Listen Wider Challenge 2020

25. A protest song by a songwriter who identifies as LGBTQIA+

This week's prompt is a bit challenging, because it requires us to know something personal about the songwriter's identity that is usually not searchable. It's easier to find these if we look for protest songs *about* LGBTQIA+ issues, but the challenge doesn't necessarily require this. "Protest song" is also not a straightforward category; some songs clearly protest specific events or policies, while others are more general calls for peace or change.

Because music is not organized or classified by the sexuality of its creators, it is difficult to construct a search or a tool for finding protests songs by LGBTQIA+ artists. It is much easier to find books and articles about either queer music OR protest songs, than it is to find materials specifically about protests songs by queer creators. While the library catalog and many databases search only the titles, summaries, and other basic information about a source, some tools search the entire text, so they can be more useful for finding, for example, mentions of queer artists inside a book about protest music, or mentions of protest music within works about queer artists. 

Google Scholar is a helpful tool for searching broadly and across full texts. While it isn't as comprehensive or selective as a database or catalog, it can be helpful for these kinds of inquiries.