lang and Melissa Etheridge, opened doors by busting them down in the ’90s. Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ 1995 video for “Warped” even featured lead singer Anthony Kiedis and then-guitarist Dave Navarro kissing at the end.ĭespite the commercial obstacles they faced, some female LGBTQ performers, like Indigo Girls, k.d. Three years later, alternative rock got into the act with Living Colour’s “Bi,” a celebration of bisexuality with a video that presented it through the straight male gaze (translation: a focus on bisexual women, aka a straight guy’s fantasy) and perhaps paved a path for more open LGBTQ acceptance in the genre. Madonna, one of the gay community’s strongest allies, kicked off her ’90s reign paying homage to ’80s gay ball culture with “Vogue” and making out with a woman in “Justify My Love” (1990). The biggest acts waving rainbow flags with their careers intact were primarily straight. The ’80s was a tragic era for the gay community, and by the end of the decade, the stigma of AIDS had pushed a lot of LGBTQ talent into the shadows. The following year, Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” became arguably the gay anthem of the decade, largely based on a video narrative that took viewers on the painful, confusing, exhilarating journey of coming out. The video featured the band’s openly gay frontman Holly Johnson performing in a gay S&M club (camp strikes again), and both the song and the clip were promptly banned by the BBC. While most LGBTQ ’80s acts were playing it safe musically and publicly, Frankie Goes to Hollywood released “Relax” in 1983.
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Queen took the camp up a notch with 1984’s “I Want to Break Free,” which put the entire band (including a still-closeted Freddie Mercury) in drag a full 25 years before “RuPaul’s Drag Race” made it mainstream-fashionable. The song was banned and MTV cut the gay ending, but the single still became the biggest hit of the decade. The hunks Newton-John was eyeing in the gym only had eyes - and arms - for each other. You had to stay until the very end, though, for the gay punchline.
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That’s certainly what drove the video for Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 smash “Physical.” The song was a culmination of the sexy image the former sweet country girl had been cultivating since the 1978 movie musical “Grease,” and the video, which dropped during the early days of MTV, was one of the first to dabble with LGBTQ images.
If queer acts hinted at homoeroticism (as Pet Shop Boys did with their 1988 clip for “Domino Dancing,” the duo’s final Top 40 hit), it was typically done within the context of straight relationships and with a considerable dose of camp and humor. Boy George introduced a large swath of the masses to gender-bending drag, but his videos with Culture Club, like most Pet Shop Boys clips, were sexless affairs. Openly gay acts like Boy George and Pet Shop Boys were thriving, but they played it relatively safe. Although straight glam rockers like David Bowie (who was kissed on the lips by an overzealous male fan in his 1979 “D.J.” video) and Marc Bolan and disco titans like Sylvester and Village People made ‘70s music safe for LGBTQ sensibilities, by the early ‘80s, those sensibilities were being pushed back into the closet. How far we’ve come from the days when only straight music stars could tease us with glimpses of overt LGBTQ sexuality in their videos without killing their careers. Lil Nas X will make swarms of pearl-clutchers enraged, but he’s already made history.
It takes a brave gay man to slide down a stripper pole to hell, seduce the devil, kiss him, kill him and assume his throne. “Montero,” which borrows its subtitle from the Oscar-nominated 2017 film, revels in the joy of queerness, a rarity in a medium whose recent LGBTQ videos have focused more on the serious and the tragic, while brazenly flaunting gay sexual liberation. Now he is bulldozing queerness farther from the closet than any Grammy-winning, multiplatinum, openly gay pop star has ever dared.