How Lil Nas X’s Groundbreaking ‘Montero’ Fits in LGBTQ Music Video History, From Bowie to Frankie to Kehlani

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For the next few months, Montero, quite possibly the biggest and brightest explosion of gay pride ever to call itself a music video, will probably be everywhere. It’s the next phase of a career that’s been all about pushing boundaries from the start

the 21-year-old rapper makes out with Satan , lap dances on him and twerks all over his face. If just reading that description fills your head with visions of blasphemy, cover your eyes. For the next few months, “Montero,” which is quite possibly the biggest and brightest explosion of gay pride ever to call itself a music video, will probably be everywhere. Just three days after its March 26 debut, it already logged 40 million YouTube views.

It’s the next phase of a career that’s been all about pushing boundaries from the start. Lil Nas X’s breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” blended the previously disparate-seeming genres of rap and country and ended up becoming the longest-running No. 1 single in chart history. About halfway through its chart-topping run in 2019, on the last day of Gay Pride Month, Nas came out as gay.

Now he is bulldozing queerness farther from the closet than any Grammy-winning, multiplatinum, openly gay pop star has ever dared. “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.

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. Although straight glam rockers like David Bowie 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.

Openly gay acts like Boy George and Pet Shop Boys were thriving, but they played it relatively safe. 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. If queer acts hinted at homoeroticism , it was typically done within the context of straight relationships and with a considerable dose of camp and humor.

 

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You did leave out the nearly career ending blacklisting, hate, and homophobia adamlambert faced after kissing a male member of his band at the AMAs. It was groundbreaking at that time. He was, and is, a brave trailblazer

‘the biggest and brightest explosion of gay pride ever to call itself a music video’ love him but not when born this way exists

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