Jamie Barton continues her fight for equality

The Times
June 2025

When Jamie Barton waved a large rainbow Pride flag as she sang Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms, the crowd fell in love with her. The American mezzo-soprano had chosen the flag because it “represents love, acceptance and tolerance” and because she’d vowed to use her voice and her public profile for good. “I’ve rarely heard a bigger cheer in the Albert Hall,” the Times critic Richard Morrison wrote. He continued: “We may not be a land of hope or glory right now, we certainly don’t rule the waves … at least, however, we now cheer sexual and gender liberation. Some progress, then.”

That was in 2019. Barton will once again publicly fly the flag for LGBTQ+ rights in July, when she sings at the finale of Classical Pride with the London Symphony Orchestra, an event also heading to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. But the general mood has changed drastically since that Proms moment, she tells me from her home in Atlanta, Georgia. “It does feel like a different world, for sure. The screws have been tightened on the queer community in so many ways,” she says.

This year Pride has taken on a different meaning for the 43-year-old opera star, who came out publicly as bisexual in 2014. “I’m reminded of how Pride started as a riot, as a fight for rights, for liberty, for freedom. We are who we are. We are not going to silence ourselves.”

Read the full interview at The Times!