Snail Mail – Forever (Sailing)
Valentine, the second album by the Baltimore indie-rock musician Snail Mail, AKA Lindsey Jordan, is a black hole of anxiety and desperation, a record that revels in the seamy, depressive aftermath of a breakup. Forever (Sailing) is the grand, gorgeous centrepiece of the album, an aching power ballad that finds Jordan singing, over grimy trip-hop production, about a relationship too toxic to last: “So much destruction / Look at what we did / That was so real / And you don’t just forget.” Across Valentine, Jordan rarely lets herself combust like she does on Forever (Sailing) – it’s a huge, dramatic sucker punch, a pop-star turn planted right in the middle of an indie record. Its genesis is a testament to the gay art of dredging up forgotten pop songs: Forever (Sailing)’s chorus is lifted from You and I, a chintzy 70s pop track by the forgotten Swedish diva Madleen Kane. But where the original track is a camp fantasia, Jordan plays it totally straight – finding intense pathos among the chintz. Shaad D’Souza
Diana Ross – I’m Coming Out
Diana Ross’s club-inspired LGBTQ+ anthem – which attained a second life as the lead sample for Notorious BIG’s 1997 mega-hit Mo Money Mo Problems – was, in the words of its co-writer Nile Rodgers, meant to do for the gay community what James Brown’s Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud did for the Black community. Inspired, according to Rodgers, by Diana Ross impersonators, the track has, since its debut in 1980, become a queer anthem for members of the community everywhere, with its message of self-love and empowerment. The track also became a central song for Ross, indicating her own coming out from under the power of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Although Ross was initially frightened when she learned what “coming out” meant, she went on to embrace the track making it her lead song at performances. With its easy joyousness and infectious message, it’s not hard to see why it’s caught on. Veronica Esposito
George Michael – Outside
George Michael would not be shamed. Released just six months after his arrest for cruising in a Beverly Hills bathroom, Outside is a jubilant non-apology for having sex in public, and a headrush of pop funk joy. As Fastlove’s pointed yet playful elder sibling, the song is one of Michael’s most ebullient – he is the pope of carnal pleasure, framed by a sweaty bassline, disco (or is that police?) whistles, and strings that cascade like party streamers. The wonderfully absurd video opens with a 70s German porno set-up and moves to show a smorgasbord of alfresco romping surveilled by the LAPD, trouser fumblers desperate for a sliver of skin. At the centre of it all is Michael in full cop fetishwear, a Castro god swinging a 12-inch truncheon around a light-up dancefloor singing about, ahem, servicing the community. Like the most enduring queer pop, Outside never apologises or grovels for acceptance. To quote Michael himself, it is “Fuck off, this is my culture” in a song. Owen Myers
Frank Ocean – Forrest Gump
After years of carefully coded songs about gay love, whether it be found or lost, one of the many thrills of Frank Ocean’s transcendent Channel Orange was his fearlessly mainstream embrace of same-sex pronouns. On Bad Religion, it was the pain of the unrequited (“I can never make him love me”) and on the far-less-heralded Forrest Gump, it was the giddy kick of the infatuation that comes first. It’s a song of a feeling many queer people know all too well, of thinking about someone in private (“You run my mind boy”) and then the dream that some of us might never get to experience in real life, the all-consuming warmth of being supported, and loved, in public (“I wanna see your pom-poms from the stand”). It’s a hair-raising song of new, frightening emotion, the excitement of wondering where something might go quietly grounded by the sad, nagging feeling that maybe that place is nowhere. Benjamin Lee
Steely Dan – Rikki Don’t Lose That Number
Many of the best-known gay songs express liberation and stoke pride. But the sad truth is, the long history of gay people has far more often involved forced repression and engrained shame. For all that time, the only way to find the meanings we desired in pop songs was to project our situations on to lyrics that weren’t written with us in mind, in the process making us as much interpreters as listeners. In that spirit, few songs have captured the covert and conflicted nature many gay people experienced in those years more vividly than Steely Dan’s 1974 smash Rikki Don’t Lose That Number. Allegedly, Donald Fagen wrote his lyric about an evasive girl he knew in college, but lines like: “I thought our little wild time had just begun / I guess you kind of scared yourself / You turn and run,” could just as easily evoke the aftermath of a same-sex fling whose consequences spooked the narrator’s partner to the core. The point expands in the bridge: “You tell yourself you’re not my kind / But you don’t even know your mind / And you could have a change of heart.” The music that serenades these words represents its own sly act of transposition. Fagen and Walter Becker lifted the main piano part for their hit from the bass riff in Song for My Father by the jazz artist Horace Silver. The off-kilter chords they repurposed for their piece reflect the gay demimonde, while the song’s complex structure mirrors the dense system of codes and clues that, at the time, defined our lives. Jim Farber
Man on Man – It’s So Fun (To Be Gay)
Boyfriend and boyfriend Joey Holman and Roddy Bottum, AKA the New York-based rock duo Man on Man, recognise the power in keeping things simple. On their plain-speaking, gloriously gay 2021 self-titled debut they sing about their new love via both sweet serenades (Baby You’re My Everything) and grunting, primal fantasies (Daddy), the latter’s tales of impromptu blow jobs accompanied by a video featuring the two men kissing in nothing but tighty whities. (The video was briefly banned by YouTube.) But it’s on this sweet lullaby that Holman and Bottum – two older gay men with nary a six-pack in sight, working in a hyper-masculine genre – strip everything back to honour and celebrate queer joy in its simplest form. Its warm-hearted spirit (“come along, it’s OK” runs the welcoming opening lyric) is replicated in the video which features friends and fans from across the queer spectrum miming along to a song whose central lyric, one that focuses on increasingly hard-won happiness, feels very necessary in 2023. Michael Cragg
Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring
The hushed Being Boring tenderly runs a hand over the untouchable veneer of youth: how even if you know your fantasies will probably end up as pipe dreams, friendship, at any rate, seems eternal. For Neil Tennant, it was the opposite: he became one of the biggest pop stars of his generation; meanwhile one of the friends he invented the world with as a teenager had died of Aids. Being Boring is such a beautiful tribute to innocence, its awful conclusion all the more gut-punching for the song’s gentleness. “All the people I was kissing / Some are here and some are missing / In the 1990s,” Tennant sings, as quiet as if walking around a museum. Yet Being Boring is quietly defiant: satirising perceptions of the Pet Shop Boys as dull, it seeded their next phase by reaching towards Balearic-inspired sounds and riffing on Stock Aitken Waterman’s love of a key change in the chorus. It hasn’t lost its seething undertow. Headlining the Other stage at last year’s Glastonbury, Tennant dedicated it to “the victims of the appalling crime at Oslo Pride”. More than three decades on, being “the creature that I always meant to be” is still sorely under threat. Laura Snapes
Troye Sivan featuring Allday – for him
When Troye Sivan released his debut album Blue Neighbourhood in 2015, its acclaim and reception effectively launched the singer-actor’s music career. Aside from a breezy and danceable production that relied on equal parts bare piano and sweeping pop production, it’s Sivan’s lyrics which are the standout. They showcased raw honesty about his sexuality, pronouns and all, resulting in a trailblazing moment for mainstream pop. For queer music fans around the world, listening to songs like for him, during which Sivan is unapologetically crooning about gay love, were equal parts refreshing and cathartic. Even more important, Sivan isn’t just relaying tales concerning dancing and hookups, but about the sheer normalcy of queer love. “We make a really good team,” the Aussie star proclaims. “We got this crazy chemistry.” Regardless of whether or not Sivan meant to break boundaries, the most important facet of songs like for him is that he was an artist fearlessly displaying his true, authentic self. Rob LeDonne
