Photo by Philip Cosores
Father John Misty has joined the ranks of artists using their concerts to take a stance against North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, a newly passed piece of legislation which prohibits transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms that do not match the “biological sex” listed on their birth certificate.
While Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam have canceled their upcoming gigs in the state, others like Against Me!, Mumford and Sons, and now FJM decided the show must go on, but only as an act of protest.
Like Mumford and Sons before him, Father John Misty has promised to give all proceeds from his April 27th show at The Fillmore Charlotte to a local LGBT charity. As he told Rolling Stone, the money will go to Time Out Youth, a nonprofit based in the very city he’ll be performing.
“The bill is obviously bullshit,” FJM said of HB2 in the interview. “[If] I thought playing a show for my fans in North Carolina was in any way some tacit endorsement of this fearful, petty, ignorant nonsense, I wouldn’t.”
Read his complete statement, in which he promises this act is the first step “in investing in the plight of other Americans,” below.
“The bill is obviously bullshit. [If] I thought playing a show for my fans in North Carolina was in any way some tacit endorsement of this fearful, petty, ignorant nonsense, I wouldn’t. I also play states that have oppressive drug laws designed to imprison the disenfranchised, rig elections, deny women their dignity, defend the reckless and insane practice of selling guns and sustain a permanent underclass with hypocritical, opportunist readings of archaic documents written by land-stealers who never intended political privilege to extend past their buddies. These are obviously all huge systemic problems. But for me, this show represents a start in investing in the plight of other Americans.”
Watch Father John Misty cover Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” during a recent gig in Chicago:
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