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Lil Nas Humping Satan

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From BBC Culture

Lil Nas X and pop's gay sexual revolution

Lil Nas X has put his sexuality front and centre of his image, as part of a mission to help normalise queerness (Credit: Getty Images)

Lil Nas X has put his sexuality front and centre of his image, as part of a mission to help normalise queerness (Credit: Getty Images)

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 lascivious WAP, contained the most-googled lyrics of 2020.

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.

Continues at

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210708-pops-gay-sexual-revolution

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