The Gay Divorcees Present 1-855-GAY-DIVO

The Gay Divorcees, a band of real-life queer divorcees, will present 1-855-GAY-DIVO, an album of songs streamed over the toll-free number, 1-855-GAY-DIVO, through the end of February. Led by composer Ethan Philbrick, The Gay Divorcees are an ensemble of nine queer artists of various disciplines who came together during the pandemic to write songs about getting into and out of state-sanctioned intimacy in the 21st century. With the 2015 national legalization of gay marriage a recent memory, The Gay Divorcees mine their own breakups to explore heteronormativity, homonormativity, and queer resistance in the 21st century.

In a moment when many people are trying to figure out how to get out of situations that are no longer working or keep going after the end of something, The Gay Divorcees approach their experience with marriage and divorce as potentially instructive. They declare, "Divorce your old patterns! Divorce your broken political systems! Divorce your inherited ideologies!"

Callers are encouraged to leave a message for The Gay Divorcees after listening to this concert for your phone.

On Sunday, February 14th at 4 PM ET, The Gay Divorcees will team up with the One Archives at USC to present a remote Valentine's Day listening party filled with performances, readings, and other surprises.

Additionally, a 10 x 22 foot billboard featuring The Gay Divorcees's Joshua Thomas Lieberman original artwork, "Escapes," has been installed for the month of February at the intersection of Atlantic and Classon Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

"When I got married in 2008, I was 22 and I could barely imagine the contours of a gay relationship, let alone how to get out of that relationship if it turned bad," says composer Ethan Philbrick. "This project, coming more than ten years later, was a way to bring a group of queer divorcees together to think alongside each other and support each other. Along the way we wrote an album of songs about the confusing specificity of getting a divorce so soon into the era of so-called marriage equality."

Each member of The Gay Divorcees is an artist who was gay married and is now divorced, although each had vastly differing experiences of the institution of marriage: experiences marked by intimate partner abuse, waning romance, gender transition, and the vicissitudes of immigration law. The Gay Divorcees are Robbie Acklen, Lauren Bakst, Lauren Denitzio, Paul Legault, Ethan Philbrick, Ita Segev, Julia Steinmetz, Joshua Thomas Lieberman, and Ashton Young.

Please visit https://divorcee.gay/ for more information.

The Gay Divorcees have been generously supported with commissioning funds from NYU Skirball.

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