Inside the Highs and Lows of Sapphic Pop’s Banner Year

H
alfway through their set, Muna address the elephant in the stadium. “We just wanted to acknowledge that someone very special is missing tonight,” says the indie-pop trio’s lead singer, Katie Gavin. It’s day one of All Things Go, an independent music festival that fans nicknamed Lesbopalooza due to its largely queer, female or non-binary line-up, including Chappell Roan. Except the day before she was scheduled to appear onstage at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York, Roan pulled out.

“We love Chappell so much,” Gavin continues, as the young, eager audience, a quarter of whom have donned pink cowboy hats in homage to Roan’s song “Pink Pony Club,” quiet down to hear what this wise stateswoman of sapphic pop has to say. “You know, we started as a queer band in 2014, so we’ve really been given the time and the grace that we needed to be nourished as artists.” Gavin leans over to plug her acoustic guitar into her amplifier as she goes on: “We wish nothing but that times a million for her, so sing this one for Chappell.” And with that, the trio launches into a strummy, slowed-down cover of Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” and the audience does as Gavin has gently commanded them to do. They sing every word in unison. They sway together, too, gently rocking from side to side in the purple and pink light. 

Naomi McPherson, Muna’s primary producer and second guitarist alongside Josette Maskin, was stationed behind a synth earlier in the evening, but is now center stage, accompanying Gavin on lead vocals. From the looks of it, they are prepping to conquer Roan’s spine-tingling vocals on the song’s epic bridge. They plant one foot in front of the other and cup the microphone in their hands. “I told you sooo,” McPherson belts out to the gobsmacked audience. They hold the high note long, like a diva, as the crowd erupts. I look to my left and see two young women crying. No one, myself included, seemed to expect this young musician in camo pants to be able to belt like Patti LaBelle. That’s the thing about queer artists, though: They are always brushing up against, bursting through, or staring down other people’s expectations about who they are and how they should behave. 

In retrospect, Muna’s cover of “Good Luck, Babe!” at All Things Go was a remarkable thing to witness — and it stood in startlingly well for the highs, lows, and sheer chaos of the past year, when queer and non-binary acts like boygenius, Victoria Monét, Reneé Rapp, Towa Bird, Muna, Kehlani, Janelle Monáe, Billie Eilish, and Chappell Roan have dominated pop culture to such an all-encompassing extent that many in the media dubbed the moment a “lesbian renaissance.” Start with the song: “Good Luck, Babe!” is quite possibly the only bop about compulsory heterosexuality to ever land within Billboard’s Top Five. It was one of the leading contenders for 2024’s song of the summer, as clip after clip of Roan performing it on the festival circuit went viral, fueling the song’s momentum until it hit like a heatwave — scorching, inescapable, and all anyone could talk about.

Second, there was the stark absence at Forest Hills of the song’s owner. Roan has been at the epicenter of this so-called renaissance, and her warp-speed transition from “gaymous” to famous has been bumpy, to say the least. In the course of a single summer, she went from living relatively anonymously to being stalked, harassed, and forcibly kissed by strangers, then subjected to multiple internet pile-ons for everything from her initial refusal to endorse a presidential candidate to attempting to set boundaries with her fans. None of these experiences are unique to LGBTQ+ artists, but together they highlight just how complex navigating mainstream success as a marginalized person can be. We want our queer pop stars whom we feel so seen by to see us, too. We want them to look and be just like us — even if that isn’t actually who they are. 

Finally, there was the Muna of it all. This is the band that arguably kicked off the whole sapphic pop, queer joy, whatever you want to call it movement a few years ago, when they released their feel-good hit single “Silk Chiffon” with Phoebe Bridgers. You could draw a straight — or not-so-straight — line connecting that song’s upbeat tempo and lyrics to Roan’s coy, queer flirtation in “Red Wine Supernova,” from Muna’s “she’s so soft like silk chiffon” to Roan’s “long hair, no bra, that’s my type.” In fact, McPherson even predicted in a since-deleted tweet from 2022 that “Silk Chiffon” would usher in an era of sapphic pop, much like the one we now appear to be living in.

SO, HOW DOES IT feel to have predicted the future? “I was right,” says McPherson when we speak a few days before All Things Go. “You could call me Nostradamus. Naom-o-stradumus!” 

All jokes aside, they know they wouldn’t be here were it not for the queer artists who came before them. “We are standing on the shoulders of lesbian, queer, sapphic artists who’ve been doing this shit for so long,” McPherson says. Right again: Because as much as this overtly sapphic pop culture moment feels new to a large swath of young queer people, it’s happened before — in the Eighties and Nineties, when artists like Melissa Etheridge, Tracy Chapman, k.d. lang, and the Indigo Girls dominated MTV, VH1, festival lineups, FM radio, and the Grammys.

“As a music historian, the way I see what’s happening right now is just a continuation of what’s been happening for a long time,” says Kaleb Goldschmitt, an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar at Wellesley College. They note that while some might argue that the previous moment wasn’t as mainstream as what we’re seeing now, that’s not actually true.  

“Tracy Chapman in 1989 was extremely dominant,” Goldschmitt says. At the height of her commercial success, Chapman performed on Saturday Night Live twice in just over a year (once in November 1988 and again in December 1989); her self-titled debut album went to Number One on the Billboard charts, and, over the years, her hit single “Fast Car” has transcended time and genre to become an American anthem. Just last year, the country artist Luke Combs returned “Fast Car” to the charts, when his cover climbed to Number Two on Billboard’s Hot 100 and netted Chapman the Song of the Year prize at the 2023 Country Music Awards.  

“Melissa Etheridge really broke through,” too, says Goldschmitt, and not just among lesbians: “Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise loved her.” Three songs from Etheridge’s 1993 album Yes I Am landed in Billboard’s Top 40; 1993 is also the year the lesbian singer k.d. lang appeared with the supermodel Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair. “The lesbian was all over the culture,” says Goldschmitt. “It was very mainstream.” 

So then why does this moment feel so different? Partly it’s the music. Mainstream lesbian artists in the Nineties existed along a very narrow sonic spectrum, spanning from outlaw country to roots-rock, with little room in between. (Queen Latifah didn’t publicly acknowledge her sexuality until 2021, and Whitney Houston’s long-rumored relationship with friend and confidant Robyn Crawford wasn’t confirmed until several years after the artist’s death in 2012.) A much wider range of acts exist today, with everything from indie rock and folk to bubblegum pop, R&B/funk, and hip-hop represented. 

Still, when I pressed a few of my queer pals on the biggest difference between the two moments, no one brought up genre diversity.  They talked about the vibes instead.   Revisit the sapphic music of the Nineties today and you’ll encounter songs about queer love that wrestle with shame and insecurity, or, at best, are shrouded in mystery and metaphors, like lang’s “Constant Craving” and Indigo Girls’ “Strange Fire.” Even Etheridge had to speak through codes. Alyxandra Vesey, ​​a feminist popular music scholar at the University of Alabama, recalls how big a deal it was at the time that Etheridge’s breakthrough album was called Yes I Am. “But she also doesn’t get to say what the ‘am’ is,” says Vesey.

Compare Etheridge’s careful omission to Rapp’s “Can a gay girl get an amen?” lyrics on “Not My Fault,” or Billie Eilish’s “I could eat that girl for lunch,” from her overtly sexual, sapphic hit single “Lunch,” and it’s like someone took a sledgehammer to the closet door. The vibe has shifted from caution to confidence, restraint to revelry. Now, queer pop stars get to say the previously unspoken part out loud. Even Etheridge is getting in on the fun. 

When a video of the artist mashing up her 1995 hit song “I Want to Come Over” with Roan’s wonderfully explicit “Red Wine Supernova” went viral over the summer, it was heralded by many as a full-circle moment for LGBTQ+ performers. “That song doesn’t exist without Etheridge, culturally,” Vesey explains, adding “But there’s just so much more specificity and delight in the specificity than we had access to 30 years ago.” 

To put it bluntly, the songs are hornier and happier now. And seeing young artists revel in their sexuality early on and without shame has been nothing short of transformative for Vesey and so many others who came of age in the era of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. As Goldschmitt says after I ask them to sum up their feelings on sapphic pop summer, “Boy, I wish I had something like that when I was young.” 

“To have something like that and have it be as fun,” they add, “would’ve been so important to my sense of who I was as a human.” 

IF ANY SONG acted as a primer for our current mainstream sapphic pop moment, it is Tegan and Sara’s 2013 hit “Closer.” The synth-pop song by the Canadian duo played on repeat in between sets at All Things Go, as if to honor its legacy as the O.G. upbeat, gay pop song. And while “Closer” may be more demure than Billie Eilish’s “Lunch,” it is still, as Tegan Quin puts it when we talk over Zoom, “a super horny song!” I was 24 when “Closer” came out, and I can confirm that the lyrics “All I dream of lately/Is how to get you underneath me” made millennial lesbians feral the same way Towa Bird’s “Drain Me” sends younger queers into a hot-and-bothered tizzy today. 

Interestingly, though, while “Closer” introduced Tegan and Sara, who had previously operated in an indie/alt-rock lane, to a wider, more mainstream audience, it also solidified them as a queer band in ways they’d never felt labeled before. When they scored an early hit with “Walking With a Ghost” in 2004 they were just random successes on radio, Tegan Quin tells me. Nobody said it was a song for queer people — but they did with “Closer,” she recalls: “It was this very direct language.” The duo had a Billboard Hot 100 hit and a mainstream audience, but to the mostly straight masses, they were “queer icons.”  

When Tegan looks at this new explosion of lesbian and queer pop, she gets the sense that the battle over labels and who certain music is “for” may be over — a relic of the Obama years, like the individual mandate. She sees a mix of identities in the audience. “It’s people who are fed up with being forced the same shit. They want their pop star to be fucking weird and have an opinion,” she says, then adds, “It’s straight people, too, saying, ‘Why can’t I love queer music?’” 

I decided to test out Quin’s theory on a group of All Things Go attendees standing near the free piercing booth sponsored by Claire’s Accessories. Several of them tell me they are straight. No one has heard of “Closer,” but they all love Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp. 

A lesbian nearby overhears my conversation and flags me down. “I think it’s nice that queer music is in mainstream spaces enough that it’s not just queer music at this point,” she tells me. Her name is Jes Klass, and she loves “Closer.” She thinks it could’ve been an even bigger hit than it was. The thing is, Klass says, “The world wasn’t ready then. It is now.” Or as Tegan puts it: “It’s like the cicadas. The ground started to rumble and we popped out early. But now they’ve all come out, and there’s too many to hold them back.” 

AS MONUMENTAL AS “Closer” felt to some of us at the time, it doesn’t hold a candle to what is happening today with “Good Luck, Babe!” You had to be in the know to know about “Closer.” You simply have to exist to encounter “Good Luck, Babe!” “Closer” peaked at Number 90 on the Hot 100. “Good Luck, Babe!” debuted on the chart toward the end of April at Number 77. By the end of September, it had rocketed to Number Four. You don’t move 73 spots up the Hot 100 without the support of a whole bunch of straight people. 

Chappell Roan is no longer your favorite artist’s favorite artist. She’s your grandmother’s, or at least your aunt’s. “Good Luck, Babe!” was probably playing over the loudspeakers at your local physical therapist’s office at some point today. Kelly Clarkson is performing it on her morning show. Jimmy Fallon is singing along to it on his late night show. Your Spotify algorithm is actually cueing it up right now, even though it just played on your “For You” playlist. That sound you just heard? That’s the sound of millions of straight women collectively adding the lesbian anthem about the tragedy of becoming some guy’s wife to their bachelorette party playlists. 

Vesey credits the current commercial appeal of sapphic pop to two major political and cultural events that occured in the 2010s: the mainstreaming of queer people in historically heterosexual institutions like marriage, and the commercial ascent of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. “Those two things allowed for queer life to be legible and acceptable in a way that’s very powerful,” Vesey says. Maybe. Or maybe it’s what Towa Bird says to me when we chat in her trailer after her All Things Go performance: “The lesbian stars have aligned.” 

Whatever the reason, Dan Ferguson is here for it. The 34-year-old Australian,  who’s one of the people I met by the piercing booth, is not a lesbian. He’s a cis hetero man. He presumably doesn’t know what it feels like to be eaten out in the passenger seat of a casual fling’s car or to have his heart broken by a woman who trades her queer partner in for a husband. And yet he finds Roan’s songs deeply relatable. “It’s like when you go through wanting someone that doesn’t want you back,” he says. “Or, you’re doing the extra effort, but they aren’t reciprocating.” To Dan Ferguson, heartbreak is heartbreak. Love is love. 

Still, Roan’s music, and “Good Luck, Babe!” specifically, hits different for the LGBTQ+ community. Goldschmitt has spoken with several queer therapists who say the song has been a major theme for many of their clients, which makes sense when you realize its scope. “Good Luck, Babe!” makes quick work of both parties in a doomed relationship — damning the one in denial to a lifetime of heterosexual misery while joyously restoring the bruised ex to the tune of “I told you so.” “We have too many trauma narratives in queer music,” Goldschmitt says. “It’s very vindicating to have somebody say, ‘Well, good luck with that.’” 

That experience of feeling seen isn’t exclusive to Roan’s songs, not by a long shot. Nearly every queer fan I speak to at All Things Go describes the same sensation about a variety of artists from the line-up. Referencing Towa Bird’s “Drain Me,” which the artist has described as an ode to lesbian sex, Jes Klass says, “There’s nothing subtle about it. It’s just out there, and it’s beautiful to hear music that speaks to the kind of relationships that I’ve been in.” 

A friend of Klass named Michelle Liga tells me she identifies as bisexual, but says things might have been different if she had grown up with the music that is coming out now: “I would be a full-on lesbian.” Her comment reminds me of something Bird said when I asked her about the way fans are reacting to this year’s sapphic pop moment: “I think they are looking inward and finding things out about themselves and seeing those in queer artists.” 

Seeing your inner queer life reflected back to you by an artist, especially for the first time, can be an intoxicating experience, and I spy evidence of this intoxication everywhere at All Things Go — in the hundreds of people dressed up like Chappell Roan, in the screams from the crowd when Reneé Rapp and Towa Bird kiss on stage, and in the young fan with tears in their eyes watching Julien Baker perform. I see it in an All Things Go Instagram video, too, when a member of the festival’s social team asks a couple what they would like to say to the indie artist Ethel Cain, and one of them coyly responds “We’re looking for a thiiird,” while the interviewer laughs. I see it in my own excitement when I scream like the baby gay that I no longer am after Lucy Dacus joins Muna on stage to perform “Silk Chiffon.” And I see it in the overwhelmed venue worker who, while serving me a Bud Light, searches for a word to describe the LGBTQ+ fans he has observed over the weekend. “Not quite militant,” he says, but something like that. 

Of course, he might be militant too if his community was in the midst of a political backlash that threatens to strip the rights away of its most vulnerable members. As THEM’s James Factora explained in a recent essay, “Facing tremendous challenges, and struggling to find meaning in the world, it’s easy to understand why many young queer people would see openly LGBTQ+ celebrities as quasi-religious figures.” 

Trying to build a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community — one that embraces fan enthusiasm while maintaining artist security — was top of mind for All Things Go’s organizers. Looking back, Carlie Webbert, All Things Go’s manager of partnerships & experiential tells me she is proud of the festival’s non-musical programming. There were multiple organizations like the Ally Coalition and Calling All Crows hosting onsite workshops that made space for LGBTQ+ people to find security and comfort. “It’s beautiful what is happening with our community,” Webert says. “But we have to de-platform it being all about the artists, because they aren’t the only ones that make it like this. We all do.”

LET’S GET ONE thing straight: Celebrity worship is not unique to the queer community. Parasocial behavior is older than Beatlemania, and every artist from beloved indie acts like Mitski to Ms. Americana herself has had to deal with stalkers, harassment, and countless other unwanted advances from their stans. That said, throughout history, LGBTQ+ people have found special refuge in the stars who proudly accepted us —  pauses to salute Cher — so it’s understandable that queer fan culture has intensified as the number of actual queer artists, not just allies, multiplied over the past few years. It’s been obvious to anyone paying attention, especially the artists.

“Gay people are lethal,” declares Reneé Rapp, the delightfully uncensored lesbian pop star with a knack for yapping and a booming, Broadway-trained voice. She gathers her long blonde hair in both her hands and tosses it behind her shoulders like she’s in a Pantene Pro-V commercial. “It’s a very specific kind of intensity.” Rapp has just returned from a series of performances in Europe, and we’re talking over Zoom about the signs people hold up at her shows. It’s been a hot topic of conversation in the comments section of her fans’ TikTok videos.

She’s seen everything from the standard, objectifying “Show me your tits” to the more original but equally vulgar and offensive “Reneé Rapp, give me a pap.” Like several other queer Gen Z artists, Rapp isn’t afraid to call out the handful of fans she says take things too far. Speaking about the “show me your tits” signs, Rapp goes off at a rapid clip: “You do realize that’s super weird, right? Like, that’s just harassment.” Her voice has the same sharp tone and slight Valley Girl intonation as the Mean Girl she famously played (“So you agree. You think you’re really pretty”), but whereas Regina George’s edge is buried underneath passive-aggressive comments that make you wonder what she thinks of you, Rapp’s is right there on the surface telling you you’re a clown. She speaks in long, obscenity-laced ribbons about how wonderful and intense the sapphic pop moment has been. 

On the one hand, it’s all she ever wanted. It’s her dream come true. She feels so lucky that she and her friends get to be at the forefront of culture when historically that hasn’t always been true for lesbians. She says it feels ten times bigger than her. Also, she just loves seeing straight people squirm: “They don’t know what to do! They’re all, like, having a panic attack,” Rapp says. It’s clear that she is just as thrilled as her fans are about mainstream queer culture. 

On the other hand, she didn’t get into this business to be harassed. Returning to the subject of the signs, Rapp says, “I wish that you could read that sign back from my point of view and understand how fucking weird and derogatory that is.” I listen and nod along as she continues thinking it through aloud: “But you won’t and you never will. But I don’t know. I have empathy that it’s really exciting. Frankly, it’s really fucking exciting for me, too. Now, does that mean I would ever verbally harass someone because I was so excited? No. And people love to do that shit.” 

Rapp’s reflection grows even more searing when she starts to unpack the strange combination of empathy and frustration she feels when the harassment comes specifically from gay women. There’s a part of her that  gets it. She’d be “tweaking” too if she saw someone like DeJ Loaf when she was a kid. She also understands how unfair the tendency to hold LGBTQ+ people to a higher standard is, and how ridiculous it is that we have such comparatively low expectations for men. Still, she says, it cuts deeper when it comes from her community. “You’re just used to men being disappointing,” Rapp says. “I’m doubly disappointed if it’s a girl.”

Being a queer person during the sapphic pop moment? Outstanding. Being one of the  sapphic pop stars at its center? Evidently extremely complicated. For all her racing thoughts, Rapp summarizes her experience with an apt metaphor: “At the nucleus, it’s lit. All the other things around it are fucking crazy.” 

EVERY ARTIST I SPOKE TO for this article understands just how important representation is. Having a group like Tegan and Sara to look up to when they were kids mattered a great deal to Muna, so it means the world to them to be able to do it for kids today. “We’ve had two songs, ‘I Know a Place’ and ‘Silk Chiffon,’ that have been claimed by the queer community, and I’m absolutely addicted to that feeling,” Gavin says. “I want to do it again and again.”

At the same time, the tension is real for queer artists who want to focus on their music, but find their identity constantly tied to their work. “It’s hard because our identity is so important to who we are and to our politics,” Maskin says — but having to constantly worry whether it will limit or define their success is exhausting. “It should just be about the fucking music,” she adds, “but with where we’re at with this conservative backlash, we aren’t given the opportunity to just be artists.” 

That’s because the kids today need their queer heroes more than ever, even if, as Bird tells me, it was never her intention to take on that role. Muna is hardly the only band to express hesitation about discussing their identity publicly. Several LGBTQ+ artists have said the topic is difficult to navigate for a variety of reasons. Some, like Eilish and Roan, are still exploring and coming to terms with various facets of their identity — a process that, Eilish wisely pointed out in this very publication, can take a lifetime. Roan made a similar point when she spoke to Rolling Stone in October, saying she still feels uncomfortable being gay sometimes. “I don’t get why this is such an issue for me,” Roan said. I do. 

Internalized homophobia casts a long shadow, and acceptance, much like queerness itself, is a spectrum. A lot of us spend our lives pinballing around that spectrum, making it difficult to describe our identity at any given moment. Most days I move through the world blissfully at peace with my lesbianism, but sometimes, like when I’m back in the South, my confidence collapses and shame creeps in. Typically, I feel at home within my community, but every so often I wonder if I’m an interloper, a “bad gay,” like Arthur Less. It’s hard enough to think and talk about your sexuality with yourself. It’s even more difficult to do with your loved ones, no matter how supportive they are. But talking about it with the public? Are you high? 

No wonder Sara Quin says the most stressful part of Tegan and Sara’s ”Closer”-era fame was how the media anointed them spokespeople for the queer community. She specifically remembers feeling bemused by the countless times they were asked to name their “favorite 20 Canadian LGBTQ+ artists”: “Who the fuck knows who’s even gay?” She laughs in exasperation. “You should see the music I listen to. I don’t even know if the people have faces, let alone what their sexuality is.” 

What is clear is that for many members of this generation of out and proud mainstream queer artists, visibility is both a blessing and a curse. Making matters more difficult is the lack of consensus among the lesbian and sapphic communities about what our relationship to mainstream culture should look like. Do we want our stars to assimilate or resist? Should they be radical or wholesome? Tops or bottoms? What about switches? Hopefully these questions taper off as the amount and diversity of mainstream queer artists increases, but we’re not there yet. As a result, new LGBTQ+ artists or media that break through often draw criticism for how they portray queerness. What makes one person feel seen, may harm another. None of this is the art or artist’s fault, but that doesn’t stop strangers on the internet from blaming them.

Boygenius’ Lucy Dacus touched on this when she told Teen Vogue that “prejudice towards gay people comes from all sides, including gay people.” Her comment underscores the reality of identity policing, an experience that Rapp also knows a thing or two about. Reflecting on the “bisexual erasure” internet discourse sparked by her coming out as a lesbian back in January on Saturday Night Live, she fires back: “I really care about gay people, but I really don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks about me referring to myself as a lesbian at this time. I just don’t care.” But for every artist like Rapp, who unapologetically embraces the chaos of representation, there are just as many who’d rather not be labeled, precisely because of the scrutiny it invites — from both within and outside the LGBTQ+ community.

“Identifiers can be cages or keys,” says Lizzy Plapinger, a multimedia artist, the former frontwoman of the indie-pop duo MS MR and a current curation and strategy advisor for All Things Go. As a queer woman, Goldsmith was just as delighted as the rest of us to experience the festival’s palpable sapphic vibes and safe-space environment. At the same time, she understands how things might feel different for the artists. She likens the experience of being labeled a “lesbian pop artist” to being referred to as a “female musician” as opposed to just a musician. “You don’t want to be painted as this one thing, because marketing-wise that closes off a world of audience,” Goldsmith says.  

The conversation is even more complicated for butch and transmasc individuals and people of color. Lauron Jockwig Kehrer, a musicology professor at Western Michigan University and author of Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance, says that many queer artists of color resist labels that might limit them musically or personally — particularly terms like “lesbian” and “sapphic,” which are often coded as white. And for all the collective joy in the rise of artists like Roan and Rapp, you can’t escape the blinding whiteness of sapphic pop’s supposed golden era. Kehrer makes the point that this too is a continuation of the previous era when, with the exception of Tracy Chapman, all of the successful mainstream lesbian artists were white. “It’s complicated because yes, we’re having this moment of increased mainstream visibility, which is lovely,” Kehrer explains, “but we’re seeing the same patterns of white, traditionally attractive, largely femme gender presentation women getting more of the attention.”

According to Kehrer, the barriers to major, zeitgeist-dominating success remain higher for artists like Janelle Monáe and Kehlani because Black queer genders are not always seen as marketable to an industry that thrives on replicating what’s already worked — read: white, cis, femme, and palatable. (Kehlani and Janelle Monáe both declined to comment for this story.) 

Towa Bird, who is Filipino and British, has experienced some of what Kehrer describes. “I do see the way that doors open for my white peers and the way they remain shut for people who look either like me or people who are not white.” Her observation is a stark reminder that the past year hasn’t changed everything for every artist equally. The roadblocks for queer people of color remain firmly in place. Unfortunately, the only ones who can do something about that are the gatekeepers, and as Rapp, blunt as always, points out, “The people at the top are still fucking cis white dudes. That didn’t magically change over the course of this last summer. Those bitches are still there.”

Whether that shifts depends on where the sapphic pop moment goes from here. Rapp hopes that it “continues to filter through to other lesbian pop girlies who are not white who have been doing this shit before us.” Towa Bird isn’t anticipating regression.  Sara Quin says there’s a good chance things will ebb and flow depending on the audience and cultural temperature. Tegan Quin thinks this year has created “an industry that understands that there is a huge audience for queer-leaning pop music.” Maybe mainstream artists will get queerer and butcher and more diverse. A gay girl can dream, can’t she? Or maybe sapphic pop’s golden era will sunset, and we will go back to mostly having straight white femme girlie pops at the top for a while. Nobody can predict the future, except Muna of course — and they say they sense a backlash coming. 

Gavin says she’s seen dialogue online debating if sapphic pop is overpopulated. McPherson knows of a few projects in the music industry and Hollywood that, they say, aren’t getting funded because people are wary of producing more queer storylines in Trump’s America. Maskin has a theory of her own: “Men are afraid everybody’s gonna just be fucking — which I feel like more and more of them are!” (A few weeks later, that idea feels like a sadly prescient commentary on the whiplash-inducing transition from sapphic pop summer to 2024’s election results.)

Backlash or not, Muna are prepared to meet the moment. For them, success isn’t about staying in the spotlight but sustaining a career on their own terms. They want the rights to be able to live the lives they want and the financial security to create meaningful art, and they want that for “all the homies,” as Gavin puts it. That’s pretty much it. “The thing that I love so much about lesbians is that we’re good at community building,” Gavin says. She, McPherson, and Maskin have been around long enough to know that trends come and go, but community? Community lasts forever. So what does it matter if the mainstream structures that have begun to welcome us temporarily rescind our membership?

As Sara Quin says, “We have always existed. We will always exist.” And the young queer fans will always have their music — even if they sometimes have to search harder to find it. It will be there for them.