Most of us know that notorious “I guess that cunt gettin' eaten” line from Azealia Banks’ “212” (you know, where she wants another girl to “lick my plum in the evening and fit that tongue tongue d-deep in”), and those who do have screamed it wholeheartedly in various states of intoxication at their local gay party at least once (don’t lie!). But what about dicks? Dicks need love, too (if you wanna call it that), yet many openly gay singers through the years have preferred a more “universal” (meaning non-gendered) lyrical approach in order to appeal to a “universal” (read: straight) audience. I mean, when Sam Smith pleads “Oh won’t you stay with me / ’Cause you’re all I need” we all know he’s talking to a man and not some genderless spiritual being, right? So why not say it?

The most common practice to avoid the ‘problem’ altogether is the use of “you” and “I” instead of the third person, but luckily for all us pop-addicted little homo boys everywhere, there’s a few artists who are not concerned with whom they might offend with their lyrics (or are concerned but chose not to give a crap). They’re hard to come by, though, so for your listening pleasure I’ve compiled some pop songs that contain lyrics sung by men for men. So you can freely dwell on your past losses and heartbreaks without that distracting lack of male pronouns. You’re welcome!

Years & Years
And I’ll do what you like if you’ll stay the night
You tell me you don’t think you should
You do it, boy
Well love I will let you go

Let’s start off with a British group that has grown very dear to my heart over the last couple of months and in 2015 was mislabeled as a “newcomer act” all over the place: Years & Years were founded in 2010 and have been releasing official singles since 2012, but last year’s debut album Communion got the trio all kinds of accolades (like the prestigious BBC Sound of 2015 award as well as a UK number one with “King”). The rather slow career build gave frontman Olly Alexander ample time to feel comfortable in his role as an openly gay singer, and the 25-year-old has never been secretive about his orientation nor his relationship with Clean Bandit violinist Neil Milan Amin-Smith, which ended last October.

“It is kind of sad to me that we don’t have gay pop stars singing about men using a male pronoun, but that could change, hopefully (…) I’d like to hear a gay artist express their sexuality in a really open way. That’s something I’ve sort of tried to do a little bit on this album, but to be able to talk about sex is possibly new for gay artists, so I’d like to see that in the mainstream,” the singer said shortly before Communion’s release and honored his own words with not one, but two out of the album’s 13 songs containing male pronouns. Album track two “Real” repeatedly addresses a “boy”, while the album closer “Memo” is about wanting more from a guy (“Who wouldn’t want it when he looks like that?”), making Communion a big step towards same-sex positivity in the pop music realm.

John Grant
For my love I won’t hesitate
I will give him all that his heart can take
And I’ll trust him fearlessly
I want him to be free

If you’ve spent 2015 actively pursuing an interest in what’s going on in pop music you have surely heard of John Grant, since his fourth solo album Grey Tickles, Black Pressure can be counted as the first that really garnered him worldwide recognition as well as tons and tons of critical acclaim. I don’t blame you if you didn’t know the Czars (an alternative rock band that broke up in 2004) alum before, but his 2010 solo debut Queen of Denmark is notable for the opening song “TC and Honeybear” which describes a male same-sex love, exemplified by the beautiful lines above. His solo work includes several songs about being gay and/or HIV-positive, the latter being a fact the 47-year-old publicly acknowledged a few years ago, making John Grant’s artistic achievements a true lesson in fearlessness for LGBTQI artists all over the world.

Troye Sivan
I see your outline in my bed
In the same spot I watched him rest his head

Moving on! If you still don’t know who Troye Sivan is, you should go read my recent portrait of the Australian newcomer for Dandy Dicks (go ahead, I’ll wait), and when you’re done obsessing, you should take a moment to appreciate his serious work as a gay advocate – not only in interviews but also in his lyrics. The song “Gasoline” from his 2014 major label debut EP TRXYE contains male pronouns (well… one male pronoun), which is a pretty ballsy move for an 18-year-old; just as ballsy as thanking “my beautiful boyfriend” (who unfortunately remains anonymous) last in his debut album’s sleeve. Said debut album by the name of Blue Neighbourhood also contains a light-hearted song entitled “for him.”, which sadly doesn’t use any gendered pronouns but, with fluffy lines like “You don’t have to say I love you to say I love you / Forget all the shooting stars and all the silver moons / We’ve been making shades of purple out of red and blue,” is clearly about a boy. Hence, you know, the title. Oh, sweet puppy love!

Frank Ocean
This unrequited love
To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult
And cyanide in my styrofoam cup
I could never make him love me
Never make him love me

Three years after release Frank Ocean’s official full-length debut, channel ORANGE still easily stands as one of the best R&B/soul albums ever recorded ever, thanks to its lyrical precision combined with raw, unfiltered emotion (by the way, where’s the follow-up, Boys Don’t Cry?). On the track “Bad Religion”, Ocean employs religious imagery and Islam references to describe a hopeless, destructive kind of love – for another man. I admit I shed a tear or two when I first heard this song because it’s pure poetry and I could relate on so many levels. The feels, man. The feels.

But hold on: “Bad Religion” isn’t even the only Ocean song with (borderline) gay lyrics. While “Acura Integurl” from his 2011 mixtape The Lonny Breaux Collection is obviously about a girl (see: the title), the two-minute ballad contains the lines “I wrote a letter to the sky saying maybe one day you'll get to kiss me / My girl found it in the car and said ‘baby, why you tryin’ to dis me?’” Get it? The words “the sky” can, in this context, easily be misheard for “this guy,” meaning the girl in question is jealous of another man. Ha. Talking ’bout subversive. Way to go, Frankie! Now where’s Boys Don’t Cry?

A Great Big World
Something happens when I hold him
He keeps my heart from getting broken

The New Yorker indie pop duo A Great Big World might have slipped from the public consciousness a little since their 2013 international smash “Say Something” featuring Christina Aguilera, but the lead single “Hold Each Other” from their second studio album When the Morning Comes – which was released in November but subsequently failed to garner much traction – makes an important statement by including both female and male pronouns in the lyrics. “The fact that I was uncomfortable singing it [the male pronoun], as someone who’s gay, it showed me and Ian [Axel] that we have to spread this message because I shouldn’t be scared to say what’s in pop music,” says singer Chad King, who, previous to the song’s release, had never publicly discussed his sexual orientation. “It isn’t done in pop music often, not in this way. The fact that I was scared to say that showed us that we needed to do it.”

Matt Alber
Everyone smiles when my handsome man walks by

Well, this one’s pretty obvious (albeit maybe not exactly what you’d call ‘mainstream’), so I’ll just leave this right here. Please note that the music video features a very, um, authentic-looking gay bear couple and it’s all super cutesy and shit. And maybe just a little cheesy. Y’know. But super cute.

Bonus: The Kinks
I’m not the world’s most masculine man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
And so is Lola

Let’s end this little overview of same-sex positivity in the mainstream with a little excursion into pop music history, shall we? Back in the wild 1970s, the late great “queer hero” David Bowie almost single-handedly “made queer cool” and continued to pave the way for a longstanding tradition of androgyny in pop music, another posterchild of which was to become the artist known as Prince shortly thereafter. Surprisingly enough, the Purple One’s discography doesn’t boast too many gender-bending lyric bits, but the song “When You Were Mine” from Prince’s third studio album Dirty Mind, released in 1980, is noteworthy here for alluding to a threesome: “I never was the kind to make a fuss”, he sings in his unmistakable falsetto, “When he was there / Sleeping in between the two of us.” Since this ambiguous part can be understood either figuratively or literally, it’s a great example of lyrical subversion.

Another is The Kinks’ 1970 hit “Lola” from the British band’s album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, a song explicitly circling around the topic of gender confusion (“I’m not dumb but I can’t understand / Why she walked like a woman and she talked like a man”) that sparked some controversy with those, well, slightly kinky closing lines above, which reportedly even resulted in a ban of the song in Australia. What’s going on? Who or what is Lola? And should it really matter? It did, obviously, but in Rob Jovanovic’s 2014 biography God Save The Kinks, the group’s lead singer and songwriter Ray Davies is cited saying, “It really doesn’t matter what sex Lola is, I think she’s alright.” If only it were that easy, my friend. Sigh. Baby steps, I guess, right?

So that’s all for today, folks! This list is of course by no means comprehensive, and I didn’t even go into the whole topic of gender-bending cover versions (you know, when male artists perform songs written by/for female artists without ‘adjusting’ the pronouns and vice versa – not to mention the controversy surrounding Ryan Adams’ Taylor Swift cover album 1989 on which he did change the lyrics to make them mainstream-friendly when sung by a man.) Oh well, maybe next time. Now go forth and prosper, be as gay as you wanna be, and sing about it loudly, and let’s conquer the mainstream together because God (I mean Cher) knows it’s long overdue (cf. Gay AgendaTM). I’m counting on you!

Images: Sony Music/Universal Music/Warner Music