A Generation of Stars Working Out Queerness in Their Songs

When in 2012 the buzzy new singer Frank Ocean said he’d fallen in love with a man, the admission was a landmark: Mainstream pop, R&B, and rap—the genres Ocean was deftly bridging—were still overwhelmingly straight. In a grateful letter to Ocean, the writer and filmmaker dream hampton put his news in perspective: “You’re a Black man in America whose star is on the rise, working in hip-hop and soul, where gender constructs are cartoonishly fixed. Your colleague Drake is often attacked with homophobic slurs when he simply displays vulnerability in his music. He seems to respond by following those moments of real emotion with bars that put ‘hoes’ in their proverbial place.” The rapturous response to Ocean’s debut album, Channel Orange, then proved that queerness need not be a career breaker.

The text of Ocean’s coming-out statement—like hampton’s words above—also implied that his reckoning with his sexuality might have musical, not just social, implications. In his open letter, Ocean described confessing his attraction to a close friend (“He