Songs as a community's diary

History books record the laws, the marches, the important dates. Good that they do. But if, fifty years from now, someone wants to know how a gay man lived in any old Spanish-speaking city on a Tuesday afternoon, they won't find it there. They'll find it, if they're lucky, in songs.

For a while now I've been thinking of my songs that way: as entries in a diary that isn't entirely mine. A collective diary, messy, written in scraps, belonging to a community that for a long time had nobody to write down its small things.

Small things are history too

There's a widespread idea that important songs have to be about important things. Freedom, struggle, Love with a capital L. Those songs exist, and they're needed. But everyday queer life isn't made only of big moments. It's made of neighbours who stare, boyfriends who never help with anything, diets abandoned by Wednesday.

When I give a song a title like «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet) or «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour), I'm noting down something that would never make the papers. And precisely for that reason it feels valuable to me. A community isn't understood only through its victories. It's understood through its quirks, its in-jokes, the way it complains about the same problems as everyone else, but in its own style.

The songs of PLANETA GAYFOLK keep returning to gay love, exes, pride, self-esteem and everyday life. That last one, everyday life, is what interests me most as a chronicler. The others already have plenty of songs. The daily life of a gay man who does the shopping, rows with his partner over the remote and laughs at his own luck has far fewer.

273 pages

In about two years I've released 273 singles and more than 280 music videos. Put like that, it sounds like a production figure, almost industrial. I'd rather see it another way: they're 273 pages of a diary. Some are long and others barely a note. Some now strike me as spot on and others make me cringe a little, as happens with any diary when you reread it.

You don't write a diary so every page is perfect. You write it so that, together, the pages tell something. If someone listened to all 273 in one go, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone in a hurry, I think they'd get a fairly faithful picture of what worried, amused and hurt at a particular moment. Contradictions included.

That quantity has its downside, of course. Some people think so much output cheapens each song. I understand. Sometimes I think so too. But a diary written only on the good days ends up a photo album, not a diary. And I wanted something closer to the latter.

An archive you can look things up in

Diaries have a problem: they get lost. They stay in a drawer, get thrown out in a house move, nobody knows where they are. Something similar happens with songs. They come out, get played for a season and then vanish into the depths of the platforms.

That's why it matters so much to me that mikesaintlouis.com has an A to Z lyrics section. It has its practical side, of course, but above all it means the diary can be read, searched and quoted. Years from now, if someone wants to know what a song said about a boyfriend from Albacete or a first drag queen, they'll be able to find it written down, without having to transcribe it by ear.

The GAYFOLK trilogy is another way of ordering that diary. If the singles are loose entries, the three albums are the chapters. «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK» is the chapter where you find out there's a place where you can be who you are. «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» is the one about longing. «El día de la liberación» is the one about arriving. A story in three acts that, deep down, is also the story of many lives.

What you write so as not to forget

Some communities have lost much of their memory because nobody wrote it down, or because it couldn't be written down. LGBT people know a lot about that. Whole generations whose love stories were told in whispers, or never told, and whom today we know only in fragments.

Songs have often been the only place that memory was kept. A lyric everyone in a bar knew by heart, a song everybody recognised that on the surface was about something else. I find that a beautiful inheritance and a slightly sad one at the same time.

I have a luck others didn't: I can write without disguise. I can put «novio», boyfriend, where once you had to put something else. I can talk about exes, diets and neighbours without hiding who I am. And I think that obliges me to something. Not to waste that freedom writing only about the big things. To note down the small ones as well, because small things are the first to be forgotten.

I don't know if anyone will listen to my songs in fifty years. Probably not many people, and that's fine. But if just one goes looking in that archive for how a gay man laughed at his troubles in this era, I'd like them to find something. Even if it's only a nosy neighbour.

The full lyrics, sorted from A to Z, are at mikesaintlouis.com.