How The Gay Icon In Music Has Evolved Since Mariah Carey

Growing up as a closeted gay man in a working class Yorkshire village wasn’t easy. I spent my former years acutely aware that I wasn’t traditionally ‘masculine’ the way I was encouraged to be by the men around me. I hated football, was more interested in flipping through fashion mags than customising cars, and my favourite film was Mean Girls. By contrast, the popular boys were busy kicking the shit out of each other in the school field, drinking White Star in the local park, and intent on putting their tongues down as many girls’ throats as humanly possible. They seemed swaggeringly confident, able to land a punch, and referred to anything that wasn’t socially acceptable as “gay”, and gay men as “faggots”. I would learn this was social masculinity in its most exaggerated – occasionally toxic – form, but all I knew back then was that these boys were celebrated by the community around me, and for a long time, I wished I were more like them.