When Macklemore’s “Same Love” came out in 2012, the song felt like a revelation, not because I resonated with it on a personal level, but mostly because the homophobic adults in my life couldn’t escape it on the radio. I was a 14-year-old lesbian, one of the only out students at my school publicly in a relationship, and suddenly a same-sex marriage anthem was everywhere. But as a work of art, the Ryan Lewis collaboration, featuring its soaring Mary Lambert chorus, felt totally vacuous, with its G-rated lyrics about not being able to change “even if I tried, even if I wanted to,” and a love who “keeps me warm.” Angst and horniness, those twin pillars of lesbian life, were nowhere to be found, brushed under an anodyne bid for mainstream acceptance.
That song is a far cry from Billie Eilish singing about wanting to eat a girl for lunch, or Reneé Rapp serenading a woman onstage with “One Less Lonely Girl” by Justin Bieber, complete with a recreation of the Canadian pop singer’s classic purple hoodie look. From Rapp and her girlfriend/guitarist Towa Bird letting it “Linger” onstage in London to Kristen Stewart’s steamy gay press tour for Love Lies Bleeding, we definitely aren’t in 2012 anymore. Lesbian sex is present in mainstream pop culture to an unprecedented, often whiplash-inducing degree. The celesbians feel free to be openly horny now, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. This moment has been a long time coming.
Throughout the 2010s, I waited for sapphic pop culture, especially music, that felt like an authentic, non-sanitized representation of queer female desire. But even as pop artists grew bolder in the kind of references they included in their songs, I still felt a similar disconnect as I did with “Same Love.” Songs such as “Girls Like Girls” by ex-Disney star Hayley Kiyoko and even the “Same Love” follow-up “She Keeps Me Warm” by Mary Lambert were feel-good tracks, sure, and they certainly were advancements in LGBTQ+ representation. (Notably, the “Girls Like Girls” video came out two days before same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States.) But their saccharine overtones, and their largely wholesome lyrics, proved almost more alienating than affirming. Admittedly, it was great to hear more from Lambert than the sappy chorus of “Same Love,” and the song represented a vast improvement. But when Kiyoko sang, “Girls like girls like boys do, nothing new,” it felt to me like a dismissal of the novel eroticism experienced by so many women who love women. I heard a spark of recognition in songs like “Closer” by Tegan and Sara, but even that synth-pop anthem was written in the second person, skillfully avoiding any explicit references to same-sex desire.
In fact, the rise of sanitized sapphic pop of the 2010s dovetailed with the moralism of my Catholic adolescence, only heightening the deep sense of shame I felt for being a nonbinary femme who, frankly, didn’t shy away from eroticism. I found refuge in artists like The Internet, whose lead singer Syd crooned, “Girl, I just wanna love you,” way back in 2013 with the sensual R&B jam “Dontcha.” Janelle Monáe wasn’t yet out, but the queer subtext in their lyrics, especially on their 2013 album The Electric Lady, was deeply sensual. That album’s opening track, “Givin’ Em What They Love” — a duet with Prince, no less — ends with Monáe singing about a woman who follows them back to the hotel lobby “for some undercover love.” These were songs in which gay girls got to do more than just hold hands, and in their way, they made me feel a little less lonely.
After same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015, however, there was a sea change. One of the largest goals of the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement had finally been achieved, and our few pop icons no longer had the unspoken obligation to convince people that love was love. In 2017, Hayley Kiyoko graduated from “Girls Like Girls” to “Sleepover,” a song detailing a fantasy about the singer’s best friend with a sexy video to match. Janelle Monáe came out as pansexual in 2018, and dropped Dirty Computer, their most openly queer album yet. (And they truly came out with a bang with the very yonic video for “Pynk,” an ode to the color of the inside of your you know what…) That same year, King Princess, an early Gen Z queer pop star, arrived on the scene, making a splash with songs like “Pussy Is God.”
Now, nearly halfway through the 2020s (if you can believe it), it seems as though the landscape is shifting even more decidedly in a sexy direction. Not only have openly queer female celebrities multiplied, but many are publicly emphasizing sex as a central aspect of their artistic projects. If I were writing a history book about this full-on nosedive into steaminess, I’d probably point to October 2020, when Kehlani and Victoria Monét teamed up for a remix of “Touch Me,” as a pivotal turning point. (Three years later, Monét confirmed that the two singers did date, and that she wrote that song about Kehlani.) Perhaps it had something to do with the pandemic making a bunch of people realize they’re queer or trans, or maybe it was because sexuality, in general, felt inexpressible for two years, but the sapphic pop music mood has only gotten hornier since then. Billie Eilish is one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and one of her forthcoming songs, “Lunch,” contains the lyrics, “I could eat that girl for lunch / Yeah she dances on my tongue / Tastes like she might be the one / And I can never get enough.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, the singer said that her inspiration for the song came from her realization that she “wanted [her] face in a vagina.”
Of course, like any trend, this one has deep roots: Blues artist Ma Rainey was singing about relationships with women way back in the 1920s. It is often frustrating that queer women of color, specifically Black queer women, don’t get the credit they are due for often being at the forefront of sexual liberation, in the music world and beyond. While horny lesbian pop music was near non-existent until recently, it has definitely been a presence in other genres, like R&B (the aforementioned Syd, for example) and rap (see Young M.A.’s whole discography, especially 2016’s “OOOUUU,” which reached #16 on the Billboard Hot 100). It’s a subtle but no less pernicious form of racism that “queer music” in the popular imagination is most often thought of as being composed of white artists — as though queerness expressed by people of color were somehow unintelligible. (It’s a personal mission of mine to expand that notion of “queer music” with our monthly playlists, which I largely co-curate with fellow brown SoCal queer Juan Velasquez.)
That’s why it’s vital to underscore the through lines from artists like Kehlani and Monáe to the current era of brazenly and unabashedly horny sapphic music being spearheaded by Chappell Roan, one of pop’s most exciting new performers. The 26-year-old singer is currently enjoying a meteoric rise in popularity thanks to her viral hit “Good Luck, Babe!” and her truly awe-inspiring Coachella performances, the first of which featured her wearing a tank top that said “EAT ME” in bold letters, paired with cheetah-print leggings and a leather bottom that can really only be described as a pseudo strapon-harness — and of course, her signature drag makeup and larger-than-life red hair. Her most popular track, “Red Wine Supernova,” is “a campy gay girl song that capture[s] the magic of having feelings for another girl,” as she described it in a statement. It is also horny and gay in a way that can’t possibly be ignored, with lyrics like, “I heard you like magic / I've got a wand and a rabbit / So baby, let's get freaky, get kinky / Let's make this bed get squeaky.”
What’s especially remarkable about Roan is that her career is starting out this way, with lyrics about vibrators, and yet she’s still on a trajectory that will take her beyond the realm of being merely “gaymous” into genuine crossover success. That would have seemed impossible just 10 years ago — a testament not just to her star power, but to an overall increase in sapphic visibility. It’s riveting to witness, not just because I myself am increasingly Chappell-pilled by the day, but also because it’s an indication of just how much American pop culture has changed from the days when “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry was seen as a salacious spectacle. (Turns out, people wanted to do a lot more than just kiss girls.)
Consider also that nearly 20 years prior to the release of “Red Wine Supernova,” America lost its mind over a brief, relatively chaste kiss between Madonna, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Video Music Awards. As Vogue noted in its retrospective on the moment, outlets like the New York Post called the performance “kinky” “raunchy” and “explicit.” Discussing the controversy in an interview with Oprah, Madonna asked, “Hasn’t anyone ever seen two girls kiss before?” to which the host responded, “I don’t know if most of America has.” Two decades later, one of pop’s rising stars is singing about actual kinky lesbian sex, while other stars sing about cunnilingus, and yet another is singing, “Can a gay girl get an amen?” in a song on the Mean Girls musical soundtrack.
And while it may seem hypocritical to end this essay with some of the wholesome queer earnestness I decried at its start, I have to confess that this current pop culture moment is somewhat of a balm for my own inner teenager. Conservatives act as though any exposure to queer sexuality is an inherently traumatic experience for young people. But if there had been more pop culture out there that affirmed that it was okay to not just want to hold hands and braid each other’s hair, but to want to fuck, my adolescent years might have proved a little less traumatic, or at least not mired in so much shame.
As cynical as I can be sometimes about representation discourse, it makes a difference to be able to see what your future could look like reflected in media. And sometimes, when I dance along to songs like Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova,” it’s almost like I can feel my 16-year-old self dancing along with me, their punk femme excess and their desire affirmed in equal measure at last.
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