Why do gay people love carly rae jepsen

There is something queer about that duality. Is it even worth asking if they like me? But her anonymity within her own music allows all kinds of desire to permeate into it. I chose Jepsen because she understood that duality, the way desire can burst and bloom but still remain impossible.

Our pop culture revolves around romantic endpoints. Even something that never leaves your imagination deserves its own bouncy pop chorus. Don't get me wrong: Like any warm-blooded gay man born in the s, I love Carly Rae Jepsen. And that's why we find so much comfort in Carly Rae Jepsen.

Then, in my freshman year in college, a friend opened up her selection of golden eye-shadows to me. In a culture in which one-sided longing is tethered to tragedy, she finds identity and fulfillment in wanting, in feeling simply because feeling is great.

In a music world in which spaces for queer people, especially queer women, are so limited, there is a revolution in that. We stepped through the door and into s neon splendor, where we danced, tipsily, and waited for the real show.

Instead, we have to sit in silence and watch that straight guy sit in ignorance due to the stigma straight people gave gay men and blatant homophobia. Do they like me? After "E•MO•TION," an album that's essentially become a gay classic, what kind of pressure was on you when recording "Dedicated" as its follow up?

In movies, feelings invariably turn into relationships, and there is little room for longings that will never be fulfilled. Her glossy pop hooks seem crafted for ubiquity, step one in the inevitable march toward her knighthood as a central pop figure alongside the likes of Ariana Grande.

How we read your hair, your clothes, the music that makes you yank your friends to the dance floor, all in service of finding one of our own in a crowded room. I unquestionably consider her album E•MO•TION the greatest pop album of this decade.

She, the person, the artist, recedes beneath the depth of her feelings. I wanted to scrub away those feelings; Jepsen wanted me to embrace them. She feels and feels and thinks and overthinks, but rarely do her desires manifest in the real world.

But the correlation goes deeper: part of flopping is being measured against your former self, blurring the space between pervasive and invisible. I stared at them, I thought, because I wanted to look like them. Desire, in the Jepsen formulation, extends beyond a simple relationship: in many of her songs, she may as easily be discussing a fumbled hook-up or a platonic longing for intimacy.

Wanting without having is not tragic, and Jepsen is one of the few celebrities telling the queer community that we are whole no matter how much of ourselves we choose to share.

She Bop We Bop

Since I was a kid, I buried a lingering desiring of mine to wear colorful makeup because I understood enough about masculinity to know it was forbidden. Survey your Carly Rae Jepsen-obsessed friends, and you might find something surprising: a disproportionate share of them are queer.

The intensity of her feelings belies their internality. But one thing was different: We were capping off our night with a performance by Carly Rae Jepsen at Heaven, a gay super-club nestled beneath the arches of a railway station.

I think the subject of love is very universal." And included in her universal message of love is Jepsen's big gay fan base. She is at once seen and unseen, lost in the orbits of her own desires. You get the sense that while her mind hums with visions of a sprawling romance with the person across the room, she is in reality static: huddled in the corner several feet away, terrified to walk over and talk to them.

Carly Rae Jepsen My

It evokes the ways in which queer people search each other out in public. The axis around which Jepsen spins, then, is longing. Jepsen, as the secondary character in her music, is the most extreme example of this phenomenon.

I wasn't intending for myself to feel pressure, but I feel like there's always pressure when you love what you do and you want it to connect.