Why Jill Sobule “I Kissed a Girl” Remains a Model for Queer Representation

LGBTQ audiences who wanted visibility in pop culture had it tough for most of 1995, when Morrissey’s “Boy Racer” was about as explicit as things got (“He’s just too good-looking…”). Two years before Ellen DeGeneres came out to a network TV audience of millions, several fresh shoots appeared in an otherwise largely barren field. The political ABC sitcom Spin City boasted a gay Black character, the third- or fourth-funniest cast member. A closeted lesbian chief of staff kept an eye on the hospital in NBC’s megahit E.R. Maria Maggenti’s film The Incredibly True Adventure About Two Girls in Love, whose title’s ironic alarmism begged for novelty status, got a limited release. On Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, the band Garbage, months before their breakthrough “Stupid Girl,” went Top 20 with a slinky, coquettish number called “Queer” back when many gays and lesbians considered it a slur.

Then Jill Sobule showed up. The Denver singer-songwriter, who died in a house fire on May 1, had already demonstrated a facility in packaging sticky melodies in acoustic pop arrangements that a granny could love. 1990’s “Too Cool to Fall in Love” hit Number 17 on the adult contemporary charts, its lilt and Sobule’s grainy warble a terrific palate cleanser amid hits by Gloria Estefan, Michael Bolton, and Wilson Phillips. (In its video, Sobule even sported short Chynna Phillps bangs.)

The Todd Rundgren-produced Things Here Are Different proved a solid debut that year; by 1995, the openly bisexual Sobule had “I Kissed a Girl” ready to go. Co-written with frequent collaborator Robin Eaton, the song has a strummy, unthreatening lope, which — in the year before Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (reluctantly, he’d later insist) — came across as subversive, like normality can be in its small way. Making out with someone of the same sex was fine. It just happens. Sobule’s fictional scenario unfolds in a similarly matter-of-fact manner. Sympathetic to her neighbor, married to a “hairy behemoth” who’s as “dumb as a box of nails,” the narrator invites Jenny inside for a smoke and sympathy. When the inevitable happens, Sobule sings the title chorus with a winning subject-verb-object directness. Had Morrisey sung the line “He was just like kissing me,” we would mutter, “What a narcissist”; Sobule bodies it like she discovered radium. Yet the kiss is special, too, for being unexpected, as the song’s fierce guitar solo — a couple of reverb-drenched notes — suggests.  “And I may do it again,” she teases. She’s earned it.

The video might have helped push the song to its Number 67 Billboard Hot 100 peak and, alas, it also pushed towards dismissing Sobule as a gimmick. I mean, c’mon: Co-starring male model/romance novel cover boy/human cheesecake Fabio at his swole peak as Jenny’s dumb-ass husband, it looked like Pee-wee’s Playhouse Guide to Sapphism, with Sobule’s blonde hair styled in a combination of Princess Leia braids and a Mouseketeer cap.

Betraying little artistic anxiety, Sobule continued releasing music as if “I Kissed a Girl” didn’t exist, though, sadly, on the pop charts she might as well not have. Follow-up single “Supermodel” appeared on the Clueless soundtrack, and, thanks to co-writer David Baerwald of Sheryl Crow’s band, it has a welcome crunch, though Sobule had mixed feelings about the song for years. 2000’s Pink Pearl is her full-length triumph: a dozen well-observed and droll songs that helped her royalty statements as TV and film producers discovered how adroitly her material complemented their scenarios. “Rainy Day Parade,”  with a marimba line brightening the couplet “We’ll have a celebration/Getting back on my medication,” showed up in Ben Stiller’s woebegone superhero flick Mystery Men. She composed the music for the Nickelodeon teen sitcom Unfabulous, and, while I haven’t watched a single episode, I hope a girl did kiss a girl in one, for Sobule’s hit was meant for adolescents for whom a daydream is safer than the reality.

Had Spotify been around in 2007 and had fans of a new star hurriedly typed “I Kissed a Girl” in the search engine hoping to hear Katy Perry’s Number One smash, Sobule might have relished the streaming royalties; that platform didn’t exist yet, but YouTube did, and she wasn’t pleased.  “Fuck you, Katy Perry,” Sobule declared in a 2009 interview with The Rumpus. “You fucking stupid, maybe ‘not good for the gays,’ title thieving, haven’t heard much else, so not quite sure if you’re talented, fucking little slut.” Not long after the comments went live, Sobule backpedaled. She was kidding, she wrote in a Huffington Post column. She was, in the words of that cliché, taken out of context. 

Her rage makes sense, though. Sobule had written an unaffected, cheerful valentine when to be queer meant skulking in the shadows or presenting oneself as a leering curiosity — I don’t know which is worse. As subtle as a car alarm, Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” comes across as a declaration by a teen who tongued a friend on a dare and as a public penance can’t stop screaming in strangers’ ears about it. This “I Kissed a Girl” made its singer one of the next decade’s biggest acts, with a whole playlist of songs whose Spotify streams top one billion. Meanwhile, Sobule’s has just about 1.3 million as of this afternoon (“Supermodel,” at least, has more than 7 million).

“I used to have stars in my pocket/Now I just watch them on TV,” Sobule sang on “Rainy Day Parade.” The trick is, she doesn’t sound aggrieved. Before her death, she released several more albums, crowdfunded in part no doubt by the untold number of women who heard in “I Kissed a Girl” years ago a way to think about their desires with wit and frankness in a pop context. Her 2022 Off-Broadway musical F–k 7th Grade, about a queer middle schooler, earned good reviews. All of them mentioned “I Kissed a Girl.” Touchstones hang around—manifestos live forever.