Never Say Never, the 2011 film documenting Justin Bieber's rise to stardom and first stadium tour, is an incredible achievement. New York Times critic Mike Hale called it "exhausting," and he is correct, but it is an invaluable cultural artifact because of its unrestrained heteronormativity. I have seen the film numerous times, and it has shaped my expectations of young male musicians whose audiences are predominantly female.
In the Never Say Never era of his career, Bieber's role within pop culture was nearly identical to that of a traditional boy band. Girls were his primary audience, and he sung about his strong romantic feelings for them. This was his big selling point in the pop culture marketplace, and as Never Say Never depicts, the strategy worked. Girls showed up at his shows, and they also wanted to marry him. In the film, there is a young fan who they interview, probably around age 8, who literally says this.
Bieber made girls feel special and gave them the opportunity to have a crush on a nonthreatening man from a safe distance. Engaging with his work was a low-stakes way for girls to dip their toes into the water of sexual and romantic attraction to boys. To me, this represents the classic boy band ethos.
When I went to watch BTS' September 2020 Tiny Desk Concert, knowing nothing about the group other than their classification as a boy band, I expected something similar to Never Say Never-era JB. I expected to be at least mildly horrified, and I thought this Tiny Desk Concert would be a heteronormative shitshow. Instead, it was an absolute joy. These men are compelling performers, their camaraderie shines through, and there is not an ounce of overt straightness to be found.
With the exception of aggressively heteronormative works like Never Say Never, I tend to find queerness in most things. You can usually find it if you look hard enough, but with this BTS concert I felt like it was out in the open. The flamboyant costumes and iridescent microphones led me to believe that this was not a strictly heterosexual enterprise. It might seem ridiculous for me to think that a performance is genuinely queer because the singers use shiny microphones, but genuine queer representation has been showing up in mainstream popular culture more often these days. It is far-fetched but not totally unreasonable to think that a boy band could be yet another example of this.
American pop culture seems to be having a queer awakening. There is a lot of nuance to be had here, but on the representation front, we have seen tremendous improvements in recent years. To provide just a couple of examples, Moonlight won the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture, Janelle Monáe came out as pansexual, and we recently had our first openly gay candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination. On the gender side of things, there are prominent trans women like Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and Jen Richards working in Hollywood. We’re seeing more of the L’s, the G’s, the B’s, and the T’s around, and we’ve even seen some nonbinary and asexual characters popping up in books and on TV shows. Though there is still a massive amount of work to be done, we have made a lot of progress over here.
BTS is now mainstream: They recently reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, and their presence is ubiquitous in the media. When it comes to the increasing queerness of American pop culture, what are they bringing to the party? On top of their sparkly microphones, eyeliner, and choreographed dance routines, there’s got to be something there. Let us investigate by examining their music videos.
Like Justin Bieber, they had some tacky moments in their early days. I guess all boy bands have their requisite "One Less Lonely Girl" moment: BTS's 2014 "Boy In Luv" music video depicts them wooing a girl. However, as they moved forward in their career, they opted for high-concept, dance-heavy music videos in place of the overt heterosexuality displayed in the screenshot below. From their recent work, you can tell that they want us to behold their beauty, and they also want to titillate, but when their sexual energy is present, it is abstract and not directed at anybody in particular. When it comes to sexual orientation, they maintain their ambiguity, and this is crucial.
We Americans expect our celebrities and other prominent members of our community to be transparent about their personal lives. Sometimes we even
bully them into it! However, celebrity culture is different in South Korea, and K-pop idols tend not to disclose these details. As such, the members of BTS do not publicly state their sexual orientation or relationship history. There is
a ton of speculation from fans, but none of them actually know the truth. Coming from an American point of view, this is novel, and coming from a queer point of view, I appreciate that the BTS members are not eager to label themselves.
Americans, and surely more people around the globe, seem to hold onto the idea that there are neat categories that everyone must fit into. It used to be gay or straight; then it was gay, straight, or bi; and now, if you travel in the right circles, it’s gay, straight, bi, pan, ace, or queer. There are many ways to live a human life, and as more of them are given a name, these categories become less neat. There are increasingly more of them to remember. I am not saying that BTS is intending to do this, and I don’t think they’re going for a queer revolution here, but their ambiguity still provides a challenge to our desire for clear categorization. And I think it is good for us because it encourages us to broaden our sense of possibility.
"Boy In Luv" was a big find for me. I sought it out on purpose because I had only been spending time in the post-2015 BTS cinematic universe, and I was sure they had something embarrassing in their past. Though I fully expected to find this music video, it was still striking to see the BTS members crushing on a girl. I nearly fell out of my chair, and this is due to the power of their ambiguity.
A far cry from their tacky beginnings, their post-2015 music videos are simply insane. They are gorgeous to look at, and sometimes they even give you a lot to think about. One of their most discussed videos is "
Blood Sweat and Tears," and I just need come out and say that this thing is wild. It is so far over the top that you have no choice but to respect the band’s commitment to their artistic vision.
In this video, the band members are hanging out in an abandoned art museum that doubles as a palace of debauchery. The debauchery is mostly implied but still apparent, and the BDSM themes are hard to miss. There are scenes with the whole band in which they execute choreography involving body rolls and crotch grabs, and there are scenes with individual members or pairs lounging in the bedrooms of the palace. Thematically, the supposed intention of the video is to highlight the pitfalls of giving into temptation, but I see no pitfalls here. I doubt any other viewers do either. This video is glorious.
There is a LOT going on in this video, and there is also a storyline. It is not the easiest to comprehend, but my current understanding of the plot is as follows: All of the members are taking full advantage of the palace of debauchery, aside from Jin, who is a beautiful, art-loving nerd. The others are eager for him to join in on the fun. Incidentally, they are also magical creatures. They are the sexy little forest sprites whispering ideas into his head, and they ultimately succeed in corrupting him. Here's how it plays out.
Two thirds of the way through the video, there is a break in the music, dancing, and seductive lounging. Silence falls, the screen turns red, and RM reads out a Herman Hesse quote about leaving a world of evil behind. Then, there is church organ music (obviously), and my favorite moment of the video commences. Jin is alone with V in the great hall of the museum. V puts his hands over Jin’s eyes for a moment, and when he releases them, there appears a large stone statue, outfitted with black feathery wings, standing on a pedestal in the distance. V exits the hall and leaves Jin to it. Jin walks up the steps of the pedestal, tenderly strokes the sculpture’s face, and then softly and slowly kisses its lips.
On my first viewing, I thought this was a little over the top, even for this video. I thought it was a little heavy handed. But I have since come to appreciate it for the brilliant climactic moment it is. V has manifested the devil in the form of this sculpture, and Jin is being pulled to it by forces of the occult. And my god, I love this plot device. The spiritual pull toward Satan is one of my absolute favorite plot devices of all time. It has been used to great effect in countless works ranging from the 1926 feminist classic Lolly Willowes to this 2016 BTS masterpiece.
BTS creates an immersive, provocative world in this video, and it is one where sexual orientation has little to do with anything. Is anyone thinking about Jin's sexual orientation as he walks over to the devil sculpture that has magically appeared in the room? I cannot speak for anybody else, but I certainly wasn't. In this video, BTS has created a world where sexual orientation is irrelevant to the issue at hand. It is a world where heteronormativity does not exist and also has never existed. It is a world of endless possibility, where men kiss sculptures that other men have manifested for them through the power of magic. Really, anything is on the table.
This video is not straight, and it is not gay. It is, however, sensual, audacious, and thrilling. Strikingly, it is still recognizable as boy band fare. You really can’t miss that. There is a moment of choreography where the rest of the members are crouched down so that Jimin can have a solo. He dramatically throws his shoulders back in a very Elvis Presley Rock God kind of way, and he’s really feelin himself, so much so that part of his jacket falls off to reveal his shoulder. He performs the shit out of this two-second solo, and I can think of no other genre of music where this sort of thing would happen.
Despite the boy band-ness of it all, and perhaps because of it, I adore this video. It has even made me cackle with glee. I got a good friend to watch it, and our subsequent conversation, in which we tried to parse out the video's meaning, made me keel over laughing in the middle of my kitchen. But within the spectacle lies genuine possibility for diversity when it comes to sexual orientation.
I will concede that it takes effort to view BTS within a queer framework. I have formal training in literary analysis and have dabbled in queer theory; even so, this one took me weeks to flesh out. But there’s still something there, and I did all the work of interpretation for you, so I am here to spread the good word. Even with a prominent boy band in our midst, we are moving away from heteronormativity and toward a society where people have a chance to discover their identity without constraints.
Though BTS' ambiguity is indeed glorious, explicit queer representation remains essential. Queerphobia and transphobia are strong forces within our society, so we need cultural products that highlight the LGBTQIA+ community and showcase our humanity. We need to see ourselves, and others need to get used to seeing us. But engaging with BTS’ work through a queer lens has prompted me to imagine a world where queerphobia does not exist and genuine ambiguity is possible. What if we viewed everyone's sexual orientation as a total blank slate?
If boy bands are to survive in a decreasingly heteronormative landscape, this might be a path forward. I invite future boy bands to make us look at them without an easy means of categorization. I encourage them to embrace sexuality in the abstract. This will allow them to do their job and fulfill their noble purpose on this earth, but it will also push our society forward and allow us to move toward a world where sexual orientation is a non-issue. When we leave all options on the table, we are challenged to view them all as equal.
