Why the first GAYFOLK album has a title like a news headline

The first album in the trilogy is called «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», New planet called GAYFOLK discovered. Read it aloud and it sounds like a newspaper headline. The kind that runs in the science pages, next to a blurry photo of a point of light, that people talk about over breakfast without quite understanding what's happened but with a feeling that something has changed.

I wanted it that way on purpose. And since almost nobody asks me about the title, I'm asking myself.

A headline doesn't give opinions. It reports. «Descubierto», discovered, is a dry word, a past participle with no subject. It doesn't say who made the discovery or how. It simply states that something now exists that we didn't know existed before. I liked that coolness for opening a story that is about to get anything but cool.

Because that's what happens when you find a place where you can be who you are. At first you don't experience it as a party. You experience it as a fact. There's a place. It exists. I've seen it. Everything else, the feelings, the mess, the longing, comes later, and that's what the second and third albums are for.

The first act is the moment of the news. The instant the map in your head suddenly feels too small.

Why a planet

I could have chosen a city. A neighbourhood. An island, which is what people usually choose when they want to talk about a refuge. I thought about all of those and they felt too small.

A city you can look up on a map and buy a ticket to. A neighbourhood is one metro stop away. An island, a ferry at most. A planet has another scale. It's genuinely far away, it has its own air, its own rules, and you don't know whether you can breathe there until you arrive. That describes fairly well how a place where you don't have to hide anything feels from the outside. It seems out of this world. Literally.

The planet also allowed me something I adore: cheap science fiction. The B-movie kind, with cardboard rockets and silver suits. That aesthetic is deeply camp, and camp is my home. I loved the idea of telling something as serious as finding your place in the world in the vocabulary of an over-excited astronomer.

What GAYFOLK means

The planet's name joins two English words understood across half the world. Gay, which needs no explanation. And folk: people, the community, the popular. The song you hum in the kitchen, not the one performed in a concert hall.

That mix interested me because it's what I do. Queer alternative pop in Spanish, with humour and a whiff of copla. Copla is folk in its own way: the people's music, which everyone knew by heart and repeated while hanging out the washing. GAYFOLK is the same thing, with a different kind of neighbours.

Some people have told me the name sounds odd in Spanish. Probably. Newly discovered planets always have odd names.

Discovery as the theme

Now the part that really matters to me.

Many people think the key moment in a queer life is telling people, the famous coming out. I think there's an earlier moment that gets talked about less: the moment you find out a place exists. That there are other people like you who live well, who laugh, who have ridiculous exes and nosy neighbours like everyone else. Before deciding anything, you have to know it's possible.

That knowledge is the first act. It isn't courage yet. It's wonder. Sometimes it's a little anger too, because you realise nobody had told you.

I think it's a beautiful moment, and one songs rarely touch. Songs tend to go straight to the drama or straight to the celebration. Wonder is left in the middle, without a song of its own. I wanted to give it a whole album.

The first album doesn't resolve anything. That's its charm and also, I admit, its risk.

Anyone looking for a happy ending in the first act will go home disappointed. The planet is seen but not stepped on. The story ends with someone looking up, knowing something new, without having moved their feet yet. Some listeners find that too little. I understand. Sometimes I do too, and then I think again: if the first album resolved everything, the other two would be redundant.

I also know some people come to the trilogy from the end, through «El día de la liberación» (Liberation day), because it's the most festive. That doesn't bother me. But I think they miss the surprise. A party is more fun when you remember there was a day you didn't even know the place it's held in existed.

Why in three acts

I could have made one long album. It wouldn't come. The story had three very different moments and each one needed its own air, its own cover and its own title. I thought of the trilogy the way you think of a play: cut the first act and the audience arrives at the second without knowing why the characters are so nervous.

The first album is the one that introduces the world. It tells you where we are, what this is called and why it matters. I made it with someone in mind who arrives knowing nothing about me, the way someone lands on a planet without a guide.

All three albums are free to download, no sign-up, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas, and also at gayfolkplanet.com. I'd recommend starting here. With the news.

Everything else, songs, lyrics and music videos, is at mikesaintlouis.com.