What to make of Katy Perry’s make-believe
If you were semi-conscious in the year 2008, you know that Katy Perry kissed a girl and she liked it.
The American pop star’s breakout single, “I Kissed a Girl,” topped the Billboard 100 chart for seven weeks (in Billboard 100 time, that’s about as long as snow has topped Mount Everest).
But what you didn’t know in 2008 is that Perry wasn’t lying: She really did kiss a girl — offstage, and in real life — and she really did like it. She wasn’t putting on a phoney Sapphic show to rouse frat boys and ruffle conservative feathers. She wasn’t, to quote another big tune from that same year (Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface”) “bluffin’ with her muffin.” She meant the words she sang, but she kept her bisexual bent a secret.
Perry revealed this secret to the world this past weekend at the Human Rights Campaign gala, where the LGBTQ rights organization presented the singer with its National Equality Award for “using her powerful voice and international platform to speak out for LGBTQ equality.”
Perry, who regularly takes to Twitter to lend support to gay and transgender rights, told the gala audience that she “did more” than just kiss girls as a teen, but she couldn’t reconcile this fact with her identity as a “gospel-singing girl raised in youth groups” where homosexual conversion therapy was a staple of the Bible Belt culture. “So,” she said, “for more of my unconscious adolescence, I prayed the gay away.”
To some, especially those exasperated by the seemingly never-ending LGBTQ+ abbreviation, Perry’s sexual revelation might land as rather unremarkable.
But for a lot of lesbians who came of age in the 2000s, Perry’s “coming out” is remarkable.
“I Kissed a Girl” wasn’t just a catchy pop song, nor was it a unifying anthem of lesbian pride. Instead, it was an anthem of lowstakes sexual experimentation for straight women. The song, rife with I’m-not-really-gay qualifiers such as, “I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it,” and, “It don’t mean I’m in love tonight,” was regarded by a lot of queer people as a convenient, socially acceptable means for otherwise straight-and-narrow (and often inebriated) women to experiment with their sexuality for the length of a song; to try on the lesbian identity as they would a costume in a Halloween store, and then put the item back on the rack as soon as they’d had their fill of fantasy. If you went clubbing in the late 2000s it wasn’t uncommon to see heterosexual women lock lips on the dance floor when the DJ played “I Kissed a Girl” — and knowing what was in store, he invariably did.
It really is quite a trip then, to discover nearly 10 years later that Katy Perry, the catalyst and lead star of this great game of lesbian make- believe, was never playing makebelieve herself.
The question now is what do we do with this information? The singer’s revelation has been met online with equal parts praise and scorn. Some commend her for using her platform to promote LGBTQ rights; others remain skeptical of a celebrity they feel launched her career by objectifying and fetishizing lesbians for a straight audience.
Critics are also having a hard time letting Perry off the hook for “Ur So Gay,” the singer’s more blatantly homophobic ditty from 2008, a breakup song in which she sings about an effeminate boyfriend: “I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf/While jacking off listening to Mozart/ You’re so gay and you don’t even like boys.”
“It’s still not entirely clear,” writes Riese, the editor-in-chief of Au- tostraddle, a queer pop culture magazine, “what Perry has done for the LGBT community that other bankable pop stars or celebrities haven’t.”
The answer is not much. She’s no Elton John and she’s certainly no Ellen DeGeneres. But maybe this a good thing. Maybe it’s the only thing that matters.
Maybe Perry’s shallow connection to the queer world is her greatest asset, because it teaches us an invaluable lesson about acceptance.
If we really want people to relax their fixed ideas about gender and sexuality then we can’t cry “phoney” or “opportunist” when they do. All deviations from the heterosexual norm are valid, whether they last 30 years or 30 seconds of a single song, on a crowded nightclub dance floor. Emma Teitel is a national affairs columnist.