“After the first Queer Folk Night in Kaustinen, a friend asked where all these people had been over the 10 years they’d been involved in folk music. I replied that they’ve been next to you all the time, wondering where all the other queer people were,” says folk singer Paula Raitanen, thinking back on the rise of queer Finnish folk in recent years.

The second such event was held during the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival in July 2025. The Struts Bar in Helsinki organises monthly Queer Folk Singers' Jam. The group Sateenkaaripelimannit (“Rainbow Fiddlers”) have performed at Oulu Pride events for several years. In November, the Folk Music Club Rahvaanmusiikin kerho in Tampere hosted its first Rahvaan Queer (“Common folk’s queer”) club night. This is all to say, queer folk music is here to stay.

In the past, the Finnish folk field offered the LGBTQIA+ community little to identify with and few role models. Nowadays, queerness is gaining a profile through the music of the Havu & Kuisma duo, solo concerts by Paula Raitanen and Laura Reunanen as well as the groups Sota-akka, Heilakko and Lempivärit, for example. Meanwhile acts such as Suistamon Sähkö and the duo Ville & Tommie challenge binary gender roles in their promo photos and onstage banter.

“I had never heard anyone talk about their queer identity before my partner Havu Palviainen and I went onstage as openly non-binary folk musicians. I’d hoped that someone from the older generation of folk musicians would tell me that this had already been done back in the ‘70s, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened,” says Kuisma Asikainen, who is currently preparing a master’s degree concert at the Sibelius Academy’s folk music department, accompanied by a written work on queer folk music.

Violent tales toughen you up

“My own work started with frustration over why we aren’t sung about – or if we are, why we tend to end up badly,” says Raitanen, adding that it’s especially disturbing when songs feature fictional queer characters who are subjected to violence. “Even if the idea is to raise awareness of abuse, it normalises violence against homosexuals,” she points out.

“It may be that some people deal with their inner trauma through this, but I don’t think the people who wrote those songs were always writing about people like themselves. Because of these experiences, I needed to find out about the actual queer history in Finland,” says Asikainen.

Today, musicians want to do things on their own terms and choose what kinds of stories are told about them. It is an important political choice to create positive stories – or at least ones in which queer people have agency and names.

The power of taking ownership

Queer folk music draws from the core of the tradition. Folk music has always been modified, with succeeding generations adding new verses and themes. Today’s queer musicians continue this with a tradition-conscious approach.

In their songs, Havu & Kuisma draw on traditional Finnish rhymed couplets (rekilaulu, also known as roundelay or Reigenlied). They combine them to create queer interpretations, and sometimes consciously modify the lyrics. Humour and silliness are an important part of the band’s activism.

They also create new songs inspired by LGBTQIA+ history. For instance, an exhibition (M/S Baltic Queers – Experiences of LGBTQAI+ Migration) that closed earlier this year at the Helsinki City Museum told tales of queer migration in past decades to more liberal Denmark, which had more relaxed legislation – a theme that ties in with many traditional lyrics.

Raitanen and Asikainen are also faithful to the tradition when writing new songs. Alongside their research, for example, they’ve written ballads, which are traditionally tragic. Death and misery are also present in their ballads, but the gay lovers eventually get to be together, either in this life or the next.

Not all of the musicians’ topics deal with queerness, says Raitanen. “I’m queer even when I sing about the Titanic or worldly angst. Queerness is just one of the important topics that I want to address in this world,” she says.

The silence of the archives

Searching for queer themes in Finnish folk music has involved pioneering work. The archives do not include such unambiguous songs as in the English tradition, for instance, where a young woman dresses up as a man in order to go to sea. The silence of the archives has led researchers to wonder whether queerness was such a taboo that collectors did not want to record it or if there are other potential explanations.

“There is a lot of material in the archives on difficult, taboo subjects. Researchers have concluded that non-normativity didn’t have a major cultural weight in an agrarian society. For example, love between members of different social classes or the youthful desire to choose a spouse based on romantic interest were much trickier things. The fact that we want to sing about these things directly says more about the present day, as we face more opposition on a societal level,” Asikainen suggests.

In the past, it was common to live in same-sex households even without a romantic relationship, so lovers could pass for being a mistress and a maid, for example.

“In a way, it was easy for couples to live in these conditions, because they didn’t stand out. And apparently, sex between people of the same gender wasn’t considered particularly dangerous, because it didn’t produce illegitimate children,” notes Raitanen. She also points out that a lot of material was not archived, or else was later destroyed, censored or subject to extremely strict terms of use, especially during socially repressive periods.

Normal non-normativity

For folk musicians, the most important queer materials in the archives are the Finnish Literature Society’s oral history collections from 1993 and 2002. The 1993 material led to Jan Löfström’s doctoral dissertation Gender Difference in the Agrarian Culture, which, according to Asikainen, is a kind of bible of queer subjects.

“By studying oral history, we move from the societal to the personal level, which provides an understanding of who and what these people were like – they weren’t just gay or transgender. For example, there was a male couple living in the parish of Ruskeala, one of whom did men’s work while the other did traditionally female work. The latter also grew flowers and spoke enthusiastically about them. These kinds of everyday aspects make these characters from the past more well-rounded. This couple was also able to live in relative peace, even though they were talked about, even further afield. The discriminatory image I had of the past was not the reality represented in the archives,” Asikainen says.

The archives do not show any particular violence or discrimination against those who behaved in a non-normative way. Rather, for instance, a farmhand who worked wearing a skirt was paid the same as others.

Other important sources for artists include various publications on queer history, the collections of the Labour Archives and the Werstas Finnish Labour Museum, court records and medical records from the times when homosexuality was classified as an illness, up until 1981.

Raitanen and Asikainen have given lectures combining archival materials and folk music in various parts of Finland, at folk music festivals and queer-themed events.

Gender-neutral language broadens interpretation

The Finnish language’s gender-neutral pronoun (hän) and terms of affection such as heila (‘sweetheart’) and armas (‘dear’) are useful in interpreting tradition and creating new lyrics.

“You can find a lot of these gender-neutral songs in the archives. It’s been wonderful to come across the neutral use of the word nuorukainen (‘youth’), for example,” says Asikainen, referring to a ballad in which one of two young people sorrows over “that youngster who is the darling of both of us,” hinting at a potential gender-neutral love triangle and even a polyamorous interpretation.

“For example, the band Enkel uses a lot of gender-neutral language in their songs,” says Raitanen. “While it’s important to make specifically queer songs because of the historical lack of them, using gender-neutral language makes songs more universal. Making songs queer doesn’t always mean that they’re only for us, but that they’re also for us.”

Strength from a sense of community

The musicians say they have received strong support for their pioneering work from the Sibelius Academy Department of Folk Music and more generally from the professional and amateur folk music community. The only negative feedback that Asikainen has received was that the venue for the Queer Folk Night event at Kaustinen was too small, so that not everyone who wanted to participate could fit inside.

The event grew out of grassroots networking. First, there was a Facebook group for the queer folk music community, where ideas for the evening were brainstormed. Leino Jylhänniemi took responsibility for organising the event, which attracted hundreds of people.

“Based on the feedback, for many people this was the most significant event of the summer and the whole year, as queer folk musicians from different parts of Finland were able to come together. Networking has made it easier to work and given us the assurance that there are people who are on our side, whether they’re part of our community or allies,” says Raitanen.

Above all, queer joy

“I feel a positive internal pressure to do this work. This is important to me personally,” says Asikainen. “Through my work, I’m able to highlight issues that are important to me as a folk singer, such as the communal aspects of singing and the importance of unaccompanied singing, but when I do it through queer folk music, I can be authentically whole on stage. That’s also important for our community and general audiences, who I can teach through my work. That’s why I’m also doing my written master’s thesis on queer folk music. It is based on theories of activism and affective worldmaking,” they say.

“Art that just reiterates what’s wrong with the world doesn’t change anything. When we create alternate realities and focus on queer joy or entire queer lives, it normalises queerness and shows that we can be an ordinary part of society and life. It’s important for me to show that this has happened before, this is what’s happening now and will in the future as well. All diversity is normal.”

Folk music belongs to everyone

Song jam sessions and workshops also introduce folk music to queer communities, who may have mental images of folk music as musty and outdated. Those who have taken part have been surprised by how radical some of the traditional songs are.

“The best future for folk music would be for it to belong to everyone,” Raitanen says. “That doesn’t only apply to sexual and gender minorities, but in general to attitudes towards singing and who is allowed to sing. At the Struts singalongs, we’ve seen how people who initially didn’t think they could sing have joined in after a few months. As one of my friends said: ‘came for the queers, stayed for the music’. The tradition is strengthened by making room for everyone.”

Translation Wif Stenger.

Featured photo Tiiu Hyyryläinen (Havu & Kuisma performing in Kaustinen).