“Lipstick Lover.”
The first time I heard “Lipstick Lover,” I was sitting in my car in the Kroger parking lot. I had been skimming the Them newsletter where Janelle Monáe’s music video was described as “sexy, sapphic fever dream.”
I watched it and thought while the music video was playful and thoughtful (and indeed a “sexy, sapphic fever dream”), the song was fine.
I loved “PYNK,” how weird and roundabout and gay it felt. How subversive it was for Janelle Monáe, this popular Black woman, to praise, to write an ode to, vaginas, if not queerness.
“Lipstick Lover” felt, in comparison, very straightforward, and yet I have proceeded to listen to it every day, multiple times a day, and in my new obsession, I’ve realized that maybe the straightforward aspect of it is in a sense the point.
Why—as Black people, as the Black community at large—are we afraid of queerness? Is it Jesus? Is it a compulsion to have everyone living only in ways that you yourself can understand?
I think about DaBaby, whose “BOP” I used to listen to with the same obsessive repetition that I’ve been listening to Monáe’s song. I think about how, at one of his concerts, he wanted to give it up for Black people who were not also gay people, as if there is something ugly about gayness, as if it needs to be something we celebrate not participating in.
I like how directly Monáe challenges that. I like how the music video for “Lipstick Lover” is all about Blackness & gayness, and how the song alone, in its repetition, in its lack of twists and turns, is straightforward in a similar way.
It echoes and states itself with certainty over and over again, as if asking you to challenge its veracity.
I came out as bi when I was like 24. I was living in Iowa City at the time and truly everyone around me was queer and they called it in me—my queerness—before I knew what it was. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t become queer in Iowa City. I just hadn’t known how to make sense of how I felt. My sexuality was so submerged in the expectations of the South, the expectations of the Black community I grew up around, the homophobia of my high school, the intense and oppressive Christianity I stumbled into in college. I had no idea what it could look like, what it could mean—my attraction to women, to nonbinary people—until I knew more people who were queer.
I remember going with my friends to this gay bar in Iowa City, to drag shows, and still thinking myself to be straight, sure, but regretting all the times I’d thought of this—all that queerness can be—as anything other than gorgeous. I have never met people more tender and more interesting and more themselves than the queer & trans people I’ve been around.
I had no idea of the depth of queer culture until I climbed out of the culture I grew up in. I’m glad I did, and I’m glad Janelle Monáe is one of the people showing what it means to be Black and queer to people who perhaps are not yet in a place where they can see the beauty of it all around them.
When I was 22, about to start at Iowa, I read The Color Purple and the gayness of that book stirred something in me and made sense to me in a way that I had no idea how to reckon with. I hope Janelle Monáe’s song does that same thing—with maybe happier tones and more colors than purple—that Walker’s book did for me.
At some point, maybe I’ll write about how bizarre it feels to be bisexual. How un-normalized it still feels to be like deeply in love with your opposite sex partner and still be queer. How one does not eradicate the other, and how you don’t have anything to prove. I’m here for more grey spaces, in-between places that are just as solid—in a way—than the more established ideas they bridge.
In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be listening to “Lipstick Lover” for what might just be the millionth time.
Image: Youtube/Janelle Monáe
