I just think ‘faggot’ hits and hurts people,” he told NME, though he then added: “‘Gay’ just means you’re stupid.” “My step-father called me a fag, I’ll show him a fag / I’ll light a fire up in his ass,” he rapped on 2013’s “Pigs,” a song inspired by the mindset of the Columbine shooters. Tyler’s career now and before, though, actually shows the extent to which such words do have fixed meanings-and gay slurs reinforce a stigma that he may well have struggled with. The way that I see things, it’s you chose to be offended if you care more about stuff like that.” Flower Boy is a reminder that it’s not only straight people who can be infected by homophobia. In 2013, he said of “faggot” on The Arsenio Hall Show, “That’s just a word, you can take the power out of that word. Notably he justified his previous use of slurs with a philosophically adjacent thought: Words are pliable, their meaning up to the user. This sort of post-labelism is certainly in vogue, and Tyler, as much as a millennial icon as any musician, may be embracing it. “The homie not gay, he just likes dudes,” Odd Future associate Mike G tweeted after Flower Boy’s lyrics began to leak online. It’s the individual relationships, not his overall identity grouping, that’s the focus here. Over a musical palette generally gentler than that which he was originally known for-more spacey synth jazz than noise-he confesses to deep loneliness and nostalgia for past loves. Tyler has cheekily accepted and rejected the term “gay” over the years, and he doesn’t use it on Flower Boy, an album preoccupied with matters of the heart. Ocean’s news came from an open letter in which he talked about a relationship with a man he still hasn’t publicly identified with a label, whether “bisexual” or “gay” or “queer,” and his songs spin stories about affairs with both genders. In all of this Tyler may be staging a crasser version of the public process Frank Ocean went through in declaring his non-straightness. “I one hundred percent would go gay for ’96 Leo. Seriously, are you gay? Are these repressed feelings? “No, but I am in love with ’96 Leonardo DiCaprio,” he says.
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I finally ask, Why all the gay humor? “Because I’m gay as fuck,” he says, without a flinch.
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“My friends are so used to me being gay,” Tyler says, “they don't even care.” At one point on the bus, he recalls sending nude photos to a group chat with his friends and no one responded.
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Never more than a few minutes pass without him saying he’s going to suck someone’s dick or him accusing someone of wanting to suck dick. It’s like a continuous loop of the “You know how I know you’re gay?” scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Then there’s this passage from a 2015 Rolling Stone profile by Ernest Baker:įor the past two days I’ve wondered, is Tyler actually gay? I cannot emphasize how much gay humor plays a role in the atmosphere around him. He also put out a controversial t-shirt that re-worked neo-Nazi imagery with the rainbow flag. In 2015, he tweeted, “I tried to come out the damn closet like four days ago and no one cared hahahhahaha,” and he rapped, “How can I be homophobic when my boyfriend’s a fag? / And we been hiding in the closet like our passion is fashion, still trying to come out.” He’s referred to himself with gay slurs over the years and has joked-or not joked-about having a thing for freckly white guys. Perhaps he’s simply now introducing a fictional “Flower Boy” persona who makes out with guys.īut if it’s a con, it’s a committed one. The centerpiece of 2015’s Cherry Bomb was an intoxicating/queasy contribution to the pop tradition of lusting after an underage girl. His early albums were wars between different alter-egos: There was a masked maniac who smoked pot and broke stuff there was a murderous cat there was a calm therapist coaching Tyler to get a grip.