Out Gay Singer Becomes Leader of Icelandic Protests
In Iceland, where the economic meltdown is far more severe than it is at present in America, a new leader has risen: folk singer and gay equality activist H?rdur Torfason.
Torafson has been called the leader of a movement to reform the Icelandic government, according to a Dec. 1 story in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian.
The prolific singer and songwriter, with two dozen albums to his credit, was not always looked up to as a leader: he spend nearly 20 years in what he called "exile" in Copenhagen after emerging from the closet in 1975: the first famed Icelander to do so.
Along the way, he established Iceland's GLBT equality group Samt?kin ?78.
Now, however, Torafson has caught the Zeitgeist with his criticisms of a government he calls "corrupt and worn out."
That, Torafson says, is only par for the course for an artist, saying that "the purpose of an artist is to criticize authority."
A Nov. 25 article on Torafson at Gawker offers another quote: "They don't have our trust and they are no longer legitimate."
Gawker notes, with tongue in cheek, "That the singer of charming little ditties could become the face of a nation of newly desperate and (for now) hopeless anti-government rioters kind of scares the hell out of us, because if it could happen in that seemingly idyllic country, what surreal end-of-days scenarios await us?
"Will John Waters take up the reins of the new American hobo class, rioting against police until our government is overthrown?"
Levity aside, standing up before authority is now a familiar act for Torafson, who told an interviewer for Gayice in 2004, "I am gay and so of course it has influenced my work."
Continued Torafson in that interview, "Ok, I was the first one to 'come out' in Iceland and it took me more than three years to make a small group of people... understand that we needed an organization [to advocate for gay Icelanders] and I managed to put that together with hard work.
"People were really afraid in those days and for a ferw more years nobody dared to show their face in public as a gay person except I."
Now however, things are different: said Torafson, "Would anybody really care today if you are gay or not? I don't think so."