My Queer Longing and ‘90s Country: A Top Ten

Longing is my favorite emotion in music. At one point I had a 3,200-song playlist of songs about longing. And for my taste, country is the quintessential genre for it.

For queer people, denied the same space in society as cis-hetero folks, the longing for acceptance, love, companionship, and fun has long been intensified, including for queer country artists like Ty Herndon and Chely Wright, though they weren’t out during their 1990s heyday.

In the ‘90s, when country’s popularity exploded, the sound of longing changed, too: louder guitars, bolder drums, and harder rocking, riff-tastic tunes like “No One Else on Earth” and “Heads Carolina, Tails California” that literally and metaphorically electrified the longing in country.

In the past decade I’ve dived headfirst into ‘90s country for reasons that have everything to do with the storytelling. I even wrote an extensive article in 2024 for PopMatters with some idiosyncratic choices for my favorite ‘90s country songs.

Most remember ‘90s country for the party anthems (“Friends in Low Places,” “Chattahoochie,” “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”), but the tender storytelling ballads rank among my favorite country songs ever: songs like “You Don’t Even Know Who I Am,” “The Dance,” “Don’t Take the Girl,” “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” and my favorite of them all, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” Brad Paisley’s ode to a stepfather that moved me so deeply and made me cry so hard that I’ve said it “slaughtered me alive and served me up for breakfast.”

In recent years there have been queer covers of songs in the ‘90s country canon, including Orville Peck’s “Fancy” and American Aquarium’s reworking of “Strawberry Wine” as a gay love story, but for me and, I suspect, many other queer country listeners and musicians, the ‘90s offer a different kind of nostalgia than other eras of country. 

Perhaps this tendency has to do with increasing sophistication and discourses on sex in country songwriting (“Strawberry Wine,” “Spilled Perfume”), but I think part of it is the mass appeal of ‘90s country, which many purists decried it for: for many queer listeners, in and out of the rural U.S., country was more musically accessible in the ‘90s than in previous eras, especially with pop and rock influences in the chart-topping work of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain.

I have a habit of projecting my life into songs that aren’t my story–at all–and the more I immerse myself in ‘90s country, the more that intense feeling of identification (not necessarily empathy) becomes conspicuous. 

Here are ten songs that inspire or reflect intense queer longing in me, ranked for the intensity of queer longing I feel with each song.