Kesha Will Headline Dan Reynolds’ LGBTQ Music Festival, LOVELOUD
Kesha is offering her influence and her vocal skills to the LBGTQ community this June. The singer recently agreed to headline the LOVELOUD festival, an event that was created by Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons. Kesha hopes her participation in the festival will encourage more participation and attendance from her fans. She is also asking people who don’t fully understand the LBGTQ community to attend the event so they can become educated and change their perceptions about LBGTQ culture.
“Please come and let me know if you don’t have the best time ever at this show because it’s going to be such a celebration of love. I think it’s going to be pretty undeniable to be sitting in an arena full of love, and not feel how beautiful of a feeling it is,” Kesha said, according to HuffPost.
Kesha will be headlining the event, which will happen at West Valley City, Utah’s USANA Amphitheater on June 29. Also joining Kesha for LOVELOUD will be a bevy of talented bands, including Laura Jane Grace, Martin Garrix, Daya, Grouplove, K.Flay, Tegan & Sara, PVRIS, and of course, founder Dan Reynolds and his band, Imagine Dragons.
Reynolds has been a longtime supporter of the LGBTQ community and created the LOVELOUD festival to bring together the LGBTQ community so they feel accepted and loved. The idea was to offer a safe event for them to share stories, be themselves, have open discussions about teen suicides in the LGBTQ community, and also to promote knowledge about the LGBTQ community to others outside of the culture.
In 2018, an HBO documentary featuring Reynolds, Believer, demonstrated how major leaders in his own religion, the Latter-day Saints, oppose gay relationships openly. That opposition has caused many LGBTQ youth who also share Reynolds’ religion to experience a damaged self-worth, sometimes even leading to suicide. Reynolds created LOVELOUD as an attempt to prevent this type of damage, and also to promote education and awareness about the LGBTQ community.
Last year, LOVELOUD, with special guest Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, raised over $1 million in donations for several charities, including the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD. This year, Reynolds hopes to achieve a similar result.
“To have a festival that essentially is a gay rights festival and have people from the faith community come out (and) people from the political realm come out… just shows that communities and people that society thinks are on very different sides of the page can come together. It was the far left, the far right. It was religious and non-(religious) all coming to the table and saying, ‘What can we do to fix this problem?'” Reynolds said, according to HuffPost.
