For those of you (presumably straight) folks who don’t know what queer-baiting is, it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like – clickbait, but specifically geared towards queer audiences. Over at Pride, Taylor Henderson wrote a great piece asking whether or not Eilish was queer-baiting her audience. Turns out, I’m not the only one who felt like the song was exploitative. Should I, a 31-year-old, really feel like ranting about a song written by a teenager? I asked myself that question yesterday, and came to the conclusion that if it was still bothering me today, then it was worth exploring. I mean…that entire paragraph (on top of the song itself and everything else she’s said about it) is problematic, but as I say, Eilish is 17. I’m fucking proud, bro! Except not really though because I was really into him, like so into him, he’s so hot oh my god, he’s so attractive.” So I wrote the song and made him fuck a dude. “He just came out to me like a couple weeks ago. Semi-ironically, her love interest in the song did, in fact, turn out to be gay. “At least if they were gay, I’d have a valid reason for their rejection and lack of interest in being with me.” “I wrote this song about a guy that really was not interested in me and it made me feel horrible,” 17-year-old Eilish has said. Upon further investigation, I found out that while the song is indeed about an unrequited crush, it is by no means a coming out anthem.
As a queer woman, my immediate reaction to the name was, “Did she just come out?” I’m not one to speculate on other people’s sexual orientation (at least not out loud), but any queer person who’s ever had an unrequited crush on a straight person has likely, at some point or another, thought the words “Ugh, if only you weren’t hetero!”, and this was the direction my brain auto-piloted. Yesterday, a friend of mine posted that Billie Eilish had put out a new track titled “Wish You Were Gay”.