I Kissed a Girl: A Ten Year Queer Retrospective
On Tuesday, Katy Perry was reported to have said that “If I had to write that song again, I probably would make an edit on it. Lyrically, it has a couple of stereotypes in it. Your mind changes so much in 10 years, and you grow so much. What’s true for you can evolve.” Clearly, she feels (or at least, thinks she is supposed to feel) responsible for reinforcing negative stereotypes with the song. I Kissed A Girl was a mistake that deserves to be rewritten to fit today’s conception of what experiences are okay to express in music.
It’s fine that some people feel this is the conversation we should be having. I don’t think Perry is wrong to make this statement, and I don’t think that it’s wrong for people to want to hear these words. However, I personally don’t feel like we should just change an entire work because it’s flawed. Rather, we should take this time to discuss why it exists in the way that it does. I Kissed A Girl was borne at the crux of a vital time in the history of LGBTQ rights. It exists in the form that it does because it’s stuck between two cultural worlds — a Schrodinger’s cat of queerness, I guess you could say. Gay enough to push the envelope; heterosexual enough to be marketed to the 2008 mainstream.
Let’s take a short trip back in time to talk about why.
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Welcome to 2008 where Dubya’s still in office, the economy is collapsing, and you’re still wearing those Crocs that are hiding in the back of your closet. Barack Obama is on the campaign trail assuring America that, if he won, he’d make sure to fix all these terrible things. Just as we flock to a president promising change, so too do we flock to a new wave of bubbly pop stars that are rising out of the economic rubble — Katy Perry being one of many.
Many people doubted that Katy could ride her way to stardom on the back of this song. According to the senior director for Katy’s label, I Kissed A Girl was a hard sell due to its controversial nature. They were frightened of the response from the ‘Bible Belt’ and thought that it could tank Katy’s career. However, mainstream America loved it. It topped the charts on Billboard for seven consecutive weeks after its release.
I Kissed A Girl was the beginning of a musical shift towards LGBT representation among her contemporaries. In the years to come we’d see Macklemore, Lady Gaga, Pink, Hozier, and more show open support for and representation of LGBT people in their songs and music videos. Interestingly, Katy made waves in 2010 by featuring same-sex relationships in her music video for Firework. This is representative of how fast cultural attitudes towards LGBT people were shifting in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Between 2008 and 2010, girls kissing girls went from tantalizing to political.
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In 2008, LGBT people in the United States had very few rights. Restriction of same-sex marriage, being forced out of the military because of your sexual orientation, and being fired from a government job over your orientation were all legal. Hate crime laws for LGBT people had not been expanded yet via the Matthew Shepard Act. There was no such thing as a federally stated LGBT pride month. Battles for all these protections were being waged, but nobody knew how they were going to pan out.
I can imagine that many of the activists ten years ago must have rolled their eyes at Katy Perry’s naughty claims that she kissed a girl. Katy Perry prancing around on the Today Show and singing I Kissed A Girl offkey is just so embarrassingly heterosexual. She has no idea how hard it is to be an actual member of the community! This is just going to reinforce terrible stereotypes about lesbian and bisexual women!
(Katy Perry, the dense, bubbly thing that she is, continued to wear cotton candy, bat her eyelashes, and titter with reporters about how one time she maybe sorta kinda kissed a girl.)
Ironically, it may have been the hard work of LGBTQ activists in changing minds and hearts that allowed it to exist in the first place. I can’t imagine this song getting on the radio in 1998 or in 2018. 2008 was a liminal space for LGBTQ rights — there were many battles we were on the cusp of winning, but we weren’t there just yet. Understanding this context makes the popularity of a song like I Kissed A Girl feel inevitable.
Like Katy Perry, America was curious about same-gender love, but still wasn’t sure whether it felt so wrong or so right.
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The most striking thing about I Kissed A Girl ten years later is how it’s not striking at all. It wouldn’t seem out of place on the radio at Kohls or at a variety show at a local high school. I Kissed A Girl is the kind of song that plays at your doctor’s office and doesn’t leave your head all day. You hear it at the grocery store, the mall, bars that are frequented by middle-aged moms, karaoke nights. We can’t get enough of a problematic song about same-gender curiosity.
I’m not going to claim that the mundanity of I Kissed A Girl means that homophobia is over. Far from it — battles for basic rights such as job discrimination, housing discrimination, and public accommodations are still being waged. However, I do think it shows that more people view LGBT people as ‘the same as everybody else.’ More people think that it’s normal for girls to kiss girls — including and especially bi-curious girls.
There is no doubt that we need more mainstream songs about lesbian love. Lesbians and bi women are still fighting every day to be seen as people rather than sexual commodities. Stereotypes abound, and corrective rape his horrifically common. However, I don’t think that this means a song like I Kissed A Girl can’t exist. Female desire is complicated and exploratory and wonderful whether it’s love or getting drunk and tasting cherry chapstick. We deserve representations of all forms of same gender love, attraction, and behavior.
As Katy Perry would say, ‘It’s no big deal. It’s innocent.’
