We asked you recently what you would like to see us write about, and this week we’re carrying daily blogs based on your suggestions . One suggestion was the way mainstream music interacts with the LGBT community …

Two of last year’s monster hits – Macklemore’s Same Love and Sara Bareilles’ Brave – were paeans to queer acceptance. In their own respective ways, these coming-out anthems have helped to open up discourses in the mainstream on queer struggle – Macklemore speaking, or “whitesplaining”, specifically to hip-hop fans and Bareilles gifting the world a pop song that’s become a rallying cry for everyone from cancer patients and anti-bullying campaigners to queer people struggling to come out to their nearest and dearest.

Seeing and hearing allies expressing their solidarity is important to LGBT people. Russian Kiss, by Annie, a fuck-you to Vladimir Putin over Russia’s increasingly brutal anti-gay laws, is a rad example of this. But how long will heterosexual artists have the privilege of mediating on our behalves from their pop chart eyries? Isn’t something amiss when an artist is crowned spokesperson for a community to which they do not belong? And at what point do these allies give up the floor to the queers they’re professing so much acceptance of? Its been noted that Mary Lambert, the queer Seattle singer-songwriter who gave Same Love its beautiful, anthemic chorus, is often a silent, background figure when Macklemore turns up to collect awards.

To whom do these songs speak? In a mainstream still low on out, queer artists, maybe the main function of these coming-out anthems is to appease the conscience of hetero audiences. Songs like Same Love, it might be argued, are a way for straight audiences to indulge in self-gratifying feelings about queer struggle without having to see or hear authentic IRL queers taking up space in the pop world.

Pop is increasingly confident at marketing itself to gay audiences. But out queer artists – particularly queer rappers, who are gaining a foothold in the mainstream – are challenging a pop factory that allows straight artists to make bank on the pink gaze, in part because this brand of pop serves to maintain an illusion of queer acceptance. LE1F, who sissied up the spot something awesome on Letterman last week, has been vocal in his opposition to Macklemore, while Mykki Blanco has challenged alphafemme pop behemoths such as Britney Spears for exploiting gay fans: “This is not ‘gay pride’ it’s ‘gay marketing’ designed to keep u fags on ecstasy blasting garbage music till 6 am.”

Blanco’s rejection of the “pop-for-queers” formula is justified. Queers are not monolithic; we do not all hear ourselves in corporate club music made by white, heterosexual women. And not all of us believe queer validation lies at the end of the marriage aisle, as the mass queer wedding ceremony performed by Macklemore and friends at the Grammys would have us believe. What about us queers who aren’t interested in heteronormative standards of love, or courting respectability? What about us queers who think the fight for marriage rights is actually a clever way to keep us distracted from other, larger, structural injustices – women’s rights, class divisions, the legal persecution of trans people, people of colour and sex workers? What if queer love isn’t the Same Love after all? What if queer love is lewd, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist?



I’m not opposed to straight pop artists addressing queer struggle or articulating their support for LGBT communities. When the mainstream does deign to address our experiences, the results can be profound. Someone I love came out to their family last year, and Same Love, which had dropped in the lead-up to this life-changing moment, was a comfort to me as I supported this person’s struggle. It resonated with me in a deep, meaningful way. The following year, that same person sang the chorus of Brave to me (really – my life is one big musical) during a tearful, difficult conversation about a trans family member of mine. I have been able to project my own lived experiences into both of these songs and take courage from them. But I’d like to live in a world in which the idea of an actual queer person topping the charts with a shameless coming-out anthem isn’t a radical proposition. Trans bloggers have been vocal in their displeasure over Jared Leto’s portrayal of a trans woman in Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club – partly because allowing cis actors to tell trans narratives maintains a media that keeps trans actors invisible. The same goes for pop. Straight allies: we’ve heard your solidarity – now make room for us to sing our own stories.

