In so many of her songs, Hayley Kiyoko has been loud and proud about her love for women. But when I ask her — queer girl to queer girl — for some dating advice, she confesses that she might not exactly be qualified to give it out.

“Just because I'm gay doesn't mean that I'm a professional at it,” the 28-year-old musician jokes over FaceTime, a sly smile creeping over her face. “I get flustered. I get nervous and I overthink things, and to be honest, I could count on my fingers how many dates I've been on. I've never been on the Hinge or the Tinder. I haven’t even done the online dating thing, so I don’t even know what that’s like.”

It’s this kind of vulnerability that’s made Kiyoko such a beloved artist. Since the musician came out publicly in 2015 with her breakout single “Girls like Girls,” she’s been exalted by her fans as “Lesbian Jesus.” The nickname partly stems from her magnetic charisma and swaggeringly confident performances. But ironically, the main reason why fans idolize Kiyoko is because she’s unabashedly human, especially in the way she openly speaks about the challenges she faces as a lesbian woman.

Throughout Expectations, her 2018 debut studio album, she sings about self-sabotage (“I over-communicate and feel too much,” she sings on “Feelings”), sapphic desire (“You wanna be friends forever?/I can think of something better,” she sings on “Sleepovers”), and the specific tragedies of queer relationships (“You say you wanted me, but you’re sleeping with him,” she sings on “Curious”). Kiyoko fittingly became the reigning face of #20GAYTEEN after coining the term in January 2018, which now sums up the explosion of queer visibility throughout pop culture that year. Yet she stands out because of her ability to capture the lesbian experience — which often includes yearning, insecurity, and above all, a deep, resounding love for women — throughout her songs and music videos, in order to assure her queer fans that they don’t have to navigate relationships alone.

Keith Oshiro

It’s a mid-December day when Kiyoko calls me, sitting in a parked car from somewhere in Los Angeles. It had been a hectic few weeks, she explains, immediately apologizing for her makeup-free appearance and her messy blonde hair tucked into a ponytail. It was only a couple days after she'd returned from a replenishing week-long vacation in Japan, but Hayley had already leapt right back into work. She’s in the midst of coordinating the last parts of her new project, I’m Too Sensitive For This Shit, a string of singles she’s been releasing one at a time, starting in July with “I Wish” and its witchy accompanying music video. Since then, she’s released three more — the sassy 90s pop-inspired “L.O.V.E. Me,” the brooding electropop song “Demons,” and the riotous synth-pop anthem “Runaway” — with a final track and video set to arrive in January 2020.