Homosexuality and Bisexuality

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Alix Dobkin, Who Sang Songs of Liberation, Dies at 80

      by

      She broke new ground in 1973 with her album “Lavender Jane Loves Women,” recorded and distributed by women for women, which sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia.Long before K.D. Lang transformed herself from a country artist into an androgyne pop idol and sex symbol, smoldering in a man’s suit on the cover of Vanity Fair being mock-shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford; long before Melissa Etheridge sold millions of copies of her 1993 album, “Yes I Am,” and in so doing came out as a gay rock star; and long before the singer-songwriter Jill Sobule’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit the Billboard charts, the folk singer Alix Dobkin chopped her hair off, formed a band and recorded “Lavender Jane Loves Women.”Released in 1973, it was the first album recorded and distributed by women for women — arguably the first lesbian record. Ms. Dobkin started her own label, Women’s Wax Works, to do it.Once a folk star playing Greenwich Village clubs with Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ms. Dobkin turned to writing songs like “View From Gay Head” (“Lesbian, Lesbian/Let’s be in No Man’s Land”). Her lyrics sketched out a lesbian separatist utopia and also poked fun at its vernacular and customs, as she did in “Lesbian Code,” which contained lines like “Is she Lithuanian?,” “Is she Lebanese?” and “She’s a member of the church, of the club, of the committee/She sings in the choir.”Her music was the soundtrack for many young women coming out in the 1970s and ’80s, a rite of passage spoofed by Alison Bechdel, the graphic memoirist, in her long-running comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (A panel titled “Age 21” showed a young woman with cropped hair and pinwheel eyes, smoking a bong and reading Mary Daly’s “Gyn/Ecology,” another feminist touchstone, as the lyrics from Ms. Dobkin’s “The Woman in Your Life Is You” waft around her, a Lavender Jane album cover propped up in a corner.)“I can’t tell you how cool it was as a young dyke to see those album covers,” said Lisa Vogel, founder of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, otherwise known as Michfest, where Ms. Dobkin would perform for decades. “To see someone not trying to pass one bit.”Ms. Dobkin died on May 19 at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., after suffering a brain aneurysm and a stroke. She was 80. Her former partner Liza Cowan announced the death.She was a star of the women’s festivals that were an expression of the alternative economy lesbian feminists were building in the ’70s — a byproduct of second-wave feminism — with their own books, publishing companies, record labels and magazines. Michfest was the biggest, an entire city built from scratch each season in Oceana County, complete with health care clinics, crafts, workshops and food for thousands. It was a complete matriarchal society. No men were allowed.When the festivals began in the mid-’70s, there were no safe spaces for lesbians, said Bonnie J. Morris, a historian and archivist of feminist music and the author of “Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals.” “You weren’t welcome to have a double bed in a hotel; there were no Disney Gay Days. Festivals were a way to get together, share information and recharge.”It was backstage at a women’s festival in 1983 that Ms. Etheridge first met Ms. Dobkin. “She was in the tradition of the classic folk troubadour, changing the world through song and cleverness,” Ms. Etheridge said in an interview.“She made an impact,” she added, “and she did it with humor. Until I heard Alix, I had no idea I would be an out lesbian performer; I just wanted to be a rock star.”“When I told her I was thinking of recording an album, she said, ‘Oh, Melissa, there’s no radio station that’s going to play a lesbian.’ After ‘Yes I Am’ came out — and I came out — she said to me, ‘Damn it, you proved me wrong. I’m so grateful.’”Alix Cecil Dobkin was born on Aug. 16, 1940, in New York City. She was named for an uncle, Cecil Alexander Kunstlich, a womanizing, drug-addicted ne’er-do-well who cleaned up his act and was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents, Martha (Kunstlich) and William Dobkin, were, like many Jewish intellectuals of the time, Communist Party members and social activists. Alix grew up listening to the folk music of Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, as well as the Red Army Chorus and Broadway show tunes, and singing at home with her parents.Ms. Dobkin at her home in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1980.Liza CowanAlix was 16 when the F.B.I. began investigating her. She had joined the Communist Party that year, but her parents had become disillusioned and left; there were too many F.B.I. informants, her father told her later.The F.B.I. followed Ms. Dobkin until she turned 30, noting in her file that she had become a housewife and mother. The file, which Ms. Dobkin retrieved in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act, proved useful decades later, when she was writing her memoir, “My Red Blood” (2009). It recorded her many addresses and helpful dates, like that of her wedding in 1965, though it had the venue wrong.Ms. Dobkin studied art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1962. A fellow student and Communist Party member was also a booker at a local nightclub, and he began to manage her, often along with a young comic named Bill Cosby. He found the pair regular work at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, where she met her future husband, Sam Hood, whose parents owned the place, as well as Mr. Dylan and other folk luminaries. When Ms. Dobkin married Mr. Hood, her career as a performer took a back seat to his as a producer. They divorced amicably in 1971, when their daughter, Adrian, was a year old.Like many women in that transitional time, Ms. Dobkin was frustrated by her role as a housewife and had joined a consciousness-raising group. When she heard Germaine Greer, the feminist author of “The Female Eunuch,” interviewed on the countercultural radio station WBAI, it was a revelation. She wrote to Ms. Cowan, a producer at the station who had conducted the interview. Ms. Cowan invited her on the program to perform, and the two women fell in love.After they got together, Ms. Dobkin decided she wanted to make music for and by women only. Ms. Cowan would go on to found lesbian magazines like Dyke, A Quarterly. In the mid-’70s, the couple bought a 70-acre farm in rural Schoharie County, in central New York State — not an easy locale to plunk down a gay family.“I remember being called a ‘hobo’ by the kids in school,” Adrian Hood said, “though they were trying to say ‘homo’. I craved a normal mom with long hair.”Ms. Dobkin in performance in Ulster County, N.Y., in 2017. “She made an impact,” her fellow singer Melissa Etheridge said, “and she did it with humor.”Retts ScauzilloMs. Dobkin’s tour schedule slowed down a bit in the late ’90s, and when Ms. Hood had her own children, Ms. Dobkin took on a new role.“She was a stay-at-home grandma by choice, which allowed me to work full time,” said Ms. Hood, who is dean of students and director of admissions at a day school in Woodstock. “That was a huge gift. She was able to express that everyday maternal attention that she missed with me.”In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dobkin is survived by her brother, Carl; her sister, Julie Dobkin; and three grandchildren. In 2015, a photograph of Ms. Dobkin taken by Ms. Cowan wearing a T-shirt that read “The Future Is Female” exploded on social media, thanks to an Instagram post by @h_e_r_s_t_o_r_y, an account that documents lesbian imagery. It brought the T-shirt, originally made in the 1970s by Labyris Books, the first feminist bookstore in New York City, back into production — and introduced Ms. Dobkin to a new generation of young women.“I’ve prepared all my life for this job,” Ms. Dobkin told the crowd at a women’s music festival in 1997. “Because being a Jew and being a lesbian are very similar. That’s why I look so much alike. I have so much in common. It’s OK to be a Jew, it’s OK to be a lesbian — as long as you don’t mention it. And what we also have in common is that we were never supposed to survive.” More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ahead of the Curve’ Review: The Business of Lesbian Identity

      by

      A 30-year-old lesbian magazine faces an existential crisis in this documentary.In the curiously commercial documentary “Ahead of the Curve,” the lesbian magazine formerly known as Deneuve receives a second shot at the cultural spotlight.Known now by the publication name Curve, the magazine was founded by a lesbian named Franco Stevens in 1990, in the midst of the culture wars. The magazine grew alongside public acknowledgment of lesbian life, and its covers featured newly out stars like the singer Melissa Etheridge or the comedian Margaret Cho. The documentary begins in the present day, as both the glossy and its founder are facing existential crisis.In vérité footage, Stevens is told by Curve’s new owner that the publication might not last another year. The film’s director, Jen Rainin, who is also married to Stevens, uses archival footage of her wife in the ’90s to reflect on Stevens’s history with the magazine and what Curve meant to its larger lesbian readership. In the movie’s contemporary footage, Stevens embarks on a tour of conference halls and community centers, asking young people what lesbian visibility has meant to their lives.There is a tension in the film between the lesbian experience and lesbianism as a consumer product. Stevens connects with young advocates and business leaders over the hopes, fears and traumas that resonate across generations. From a perspective of a business in the process of rebranding, Stevens’s foray into this world of lesbian and queer-centered spaces has focus-tested value. But it is hindered as a documentary by the spotlight on marketing, which boxes conversations about lesbian identity into sterile conference rooms where participants in name tags and lanyards share heartfelt stories for the purpose of a product. The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.Ahead of the CurveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Mae Martin Embraces Ambiguity in ‘Feel Good,’ and in Life

      by

      In an interview, the creator and star of the Netflix comedy discusses the hazy line between fact and fiction, the value of uncertainty and the joy of finally getting to be a leading man.Mae Martin didn’t set out to confront a throng of personal demons with the semi-autobiographical tragicomic Netflix series “Feel Good.” That’s just how it played out. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Chloe Moriondo and girl in red, Maestros of Growing Pains

      by

      Moriondo cited Marie Ulven (who records as girl in red) as an early influence. Both are releasing new albums that showcase frank emotions and more ambitious productions.Chloe Moriondo began posting YouTube videos in 2014, when she was 11 years old, part of the early waves of young people who built their musical identity on the platform, one bedroom-pop song at a time. She’d been growing up in public for years by August 2019, when she posted a video titled “a ramble about self identity, growth, and being a lesbian.”She was evolving, she said, and a lot of the old songs she’d sung (or even listened to) no longer felt quite right. Her tastes were changing, and her confidence was growing. A month later, she posted a cover of girl in red’s “Bad Idea,” and at the end of the performance, spoke about how influential girl in red’s music was becoming on her own songwriting.When the Norwegian teenager Marie Ulven began posting songs online as girl in red in 2016, she quickly attracted fervent attention for her ecstatically frank and utterly candid declarations of gay love, and quickly built a community for whom girl in red fandom was a safe space for identity expression.Ulven also provided a raw foundation that’s now being built upon, both by her acolytes and also herself, as is clear from two excellent new releases: “If I Could Make It Go Quiet,” the first full-length girl in red album, and “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo’s major label debut album.On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics. Most songs are about relationships that don’t quite congeal, like “Manta Rays,” when she sings, “My therapist will tell me that it’s best to let it be/but I wanna light fires, I wanna explode/I want to be everything you want to know.”Moriondo writes with a winning bluntness, both about her own shortcomings and the objects of her obsession. “I wanna be with her all day/I’m a bitch to everyone else anyway,” she shrugs on the crystalline “Strawberry Blonde.” On the frisky, muscular “Take Your Time,” she bemoans her fate of being in thrall to someone who’s no longer around: “I wanna know/what will it take to make you let me go/You don’t fade like old stick and pokes.”Musically, Moriondo has absorbed several waves of punk praxis. On “I Want to Be With You,” she’s a maximalist, comfortable with jet-engine-intense production, and “Girl on TV” is keenly tuneful, verging on Avril Lavigne, or even Ashlee Simpson territory. But some songs on this album, like “Rly Don’t Care” and “Favorite Band,” are redolent of the earliest, and sparest, girl in red singles — direct production, and the simple joys of expressing oneself in first person, reveling in the emphatic, liberating power of the “I.”Moriondo is part of a microgeneration influenced by Ulven’s loud and uncomplicated transparency. (She had been scheduled to open for Ulven on tour last year before the pandemic.) Ulven is 22 now, and her emotional circumstances have become more complex. “If I Could Make It Go Quiet” finds her in the throes of romantic anxiety, singing about relationships that are buckling under the weight of her success. “If I ever make it back/Will I find what we once had?” she sings on “Hornylovesickmess. “Guess I ruined us pretty bad/So don’t ever take me back.”Ulven is also astute in capturing the pain of coming in runner-up for someone’s affections. “I can’t be your midnight love/When your silver is my gold,” she sings on “Midnight Love,” with vocals suggesting an unusually spooky Dusty Springfield.Early in her career, Ulven’s production was unfussy, but as she’s developed, her songs have become amplified. “Did You Come?” is rife with moaning feedback, and the lightly curdled “You Stupid Bitch” pulses with a wall of sound that nods to new wave.“If I Could Make It Go Quiet” was produced entirely with the Norwegian musician Matias Telléz, the only exception being “Serotonin,” which is also produced by Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and sonic architect. It’s a lush song that’s also risky, singing about a painful, chaotic internal tug of war:I getIntrusive thoughtsLike cutting my hands offLike jumping in front of a busLike how do I make this stopAnd yet Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades — just like those she influenced, Ulven is growing up in public, too.girl in red“If I Could Make It Go Quiet”(AWAL)Chloe Moriondo“Blood Bunny”(Public Consumption Recording Co./Fueled by Ramen) More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Live Your Gay Millennial Pandemic Fantasy in Stardew Valley

      by

      In the farming RPG, I can enjoy a life of pastoral domesticity. IRL, I’m a lesbian urbanite struggling through the pandemic.Fed up with his soulless corporate job, a young man moves to the farm he inherited from his grandfather, where he joins a quaint community and meets his future husband. That’s not the plot of a new gay Hallmark movie — it’s the story of my pixelated alter ego in the video game Stardew Valley.In February 2016, Eric Barone, known online by his alias ConcernedApe, released Stardew Valley for PC. The simulation role-playing game quickly became a hit. In the pandemic, Stardew Valley fever is back with a vengeance. Thanks to the popularity of the Nintendo Switch and a massive game update released in December, it recently sold its 10 millionth copy.Since its debut, Stardew Valley has been lauded for its relaxing, immersive gameplay, a Harvest Moon-inspired simulator sure to delight lovers of Animal Crossing. Players create their own farmer avatars, who then leave the city for Stardew Valley. There, they manage their farms while honing skills, completing quests and, if the player desires, romancing an eligible villager. The game’s wholesomeness is universally appealing, but its particular blend of same-sex romance options, anti-corporate sentiment and pastoral Zen makes it even more tailored to escapists like me — gay millennial urbanites stuck in an endless pandemic slog. I grew up thinking any adult could easily have access to the simple life. Now I’m pretty sure I can only get it from a computer game.In real life, I’m a single lesbian in Brooklyn trudging through my second year working from home. My most productive days involve a move from Office A (the desk in my bedroom) to Office B (my coffee table). On Thursdays, I wake up excited to water my houseplants. I cope with stir craziness by watching TikToks of mushroom foragers, expert hikers and cottagecore lesbians. These people all seem to live in a universe sans Gmail, Zoom or masks, their rents paid by birdsong and dried lavender.In Stardew Valley, life can also be that simple. My farmer’s days usually go like this: He wakes up and gets coffee for his husband, then kisses said husband and their two toddlers before setting about his agrarian duties — collecting eggs, making goat cheese, planting sunflowers. His biggest problem right now is a voluntary quest to ship 500 fruits by the month’s end. There are no consequences for failure. I can redo any bad day with the click of a button.During same-sex weddings, the officiant charmingly stumbles through pronouncements of “husband and husband” or “wife and wife.”Stardew ValleyThough inclusive romance has increasingly become an option in open-ended, role-playing games like Stardew Valley, it is rarely the default in video games. Players take on straight male personas by rote in blowout franchises like Halo, Zelda, Grand Theft Auto and Mario. And same-sex romance — much less same-sex domesticity — is already scarce in media of all kinds. When depicted, that romance is often necessarily fraught with real-world problems: coming out, finding a community, combating prejudice. In Stardew Valley, my farmer’s gayness is a nonissue. I had him woo his husband, the town doctor, by bringing him fruits and vegetables.Yet gayness is not so embraced as to become invisible. If you have your farmer pursue a younger villager of the same sex, cut scenes sometimes show the young person shyly acknowledging their first gay crush. During same-sex weddings, the officiant charmingly stumbles through pronouncements of “husband and husband” or “wife and wife.”This balance between inclusivity and acknowledgment can feel especially heartwarming given the game’s small-town setting. A 2019 report by the think tank Movement Advancement Project found that, although between 3 and 5 percent of rural Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, their environments come with significant challenges. “On average, public opinion in rural areas is relatively less supportive of L.G.B.T. people and issues,” the report states, citing discriminatory legislation and political representation as additional barriers.There is one notable blind spot in the game’s sunny outlook: You can customize your avatar to have a darker skin tone, but your farmer would join a minority in Stardew Valley. There are only three characters in the game’s preset, 41-person world with dark skin, making this pixelated paradise more alienating for people of color.There are no consequences if the avatar fails at his tasks. The player can redo any bad day with the click of a button.Stardew ValleyEven if I did want to change my career, overcome those obstacles and live out my gay farm fantasy, homeownership feels even less realistic to me, at 26. According to a recent survey, most millennials reported they do not have enough saved up to make the average U.S. down payment. Even if I could get a mortgage, it’s difficult to imagine I could pay it off with fresh dairy and organic parsnips.In Stardew Valley, corporate greed is a far more oppressive force than homophobia. JojaMart, the Amazon-meets-Walmart conglomerate from which your farmer escapes, hopes to take over the town by replacing the community center with a warehouse. Competition drives prices up at the local seed shop, and two villagers struggle with poverty and alcoholism. In order to rebuild the community, players must grow, craft and forage a series of goods. From there, it’s practically impossible to spend your hard-earned Stardew Valley cash maliciously. After exhausting your options for farm buildings and house expansions, all that remain are ways to uplift the town, like upgrading a fellow villager’s trailer home to a house.As I scroll social media, I see my peers indulging their own fantasies with mood boards and TikTok videos of beautiful weddings, humble woodland cottages and biodiverse lawns. These things are attainable in theory, but to many young gay people today, they can feel more like daydreams. I don’t think my farmer avatar will be able to harvest his 500 crops before the clock runs out, but at least he comes by those simple pleasures easily. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Tu Me Manques’ Review: Traces of a Lost Love

      by

      A conservative father who could not accept his son’s sexuality is led on a contemplative tour of queer life in New York in this Bolivian film.The Bolivian film “Tu Me Manques” begins with a fight for an absent man’s affection. Jorge (Oscar Martínez) was the father of Gabriel, the former lover of Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa). When a chance phone call makes it possible for Jorge and Sebastian to meet, Sebastian is quick to hurl accusations at Jorge, who wouldn’t accept his son’s sexuality. Jorge has only tragedy to fling back: Gabriel died by suicide upon returning from New York City to Bolivia.What follows is an exploration of grief and adoration, as both men try to find a way to honor Gabriel’s memory. Jorge travels to New York looking for answers, and in response, Sebastian gives him a tour of Gabriel’s life in the city, introducing him to queer friends and gay nightclubs. The reminiscences lead Sebastian to write a play about his lost love, and the movie uses his theatrical ideas as an interesting, if somewhat alienating, reason to experiment with editing and form. Sebastian hires 30 actors to perform the role of his beloved — a gimmick that is mimicked in the film’s flashback sequences, which rotate in different performers as Gabriel.The film was written and directed by Rodrigo Bellott, who adapted the story from his play of the same name, based on similar events in his own life. Though the movie’s aesthetics are tepidly pleasant, Bellott’s biggest success is freeing his film’s relationship to time. In this sense, the movie retains some of the vitality of theater, where the characters invite the audience into reverie. Sebastian’s past, present, future and his fantasies of all three interact through flash-forwards and flashbacks, weaving together to create a moving and intellectually rewarding testament to queer life and loss.Tu Me ManquesNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on virtual cinemas. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Television

      Colton Underwood, ‘Bachelor’ Star, Comes Out as Gay

      by

      The 29-year-old former football player had written about questioning his sexuality in a memoir, published in 2020.Colton Underwood, a star of “The Bachelor” and a former football player, came out as gay in an interview with Robin Roberts that aired Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”He described 2020 as a year of self-reflection, one that “probably made a lot of people look in the mirror and confront what they were running from or what they’ve been putting off in their lives.”“I’ve ran from myself for a long time,” Mr. Underwood, 29, said in the interview. “I’ve hated myself for a long time. And I’m gay. And I came to terms with that earlier this year and have been processing it, and the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know.”He said that coming to understand his sexuality has been a “journey,” and now he is “the happiest and healthiest” he’s felt in his life. He had reached a low in 2020, he said, that led to thoughts of self-harm and suicide.“I got to a place where I didn’t think I was ever going to share this,” he said. “I would have rather died than say, ‘I’m gay.’ And I think that was sort of my wake-up call.”In his 2020 memoir, “The First Time: Finding Myself and Looking for Love on Reality TV,” Mr. Underwood described being confronted by his parents about his sexuality as a teenager.“‘You know, Colt, we’d still love you and support you if you were gay,’” he recalled his mother telling him.His father was more confrontational. “He’d pulled up the history of recent Google searches, which included gay porn sites and a variety of questions: ‘Am I gay? How do you know if you’re gay? Why don’t I like having sex with my girlfriend?’” Mr. Underwood wrote in the book. “At first, I denied responsibility. Then I owned up to having been curious. He asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no, explaining that I’d figured things out on my own.”Mr. Underwood appeared on “The Bachelorette” in 2018 and quickly became a fan favorite on the reality dating show. But Becca Kufrin, the season’s star, worried that he was unprepared for a lifelong commitment and eliminated him after their “hometown” date, where she met his family. (The show’s producers had made Mr. Underwood’s sexual inexperience a major plot point.)He starred on “The Bachelor” in 2019, where again his virginity was a central theme. Near the end of the season, as the stress of the show increased, he said he was “done” with filming and “jumped the fence” of a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal in an effort to escape the set.After the show ended, Mr. Underwood and Cassie Randolph, 25, the front-runner of his season, began dating. Ms. Randolph’s family helped him recover from Covid-19 in March, around the time his memoir was published.The couple announced their split in May 2020. In November, Ms. Randolph filed a restraining order against Mr. Underwood, who she said had placed a tracking device on her car. Viewers of his “Good Morning America” segment inferred that this was the personal low to which he was alluding.The “Bachelor” franchise had its first onscreen same-sex relationship in 2019 on “Bachelor in Paradise.” Demi Burnett, who appeared on Mr. Underwood’s season of “The Bachelor,” and Kristian Haggerty, who was flown out to the set midseason, ended up getting engaged. (They later broke it off.)In its 20 years, the franchise has never featured an all-gay cast. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Eddy de Pretto Is the Proud Sound of a New France

      by

      Born in the Paris suburbs, the singer has made waves with two albums that draw as much from ’60s chanson as contemporary hip-hop.Eddy de Pretto is now 27, and these days he sings on some of the largest stages in France — or he did, when the stages were open. When he was 21, he performed for a smaller audience: the tourists on the bateaux-mouches, the Paris sightseeing cruises that ply millions of people up and down the Seine.“It was a pretty crazy job. I was on the singing cruises, the ones where they serve you dinner,” de Pretto said in a recent video interview from Paris. From the little stage in the boat’s dining room, he recalled, he’d serenade tourists with syrupy Charles Trenet standards, to total indifference. “They were eating, looking out at the Eiffel Tower. They didn’t even realize someone was singing — they thought it was a soundtrack.”“But those three years on the bateaux-mouches were so completely typical of what it’s like to make a career,” he added. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all.”Those lonely nights on the cruise ship are the origin of “À Tous Les Bâtards” (“To All the Bastards”), de Pretto’s second album, released in France last month. “I was waiting patiently to take the throne/And they’d sing my songs like I sang ‘La Vie en Rose,’” he belts on the first single, “Bateaux-Mouches,” whose started-from-the-bottom lyrics recall many a hip-hop boast. But name-checking both Rihanna and Édith Piaf as your lodestars? That’s rarer.De Pretto burst to fame in 2018 with his triple-platinum album “Cure,” and its blend of urban beats and chanson poetics was not its only uncommon attribute. There was his voice: big and vibrant, with every syllable articulated for the back of the house. There was his look: hoodies and tracksuits, a three-day beard, and a strawberry-blond tonsure like a medieval monk’s. And there was his biography: a young gay man, uninhibited and unperturbed, from the suburbs that Parisians still typecast as a cultural backwater.De Pretto started out singing on the tourist barges that ply the River Seine. “It was totally formative to sing every night in front of people who didn’t give a damn at all,” he said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe was born in 1993 in Créteil, to the capital’s southeast. His father was a driver, and his mother a medical technician who revered an earlier generation of French singer-songwriters. “We lived in public housing, and my mother listened to a lot of Barbara, Brassens, Brel, Charles Aznavour,” he said. “She listened to it all the time, and really loud, too. Loud enough to hear it over the vacuum cleaner.”De Pretto said he played sports as a child, badly enough that his mother enrolled him in acting classes. The stage suited him. He landed a few small TV and movie roles. But his theatrical tendencies were not in harmony with the macho culture of the Paris suburbs.That tension inspired his breakout single, “Kid,” a mid-tempo ballad about parents and their effeminate sons. “You’ll be manly, my kid,” de Pretto sings over spare piano chords and digital hi-hats, though the song’s video shows him struggling to heed the call. Shirtless and sweat-soaked in the gym, de Pretto looks far too rangy to lift the massive barbells, trapped between family expectations and his true nature.“Every single word of ‘Kid’ is so wonderful,” said the singer Jane Birkin, who performed a duet with de Pretto in 2018. “He faced up to quite a lot of teasing, getting through in quite a tough neighborhood, with tough friends. And I should think he made himself respected — I wouldn’t mess around with him. And, at the same, time he has great fragility and great poignancy.”“Kid” was an instant hit in France, and seemed to come out of nowhere. De Pretto’s weighty voice sounded like a ’60s throwback, but he sang over spare, menacing, bass-heavy beats. The slangy lyrics had the vibrancy of the suburbs, but they were as poetic as they were acidic, with that French fixation on what de Pretto calls “the weight of the word.”For his first big TV appearance, in 2017, he performed with nothing but his own iPhone for accompaniment. The album cover of “Cure” had the same Gen-Z nonchalance: mirror selfie, phone in hand, leg hoisted on the kitchen table. A critic for the French newspaper Libération said astringently — but not without cause — that it looked like a late-night drunk pic sent to a Grindr hookup.Indeed, there was also de Pretto’s subject matter: furtive glances in the locker room, sloppy after-parties in darkened basements, grim evenings trawling the apps. On his spiky single “Fête de Trop” (“One Party Too Many”), he details the malaise of yet another evening getting high and “slipping my tongue into the salivating mouths” of “tonight’s boys.” “Jungle de la Chope” (“The Hookup Jungle”) delves into the “insipid conquests” of casual sex, safe or otherwise.Some gay musicians treat their homosexuality as a nonissue; others want to make it a mark of distinction. What made de Pretto’s debut so thrilling was that he did neither. He assumed his identity to the hilt, and thereby made it nothing special. “I’m writing from my point of view as a gay man,” he said. “But the songs are not a defense of being gay. I mean, yes, I’m gay, and I’m casting an eye on society.”De Pretto said his albums were about “breaking these fantasies and these received ideas of what happens in the suburbs,” and confounding a “stereotypical view of being gay.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesHe has, however, recorded one sideways pride anthem. “Grave” (“A Big Deal”) is a funny, filthy encouragement to anxious gay youth — think Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” for teens whose first view of same-sex intimacy comes through streaming video. It’s a catalog aria of gay rites of passage that, de Pretto sings, are “not a big deal”: scoping out classmates in gym class, fantasizing about your best friend, and many more not printable in a family newspaper. “Not living it: That’s a big deal!” goes the refrain.“If I had to compare him to anyone, it would be Christine and the Queens, although Eddy hasn’t exploded internationally,” said Romain Burrel, the editor of the French gay magazine Têtu. “Christine really opened the way for questions of gender and sexual orientation,” he said. “But Eddy is very, very French. There’s been a globalization of music, but when you listen to Eddy de Pretto, you’re in the 11th Arrondissement.”Musically, “À Tous Les Bâtards” sounds a lot like “Cure”: the same big voice, the same minimal beats. But de Pretto’s writing has become less angry, more confessional. “Désolé Caroline” (“Sorry Caroline”), its second single, sounds at first like a breakup song, addressed from a young gay man to the straight girl he cannot love. (In the interview, De Pretto described this kind of romantic rejection with the charming franglais verb “friendzoné.”)Then again, this “Caroline” — whom the singer wants to get out of “my veins” — may not be an actual girl. She may be a personification of cocaine: a double meaning he underlines in the music video, which features de Pretto in a white parka singing amid flurries of snow.“I love playing with these double meanings,” de Pretto said, “because it opens up the field of possibilities.” He certainly leaves the field open at the end of “À Tous Les Bâtards,” in the ingeniously smutty ballad “La Zone.” Here suburbs and sexuality become interchangeable, as de Pretto entreats us in a smooth falsetto to risk visiting … well, a certain area often considered dirty, or dangerous.“La zone,” in French slang, denotes a rough suburban neighborhood, the sort of place you might go to score drugs. But as de Pretto croons of the “dark pleasures” of a place where “some men are afraid to go,” we realize the particular zone he’s inviting you to is more anatomical than geographical. (Birkin said this song reminded her of “Sonnet du Trou de Cul,” a poem by Verlaine and Rimbaud written in 1871. “It’s a wonder people don’t talk about it more!” she added.)The Paris suburbs have birthed so many of France’s best singers and actors and artists, not to mention the reigning world champions of soccer. And yet western Europe’s largest and most diverse city still treats the towns outside its ring road as inaccessible places. “That was the whole project of the first and, I hope, this second album: breaking these fantasies and these ideas everyone has of what happens in the suburbs,” de Pretto said. “And of a pretty stereotypical view of being gay.”“That’s the job of an artist,” he said, “to find points of view that haven’t been found yet.” More