The summer of 2024 was heralded across the board as a Sapphic Pop Renaissance. Chappell Roan was at the forefront of that, but she wasn’t alone up there, as we all were deeply and respectfully enjoying Billie Eilish’s “LUNCH,” Megan Thee Stallion’s “Like a Freak,” and Kehlani’s “After Hours.” “Summer of 2024 is undoubtedly a summer for the girls, and for queer pop-loving women, we have certainly been fed,” wrote Niya Doyle in ‘Every Contender For the Song of the Summer Is Queer. “And summer’s just begun.”
The summer of 2025 has begun on a more ominous note, when it comes to the queer women of pop. Following a whirlwind of drama surrounding JoJo Siwa monkeying around with reality TV star Chris Hughes on Celebrity Big Brother UK despite having a girlfriend and then breaking up with that girlfriend and then dating Chris Hughes, Fletcher returned to the world after an apparent healing journey with “Boy,” a single off her upcoming album, Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me? In this scenario, “really knowing” Fletcher means knowing that she kissed a boy and feels, seemingly, pretty sad about it? I’m scared to think of what you’ll think of me, I had no choice, she sings. I closed my eyes and leaned in, I kissed a boy.
“Being bisexual should be celebrated, so why does Fletcher seem so down?” Mey Rude asks in Out Magazine, adding that the song “evokes sympathy, not celebration… what exactly is Fletcher mourning? Is she grieving her loss of community or status? She is still just as queer as she ever was, and in the vast majority of the world, being with a man only raises her status.”
Fletcher’s desire to date people of all genders aligns her with the biggest chunk of the LGBTQ+ community — 57% of adults who identify as LGBTQ+ identify as bisexual, according to a 2024 Gallup Poll. In theory, this was an opportunity for her to connect with a new group of fans within her overall base. But that’s not what happened.
Prior to this point, all of Fletcher’s music has been focused on her relationships with women, although she didn’t identify as a lesbian — she declared herself queer and open to relationships with people of any gender in 2021. Her fanbase apparently connected with her music because of its focus on lesbian relationships. Thus, the release of “Boy,” which confirmed rumors that have been swirling for some time now about Fletcher having a boyfriend, was met with some blowback. Some are offended that Fletcher released the song during Pride Month with a Pride tie-in. Some have accused her of deviously building and profiting off a lesbian fanbase only to strategically betray them at a divisive political moment — which feels unlikely, even if only because building a lesbian fanbase is rarely a smart financial move.
The objection to Fletcher’s framing of her new relationship, via this song specifically, is the piece of this that makes sense to me. Her first instagram post about the track declared her new song “the sound of my exhale,” suggesting this new era is more grounded than her previous work, and a similar sentiment exists in her Rolling Stone interview (more on that in a minute). She also literally erased the entirety of her instagram feed prior to one week ago, which reads as a symbolic erasure of her sapphic past. The song itself uses queer tropes to frame a famously conventional relationship choice (having a boyfriend) as a mournful confession of a shameful secret, a love she wanted to resist, but couldn’t. Everything about it just feels… annoying. Legal, but annoying!
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Fletcher said she became known for “this chaos and this toxicity and bitterness and sapphic drama,” but began an intense healing journey following her 2023 diagnosis of Lyme disease which allowed her to pause: “I started having so many questions about my career and my purpose. I think through allowing myself to ask those deeper questions about this fixed dream I thought I would always be chasing, my heart opened in a way I wasn’t expecting, and I fell in love with a boy.”
Obviously we all know that the act of falling in love with a boy doesn’t make Fletcher, or her music, any less queer. Truly, is anything queerer than Fletcher writing a dramatic song about her boyfriend and launching it in a way that inspires the community to have the same fight about representation we’ve had every quarter for the last quarter-century?
Fletcher emphasized to Rolling Stone she still identifies as queer: “I’m a queer woman. I’ve always been queer. I will always be queer. My identity is not shifting and it’s not changing. My community is not changing.”
The more frustrating response to Fletcher’s big reveal are people claiming her recent failure to speak to the lesbian experience for this one song specifically leaves us in a veritable desert of songs to listen to, that this wouldn’t hit so hard if there were more queer musicians out there. But there are! There are many other queer women and non-binary artists who are centering queer people in their music and/or lives, like Chappell Roan, Hayley Kiyoko, Tegan & Sara, Kehlani, Brandi Carlile, Doechii, Joy Oladokun, Reneé Rapp, Zolita, G-Flip, St. Vincent, girl in red, Brittany Howard, King Princess, Lucy Dacus, Gigi Perez, Janelle Monae, I could go on forever. There is so much lesbian music out there, even in the most mainstream genre of all, pop. There are thousands of queer artists out there singing about the sapphic experience — but most of us probably haven’t heard of them, let alone heard their music. That’s the fault of the late capitalist catastrophe of the “music industry,” not Fletcher herself.
Would it be more exciting for me personally if Billie Eilish had been captured making out with a girl on a balcony in Venice, Italy rather than with her rumored new boyfriend Nat Wolff? Absolutely! Was JoJo Siwa only interesting to me at all because of the relationship between her weird brand and level of mainstream fame and absolute diehard devotion to lesbianism? Yes! Do I even care who Fletcher’s boyfriend is? I do not!
But there are so many other out LGBTQ+ celebrities in visible lesbian relationships right now, too. We’re living in a world where there are two couples in the WNBA who, through a variety of offseason trades, have managed to find themselves playing on the same team. Where boygenius’s Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus fell in love. Where Lesbian Jesus Hayley Kiyoko has been dating former Bachelor contestant Becca Tilley for seven years. Where former Bachelorette Gabby Windey married nerdy ponytailed comic Robby Hoffman. Where Niecy Nash married Jessica Betts who wrote the “stud anthem of summer” with Da Brat, who just managed, at the age of 49 and with the assistance of IVF, to have a baby with her wife, Jessica Harris-Dupart.
When it feels like we’re going backwards politically and culturally as LGBTQ+ people, it can be really disturbing to see things like, as I’ve written already, the response to JoJo Siwa dating Chris Hughes from her apparently new Big Brother UK fanbase — they call her “Joelle” and express their affection for her embrace of her “softer, feminine side,” declaring her relationship with Chris “the happiest she’s ever looked.” JoJo has changed how she identifies from “lesbian” to “queer,” and said she’s into people of all genders. Some of her new fans are treating her like she changed from “lesbian” to “straight.” Some of Fletcher’s fans seem to be doing the same. That’s not on JoJo or Fletcher.
Still, there is this idea that when people like JoJo or Fletcher date men, that somehow this gives ammunition to men who believe lesbians are just straight girls who haven’t met the right man yet, or to families who think their daughters will grow out of their lesbian phase, or religious figures who think conversion therapy works. But the minute those homophobes have us blaming and fighting with each other, instead of against them, they have won.
It can be heartbreaking when your favorite musical artist takes their work in a personal or creative direction that no longer connects with you, but why is that heartbreak so often expressed as vitriol?
But I don’t know. Maybe this was inevitable all along. What begins in chaos ends in chaos, I think, is the saying.
Comments
finally some smart writing on this!!!
yes i totally agree! i’ve been trying to figure where tf i stand in this mess and both sides have such good points! like i love her but also WHY?! but also her dating a man shouldn’t be a reason for anyone to hate her.
I’m already sick of the discourse.
I really don’t think the bisexuality or male partner is the problem with this. I think it’s well known that the queer, poly Janelle Monae’s longest term partner is a man, her contributions to 2020s queer pop are better than 99% of what’s out there, and I think it really does help that it feels genuine. I suspect that if Fletcher’s career had involved being openly bisexual and writing music that honestly reflected her sexuality, then she would not have written a song about being terrified of the impending heterophobia of her fans.
I just wish, when people were writing their defenses of Fletcher’s right to date men, that they would acknowledge the cultural context that is the long history of lesbian sexuality and sexual desire being reduced to a spectacle for male consumption. People love to say fetishization isn’t as bad as violence so it’s not a big deal really, but I think it suffocates lesbian love by invalidating, belittling, trivializing our full-bodied desire for other women into nothing more than a sex thing, and not even one for our pleasure or our partner’s pleasure, but for some real or hypothetical man, and that sucks and it feels bad. Thus, when it comes to art about female same-sex desire (and especially when that art is very sexual and graphic ala the opening lines of LUNCH or Fletcher’s music videos), the artist’s relationship to that kind of sexuality greatly informs how much I appreciate it. It just does not feel as good to enjoy lesbian art made by men or made by women who are pandering to a straight/male audience. (And yeah, sexy stuff is sexier when coming from women who mostly date women; and yeah, sexy stuff feels more objectifying when coming from women who exclusively date men.)
This is all to say: this song, combined with the rumors about her being in serious relationships with a couple of different men for a long time now, and the interviews where she said she feels more genuine now, and the album title that strongly suggests her public persona is fake, suggest that Fletcher was leaning into a very marketable Sexy Lesbian persona that misrepresented how serious her interest in women was, and this is what the fans are feeling hurt by. I think it’s really hard to say that a queer woman’s actions were homophobic or misogynist without getting a lot of pushback (because how could a QUEER PERSON ever be HOMOPHOBIC? etc), and comments like “what will we listen to now?!” and “this is giving ammunition to homophobes” are just women are groping around to find a way to vocalize feeling misled without being told that they aren’t allowed to feel unhappy about it.
Don’t get me wrong: if women are kissing in your music video, I WILL be watching it over and over and over and over even if I’m not the target audience because that is unfortunately who I am. But it sucks to live a life where so much art that’s about you is not for you or by you and, in fact, is kinda ideologically dedicated to invalidating your entire lifestyle sometimes.
This is a very excellent addition. It’s so weird and frankly comes across as homophobic that Fletcher preemptively played the victim for… autonomously doing exactly what society expects of women to do by dating a man. The “oh woe is me” routine is just weird and unnecessary. And I say this as someone who never listened to her work, I had no investment, but if you’re going to play the victim for being straight passing, people are going to criticize that angle.
To my understanding Fletcher was predominantly dating women for a decade. She was also never out as a lesbian, she was out as queer and said she was open to all genders but had found herself more drawn to women. I don’t think it’s fair to assume that she was exaggerating her feelings for women. Obviously, I don’t know her, maybe I’m wrong, but I think jumping so quickly to assuming that she must’ve been faking *is* coming from a place of biphobia.
I understand your feelings around lesbian sexuality being fetishised for and by men, but to imply that just because Fletcher can also experience attraction to men means that her portrayals of female same sex desire must be pandering to male audiences is an incredibly biphobic take. It’s assuming that bi women are incapable of engaging in and expressing their desire for other women without centering/catering to men, which is just…plain misogynistic. Women are not defined by their relationship to men.
I (a bisexual, fwiw) disagree with the claim that this was a quick jump, or a biphobic one, for the reasons I laid out in my post: this is a conclusion that I reached based on the combined effect of a whole bunch of different elements of the whole spectacle. I specifically and elaborately specified how I don’t think that being bisexual automatically makes portrayals of female same sex desire inherently a man-pandering exercise. However, I think it’s also verging on gaslighting to say that nobody ever portrays female same-sex desire for man-pandering reasons and we are never allowed to reach that conclusion, even in the presence of an abundance of evidence, and then I went on to provide a whole bunch of reasons why this particular case gave a lot of us the ick, haha.
I think it’s misogynistic to deny and negate women expressing their discomfort with objectifying portrayals of women, and it’s extremely frustrating when people use “women can’t be misogynistic” as a gotcha against me personally having a comfort level that differs from theirs.
I don’t think you did really specifically and elaborately articulate that (I assume you mean the initial paragraph mentioning Janelle Monae). I also notice that you mentioned that it would’ve been okay had Fletcher always been ‘openly bisexual’, but the reality is that for some people sexuality is fluid and changes throughout their lives. She may well have felt mostly gay (again, she never identified as a lesbian) and then that changed. People shouldn’t be punished for that.
I do understand that you came to that conclusion as a result of a number of things – I still ultimately think it’s an assumption without evidence. Like, yeah, you could be right, but there’s no proof, and I think it’s best to give people the benefit of the doubt, as opposed to risking denying their lived experiences. I’d rather give Fletcher the benefit of the doubt and find out I was wrong than say ‘oh she must’ve been faking it all along!’ when actually that wasn’t the case at all and therefore she’s having people deny and distrust her own experience of her sexuality.
I never said that nobody ever portrays female same sex desire for man-pandering reasons – of course they do! I said that it’s biphobic and misogynistic to assume that a bi woman is incapable of portraying female same sex desire without pandering to men in some way. Not that you can never reach that conclusion. You said, ‘when it comes to art about female same-sex desire (and especially when that art is very sexual and graphic ala the opening lines of LUNCH or Fletcher’s music videos), the artist’s relationship to that kind of sexuality greatly informs how much I appreciate it. It just does not feel as good to enjoy lesbian art made by men or made by women who are pandering to a straight/male audience.’ Based on everything else you said in your comment, the implication there seemed to be that because Fletcher is now dating a man, that must mean her art is pandering to a straight/male audience. How do you know what Fletcher’s ‘relationship to that sexuality’ is?
I mean, I clearly don’t think women can’t be misogynistic because I said I thought your line of thinking was misogynistic. I don’t mean to deny your discomfort at what you perceive to be objectifying portrayals of women – I think the thing is it’s not always easy to determine what is objectifying, and it feels suspicious to me to only now perceive Fletcher’s portrayals as objectifying because she’s come out as bi instead of gay. I also think that too often people associate ‘I feel uncomfortable with this thing’ to ‘this thing must be morally wrong’, when that’s not necessarily the case. You can feel uncomfortable with her videos, for example, without that meaning that she’s purposefully catering to the male gaze. Again, I don’t know her personally, maybe she was, I just feel like people really aren’t giving her enough grace, and it seems like as soon as a queer woman starts dating a man, people think she can’t possibly separate herself from patriarchal values and the male gaze etc. which is messed up.
*When I said I “specifically and elaborately” made my point about how this sort of behavior hurts women like me, I meant that I was careful to provide a lot of detail and nuance if you read the whole post and tried in good faith to understand me. I gave the example about Janelle Monae, but I also said that certain trends felt bad, or felt better/worse given certain contexts. I didn’t say that anyone pandering to men was totally faking and lying, or that I’d never ever listen to a song if it didn’t meet my criteria.
*I wrote that Fletcher would not have written this song if she had been more “openly bisexual.” What I mean is that: yes, we can never read minds, but I think all the evidence suggests she had been downplaying her male relationships/keeping them a secret for a while, and that informed the tone of all of this.
*I agree that “people shouldn’t be punished for” any of this at all, which is why I never said anything about punishment in any way.
*Regarding your comments about how it’s biphobic and misogynistic to assume Fletcher’s pandering to men because she’s been dating men only for years now: I think it’s possible for women–straight, gay OR bi–to lean into objectification of women, simply because “Sex Sells,” after all, without it being fake or an act or something they don’t enjoy at all, and I think you can genuinely feel something while also playing up some things and minimizing others in order to benefit from what the majority wants out of you. Once again, I want to remind you that I’m talking about the forest and you’re focusing on the trees: the reason that this particular song gives me this impression is because I think if she were just earnestly describing her desires, she wouldn’t have expressed (across multiple mediums!) how much she’s felt like a fake recently. The context is essential.
*Regarding the quote “I also think that too often people associate ‘I feel uncomfortable with this thing’ to ‘this thing must be morally wrong’, when that’s not necessarily the case:” once again, I was very careful to say “I don’t like this and it’s depressing,” not “it’s morally wrong” or “let’s ship fletcher to jail ASAP.”
*You say it’s suspicious to think her art is objectifying when she’s out as bi, but I did elaborately spell out that the objectifying feeling comes from the contrast between how straight and lesbian relationships are portrayed.
At the end of the day, however, you are free to think my intentions are suspicious as long as I am free to think her intentions are suspicious, so I guess we’re even there. :)
There is always a suspicion of marketing / rainbow washing (or lesbian washing we should say) when celebrities are involved.
More suspicious when announcements coincide with products to be promoted (a new album/ movie / TV show etc. Do we really need to idealize celebs? We will not miss these two.
Being openly gay is not something that is encouraged/ would make someone’s career easier so that doesn’t make sense. Dating men doesn’t make you any less queer and people should absolutely not be biphobic. The problem with Fletcher is her acting like her dating a guy will make her life harder etc when most people still prefer women and men to date each other. It is also not their fault that idiots will act like this is “proof” that lesbians can be “turned”.
I attended a 2 days sold out concert in London last year. Having she being straight I don’t think she would have filled the venue (crowd predominantly FLINTA). If one is a great musician making great music I would tend to agree with you. If you are just pop average singer it is a different matter.
i don’t really know how fletcher would’ve been received by a straight audience, but i do know it’s really rare for someone singing about gay stuff exclusively to develop the kind of audience that straight pop stars have. chappell roan is such an exception in that regard. there’s a ceiling. it’s definitely not something i can imagine someone really building a career strategy around sapphic songwriting, that would be a pretty big risk. obviously fletcher being conventionally attractive and white and thin helped too. We’re definitely not living in a world where there are so few queer artists that every mediocre one can fill a venue — there are heaps of queer artists out there not filling venues. the bar for entry and success are still pretty high.
What if the music just isn’t good? How about that?
Also, a female celeb does this every 3 to 5 business days. There are better musicians to listen to regardless of sexual orientation. Let’s all get better taste please.
this is a valid point yes
Yeah the song is just not good
My absolute favorite internet post on this was someone saying something along the lines of ‘the biggest crime of this whole thing is calling a 38yo tax paying man a boy’! (So funny)
I appreciate this balanced take that helps articulate what this song made me feel.
thank you — i’m glad it resonated with you ❤️
THANK YOU for this. everybody talking about this has been so extreme on one side or the other. nuance is so needed!
anybody here been to a fletcher concert? i have never been around so many mean girls since high school!
the vibes at janelle monae concerts, tegan + sara, chappell roan, are unmatched.
the vibes at fletcher concerts? if that is queer community, no thanks!!!!!
i wish i could say i was surprised by the response of her fandom, but that would be a lie.
That’s interesting about your experience at Fletcher concerts/her fandom. I’m not into her music personally so I’ve not particularly followed her, but I have looked into all this drama, and felt quite despairing at the response, worrying it was reflective of the feelings of the majority of our community. So it’s somewhat reassuring to hear that maybe her fandom is just particularly bad (though I wonder why).
Glad to hear that someone else had this experience at a Fletcher concert lol. I wasn’t that familiar with her music but went to her concert a couple years ago because Chappell Roan was opening, and the vibes were RANCID and unlike any other queer event I’ve attended. It was as if everyone’s meanest, rudest ex-girlfriend had gathered in one space.
yes, thank you! it felt to me as if llesbians with the most intense feelings about their exes drifted towards fletcher’s music and then towards her concerts to unleash their toxic emotions. i honestly felt judged just for being fat and taking up space at a fletcher concert, which i’ve never felt at a queer concert before.
it was so unpleasant, my wife and i were like…. NEVER AGAIN.
also jealous you saw chappell all the way back then! can’t believe she was OPENING for fletcher. the tables sure have turned.
That’s what I’ve heard…that her fanbase is toxic AF, especially at concerts
This is why I don’t look to celebrities as justification for my existence. I was gay long before Fletcher existed in the music world and will still be gay long after her relevance expires. I don’t care if someone identifies as a porcupine who likes having their quills sucked. Do I like your music? Your entertainment product? Yes? No? Maybe? Sexuality, gender, and everything around the sun doesn’t matter, as long as I “get” the product.
Celebrities entertain. If they don’t entertain me, it has nothing to do with whether or not they used a subset of the LGBTQ+ community to score likes, and shares, to increase their popularity before they reveal their sad secrets. I don’t like Fletcher’s music, Billie’s or JoJo’s either. Their quest at finding who they are doesn’t affect my stance—wasn’t a fan before and still not a fan now. I’m more of a In This Moment / Nightwish / Halestorm kind of music gal. The harder the better. With that said, all this obsession over who someone gets their jolly’s off with is a bit much. They do them, you do you, I do me, and honestly, if you’re happy, then congrats! Enjoy that happiness for it’s elusive to so many.
I’m a lesbian. Like, an actual one. I have zero interest in men, and honestly find the idea of having attraction to men…unattractive.
Therefore, I have no interest in Fletcher anymore. If I wanted to listen to a pop star in a hetero relationship who sings about hetero things and males, I’d listen to any of the other [better] singers out there.
Just this comfortable in your biphobia. OK, Karen.
Hi! It’s not biphobic to have preferences. Thank you for your name-calling though ❤️
The biphobia in reaction to this has been ugly and completely uncalled for. There is nothing wrong with being bisexual. This issue is the way she is framing it like it will be harder for her cos she is with a guy but people accusing her of pretending to be gay etc for fame makes no sense. Since when has being anything other than straight helped someone’s career?
So….you *only* listen to music that you relate to lyrically?
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I think Fletcher is an average musician. The only reason I listened to her songs is because they were a woman speaking of wlw. Now that her songs going forward will seemingly reflect hetero relationships, I’ll be listening to other artists (who I find to be better) speak on that same subject.
Okay. I wouldn’t assume her songs will all be about her relationship with a man, though. She said most of the album isn’t about that, and even if she’s in a monog relationship with a guy she could still sing about female exes, for example. (Not that I’m invested in whether you listen to her, I’m not into her music personally, just think it’s important to note that just because a bi woman is dating a man doesn’t mean suddenly her focus is all on men. She’s still attracted to women and still has a history with them so may well still sing about them.)
I had been blissfully spared of all of this somehow – my only thought is that this read “Conflating “chaos and drama” with “dating women” in a mainstream magazine in the year of our dying lords, 2025, is…. wild?!!” isn’t quite right to me — she didn’t just date women, she had a very very messy breakup (where she lived w/ her ex-girlfriend and made a bunch of sexy music videos together after they broke up, and then made songs directly calling out her ex’s new partner). I feel like that’s the chaos and drama she’s referring to, but I could be wrong!
oh yeah, definitely it is, 100%
what i meant was more the entire paragraph, where she’s like, i was caught up in all this toxicity and drama, but then i healed, and now that i’m better, my heart was open to this less toxic, less dramatic thing — a man. but your comment and another made me rethink my reaction to that line, and i think i was being too harsh in a way that i wouldn’t want someone to be to me if i was in her shoes, so i did remove it.
lol I should not have kept reading the comments! I’ll just say, the fact that people are pivoting all the way to ‘fletcher is a fake guy who probably just queerbaited/made sexy lesbian content for attention/the male gaze’ is *fucking insane* and, to be that annoying bitch, it’s biphobic.
no, fletcher’s life will not be meaningfully harder because of this. (also, like, let’s talk class folks – she was always going to be fine anyway.) but it is hard to have a community that you love and are a part of talk shit about you the moment you’re something different than they expected. take it from me, a bi woman who’s gotten to hear people say fun things to me like, “ugh, why don’t they understand that we don’t want bisexuals here??” at queer events when they assumed I was a lesbian.
I’m mostly just mad at fletcher for doing this right as June started so all the other bi women can overhear this influx of criticism when we’re supposed to be building community. this extra makes me want to stay home from any gay things – but hey, the real lesbians probably didn’t want me there anyway. ;)
i hope you don’t stay home from gay things for pride! i think the real world community, not the Very Online one, is not as hostile as the discourse makes it seem. i literally don’t know any lesbian in real life who doesn’t want bi people in queer spaces. anyone who feels that way is the one who doesn’t belong at pride, not you.
In my experience, real-world spaces are worse than online ones. I’ve never been to a lesbian/queer women’s space that wasn’t openly hostile to bi women.
Huh, that hasn’t been my experience. I used to be part of a great in person queer community pretty equally populated by lesbians and bi women/NB folks, and there was no exclusionary behaviour. The right places are out there! I find that more alternative, underground queer spaces tend to be better, and ones that put the emphasis on ‘queer’ as opposed to, say, ‘LGBTQ+’
I think people are being too harsh on Fletcher. To my understanding she deletes all of her IG posts every time she starts a new album cycle, which is what most pop artists seem to do these days. There’s no reason to think she’s ‘erasing her sapphic past’ when she still very proudly identifies as queer – she’s literally just starting a new album era. As for the song lyrics, they read to me as someone well aware that much of her fanbase values her almost solely based on her perceived lesbian identity, and therefore will not react well to the news of her falling for a man – that’s why she’s scared (and, clearly, justifiably so).
I can understand why that Rolling Stone passage has bothered people, but I can’t imagine she meant ‘dating women was so toxic and now that I’ve done some emotional healing I’ve of course realised the superior option is dating men’. I’d imagine she meant ‘I was caught up in a lot of damaging behaviours, and wanted to focus on emotional healing. It also happened that once I’d done a lot of that healing, I was able to consider a relationship with someone I wouldn’t have considered before,’ and was just a bit careless in the way she articulated it.
I also would push back on the idea that Fletcher is no longer writing about ‘the sapphic experience’ (but it’s okay because others are) – being bisexual is being sapphic, and so any bisexual woman is always writing about the sapphic experience in some way, even if some of the time she’s writing about men. It’s false to think that just because a queer woman is dating a man her queerness is no longer as present, or will no longer inform her song writing. Likewise, just because Fletcher has a boyfriend doesn’t mean she is no longer ‘centering queer people in [her life]’. Queer women dating men are still queer, and can still have queer friends and found family, and be immersed in queer community, culture, activism and politics – I know you’ve said that Fletcher is still just as queer, but some of your other words here undermine that sentiment.
The anger from fans that she released the song during Pride, and the fact that bi artists’ work is often only held up in the community when they’re dating women, sends a pretty clear message that ‘you’re welcome as a bi person in the community only if you behave in such a way that allows us to effectively ignore your bisexuality and read you as gay instead’. (Bisexual people are allowed to…be bisexual…during Pride, or any other queer celebration, folks!)
Your second to last paragraph hits on a really important part of this, I think. It seems like a lot of the hostility towards Jojo and Fletcher is driven by the fear that their actions will give credence to lesbophobes’ belief that all women need is the ‘right man’ etc. Unfortunately, this is of course true. But that’s not Jojo’s and Fletcher’s fault or responsibility. When we turn on our community members for reasons like this, we are punishing them for other people’s bigotry, and doing nothing to actually combat the bigotry itself.
“When we turn on our community members for reasons like this, we are punishing them for other people’s bigotry, and doing nothing to actually combat the bigotry itself.”
yes, exactly this. pretending that bisexual people don’t exist is not an even vaguely reliable or effective way to respond to or undermine anti-gay sentiment.
Yes, and it’s something I’ve noticed happens a lot in marginalised communities – this policing of other community members’ behaviour and punishing of community members, lest they do something to give bigots’ ammunition, instead of focusing the criticism squarely at the bigots themselves.
yep 100%
Respectfully, I want to push back on that assertion that love between a man and a woman is “the sapphic experience” just because it involves a woman who also has sapphic inclinations. Sapphic is an adjective describing things that concern attraction between women. Bisexual women absolutely have experiences that can be described as sapphic, but their interest in men is not part of that sapphic experience; in the venn diagram of lesbian and bisexual experiences, it would fall outside of the shared region that can be described as sapphic. And I mean, it definitionally is the opposite of sapphic: I would disagree with the claim “buying ice cream is the sapphic experience (when a bi woman does it)” but even that wouldn’t be as drastically wrong as “a woman dating a man is the sapphic experience.” I understand the political motivation behind saying that loving a man (well, a ‘boy’ well over the age of 30 in this case) counts as the sapphic experience in that it’s done in service of highlighting bi/lesbian commonality, but I think that an essential part of highlighting commonality is acknowledging the differences. I also think it’s important to take words in context and good faith and see that Riese was actually trying to inclusively avoid using the word lesbian to describe same-gender love here.
Honestly I think this is really personal and individual. I’m not saying that love between a man and a (queer) woman is ‘the sapphic experience’, but I am saying that it is part of the sapphic experience for some women. Ie. it is part of some sapphic women’s sexualities, and we can’t really divorce their attraction to men from their attraction to women – they’re always bisexual, not half straight and half queer, or sometimes straight and sometimes queer.
I think the perception is often that when a bi woman is involved with another woman romantically/sexually, she’s doing so in a lesbian way/having a lesbian experience. And when she’s involved with a man in the same way, she’s doing so in a straight way/having a straight experience. Some bi women may feel that is representative of their internal experience, and that’s fine.
For others, it’s not reflective at all – for some, their queerness really heavily informs the way they interact/engage with men. They don’t feel like they’re having the same experience with men that straight women do. It doesn’t feel like a ‘straight experience’ to them. All their sexual experiences feel queer/wholly bisexual in some way. And I can understand how that might be hard for some to understand, but I think the way we experience our sexuality is very complex and nuanced.
To get to the point, I suppose the crux of what I was trying to say is that Fletcher is a queer woman and as such, anything she writes about is informed by that identity. So, maybe ‘such and such is the sapphic experience’ is the wrong way to phrase it, but it’s not a case of anything she writes about other than women is suddenly totally divorced from queer experience, because she’s still queer.
The thing that I really bothers me about is how she did it. The promos, the interviews, the song itself, which.. I have many issues with, but doing references to I kissed a girl and making it more problematic than the original, that wasn’t on my bingo card.
Being able to complete a whole bingo card with problematic subtext wasn’t on my bingo card. In between the lines is still where some of us live, I still live there and it’s a me problem I know, but I really thought that she was more aware of the lesbian culture than she is. Like how can you know and use so many references and subtext, things that are really precious and important in such a … bitter way.
Maybe it’s because I have experienced Grande Fratello this year, which honestly was one of the worst most triggering experiences with media that I ever had in my life, or that I have been watching Contrapoints’ latest video on repeat, but things around this album cycle screams pipeline to conservatism to me.
I don’t have a problem with her dating a man, in fact, I’m happy for her if she is indeed, feeling happy and healthy and in love. I actually have a lot of sympathy for bi women because it’s trickier to navigate both worlds.
Billie can literally do whatever she wants. She was already an artist that I appreciate a lot for “Listen before I go”, so yeah. That’s pretty rough. I’ve enjoyed her work even before she came out and put out explicitly queer music and “Lunch” is just a delight. I also got why girlies in middle school thought that Fred Durst was hot. I saw Billie and was like.. ok I do get it now.
With Jojo .. I don’t mind it? That whole situation is a mess, but she’s a reality tv child star who’s thing was dancing. That is a wild and really tough thing to be. It’s fine.
Hilariously with St Vincent, I could literally name more of her exes than her song for years because of you, which is very very rare for me. I am calling her out because having a kid after ‘My baby wants a baby’ was a personal attack to me. How dare she have a child with her wife? Doesn’t she know that almost all of my close friends now have children and I am having my feelings about it?
I, truly, hope that I am wrong about my take on the Fletcher thing..But yeah thankfully, we are spoiled with options now when it comes to lesbian music. And if we’re talking about queer music even more options. I found a duo called The Male Gays and their cover had all the queer slurs (that’s the inclusivity I am here for) and the music’s pretty dope but the wildest thing about it is that when I checked their Spotify they were standing at a massive 6 monthly listeners. They have like 17 now.. So I dunno maybe check them out? In the spirit of WLW to MLM solidarity during pride month.
I mean, the rumor is her boyfriend (Jagwar Twin) is in a cult (the conservative Christian “Modern Mystery School”). So the conservative pipeline theory unfortunately makes sense
Oh Rip.. I honestly haven’t looked into it further.. Like I got so infuriated and disappointed in her for the song and I had my little.. well.. not little.. think pieces in the comments and I talked about it in therapy actually like am I over-reacting to this ? Like was my ADHD connecting some points that have nothing to do with eachother? But if that rumour is true and I’m right.. Look I’m a petty bitch and I’m also gonna take any sort of dopamine spike I can get because my poor brain needs it but I’m also genunely RIP to that woman.
I’ll still probably gonna stream the album and autopsy the whole situation eventually because Fletcher very few artists that I supported with money because it’s been very tight the past years so it will be a learning experience in another way, now the whole thing is tinted pitch black comedy in my mind and I’m just laughing my ass off.
Oh another sidenote or honestly, defense for my reaction because I just listened to the L and Back podcast about the Ultimatum and again, reality tv is not my vibe at all but I absolutely died at the line that Fletcher is the right amount of queer. THE RIGHT? about of Queer? I hope I’m not paraphrasing that and that is the exact wording because it’s so goood.. (Also the right amount of queer for me right now is Renee Rapp because as stated I am a problematic bitch too but her stuff is sparking so much joy right now because the ADHD the talent the pettyness? It speaks to me on a personal level.).
Kind of irresponsible journalistically to be all “I don’t care who Fletcher’s boyfriend is” when he’s in a cult and has SA allegations but sure