Last Halloween, he dressed up as Nicki Minaj on his November single “Holiday,” he slipped in a lyric about being a “bottom on the low.”
“I know we promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be ‘that’ type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret,” he wrote.īut Lil Nas came out during pride month in 2019, and since has been experimenting with presentations of queerness and gender that are extremely rare for a mainstream male pop star of his stature. The musician elaborated on the shame he previously felt in a letter published on Friday, addressed to his 14-year-old self. Read more: Inside the Record-Breaking Rise of Lil Nas X When that song first hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 2019, Lil Nas had not yet come out to anyone he was still singing about cheating on a female partner and “bull riding and boobies.” In an interview with TIME later that year, he said he had been taught from a young age that homosexuality “is never going to be O.K.”
Lil Nas X’s self-presentation in “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is a stark contrast from his persona when “Old Town Road” stormed into the public consciousness two years ago. “It took a lot for me to come out of my comfort zone” Read more: Historians Decode the Religious Symbolism and Queer Iconography of Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero’ Video I want kids growing up feeling these feelings, knowing they’re a part of the LGBTQ community, to feel like they’re O.K. “Even as a little child, I was really scared of every single mistake I may or may not have made. “I grew up in a pretty religious kind of home-and for me, it was fear-based very much,” he tells TIME.
Specifically, Lil Nas hopes the video, which uses classical imagery to tell a story of sin, banishment and redemption, will open up a dialogue about the continuing omnipresence of repression among LGBTQ youth, particularly within Christian spaces. “I want to be part of a conversation that actually applies to my situation and so many people that I know.” “I feel like we’ve come to a time in music where everything is nice and nothing is really cutting edge or starting conversations any more,” he told TIME in an interview on Friday evening. Lil Nas says this range of impassioned responses is exactly what he had hoped for.