In a feature story for Rolling Stone Magazine that debuted today, deeply beloved musician and child prodigy Billie Eilish, an icon of gay pop who empowered me to return to my essence by wearing clothes that are four sizes too big for me, spoke in more detail about her upcoming album “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her evolution as an artist, her mental health struggles, her concerns for the environment, swimming, and her sexuality.
Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
Last week we lost our minds over Eilish’s new track “Lunch,” which she sang at Coachella to much acclaim, and in the interview, Eilish plays the song for journalist Angie Martoccio, who describes it as “a sexy, bass-heavy banger where Eilish is crushing on a girl so hard she likens sex with her to devouring a meal.” She explains to Martoccio that she wrote some of “Lunch” before even hooking up with a girl, and some after.
“I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life,” she says. “But I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina. I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever, in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up.”
She spends time in the piece reflecting on the hullabaloo around all that — the speculation, the Variety interview in which she said she was attracted to girls “for real,” and the subsequent red carpet follow-up question about if she’d intentionally come out in that interview. Following the red carpet interview, Eilish chastised the reporter-in-question for asking her if she’d come out intentionally, likening the question to “outing [her] on a red carpet at 11 a.m..” She tells Martoccio that she now classifies that instagram post as an overreaction, explaining, “Who fucking cares? The whole world suddenly decided who I was, and I didn’t get to say anything or control any of it.” But Eilish eventually concludes, “I know everybody’s been thinking this about me for years and years, but I’m only figuring out myself now. And honestly, what I said was funny, because I really was just saying what they’ve all been saying.”
There’s many relatable sentiments in the Rolling Stone interview about her sexuality, but also about Billie’s mental health struggles and agoraphobia. She gets deep into remembering how she dealt with sudden fame at such a young age by retreating internally, hiding from the world in hopes of emanating the aura of “this mysterious, cool person.” But eventually she realized that doing this was preventing her from enjoying life and making friends, and so she decided to turn it all around and start accepting social invitations and going to Chipotle.
Eilish also talked about how she decompresses through exercise, but also through sex. “I basically talk about sex any time I possibly can,” she told Rolling Stone. “That’s literally my favorite topic.” For example, she really loves masturbating, which she says is an enormous part of her life and a “huge help” for her “as somebody with extreme body issues and dysmorphia that I’ve had my entire life.”
Finally, Eilish does in fact speak on a contentious topic many fans were hoping she’d address — the ocean. She explained that she has traumatic memories of learning to swim as a child, which led to a tenuous relationship with water. Simply thinking about swimming made her heart race, but she has since grown and changed and is now okay with being underwater. However, she takes a hard line against whales, pointing out: “How can anybody just accept that a whale exists, y’all? Those things are enormous. The noises they make. That shit is terrifying to me. Terrifying.”
You can read the full interview on Rolling Stone.
Billie Eilish penning a song about eating box was always an inevitability. It couldn’t get any gayer unless she puts Kehlani on the remix.
Also, that last paragraph is amazing. 10/10 no notes.
So the accusations where she was “queerbaiting” were sort of accurate after all – not at all intentional (she identified as straight at the time, and her *conscious* intention was to celebrate female friendship, even if it accidentally had lesbian vibes) but somewhat ironic in hindsight.
For the term “queerbatiting” to constitute an accusation, it needs to imply intentional deception.
Seeing as Billie is sharing with us that she’s been discovering all of this herself in the past year, any perceived signaling wasn’t intentional.
I personally wouldn’t call the process of self-discovery “queerbaiting”, even in retrospective.
Queerbaiting is a way to talk about media, not real people.
Perhaps, but I usually see the term being used to talk about specific people who created specific pieces of media which are seen by some as queerbaiting, which she did. That seems like unnecessary language policing to demand it only be used for the media works and not for the people who created them. At the very least, even if it’s “improper”, that’s not how I see it being used.
Nah, hating whales is disqualifying.