Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer Helped My Queer Journey

This LGBTQ+ Historical past Month, we’re asking writers to mirror on a second in queer popular culture historical past that has allowed them to expertise queer liberation in their very own lives. Try our protection right here.

When Janelle Monáe launched “Make Me Really feel,” the funky hit single off her third studio album, “Soiled Laptop,” in February 2018, the music consumed my ideas. I used to be 19 on the time, and the 12 months had been a major one for me — I had been coping with my mother and father’ divorce, began rehashing non secular trauma, and shaved all my hair off. And on high of all that, I started to query my sexuality.

However Monáe’s catchy lyrics — “That is simply the best way you make me really feel” — saved echoing in my head. The music itself was instantly praised as a bisexual anthem, and Monáe’s music video with Tessa Thompson portrayed an irresistible flirtationship between the 2.

At that time in my life, I might usually struggled to place my sexuality into phrases, so I might run away from the considered labeling myself. However one thing modified that spring, and I do not suppose it is a coincidence that “Soiled Laptop” was launched alongside my very own journey, offering a soundtrack to feelings I might lengthy saved deep inside myself.

Since childhood, I might attended weekly Sunday service at my Baptist church with my mother and father and went to a non-public Christian faculty from kindergarten to eighth grade. Years of homophobic, transphobic, and misogynist language was spouted from the mouths of my Sunday faculty lecturers and the dean at my faculty, however that by no means stopped me from listening to secular music.

I used to be 11 once I first heard Monáe’s music, and it was paradoxically throughout a Kmart business for the back-to-school season, because it performed “Tightrope” that includes OutKast’s Massive Boi. The catchy monitor — which occurred to be the debut single for 2010’s “The ArchAndroid” — feels timeless and nonetheless holds a spot on Monáe’s setlist for his or her ongoing “The Age of Pleasure” Tour. I sometimes listened to “The Electrical Girl,” however one thing clicked when “Soiled Laptop” was launched.

Maybe it was as a result of, alongside “Soiled Laptop”‘s launch, Monáe gifted their followers a whole 48-minute “emotion image” of a dystopian and science-fiction scope right into a world that started together with her character Jane 57821 being labeled as “soiled,” which referenced the marginalized and oppressed. The movie and album additionally launched me to the idea of Afrofuturism. Little did I do know that Monáe’s utilization of Afrofuturism all through their discography portrayed a future filled with Black, queer folks, one which I felt I might actually belong to.

In highschool, I assumed that my allyship to the queer group ended there — however nothing extra. As I surrounded myself with extra pals that recognized as LGBTQ+ and consumed extra queer media through Tumblr, although, I started rethinking my sexuality. I used to be astonished by Monáe’s unapologetic nature to their Blackness, womanhood, and queer identification, which is one thing that I did not know was attainable to do without delay. Between the album’s empowerment anthems like “Django Jane” and colourful labia-lined pants from the “PYNK” music video, I shortly turned obsessive about the album and attended the “Soiled Laptop” Tour 3 times the next 12 months.

“Monáe perseveres previous the misogynoir, and I have been taking notes.”

5 years later, the whole album feels timeless and as transferring because it did on the primary hear. In “I Like That,” Monáe made a reference to being referred to as “bizarre,” and as a Black lady who’s undoubtedly leaned on the “otherness” or various spectrum of Blackness, I really feel seen each time I hearken to it. Their androgynous, suit-forward type has been an inspiration for my evolving type, and their public stance to be a “free-ass motherf*cker” will at all times encourage me to specific myself to the fullest. Past type and character, I’ve admired Monáe’s method to sexual liberation amid on-line discourse that has revolved round others making an attempt to police their physique.

Whatever the unfavorable pushback they’ve obtained for his or her music movies or performances that commemorate sexual autonomy and Black our bodies, Monáe perseveres past the misogynoir, and I have been taking notes ever since my 19-year-old self first listened to “Make Me Really feel.”

Certainly, the summer time after “Soiled Laptop” was launched, I attended my first Delight and have not missed an annual celebration since. Though I have never come out to a majority of my household, I might hope that my expression of Blackness and gender identification can silently converse for itself. As I revisit Monáe’s discography, I am grateful for his or her enduring queer bops.

In September, I even attended Monáe’s “The Age of Pleasure” Tour at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. The three-act present was the second sold-out cease in New York Metropolis, and though the night time was a precursor to town’s current flooding, you’d don’t know that Brooklyn was plagued with rain, due to Monáe’s dazzling efficiency. Described by the singer as a “protected oasis,” the two-hour set was an ode to the pleasure politics of “The Age of Pleasure” whereas paying homage to the revolutionary queer anthems from “Soiled Laptop” and “The ArchAndroid.”

5 years in the past, I could have recognized little or no in regards to the intersection of my queer identification and Black womanhood, however due to Monáe’s artistry, I can usually mirror alone revolutionary politics and apply them to my life.