When Sam Smith released a much-discussed cover of Whitney Houston’s hit “How Will I Know” in 2014, he made two key changes—one daring, the other depressing. He slowed the pace, inverting the original’s froth to bore straight into its pain. But he also neutered the lyric, censoring the “boy” Whitney had pined for to instead aim all his yearning at a genderless, anonymous “you.”
Why would an out gay artist—one frank enough to repeatedly discuss the man whose romantic rejection inspired his breakthrough album—still get cagey about pronouns in a cover? Smith gave a tidy explanation in his Fader cover story: “I’ve made my music so that it could be about anything and everybody—whether it’s a guy, a female, or a goat.” That sounded inclusive enough to snow plenty, especially those who never liked thinking about man-on-man lust to begin with, even within the unseen ether of a pop lyric. But for gay people—and for the increasing population that identifies with them—Smith’s move probably felt like a drag. Certainly that’s how this gay person felt.
Here was the top-selling openly gay star in current pop—as well as the only artist of his sales stature to ever come out during his first flush of fame—still deflecting, still making assumptions about what the mainstream audience wants or needs. In the process, Smith implicitly extended a history of hiding. And for what—the pretense of universalism?
Smith’s lyrical tweak came as a contrast to far more progressive changes in pop, which had begun to gather steam right around the time of his Whitney cover. Over the last three years, increasing numbers of LGBT artists have pointedly used the proper pronoun when singing of their romantic pursuits. That growing list includes Frank Ocean, Tegan and Sara, John Grant, Olly Alexander, Troye Sivan, Kevin Abstract, Mary Lambert, and Chad King of the hit duo A Great Big World. At the same time, Smith’s reticence speaks to something LGBT artists have long felt uncomfortable expressing. Decades after gay artists felt emboldened to announce their identities, many still shield their lusts.
Why has desire lagged so far behind identity in queer pop? Why have so many LGBT stars felt comfortable saying who they are but not who they want?
If you survey the history of queer music over the last century, you’ll see a group of people struggling with these questions, along the way coming up with lots of camouflages and codes to make their feelings palatable. As far back as the 1920s, blues mamas like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang of gay characters, though they didn’t directly express their very real own desires in that direction.
It wasn’t until 1962 that the first man-to-man album of love songs appeared, if quietly so. That shadowy work, recently reissued by Sundazed under the cheeky title Love Is a Drag, featured covers of American standards previously recorded only by women, including “My Man” and “The Man I Love.” This time, they were delivered by a man—Gene Howard, a talented and clearly openly-minded straight guy who’d previously performed as a star singer in Stan Kenton’s band. Amazingly, everyone involved in the creation of this earnestly intended album was straight. The album was intended as a marketing splash, and while it made small waves in hip Hollywood circles, few outside the gay demimondes of San Francisco and Greenwich Village knew it even existed.
Tellingly, there wasn’t another work to vaguely compare with this compilation for at least another decade. Pronoun-proper gay love songs didn’t appear in notable numbers until the “womyn’s music” movement of the ’70s. Lesbian artists like Holly Near, Meg Christian, and Cris Williamson led the way with gender-specific songs, including “Imagine My Surprise” (by Near) and “Sweet Woman” (by Williamson). But their recordings sold only in the ghettoized world of women’s bookstores and coffee shops.
In terms of major label exposure, the first openly gay artists were men, starting with the glam-rocker Jobriath, who referred to himself as “a true fairy” when Elektra Records released his debut album in 1973. The next year brought “out” artist Steven Grossman, whose album Caravan Tonight drew a small cult when it appeared on PolyGram Records. Grossman’s songs centered on identity rather than lust, while Jobriath presented himself as a virtual alien rather than a recognizable human being.
The early ’80s saw several striking assertions of gay sexuality, including Tom Robinson’s cut “Now Martin’s Gone” and Bronski Beat’s “Why.” The latter broke into the UK Top 10 in 1983, despite the mention of a gay kiss in its lyrics. Reflecting the extreme outlier role of those artists, however, anger fueled far more of their songs than eros. It wasn’t until the spread of AIDS that a full wave of major pop stars took that first step of at least coming out. Even then, it took a full decade of pressure from activist groups like Act Up and Queer Nation—as well as tens of thousands of deaths—to make that happen.
Finally in the early to mid 1990s, we saw the first “out” mainstream stars, starting with women like k.d. lang, Melissa Etheridge, and the Indigo Girls, followed by men like Elton John, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and Rufus Wainwright. Many of these stars had hinted at their sexuality for years, and certainly clued-in fans sniffed out the truth long ago. But the need to make things crystal clear took on a greater urgency with LGBT lives on the line. Even so, these artists rarely mentioned the genders of their lovers in their songs.
A crack in queer pop’s last big taboo didn’t start until 2012, when Frank Ocean sang of a “boy” who obsessed him in “Forrest Gump”—gender specificity that listeners have come to casually expect from Ocean. By 2013, Mary Lambert was repeatedly crooning the chorus “she keeps me warm” in Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Same Love,” a hit initially recorded for the same-sex marriage battle in the trio’s native Washington. Perhaps the most overt gesture quietly arrived last year from Kevin Abstract, the Atlanta rapper (and sometimes singer) who offered an ode to his American Boyfriend to a genre that had long made macho conventions central to its identity.
Despite such changes, some of the artists who forged them struggled with their decision. A Great Big World’s 2015 hit “Hold Each Other” found its two members—one gay, one straight—each making the gender of their romantic pursuit plain. But the impetus for this came from the hetero member of the duo, the one used to expressing his sexuality without consequence. The group’s gay member, Chad King, told Billboard that his first thought upon hearing that suggestion was, “I can’t do this, no one does this.” He had spent his whole life singing about girls “because it’s just what people do… that’s what the pop world is like.”
And to a great degree, it still is. Two decades after top singers first came out in significant numbers—and more than 40 years since the modern gay rights movement began—we have to wonder why the honest use of pronouns has been so recent, and so rare. A key answer, it seems, reflects those elements that have been successful in mainstreaming the modern LGBT movement over the last decade and, just as importantly, those that have not. Undoubtedly, the most effective strategy in selling the movement to the masses over the fast-advancing last decade and a half has been the near total elimination of the sex from the discussion. Gay politics in the millennium has focused on three decidedly chaste and conservative issues: the rights to join the military, get married, and have children. It doesn’t get more heteronormative than that.
This approach stands in jaw-dropping contrast to the gay movement of the ’70s and early ’80s, which defined liberation as being confident enough to carve out an entirely alternative life. Extending the hippie tenants of “free love,” gay culture from three and four decades ago equated sexual expression, or even promiscuity, with liberation. While that mindset brought great encouragement (and a hell of a lot of fun) to the gay community, it appalled the mainstream. It wasn’t just the same-sex angle that made many clutch their pearls—it was the movement’s confident unmooring of sex from love, or even from relationships. While that sensibility hardly defined the lives of many LGBT people, the mere introduction of it as an option proved subversive enough to shake conservatives to their core. The oppositional sensibility—however encouraging to those of us who prize “otherness”—kept the community marginalized, feared, and mocked.
The effect of this wasn’t lost on LGBT spokespeople of the last decade and a half. Learning from this earlier outcome, they began to increasingly emphasize the similarities between gay and straight people rather than the distinctions. Conformity became the new mantra, a strategy that proved far more effective than rebellion ever had—even if that stance stripped the movement of something fundamental to its core.
In a way, gay pop stars were way ahead of the curve on this approach. As pop darlings trying to attract as wide an audience as possible, they knew instinctively how to downplay the divisive specifics of sex choice. Instead they emphasized the righteous angle of identity. Coming out simply meant being true to oneself, something any person of empathy could champion. To go below that and get gritty about gender objects was seen by many as offering “too much information.” Or, to paraphrase Sam Smith’s reasoning, to make music that wasn’t “for everyone.”
But why wouldn’t it be? In the same way that words matter, so does specificity, particularly in art. When artists reveal their individual obsessions and desires, it not only makes for more vivid songwriting—it can bring listeners closer to them, even make them relate in ways they might not have expected. (Frank Ocean showed this in Blonde’s “Good Guy,” setting the scene of his sexual frustration in a gay bar.) Straight people can learn a lot about how to adjust to this mindset from LGBT people. We’ve had years of practice with it. For our entire lives, we’ve had to switch gender pronouns, and Photoshop in different mental images while listening to pop songs or watching movies. If 10 percent of the population can manage to dream their desired details into the 90 percent art made by straight folks, then why can’t the reverse be true too?
For LGBT stars, using the proper pronoun represents an even riskier kind of coming out. However difficult that advance has been to enact, the fact is, it's clearly happening—and the Obama era surely helped encourage it. While the Trump/Pence regime promises to make this tougher, there’s also a renewed protest movement of progressivism under foot. The broad outlines of that pushback show the support that remains for LGBT issues. At the same time, the newly politicized work of huge stars like Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar broadly demonstrates the resonance of outspoken messages in pop culture. Amid this defiant new climate, more stars in the spotlight may come to realize something key: Singing the truth of your life isn’t shutting anyone out—it’s inviting them in.
