Pride in her music
Pop singer Ria Mae never considered herself an LGBTQ activist, but a recent music video shoot for the song Gold pushed the Halifax native to reflect on the boundaries of her own identity. It began when a director pitched Mae the idea of playing a fictionalized version of herself caught in a passionate but troubled romance with another woman.
She knew portraying a lesbian could potentially pigeonhole her music career, but Mae paused to question why she was so worried about putting her sexual orientation on the radar.
“I had this gut feeling, like, ‘Shut up. It’s good, and it’s important.’ ”
So Mae agreed to the storyline for Gold, a rare example of a music video where a lesbian relationship doesn’t exist solely for the titillation of straight men.
Gold director Alon Isocianu says this wasn’t the first time he’d proposed a same-sex relationship for a video, but it was the only instance that he felt almost no resistance.
“It’s happened for years where I would pitch a video that had a same-sex couple, and the record labels were like, ‘We love all these scenes, but can you make that scene between the two high school kids, a boy and a girl?’ ” he says.
Isocianu, who has worked with Kelly Clarkson and Pentatonix, thinks executives don’t want to “open that can of worms” with an artist or risk making a video where the song is overshadowed by the sexual orientation of its characters.
“It always blew my mind that would be an issue,” he says. “If I had a black character and somebody was like, ‘Can we just make him white?’ it would be a weird conversation to have.”
While music videos may seem like a minuscule concern, in the bigger picture they can play an important role for young LGBTQ people who seek adequate representation in mainstream media.
“Pop music itself was — for many young people trapped at home in suburbia — all they had,” says Mark Simpson, a British author and pop culture critic, reflecting on the era when MTV and Much Music ruled the airwaves. “(It was), their only escape and their only connection.”
In the 1980s, most gay characters in music videos were part of tragic stories, like Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy, or subjects of overt sexual repression, like in the Pet Shop Boys’ Domino Dancing. By the 1990s, some headway was being made as singers like k.d. lang and George Michael came out.
Today, the portrayal of LGBTQ themes in videos is becoming more mainstream. But even with so much progress, at least one artist has found many battles left to fight.
Last year, Nashville singer Who is Fancy, born Jake Hagood, became a guinea pig for the music industry’s tolerance of queer artists. Signed by Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun, and under a deal with Republic Records, the singer-songwriter was part of a marketing campaign that kept his identity secret.
But in retrospect, the flamboyant performer says the reasons behind the approach were flawed.
“In the midst of being promised the world, you’re excited and you want to go for it,” he says of going along with the strategy.
Plans were unconventional for Goodbye, his music video debut. Instead of showcasing the singer, three versions were filmed with actors portraying versions of his personality. A fourth version starring Hagood was never released, he says.
Pop star Meghan Trainor, Hagood’s longtime friend, says she disliked the concept from the start.
“I felt like you’re hiding this guy,” she remembers thinking, even as his song climbed the chart.
“What I loved about (Who is Fancy), was his appearance. He’s this bubbly, happy person ... he has the confidence, he has everything, and they just — I don’t like what they did.”