Lil Nas X and pop's gay sexual revolution

With his sexed-up performances and on-stage kisses, Lil Nas X is the most talked-about man in pop. He's part of a wave of queer stars asserting their sexuality, writes Louis Staples.

Lil Nas X is the most homoerotic man in music right now. As he gears up for the release of his debut album Montero this summer, the singer and rapper, who first hit the big time with the 2019 hit single Old Town Road, has put his sexuality front and centre of his campaign. Released in March, the video for the album's lead single Montero (Call Me By Your Name) saw him pole-dance into the fiery depths of hell, before giving the devil a lap-dance, while wearing thigh high boots. Performing the song on Saturday Night Live in May, he was clad in a leather two-piece painted with red flames, with his oiled-up torso on display, as half-naked men danced behind him, and one of them even licked him. Then, in another appearance at the BET awards a couple of weeks ago, he went one step further, giving a passionate kiss to one of his backing dancers while dressed as a pharaoh.

Warning: this article contains strong language that some readers may find offensive

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As for those who might take issue with such displays of queerness? Lil Nas X has positively revelled in provoking them. The devilish video for Montero was, above all, his way of turning homophobic rhetoric – which has long described gay people as sinners who are destined for hell – on its head, while the lyrics practically drip with arousal. Then after the BET awards, he responded on Twitter to complaints about his kiss by joking that he would have sex on stage next time. This is clearly about more than just provocation, though: just before Montero dropped, he posted a letter to his 14-year-old self on social media, saying that he’d made the song to help normalise queerness, and queer sexuality. "I know we promised to never be 'that' type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret," he wrote. "But this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist".

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The rise of Lil Nas X is representative of an era where gay sex is taking up more space in music than ever. Other younger pop stars who have put their sexuality front and centre in their work recently include Olly Alexander, the former frontman and now sole member of British band Years & Years. He also subverted the homophobic association between homosexuality and sin in the lyrics and video of his 2018 single Sanctify, a song about sex with a man who is still in the closet. Australian pop star Troye Sivan's 2018 album Bloom featured numerous references to sex with men. When it comes to female artists, meanwhile, Hayley Kiyoko has been described by fans as a "lesbian Jesus" for her sexy pop bops, while pansexual singer and actor Janelle Monáe's hyper-sexual, vagina-themed video for 2018 PYNK catapulted her to queer icon status. More recently, bisexual rapper Cardi B's record-breaking, joyfully lasciviousWAP, contained the most-googled lyricsof 2020.

The 'don't ask, don’t tell' years

Of course, the LGBTQ+ stars of today are part of a long lineage of gay pop icons, stretching back to the likes of Elton John, George Michael and Freddie Mercury. When these musicians first hit it big, it was a very different era: in the 1970s, disco had allowed queerness in pop to flourish for a brief moment with US acts such as Sylvester and The Village People, while in the UK punk group Tom Robinson Band released the seminal gay protest anthem Glad to be Gay in 1978. But as the Aids pandemic worsened in the 1980s, gay men became tabloid targets, and while speculation over stars' sexuality was rife, they remained in the closet, prevented from expressing their sexuality in their work in any overt ways. As critic Alfred Soto wrote in a 2016 tribute to Michael following his death, fans back then were "fine with queerness so long as the artists didn't ask or tell". David Bowie – who traded on an androgynous aesthetic and a hedonistic public persona – had found this out the hard way. He regarded coming out gay in 1972, then bisexual in 1976 (before re-assigning himself as a "closet heterosexual" later on) as one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Bowie said in a 2002 interview that bisexuality made things "a lot tougher" in the "puritanical" US and "stood in the way of so much [he] wanted to do". In a 2007 interview, Boy George also attributed the downturn of his career in the US with coming out as bisexual on television in the 1983, before coming out as gay years later.

There were exceptions, who capitalised on controversy relating to their discussion of gay sex. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's iconic 1983 hit Relax, a song about anal sex with a video set in a leather club, was famously banned from TV and radio by the BBC, but it still became one of the best-selling singles ever in the UK. Meanwhile, British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat's successful 1984 debut album highlighted the unequal age of consent for gay men in the UK at the time. The group headlined the famous Pits and Perverts concert in London's Electric Ballroom to raise funds for campaign group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, an event which was portrayed in the 2014 film Pride. However while these acts were able to make a momentary splash as gay provocateurs, expectations were different for big-name artists hoping to carve-out long-term careers in the mainstream, whose public image was more tightly monitored by record label bosses.

Such examples aside, music's association with queerness for a long time was a primarily clandestine one. In A Very English Scandal, the recent TV drama starring Hugh Grant about the gay sex scandal that engulfed British politicianJeremy Thorpe in 1979, the adjective "musical" was used as a euphemism for a man being gay. Pop, in particular, is a genre that has long been a covert outlet for queer sexual expression, as culture journalistBrennan Carley points out. "Gay pop stars can be – and have been – subversive about slipping in references that change our language and thoughts about gay sex," he tells BBC Culture. "The more that happens, the less people feel uncomfortable hearing about it." A classic example is Lady Gaga's "bluffin' with my muffin" lyric from her 2008 single Poker Face, which was her first musical reference to her own bisexuality.

What feels different now, though, is that young, mainstream artists are referencing queer sex in a way that goes far beyond subtle implication: they are truly out and proud. And they are doing so to a chorus, in the main, of celebration and acceptance. There was a predictable furore in response to Lil Nas X's Montero (Call Me By Your Name) video and its subversive satanic theme: footage of US pastors branding the rapper a "Satanist" began to circulate the internet and Fox News hosts expressed anger, while conservative commentators called out the young rapper on Twitter. Yet these voices felt very much like an angry minority and the song went straight to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. 

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As a marker of how things have changed only relatively recently, compare the reception of Lil Nas X to that of another gay male US pop star, Adam Lambert, when he emerged just over a decade ago. First of all, just before appearing in the final of American Idol in 2009, supposedly "scandalous" photos of him kissing another man appeared online and sparked national conversation. Fans subsequently attributed this as the reason for him losing out on the crown, given that an openly LGBTQ+ performer has never won the series. Then later that year, while performing his debut single at the American Music Awards, the now publicly-out Lambert caused uproar by kissing a male backing dancer. CBS blurred out the kiss, which drew thousands of complaints, from its televised broadcast. Jarett Barrios, then-president of GLAAD, claimed that the censorship "reinforced an unfortunate double standard that is applied to gay performers".

However, Lambert was unapologetic when he was outed in the press, and in the face of outrage at his televised kiss. With this response, he was picking up the proverbial baton passed to him by George Michael, who became very public in his embrace of his sexuality in 1998, after he was outed via his highly publicised arrest for cruising in a Los Angeles public toilet. With the single Outside, he matched sexually upfront lyrics with an irreverent video in which he played a police officer, turning the tabloid attempts to shame him on their head. In the aftermath of the peak of the Aids crisis in the UK, this gave a generation of gay men – who had grown up under homophobic Section 28 legislation – a much-needed shame-free celebratory image of gay sexuality in mainstream culture, and Michael became an exemplar for gay musicians looking to assert themselves.

Why stars have sexed-up

Amelia Abraham, author ofWe Can Do Better Than This, a new book exploring the future of LGBTQ+ rights globally, says that the new wave of sexually-open queer pop musicians reflects the much wider shift in attitudes towards queer sexuality. But also, it's gratifying that it's not just gay men who are dominating such discourse anymore. "Lesbianism and queer femininity have been more invisible, historically, compared to gay male sexuality and I think that is changing, and it’s important to see," she says. "It reflects a broader shift in society, where more women are comfortable talking about same-sex attraction. We have to thank feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and the people at the forefront of culture who have stuck their heads above the proverbial parapet to improve visibility."

The contribution of some huge female pop acts in normalising acceptance of queerness can't be understated, including queer stars like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga. Carley thinks Gaga is the most "brightly shining example" of a pop star normalising queer sex over the last decade. "We're 10 years on from Born This Way, which might not have reinvented the wheel with its sound, but it absolutely helped infiltrate culture in a way that moved the LGBTQ+ message of positivity and acceptance along," he says. "As more musicians like Gaga come along and follow her through the door she and others before her helped to open, we get closer and closer to mass destigmatising of queerness."

Social media has also played a role in queering music – and allowing stars to be frank about their lives, when it comes to their sexuality and otherwise, in their own way, unmediated by the industry or the press. In 2012, Frank Ocean changed the landscape of hip-hop forever when he revealed in a Tumblr post that his first love was a man. Without him we probably wouldn’t have Lil Nas X, who originally came to stardom when Old Town Road went viral on TikTok and came out publicly on Twitter in 2019. Troye Sivan started out on YouTube and Cardi B became a viral celebrity on Instagram before she first topped the charts with Bodak Yellow in 2017. These platforms have allowed queer artists to build a following without waiting for record companies to take a risk on them. It also gives them a way of communicating directly with their audience and addressing criticism – or prejudice – head-on.

However, when it comes to commerciality, queer artists have still faced an uphill battle in recent years – and particularly when they sing about sex. In a 2019 piece for GQ magazine, pop-culture writer Alim Kheraj wrotethat queer artists were struggling to make money: "the sour truth of it all: queerness still, it seems, isn't bankable". Kheraj observed that Hayley Kiyoko was the only openly queer artist to break into the top 40 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2018 – despite it being a year nicknamed "20GAYTEEN" by Vice Magazine, using an expression coined by Kiyoko herself, for its proliferation of young queer people across popular culture. Sam Smith's album sales began to fall at the same time as the British singer became more public about their queer sexuality (including with a much-discussed appearance on US talk show Watch What Happens Live). This mirrors what we have seen in Hollywood film, where queer sexuality is still allowed only so long as it is relatively desexualised or not too queer: Call Me By Your Name and Bohemian Rhapsody are just two recent examples of films that starred straight actors and were accused of sanitising their characters' sexuality for mainstream audiences.

Alamy

But Lil Nas X and Cardi B seem to be breaking this cycle. In fact, their hyper-sexual performances and videos seem to be driving their commercial success. Now, it feels like pop music could be uniquely placed to facilitate a wider acceptance of overt queer sexuality within mainstream culture because, as well as providing space for ambiguity and innuendo over the years, it is a medium that also thrives via controversy, spectacle and experimentation. The 2003 MTV Video Music Awards – when Britney Spears and Madonna infamously kissed – and the video for Christina Aguilera's smash hit Beautiful – which featured same-sex couples kissing – are two examples of watercooler pop music moments that platformed same-sex intimacy. Carley says Katy Perry's 2008 hit I Kissed a Girl, which saw Perry flirting with same-sex attraction, is, while flawed, another important example of this type of "moment". "It's the (semi)-problematic-in-retrospect banger that launched a thousand thinkpieces," he explains. "But it certainly got a lot of straight listeners thinking about queerness in a way that may have been retrograde, but at least got the gears turning".

The suspicion over 'queer baiting'

Increasingly, though, audiences are becoming more sceptical of displays of queer sexuality that they suspect to be ersatz. In 2018, Girls – a 2018 collaboration between Rita Ora, Cardi B, Charli XCX and Bebe Rexha – aped Perry's suggestiveness but was much more harshly criticised. The song's lyrics, which included the insinuation that girls only kiss after drinking red wine, were called out by Kiyoko, among others, for fuelling "the male gaze while marginalizing the idea of women loving women". Fans accused Ora, in particular, of "queer baiting" – a marketing technique in which creators hint at, but then do not actually depict, same-sex romance in order to generate publicity and sales. This backlash led to the unfortunate situation where she then felt the need to address the backlash by publicly coming out as bisexual. 

Discourse around so-called queer baiting often shows us that there's distrust among LGBTQ+ audiences. After so many years of watching queer stars be shunned as soon as they were too open about sex, it's hardly surprising that some might feel uncomfortable with queer people and sexuality being used in a way that doesn't feel authentic. "I'm not interested in going around asking people to prove their bisexuality, but I think these songs [like Girls] and the context surrounding them often come off as insincere," says Abraham. "It feels an appropriation of queer culture to sell records."

In that sense, it still feels impossible to separate the expression of queer sexuality in music from the wider political struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Dr David Bretherton, professor in music and queer music theory at the University of Southampton, doesn’t think it's a coincidence that queer sexuality is becoming more prominent in English-language music at this particular moment in time. "[In the US during the Trump administration], there were rollbacks of protections [for LGBTQ+ people], and progress [on LGBTQ+ rights] seems to be stalling in the UK. Suddenly things aren’t moving forward." Bretherton thinks artists being "unapologetically and explicitly queer" could be a reaction to this – a way of trying to protect the gains LGBTQ+ people have fought so hard for. "One way to protect your rights is to exercise them. Trump is gone for now, but even so, I think that's what queer musicians are doing now: they're saying 'we're not going anywhere'".

Alamy

In the past, many queer pop stars were trailblazers in identity alone, when it wasn't marketable or profitable for anyone to even appear to be LGBTQ+-friendly. Carley thinks this helped pave the way for today's musicians to be sexual: "We are where we are today because of our forebears. [Previous stars] might not have been in a place to be open about gay sex in their music, but Olly Alexander and Lil Nas X are [able to] because of the trails they blazed before us." When he announced Montero, Lil Nas X was open about the fact that the homoeroticism in his work has a purpose. "People will be angry. They will say I am pushing an agenda. But the truth is: I am," he wrote. "The agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people's lives and stop dictating who they should be."

For LGBTQ+ musicians, this moment – where, finally, there could even be a perceived economic benefit to flaunting their sexuality – might be an opportunity. Time will tell whether Lil Nas X can harness the power of controversy and ride the tidal wave of love from his queer fans to long-term superstardom. Now that a new generation of queer music trailblazers like him are opening not just the closet door, but the bedroom door too, others should be able to grind, lick and pole dance their way through it. Pop will always find a way to thrive off controversy. But one day, perhaps the very representation of gay sex in songs and music videos won’t generate the same level of outrage, because it will be a less taboo part of pop music and wider society. And if that ever happens, queer artists will thank the stars of today, and yesterday, for daring to share their sexuality with the world.

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