someone said troye sivan's whole brand is being gay. he replied "i am gay!!!! gay gay gay gay" over madonna's vogue. no further questions.
Photo: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
via RealityTea, QNews and Troye Sivan's own Instagram Story, as captured by Pop Crave
Four exclamation marks. We counted.
On Wednesday Troye Sivan posted that the video for his new single "FF" would drop at midnight Eastern with the album. Someone quote-posted it with a complaint: "his entire brand being the fact that he's gay is so exhausting." Sivan took a screenshot, put it on his Instagram Story, and added a caption: "I am gay!!!! Gay gay gay gay." The song he set under it, per the music sticker visible in the screenshot Pop Crave shared, was Madonna's "Vogue." RealityTea describes the same Story, and notes he turned the complaint "into the punchline" rather than arguing with it.
Pop Crave's post of it passed 66,000 likes by Friday afternoon. The critic, whose handle is cropped out, has presumably had a long day.
the album he was busy releasing
This all happened on the eve of She's the Best, his fourth studio album, which came out Friday, Oct. 9, per QNews and RealityTea. Earlier in the week he had posted that he had "somehow" made "the gayest music video of my career." The "FF" video, directed by Gordon von Steiner, was filmed on Fire Island, QNews reports. The chorus, as QNews prints it: "Me and my baby are fucking forever." Sivan's own description of the song, quoted by QNews: "FF is an undying love song to a man I don't know yet. Or at least I don't think I do."
So the complaint arrived less than a day before a man released a gay love song, shot on Fire Island, with a video he had personally billed as his gayest. Timing has never been the critics' strong suit.
the actual answer to the complaint
Straight pop has been one long brand about being straight since the invention of the radio, and nobody has ever called it exhausting. Sivan has made the gay part of his work the point for years, right up to the Madonna-sampling, Ian McKellen-narrated "Party" we wrote about earlier this fall. He was in a bathhouse with Elliot Page for a magazine shoot. The brand is not hidden. That is rather the idea.
His reply was the right length. Some criticism deserves an essay. This one deserved Madonna.
the internet reacts
the gays, and a lot of other people, had one question: when exactly did anyone complain about a straight man singing about his girlfriend?
yoona @girlikeyoonaAnd gay people deserve to be obnoxiously gay in pop culture ns… yall don’t complain about heterosexism being everywhere34,238 likes∞ michelle ∞ @randomheartSO MANY straight artists make their entire brand about their relationships and no one says a thing but when a gay man does so bc they’re HIS reality and HIS experiences then he gets inundated with criticism. homophobia alive and well.10,989 likesmaria ⋆˚꩜ zara larsson's ashtray @hudcnmariain this political climate its actually soooo nice to have people who are unapologetically gay2,672 likes
