Peter Knegt

Peter Knegt builds a body of work that treats pop culture as queer culture, using music, film and performance to explore identity, legacy and representation. His coverage centres on LGBTQ artists and icons, pairing personal essay writing with curated conversations and projects that trace how queer stories shape mainstream culture. He works with the arts team at the CBC, where he hosts, produces and curates series that foreground queer perspectives across music, cinema and performance.

Here & Queer and LGBTQ artists in pop culture

Knegt hosts the Canadian Screen Award‑winning talk series Here & Queer, which celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations. The show places queer creators within the broader architecture of pop culture, treating their music, films and performances as central rather than peripheral. Episodes such as his in‑depth sit‑down with Elliot Page focus on the guest’s creative work and public life alongside their personal journey, framing the conversation around visibility, self‑definition and the pressures of fame.

Short‑form pieces and clips drawn from Here & Queer show how he connects these interviews to wider debates about pop culture history. A segment asking whether Gen X is the last generation to truly care about pop culture history links generational attitudes with the preservation of queer stories and artistic legacies. Conversations with artists like Sasha Velour and Priyanka treat drag as a genuine art form, discussing live performance, music and visual storytelling as parts of a coherent practice rather than novelty entertainment. Across the series, Knegt consistently positions queer artists as authoritative voices on culture itself, not just on LGBTQ issues.

Queeries and essays on queer pop icons

Knegt’s long‑running column Queeries interrogates LGBTQ art, culture and identity through a personal lens. The series mixes criticism, history and memoir, with each instalment using a specific subject to examine how queer lives and aesthetics are reflected in popular culture. Over seven years, Queeries developed into a sustained essay project that treated queer culture as a canon worth documenting and debating, culminating in a farewell piece that marked its impact and duration.

His essay on Madonna, written with Anne T. Donahue, is typical of how he approaches music. Framed around the question “Should we be rooting for Madonna?”, the piece contemplates the “Queen of Pop” in light of her latest reinvention, weighing fan loyalty, cultural fatigue and the expectations placed on aging female pop stars. Rather than simply reviewing new work, Knegt situates Madonna’s catalogue within queer history, acknowledging her longstanding relationship with LGBTQ audiences while questioning how that legacy functions in the present. This combination of reverence and scrutiny recurs elsewhere in his writing, where iconic queer figures and pop stars are examined as complex, evolving symbols rather than static heroes.

Emerging Queer Voices and new storytellers

Alongside his columns and talk series, Knegt produces the essay series Emerging Queer Voices for CBC Arts. This project focuses on newer writers and artists, giving them space to articulate their own experiences and cultural critiques. His role here is curatorial: he creates a platform, shapes themes and helps frame these essays as part of a growing body of queer commentary and storytelling.

Related projects extend this curatorial work into visual and multimedia formats. CBC Arts materials highlight compilations of trans filmmakers and other Here & Queer guests that are tied to occasions like Trans Day of Visibility, using Knegt’s interviews and selections to showcase a range of perspectives. These pieces underscore his interest in building archives of queer work — not just spotlighting individual artists, but arranging them into accessible collections that can be revisited by audiences over time.

Queer cinema, festivals and cultural history

Outside his CBC work, Knegt is described as a writer, broadcaster and film curator, and he runs a queer cinema club that extends his programming into live screenings and discussions. His curatorial practice emphasizes the historical dimension of queer cinema, drawing connections between past and present releases and treating festivals, retrospectives and special events as vital sites for queer storytelling. Earlier in his career he wrote extensively about film and has covered topics such as the ongoing importance of LGBT film festivals, arguing for their role in sustaining communities and bringing marginalized work to audiences who might not otherwise encounter it.

This film‑side expertise feeds back into how he writes about music and pop icons. Lists and essays associated with Queeries, including work highlighting “iconic queers in cultural history,” treat musicians, actors and other performers as participants in a shared queer heritage. His own public descriptions of his work emphasize “queer cinema club” activity and “various gay things” he does for the CBC, reflecting a self‑conscious focus on LGBTQ content as the thread tying together his coverage. For story pitches, this means Knegt is most aligned with material that intersects music, film or performance with queer identity, cultural history or questions of representation, rather than with purely technical or industry‑focused music news.