How Academy Proud Aims to Create ‘A Sense of Belonging’ for LGBTQ+ People at the Recording Academy

After watching LGBTQ+ artists dominate at the 2024 Grammy Awards, Ryan Butler — the Recording Academy’s vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion — says he’s finally seeing his team’s hard work pay off. “After those wins, I’m confident that we’ve done the work that was needed,” he tells Billboard.

That work, for the last two and a half years, has involved building out the Academy’s DREAM Initiative (Diversity Reimagined by Engaging All Musicmakers). Through the new network, Butler’s DE&I team created a series of what he calls “membership resource groups” to help “create dialogue and a deeper understanding of what support looks like” for underrepresented groups — including women, the Black community and plenty of others. Now, with their most recent group, the Recording Academy is looking at what they can do to help the LGBTQ+ community.

During Grammy Week, the Recording Academy officially launched Academy Proud, their latest membership resource group aimed at increasing representation and visibility among their voting body. Partnering with LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD and queer entertainment organization OUTLOUD, Academy Proud officially launched during a Grammy House event on Sat., Feb. 3.

So how will Academy Proud actively benefit the LGBTQ+ music community? Below, Billboard chats with Butler about the new initiative, his goals for driving representation at the Academy forward and the work that still needs to be done for underrepresented communities at the Grammys.

Tell me a little bit about how this initiative got started — when did the concept first come up, and when did you decide to partner with GLAAD and OUTLOUD here?

It’s been in my mind for about two and a half years, when we first started to partner with GLAAD. I wanted to create a network of member resource groups — most companies have ERGs (employee resource groups), but we are so member-focused, that I wanted to be a little innovative in this space and create MRGs. So, I created this network called the DREAM network, and under DREAM we have eight priority demographics, and we proceeded to create MRGs around each one of those demographics. So we have Women in the Mix, the Black Music Collective, Grammys Next Gen, Gold Music Alliance, and now Academy Proud. We also have an MRG for the Latin community, for Indigenous people and for disability and accessibility.

For our readers, can you explain how a member resource group works for the Academy’s membership? What is it that an MRG provides directly to members?

On its highest level, it’s driving representation. This is a way for us to really establish a baseline of how many of our members identify as LGBTQ+, and then [that] helps us figure out what we can do to support that membership, to increase representation in that membership. I feel like inclusion and diversity are often action items — it’s very easy to invite people and include them — but you first really need to create a sense of belonging. So, what the membership resource groups do is create a sense of belonging, and give someone who is maybe Grammy-curious, and who may have joined us at a Grammy House event, to know and understand that the Recording Academy can be their home. 

So what specific initiatives do you see Academy Proud taking on in the coming months or years to actively court a more diverse LGBTQ+ membership base?

Well, I think the visibility of what we did this Grammys Week is going to be amazing for those who may be outside of the Academy wanting to be a part of it, or determining if they’re going to be able to become members. The visibility of having an official Grammy Week activation is huge — but I really want to make sure that we understand what support looks like for the queer community. It’s going to be different for every community. I identify as a Black, gay man; I know that we often talk about intersectionality, but for me, it’s also about indivisibility. I’m always Black, and I’m always gay, and I don’t really live my life in sections. It’s great for us to have that dialogue and to understand how the queer community feels within the music community, and what we as the Academy can do to support the community year round. So if it’s panels, discussions, surveys, gatherings, I want it to be interest-led by the community itself.

We could make a beautiful deck and say “this is what we’re going to do,” but that may not be what the community needs. It’s really important for us to be listening, and to really have a deep understanding of what support looks like. What is stopping you from joining the Recording Academy, and if you have joined, what’s stopping you from being an active member? What barriers do you see to becoming an elected leader? That’s really how we change — it’s about representation on our board of trustees, in our elected positions, as presidents of our chapters.

I know you’re still in the early stages of the initiative here, but in those early stages, has there been any particular feedback that provided a solid baseline of where to start?

I think the recognition is where we really needed to start. In the queer community, we understand that we are the innovators, we understand that we are on the front end of helping to curate and cultivate what’s happening across the culture. I think the first step was the Recording Academy recognizing that, and recognizing the contribution and the impact that the queer community has on music and other cultural areas; music, fashion, film, etc. For us to actually recognize that, I don’t think there’s many organizations that are really standing on the fact that, but for the contributions of the queer community, we would not be where we are today. 

The launch of the initiative happened in tandem with this year’s ceremony, which saw a lot of historic wins for the LGBTQ+ community — alongside having a wide range of LGBTQ nominees, three of the Big Four winners were queer women. To what do you attribute this uptick in queer representation at the Grammys? 

It’s really because of the hard work we’ve been doing across all of our verticals. Our philosophy is going from the inside out — we’re just now starting to see the “out” part, but the work has been in progress for years. You really have to build a place where someone feels like they belong. Yes, we could have launched Academy Proud two years ago, but we wanted to make sure the LGBTQ community felt like they belonged at the Academy. From here, we just keep moving forward and increasing the representation on our national board and in our programming, and making sure that representation is not just isolated to the month of June. 

With those bigger strides, there are also areas where representation is still coming up short — there has been a noticeable lack of trans and non-binary nominees over the last few years, even as the number of LGBTQ+ nominees grew year-over-year.

We can never celebrate too early, and there’s plenty of work still to be done, but I feel like we are in a much better position now. When DE&I is being attacked in so many spaces, I am proud and honored to know that the Recording Academy stands firm in supporting it, and it’s still a part of our values, and we understand how much better we are when we have the contributions of everyone.

That’s especially true as the political right continues to push anti-LGBTQ bills and laws, including laws that aim to restrict performers’ rights to free speech and expression. How do you look at combatting those restrictions from the perspective of providing DE&I resources for the Academy’s membership?

It’s about creators, and it’s about being there 365 days a year. We’re known for Music’s Biggest Night and the awards show that we do, but we’re working through the rest of the year, not just on Grammys night. Whether it’s our advocacy and public policy team in Washington, D.C. or our DEI team, the Academy is here protecting and advocating on behalf of all creators. Whenever there is a creator in a space facing a barrier, it is our job to make sure that we eliminate that barrier, and allow that creator to be their full self. 

I want to go back to talking about the trans community, though, because they are the ones being most directly affected by that legislation. With this lack of trans visibility in the music industry at large, including at the Grammys, how does this initiative specifically aim to uplift the voices not only of trans and non-binary artists, but trans and non-binary workers throughout the industry?

That work is not just isolated to Academy Proud — it’s also part of Women in the Mix, where we made a very conscious decision to not use terms like “women-identifying.” We’re here for all women — if you are a woman, you are a woman. We released our Women in the Mix study, and it was the first study that surveyed gender-diverse people in the industry. Now, we do have a baseline for that, and recommendations surrounding that. It really is about that crossover and overlap between our membership resource groups. We are absolutely dedicated to uplifting the trans community, through both Academy Proud and Women in the Mix.