In early 2011, Karen Pittelman recalls, she was having a hard time finding a place for her new country band, Karen & the Sorrows, to play that “felt like home.” Her previous band, the punk quartet Royal Pink, had encountered plenty of queer-welcoming venues. But though their music fit in the alt-country mainstream — narrative songwriting with touches of pedal steel and twang — there was not yet a space in the New York country music scene that centered on queer performers.
Pittelman, co-founder of the Trans Justice Funding Project and author of Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change, decided to take matters into her own hands…