocean, Lil Nas X, Janelle Monáe, Syd, Kevin Abstract, and MNEK have achieved considerable success while expressing Queer identities. This new wave has begun dismantling the false dichotomy between “Black music” and “Queer music,” creating space for more nuanced expressions of identity.
Critic Jason King has suggested that these artists have shifted the conversation around Black masculinity in popular music by refusing to compartmentalise their identities or conform to narrow expectations. Their success challenges the music industry’s long-standing assumption that mainstream audiences won’t embrace openly Queer Black artists.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of today’s Queer Black musicians is their rejection of rigid gender presentation. Artists like Lil Nas X, who famously performed on Saturday Night Live in a leather skirt, directly confront these expectations. Their refusal to “tone down” their Queerness for mainstream acceptance echoes Roderick’s defiant artistic philosophy: “If I’m denied something, I 100% [give] a fuck you.”
Creating Without Permission
One of the most significant developments for Queer Black artists has been the democratisation of music production and distribution. Independent platforms have allowed artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers who might have demanded they conform to narrow stereotypes of Black masculinity.
Roderick’s album “In Between,” created during COVID isolation in a tiny Brooklyn bedroom, exemplifies this DIY ethos. “Out of that experience, I think I wrote ‘In Between,’ my latest album,” he explains. The album emerged not from a major label’s carefully managed development process but from personal necessity—processing both a breakup and the collective trauma of the pandemic.
And he needs nobody’s permission to put this album out, except his own. He is creator and gatekeeper.
The Future of Queer Black Pop
As Roderick prepares for a musical career that might indeed position him as “the Black Elton John,” the landscape for Queer Black artists continues to evolve. The increasing commercial success of openly Queer Black musicians suggests that audiences are more receptive than ever to diverse expressions of gender and sexuality.
Yet challenges remain. Commercial radio play, major label support, and mainstream visibility continue to be unevenly distributed. The “ghettoisation” of Queer artists—being relegated to niche markets rather than considered for their artistic merit regardless of identity—remains a persistent issue.
Perhaps the true measure of progress won’t be when we have “the Black Elton John,” but rather “Roderick Woodruff”, the artist who can simply be himself, without qualification or comparison.
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