The Gay Divorcees: A Valentine's Day Listening Party

Performance Studies Alumni Ethan Philbrick (M.A. '12, Ph.D. '18) and Julia Steinmetz (M.A. '06, Ph.D. '17) and their band The Gay Divorcees host a Valentine's Day listening party. 

Throughout February 2021, The Gay Divorcees will be streaming their album of songs over the toll-free number 1-855-GAY-DIVO. On Sunday, February 14th, they 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.

The Gay Divorcees is a band of real-life queers who got gay married and gay divorced, led by composer Ethan Philbrick, who have come together during a pandemic to write songs about getting into and out of state-sanctioned intimacy 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. Divorce your old patterns! Divorce your broken political systems! Divorce your inherited ideologies!