I hadn’t considered how gay the iconic Mean Girls line “it’s not my fault you’re like in love with me” was until it rolled off of Reneé Rapp’s lips.
To be fair, the deciding factor maaaaaaybe wasn’t just the voice over in the opening seconds into her newest single with Megan thee Stallion — “Not My Fault” of the upcoming Mean Girls Musical soundtrack — though it certainly didn’t hurt!
Instead, it maybe came from the matching “it’s not my fault you’re like in love with me” captions that both Meg and Reneé left on their Instagrams this week to hype the song’s highly anticipated release. But still, points were made!!
The newly revamped Mean Girls hits theaters on January 12th, just a little shy of the 20 year anniversary of the original. It’s based on the original film’s Broadway musical adaptation. All of which is to say, there simply could not be a better Regina George than Reneé Rapp.
Besides being recorded by two hot bisexual stars, “Not My Fault” also has some winks for what’s apparently a long-standing theory — though unbeknownst to me before this week — which is that Regina George is a lesbian??
In the second verse Rapp hits us with:
“Get her number, get her name
Get a good thing while you can
Kiss a blonde (Kiss a blonde), kiss a friend (Okay)
Can a gay girl get an, “Amen?”
Amen. For her part, Meg follows up with “I been told y’all, I’m the black Regina George.”
Rapp (who, by the way, also played the best villain to ever stomp through hallways in pink during the show’s Broadway run) amped up this queer reading Regina last week when she captioned her Instagram with a real direct “regina george was a lesbian”… so yeah, not a lot of room for misinterpretation there!
Now, do I think Reneé Rapp was just making a little tee-hee gay joke with her fans? Yes, yes I do. But it also means that the queer actor playing Regina understands her to be gay, and I can’t wait to see how that interpretation ultimately plays into her performance.
According to a deep dive by Diva Magazine, it appears the “Regina George is a lesbian” train first took off in 2021, by @lizzie.mchigher on TikTok, who in particular has a lot of very interesting things to say about Regina’s relationship with Mean Girl’s noted lesbian outcast Janis Ian and Regina’s own internalized homophobia. Later, in 2022, a fan held up a sign that said “Regina Is a Lesbian” during one of Reneé Rapp’s concerts and she responded, “She is! It’s so true, and I heard that from God. He told me.”
@lizzie.mchigher
It’s still a few weeks before the new Mean Girls release, where we can see Regina’s positively affirmed lesbian era for ourselves. Until then, here’s “Not My Fault.” When we started the pink revolution for Barbie over the summer, I didn’t realize that deep into winter we’d still be here. But fuck it! Pink forever.
Let it catch on like Fetch never could.
A link to Tidal would be nice.
This song has been stuck in my head all weekend! So excited for Reneé to be the musical guest on SNL in January