By Chris Azzopardi
Photos: Hedi Slim, Danielle DeGrasse-Alston
Nobody is stopping Troye Sivan except for maybe Troye Sivan. No queer-averse label bosses, no identity-stifling pressure to be anything but who he is: the LGBTQ community’s precious paradigm of unapologetic, unicornian queerness.
But even with the YouTube-launched pop fixture’s steady mainstream rise, with assists from Ariana Grande on a single featured on his sophomore album, Bloom, and a live duet at a recent Taylor Swift concert, the 23-year-old’s follow-up to 2015’s Blue Neighborhood refuses to sacrifice self for commercialism.
And he won’t stop there this time, not during this album cycle (or ever): In the seductive video for the album’s first single, “My My My!,” Sivan works a room doused in the carnal grit and flashing lights of a gay bar’s seedy backroom – and also an entire street – in a blistering heat as hot as the shirtless guys feeding his desire.
He’s coy about its subject matter, but Sivan wrote an entire song about bottoming too. Its gay-sex specificity perhaps lost on heterosexuals, the anthemic send-up is concurrently a love song and the most liberating of queer secrets. Giggling, he tells me, “That was the goal.”
Sivan’s transparency is hardwired: He truly can’t be anything but himself. This is clear on Bloom, but holds true during conversation, as Sivan talks about deriving power from femininity, working through residual queer issues, and dealing with the fear of shooting “My My My!” with a crew of dudes bigger than him.
Did you imagine you’d be answering all these questions about sex after “Bloom” was unleashed into the world?
No way. Honestly, I never would’ve thought I would have written that song. That song came out of a session that I felt wasn’t going too well. It was me and my best friend (and producer) Leland, us being like, “OK, well how do we make the most of this day? Let’s just start messing around and having fun.” And we wrote it that night – never, ever thought that it would see the light of day. We ended up with something that I thought was really, really cool and interesting and real.
Mainstream culture has come around to same-sex love, but gay sex is still taboo. Does your frankness about gay sex on this album feel radical or political?
Not really. I wanted to make music for people like me. The first album I was conscious of trying to keep things really digestible for as many people as possible. This time around I had a different set of goals, which were to really, actually, accurately represent where I feel like I am in my life. And if it’s talking about going out and partying, or if it’s talking about staying at home and cooking in the kitchen – or if it’s talking about sex – whatever it is, I wanted a 20-year-old queer person to hear this and be like, “Oh yeah, this is, like, legit.”
What influenced you to deliver something more queer-specific?
It was having all of these really inspiring experiences and meeting all of these really inspiring people. You know, whenever I start writing music, my number one goal, always, is to keep things honest and real, because I think it’s the only way to stay relevant and stay true over a long career. I wanna be doing this for the rest of my life, and I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to be thinking about cool concepts and things like that for the rest of my life. But I’ll always be able to speak about where I am in my life, that’s always gonna be there. So I fall back on that, and I wanted to not hold anything back. It’s so cool to me to be able to celebrate all of those things I was celebrating in my real life. So, why not go for it and talk about that on the album?
When did the album’s more defiantly queer narrative begin to take shape artistically?
It was probably just the moment where I had immersed myself in the LGBTQ community. When I think about my real life, I have almost exclusively queer people around me in L.A. I’m living in this little bubble right now where I forget sometimes that it’s a thing and that there are, like, straight people in the world (laughs).
I’m sure that you’re reminded when you perform in small towns that aren’t like West Hollywood.
Right, exactly. And then I travel to somewhere like that or I’ll go home to Australia – or I’ll just read the news – and very quickly get reminded just how lucky I am and how specific my experience is. But my hope is that it’s an experience of hope for people, that they hear this and feel like, “Oh, that’s possible and I can go and live this happy and healthy and fulfilled, fun life.” And see that there is, 100 percent, another side to the world.
Is your goal to make gay radio smashes?
I actually don’t know. For me, I’ve walked this line between having a really young, active online audience – a similar audience that you would see at an Ariana Grande or Justin Bieber show – and then also wanting to do these really subversive queer pop songs. I think my approach to it is not thinking too much about what I want commercially, just letting things happen, making stuff that I like. Hopefully if I like it, somebody else is gonna like it.
You have a role in the forthcoming film Boy Erased, starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe as parents who send their child to a conversion-therapy camp. What about the film resonated with you?
The script. I just couldn’t put the script down. It really tore at me. Then I read the book and started immersing myself as much as I possibly could in that world. My coming out experience – and the moment where I accepted my sexuality as something that I couldn’t change – was a weight off of my chest. This wasn’t for me to deal with; it was more for everyone else. I had come to the point where I had accepted it within myself, and then it was about navigating through the rest of the world: my family, my friends.
So, the thought of going to a program like the one in the film at that crucial, vulnerable moment and being told, “No, this is 100 percent back on you, and you’re filling a God-shaped hole in your life with these tendencies” was one of the most harmful and hurtful things that I can imagine. It’s been proven to be ineffective and extremely dangerous, and you’re signing these kids up for an impossible task. It really hit home and struck a chord with me, and I haven’t wanted anything as bad as I wanted this role in this movie, so I just auditioned and thankfully got the part.
Your sister once caught you in a vulnerable state, dancing to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” When did you become comfortable with that kind of vulnerability on stage?
It’s still really new to me. I think the “My My My!” video was a huge step for me personally; that was a moment where I really had to actively pep talk myself into it. I knew that was the way I naturally wanted to move to the song, and that was the way the song made me feel, but that didn’t make it any easier to do in a big group of people – especially with burly cameramen! (Laughs) It was scary! But when I pushed through, I felt how amazing it felt. It felt so right, and now I have to retrain my brain a little bit to be able to do that on stage and to be able to do that in front of other people.
You were scared of your feminine attributes as a child. Can you tell me about your journey to embracing femininity? And when you do embrace it now, how it makes you feel?
I was really scared of it in my childhood, and it was something that I definitely tried to shy away from. Now, I celebrate it as such a source of power for myself. I feel so liberated and free, and I’m having fun. And femininity is magical. Who wouldn’t want to be feminine?
How would you compare where you were to where you are now?
It’s like night and day. It feels really artistically inspiring to me, really personally inspiring. And I’m just much happier.
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As editor of Q Syndicate, the international LGBTQ wire service, Chris Azzopardi has interviewed a multitude of superstars, including Meryl Streep, Mariah Carey and Beyoncé. Reach him via his website at www.chris-azzopardi.com and on Twitter (@chrisazzopardi).