a closeted 14-year-old watched ian mckellen on stage in perth. now gandalf narrates his gay disco video.

via Rolling Stone Australia, PinkNews, QNews and OutInPerth

The first voice in Troye Sivan's new video is not Troye Sivan's. It is Ian McKellen, doing the full cathedral baritone, asking a question QNews transcribed as "What is victory if not celebrated?"

Then a pop star in a full suit of plate armor eats cake.

what "party" actually samples

"Party" went up on Thursday, the second single from She's the Best, Sivan's fourth album, out October 9. It is built on Madonna's "Music," the 2000 one, which is a large thing to stand next to and a funnier one once you have decided your video is set in the Middle Ages. Gordon von Steiner directed it at a castle in Berkeley, England. Sivan's brother Tyde Levi is on the track, the first time the two of them have made a song together, and their sibling Sage Mellet turns up on screen.

"Dance music sounds very different on a dance floor than it does coming out of your laptop speaker," Sivan told Rolling Stone Australia. "The repetition becomes almost hypnotic, and I wanted to play with structure in that way."

why it is set in a castle

Because the joke is load-bearing. "We kept coming back to the idea that partying is actually quite sacred, especially for queer people," Sivan said of his conversations with von Steiner, and once he says it out loud the armor stops being a costume gag. Putting a gay dance floor inside a thousand-year-old building is an argument: people have been finding each other in rooms like this for as long as there have been rooms, and most of them did not get a music video out of it.

"Nightlife is often the first place a queer person finds themselves in a room where they're not the minority," he said, "so it becomes a really formative and liberating space for so many of us." Anyone who has walked into a bar like that for the first time recognizes the sentence immediately and could probably not have built it that cleanly.

how sivan met mckellen

This is the part worth stopping on, and every outlet buried it.

Sivan was 14, in Perth, in a production of Waiting for Godot with McKellen. Rolling Stone Australia reports he was working up to telling his mother he was gay at the time, and that watching a man be openly, unembarrassedly gay and successful at that exact moment did something permanent. He has framed the cameo since as a line drawn between two generations, which is a generous way of describing what is really a teenager's private calculation that the future might be survivable.

So the shape of it is this. A boy who has not told his mum yet sits in a theater in Western Australia watching the most famous out actor alive hold a stage. Years pass. The boy grows up, gets a career, makes a record about dancing, and calls that man to ask whether he would mind opening it.

Sir Ian said yes. He also, one assumes, read the treatment first, saw the words "knight," "cake" and "sacred," and said yes anyway.

There are worse uses of a knighthood.