CWs: discussion of biphobia, homophobia, and transphobia
The number of times I have Googled “is this singer/songwriter gay,” usually after misinterpreting some vague lyrics about switching teams or being your authentic self, is disheartening. Not only does the process of typing such a direct and reductive sentence into the search bar feel like a betrayal of the beautiful subtlety and nuance that queerness allows, but the part that comes next often makes me want to rip my eyeballs out. Most interviews with artists cannot be powered through with a simple command-F. Instead, they require you to read more closely than the philosophy text you’re currently putting off. Sometimes the interviewers don’t want to ask directly, so they tiptoe around asking about queer identity with questions about allyship and lyrical inspiration, but often, the artists respond with frustrating ambiguity no matter how direct the question.
I once spent about 20 minutes on a weeknight combing through an interview with Harry Styles just to get to the line where he says, “I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun. Honestly? I can’t say I’ve given it any more thought than that.” That would be a great answer, because sexuality is something that’s fun, but it just feels disingenuous when his most recent album is literally the trans pride flag, and his lyrics often require his listeners to put quite a bit of thought into sexuality. So if he is not queer, I am frustrated that he might just be using this ambiguity to leave that interpretation open, and if he is queer and choosing to embrace it without labels, I am frustrated by the distrust created by other artists appropriating queer symbols that has caused me to question his identity in the first place.
In another interview with Lizzo, the question was deflected:
Interviewer: “Are you an ally or a member of the queer community?”
Lizzo: “Are you a member of the community?”
Interviewer: “Yes. I’m gay.”
Lizzo: “Oh shit!”
She goes on to say that she is an ally, and she “of course leans heterosexual,” but cannot land on a straight answer (yes, pun intended).
I’m not sure whether the initial confusion, the search process, or the close reading of the interviews wear me down quite as much as the betrayal I feel when I reach the end of my cyber scavenger hunt. Often, the disappointing reveal is that one of my favorite artists was likely not creating art based on an experience of queerness and was not intentionally reaching out to a queer audience. Maybe some artists are genuinely reflecting on their experience without the typical labels, but I have often found that they are either capitalizing on queerness to increase their fanbase and sell their albums or thinking about it so little that they don’t even hear how their lyrics sound. This becomes apparent when Demi Lovato insists that queer audiences were reading too far into her lyrics, or Billie Eilish says she clearly meant something else. When artists completely gloss over the seemingly obvious second meaning of their words or are astonished that their audience could have been listening with a queer lens, that hurts. It is painful to realize that my adaptive subtle signaling and hunger for representation are either completely irrelevant or just convenient marketing tools for someone I admired. No matter the intent, I am left feeling like I almost found something. I allowed myself to relish in the validation and connection but it was wrenched from my grasp at the last second.
An important caveat here is that labels can often be reductive and confusing. For all the good that they do in helping people connect with others and communicate their inner experience, labeling can also put people into boxes. So expecting every famous person to be either openly queer or 100% cishetallo is unrealistic. Celebrities are also people, and they are also just trying to figure their shit out. Who knows, maybe someone who doesn’t publicly identify as queer is still exploring. There are some well-thought-out theories about Taylor Swift’s “betty” being her way of exploring her sexuality through fiction (she is named after James Taylor, so James in the song is her!). But in all seriousness, artists might be in various stages of understanding and expressing their identities, and who can fault them in such an oppressive society? Non-answers in interviews are frustrating, but I sure as heck don’t have it all figured out.
We wouldn’t be in this pickle in the first place if homophobia and transphobia didn’t exist, but they do, and they necessitate labels that are made vulnerable to exploitation. So, how do I protect myself from falling into the same queerbaiting trap while also respecting the privacy of artists, especially closeted and oppressed queer artists just trying to find their way, just like I am? The fact that some songwriters do cross these wires makes me feel a bit less safe. And unfortunately, these queer-coded marketing strategies are common enough to muddy the waters and break down trust between artists and their audiences.
Queer-coded lyrics and suspect relationships between artists and rainbow capitalism are not all in my head; they are actually part of a common phenomenon. Queerbaiting is when artists are purposefully vague and capitalize on queer-coded symbols in order to turn a profit rather than authentically express themselves. And it happens a lot—in TV, movies, books, fashion, but I’ve noticed it especially in pop music. Once I started looking deeper into how artists interact with queer people and looking up lyrics to check my interpretations, everything got a lot messier. I started to see common lyrical themes that kept tripping me up as well as conspicuous but superficial relationships between artists and the queer community.
When I came out recently to a friend, the first thing she did was send me a playlist titled “Gay TSwift Anthems,” and I thought, Sweet! One of my favorite artists is gay?? Nope, sorry. Despite her not-so-subtle lyrics (“shade never made anybody less gay”), she has actually never come out as queer. And to add salt on the wound, the release of her album “Lover” was conveniently announced during Pride Month in 2019, right after a surprise performance at the Stonewall Inn. As if the corporatization of pride month wasn’t hard enough to swallow, it hurt to see one of my favorite artists so blatantly profiting off of it. This is not to say that celebrities and artists that aren’t queer cannot be allies. But to me, it is about how much money they are making off the queer community—which can be a lot given that our purchasing power is estimated to be around $3.7 trillion globally—compared to how much they are giving back. It is not a clear line, and Swift’s $113,000 donation to an LGBTQIA+ group in Tennessee isn’t nothing, but it is less than 1% of her annual income of $80 million, so she could definitely be doing more for how much she is gaining. This ratio is what makes it feel more like exploitation than allyship.
At this point, I started to reconsider the other popstars I thought of as “gay icons:” Carly Rae Jepsen, Maggie Rogers, Madonna, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa, Diana Ross, Lorde, Ariana Grande. After a lot of Googling, I found none of them to be openly gay. The history of straight people (or closeted queer people) being gay icons goes back to Madonna in the 80s. Her music being embraced by gay men particularly at that time was less about her personal identity and more about being able to use her art as a mode of feminine gender expression. Queer people still embrace and co-opt femininity through artists like Beyoncé, and while that is very important and valid for those in the queer community celebrating their femininity, I am looking for something different. In my music, as in the books and TV shows I consume, I am looking for representation.
As an AFAB trans person, part of my own queer rebellion is my masculinity, but also my rejection of the gender binary altogether. Unfortunately, this and my bisexuality come with a side of homophobic and transphobic microaggressions and attitudes from the world around me. What helps me through that is solidarity with other queer people, seeing them go through the things that I go through, feeling the way I feel, and coming out on the other side okay. Seeing people present themselves authentically and still thrive is powerful. It makes me feel less alone and validates my celebration of my own identity. For me, the music itself is not the celebration, but finding it in the first place is. I think we are at a point in history where gay icons are still not really expected to be gay themselves, but at the same time, the line between queer artists and gay icons is blurring.
This creates the opportunity for straight artists to muddle this distinction in the context of their own public perception and identity while potentially profiting from their adjacency to the queer community. And it is possible to do it very subtly, because people like me who are on the lookout for artists to connect to will eat up any queer vibes sent their way. As much as I love belting out, “I’m coming out / I want the world to know” as I drive home from work, as a queer person, I also want to feel like I could be the person in the recording studio creating art that reflects my deepest feelings and experiences that is embraced by the public. I want to see the possibility of my success and acceptance reflected back at me. So my ears perk up when I hear something that sounds queer. It gives me a glimmer of hope that someone else feels my pain and has gotten through it. Because that connection is so rare, I am constantly searching, and I get that much more excited when I come across it. I am vulnerable because it doesn’t take much to get me to tune into possible gay vibes. I am already on alert.
These moments when I thought I felt a connection to an artist and followed false leads began to build up; they started to degrade the confidence and comfort I felt as a member of the queer community and as someone who thought they had an understanding of queerness. Music from those artists appears on queer Spotify playlists, is embraced by queer influencers, or just “felt gay” to me in some way or another. I had felt like, at least in this world, I was on solid footing, but now the ground was shifting beneath me.
Along with this hunger for representation and constant alertness, I started to see other aspects of queerness repeatedly being exploited through queerbaiting. This exploitation capitalizes on the subtlety of queer signaling as well as public perception of queerness as abnormal. This societal attitude frames straight artists that play with same-gender romance as somehow edgier, invalidating bisexuality/romanticism and pansexuality/romanticism by reducing them to an aesthetic.
Let’s start with the idea of coming across as edgy. Think “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. Katy Perry has not come out as bi despite describing bicuriosity in her lyrics, but as long as queerness is seen as something abnormal or unacceptable in society, the imagery of bisexuality is vulnerable to be used as a rebellion for the sake of rebellion. In this sense, bicuriosity and experimentation become tools to upset homophobic audiences, controlling boyfriends, or conservative parents (see the line “I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it”). It becomes a way for artists to brand themselves as not caring about the rules, but that only works when the rules are written to constrict queerness.
Now, I think there is an important distinction to be made here, because my queerness is a rebellion and should be celebrated as such. There is still plenty of legislation making its way through the House and Senate that would give me basic rights like access to healthcare, the chance to participate in sports, and freedom from discrimination in professional spaces. These questions still being debated by politicians are literally about my and so many other queer people’s right to exist in society. So expressing myself the way I do is a daily rebellion, and I appreciate artists who support and celebrate that. But there is a difference between celebrating the rebelliousness attached to queerness and using queerness to develop your own rebellious aesthetic. I honestly feel comforted when I listen to Macklemore’s “Same Love,” because he expresses his feelings about the rights of queer people without pretending to be queer himself. I feel supported when I listen to declarations of support, but I feel violated and distrustful when I hear artists only interacting with queerness by teasing at it.
Queer signaling is another central aspect of my queer experience that I have noticed is vulnerable to be used for queerbaiting. Its exploitation functions in two ways. First, the coded symbols are available for anyone to use, and second, queer audiences have a well-developed sense for picking up on these symbols. I think I listen more closely to lyrics and try to read between the lines because subtle signaling has been part of the survival of queer people throughout history. An adaptation to homophobia and transphobia is a loose aesthetic code used to connect with other queer people. It is not a diagnostic cipher, and it is definitely not a pass to start stereotyping gay people. If you play softball that doesn’t mean you are 100% a lesbian, but if you also wear a lot of flannels and drive a Subaru, that might explain why you keep getting hit on by women.
The development of this system leaves countless queer-coded symbols vulnerable to exploitation by songwriters and PR teams, especially as this aesthetic works its way into the mainstream. The co-opting of this system is such a manipulative marketing strategy because if artists are accused of queerbaiting, they can just claim that it wasn’t their intention, that audiences are reading too far into something, or that those signals don’t always equate to queerness. This deniability is something built into the system for safety, but it leads to easy gaslighting of queer people. Can you blame queer folk for pulling queer interpretations from lyrics? Especially some of these?
“Medicine” by Harry Styles (cover)
“The boys and the girls are here / I mess around with him* / And I'm okay with it”
*heard as either “him” or “them”
“Wish You Were Gay” by Billie Eilish
“I just wanna make you feel okay / But all you do is look the other way / I can't tell you how much I wish I didn't wanna stay / I just kinda wish you were gay”
“I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross
“I'm coming out / I want the world to know / There's so much more to me / Somehow I'll have to make them / Just understand / I'm spreadin' love”
“Thank U, Next” by Ariana Grande
“Plus, I met someone else / 'Cause her name is Ari* / She taught me love (love)”
*easily misheard as “Aubrey”
This last one is actually a common trope in recent pop songs that I have now fallen for three times! I’m calling it the self-love pronoun trap. It happens when artists sing about rejecting relationships with others and loving themselves instead, but they describe themselves in the third person. Here the other two examples:
“Soulmate” by Lizzo
“And she never tell me to exercise / We always get extra fries / And you know the sex is fire / And I gotta testify / I get flowers every Sunday / I'ma marry me one day”
“Liability” by Lorde
“So I guess I'll go home / Into the arms of the girl that I love / The only love I haven't screwed up / She's so hard to please / But she's a forest fire / I do my best to meet her demands / Play at romance, we slow dance / In the living room, but all that a stranger would see / Is one girl swaying alone”
The Lorde song hurt too because I was just half-listening, and I also heard this section of the song:
“The truth is I am a toy / That people enjoy / 'Til all of the tricks don't work anymore / And then they are bored of me / I know that it's exciting”
After hearing the same-gender pronouns and thinking she might be queer, I interpreted the second section as her speaking to the frustration I’ve encountered among people in the bi community. Being used like a toy, as if their only value is sexual experimentation. I heard this and got really really excited! Wow, I thought, an artist with a huge platform is giving exposure to this really nuanced issue that affects bi/pan and other queer people! This is exciting! This will make more people aware of the dynamic and encourage them to empathize with a queer perspective! But alas, after looking up the full lyrics and finding no evidence of Lorde coming out as queer, I realized my mistake. This once again left me questioning my own intuition, feeling less sure of myself in what I thought was my own world. I felt like my small queer space had been invaded. I had almost let this artist in and felt a connection, only it had fallen flat. I had opened myself up for no reason.
I worry that these vague lyrics are eroding the perceived validity of bisexuality/biromanticism and pansexuality/panromanticism. These identities’ expansiveness and adjacency to heterosexuality/heteroromanticism is the fourth aspect of queerness that I feel is being exploited by queerbaiting, and in this case especially, its use influences the public perception of these orientations.
Many of the artists I’ve mentioned so far, although straight as far as we know, have been speculated to be bi or pan, and many queer artists who have gained traction are bi or pan: Lady Gaga, Halsey, Miley Cyrus, Phoebe Bridgers, mxmtoon, and Kesha. So, why do these specific identities get dragged through the mud and who does it hurt?
Bisexuality and pansexuality are often fired at from all sides. Stereotypes that I’ve seen portrayed in media and used by bigoted people on the internet include bi/pan people being greedy, indecisive, confused, hypersexual, and/or unfaithful. From within the queer community though, there is a sentiment that we are not “queer enough.” This plays out through bi/pan folk in straight-passing relationships being invalidated, bi/pan authors being left off of LGBTQIA+ author lists, gay and lesbian people being portrayed much more frequently than bi/pan people in movies and TV shows, and many more scenarios.
As a bi person, this can make me feel like both too much and also not enough to be accepted anywhere. It can feel like I am straddling the line between two communities that both reject me. This invalidation is part of a cycle with queerbaiting. Because the identity is placed in this vulnerable, invalidating position on the edge of the queer community, it is an easy target. This public perception of being right on the edge of queerness can make media or artists palatable for homophobic audiences, but LGBTQIA+ audiences can still latch onto the queerness of it. This works to the advantage of producers and PR teams searching for the largest audience possible. The other part of the cycle is that through queerbaiting, bisexuality/pansexuality/bi-curiosity can be appropriated by anyone, and become fetishized and conflated with promiscuity (see “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry, “Girls” by Rita Ora, “Te Amo” by Rihanna). This further invalidates people who actually inhabit these identities. Thus, the cycle repeats.
This cycle hurts artists who actually identify as bi/pan. Halsey, Lady Gaga, and many others have been accused of queerbaiting, accused of just saying they are bi or pan to sell albums and tickets. This has prompted many openly bi/pan artists, including Lady Gaga, to hesitate to call themselves a part of the queer community. Instead, during a speech in 2016 after the Pulse nightclub shooting, she positioned herself as an ally to the queer community. What kind of message does this send to bi/pan people? That their identities are not valid, but instead just a phase? An act of rebellion? A marketing tool? Bi and pan identities are hung out to dry at the expense of both bi/pan artists and listeners.
For this reason, we need to be careful about how often we throw around the accusation of queerbaiting. Often, it is actually thinly veiled biphobia. If we didn’t have people exploiting bi/pan identities in the first place, actual bi/pan people wouldn’t be getting thrown under the bus like this. But celebrities are often not transparent about their identities, so we are faced with the choice between interrogating queer celebrities and protecting queer consumers from being baited. I am sitting here writing this because I’ve been harmed by the practice of queerbaiting, which has caused me to scour through interviews to pin down peoples’ identities. My own hurt is feeding right back into this accusatory and reductive cycle of mistrust and dishonesty.
I still love a lot of the artists I’ve criticized here, but what I hope to bring to this discussion is a healthy level of skepticism and a validation of my own and maybe others’ feelings of confusion and betrayal caused by queerbaiting music. There’s a chance some artists are not doing this on purpose. There are tropes that likely seep into the subconscious of some songwriters, but we still need to interrogate why those tropes and aesthetics become marketable in the first place. And the impact is still the same. So, if you have ever misheard lyrics or been made to feel abandoned and lonely, you are not alone. Our feelings and experiences and identities are real and not just up for grabs by songwriters and artists only trying to turn a profit, as difficult as they might be to pinpoint. We deserve better. It is not too much to ask to want to see yourself reflected authentically in the media you consume rather than feeling emotionally manipulated.
To help readers continue exploring this topic, I have created a few Spotify playlists. The first one, Queerbaiting Lyrics, includes the songs mentioned in this article as well as other examples of ambiguous lyrics to help you really get a sense for the issue I’ve described here. Especially if you are cishetallo, please listen to these songs and try your best to empathize with how confusing these lyrics can be for a queer person to hear. The second playlist, Queer Space is a collection of openly LGBTQIA+ artists. Listen to this playlist to let your queer soul soar. There is no need to be skeptical of the identities of these artists, so sit back, trust your interpretation of the lyrics, and just sink into the gay vibes <3