It remains to be seen how they will fair commercially now they have come out as non-binary. Kheraj observed that Kiyoko was the only openly queer artist to break top 40 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2018, and that Sam Smith’s album sales began to fall when the singer became more public about their queerness.
“Nevertheless, the sweet feeling of victory is tinged with the sour truth of it all: queerness still, it seems, isn’t bankable.” That can only be taken as a win,” he wrote in GQ last year. “All of this LGBTQ visibility put queer representation at a new cultural peak. But while queerness seems to be marketable, is it profitable? Pop culture writer Alim Kheraj isn’t convinced.
“Rap music becoming more queer was one of this decade’s big cultural moments,” says Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+Culture, “because it definitely felt like rap was a frontier that we didn’t think would be a place where so many queer stories could be told”.įamous musicians being able to come out and openly explore queerness in their work is a definite step forward. This year, rapper Lil Nas X came out as gay while breaking Mariah Carey’s record for the longest-running number one single in US chart history with the ubiquitous Old Town Road. In 2012, Frank Ocean penned an emotional letter, explaining that his first love was a man, while other queer rap artists include Azealia Banks, who identifies as bisexual, and Angel Haze, who is pansexual (a term used by those who reject a gender binary when it comes to attraction). Germany’s Kim Petras has become the first global trans pop sensation, touring across the world, and America’s Hayley Kiyoko has been described as a “ lesbian Jesus” for her sexy pop bops.Įven rap music – a genre that has traditionally celebrated hyper-masculine, heterosexual male bravado – has become more queer. British soul singer Sam Smith, who won an Oscar in 2016, recently came out as non-binary. Bisexual singer and actress Janelle Monaé’s 2018 masterpiece Dirty Computer was sensually sapphic from start to finish. It’s not just queer men who are enjoying the musical spotlight. “The gay thing will always keep some from taking me seriously… But I have always treated my songwriting, performance and production as something with very high stakes.” “From the time that I started, I thought and hoped that whatever I was doing was gonna make it easier for somebody, somewhere,” Shears tells BBC Culture. This decade has also seen more established gay musicians like Jake Shears, Will Young and Adam Lambert exploring their sexuality more freely than ever within their work. Meanwhile South African singer Nakhane has explored the conflict between religion and sexuality in his music, and the British musician MNEK has been Grammy nominated, worked with Beyoncé, and received rave reviews for his 2018 debut album Language, which puts his queer identity front and centre. New gay pop stars who have emerged include Australia’s Troye Sivan, whose most recent album, 2018’s Bloom, explicitly discussed gay sex and the similarly forthright Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander, who has always embraced queerness in his work and public persona. The last decade in music has arguably been the queerest since the 1980s. She re-queered a mainstream that had fallen back into heteronormative mundanity.” But a decade on, with Gaga successfully branching out into film and TV, how queer is the mainstream? As Brian O’Flynn wrote in The Guardian: “Gaga did for my generation what Bowie did 20 years earlier. Gaga’s ascension was about more than eccentric costumes and ridiculous wigs. She was a fierce advocate for LGBTQ+ rights both on and off the stage, but her vocal support for the queer community and her own bisexuality didn’t hamper her success. Ten years ago, Lady Gaga became a global star at a time when the pop charts were politically sanitised. Why Tales of the City is the ultimate LGBTQ+ fantasy But have these advances been matched by a more fundamental shift in attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people - and is that evident in popular culture? The 2010s have been a decade where LGBTQ+ rights and freedoms have advanced significantly in the west – superficially, at least.