#also im str8 up regurgitating How to Be Gay by David Halperin

[xirae]

Tbh though I do Think Lil Nas X exists in a weird spot. Pop stans have always kind of had it out for him imo, and I don't think it's their fault as much as they're not aware of the dynamics of it all.

For figures like Lady Gaga and Madonna there's a process of decoding and recoding of the mainstream, industry-produced object. Gay men grab these songs, then rewrite the values and messages around gender and desire to fit their own personal expression. It's a process shared with the old love for specific Hollywood movies like Mildred Pierce, Sunset Boulevard, The Women, Mommie Dearest; otherwise traditional, conservative works when taken at face value, these movies took on unique meanings for gay men.

There's an air of inauthenticity and artificiality around pop music worked in favor of this to put dominant values in question. There's a split where the dominant values around gender and desire expressed in pop music become denaturalized while the song as an object paradoxically becomes more potent. Pop music becomes an avenue to express feelings gay men can't just normally say or express with what is given to them "naturally" - the assigned rules given to us as Men and the way it affects what we are even capable of saying, the way our bodies and words can even be interpreted. Possibly just as nebulous as my attempt to define and categorize it, David Halperin would call this feeling gay men want to express through woman-fronted pop music "queer subjectivity."

I think since Lil Nas is an "Industry Baby" this air of inuathenticity around his music works against his favor rather than for it - at least in terms of pop stan reception, not in terms of sales or financial success. The expression gay interiorirty becomes denaturalized without there being another sort of split, no recoded subculturual object that feels all the more potent. Maybe in some ways I'm wrong about the pop stans and am just bitter at them for my personal grudge; it's the ppl who have deep personal investment in pop music that are able to subliminally detect this. They simply can't use his music the same way they use pop girlie music.

There's more to this too, I think the fact Lil Nas is a rap artist deserves it's own post. Bc the exception to my rule this year is Troye Sivan - specifically Rush though and not necessarily his whole album. Rush, a song that owes itself to Madonna and Lady Gaga a bit more than a lot of the work Lil Nas X has put out, is what got gay stan twitter moving. And it definitely owes more than One of Your Girls and Got Me Started, Troye singles that didn't quite make the same splash on stan twitter - the former notably being a song about desiring a straight man, an explicitly gay song. What I'm saying here is in a rare case, pop music form can often save the desolate gay man from the artistic paradox of connecting to gay audiences, but it usually has to be POP, like POP music.

But then Saucy Santana had a moment with Material Girl...... making my head spin atm the fuck. Probably something to be said for that being a meme more than a song tbh