On Monday the 28-year-old went on the Zach Sang Show to talk about his newly released album and admitted to having a few hookups with straight men that left him feeling “empty.”
“And I always thought it was really hot,” Sivan admitted. “I started to go into my own head, like, why is that hot? Is this internalized homophobia where I’m like, this person 100 percent would have scared me in high school and now they’re showing me attention—is that what I’m feeling and responding to? Why is this such a fantasy kind of thing?”
His highly anticipated third studio album Something to Give Each Other dropped on October 13 along with a full-length music video for the song “One Of Your Girls.” The lyrics for the song make it clear that Sivan is talking about crushing on straight guys who want to keep him a secret, “Say what you want, and I’ll keep it a secret. You get the key to my heart, and I need it,” he sings.
The “Rush” singer said that one of the hardest things about these encounters was that ultimately it couldn’t be anything real. “When I followed through a few times there was this sort of empty feeling afterwards with these particular guys because there was a limit to what it could be,” he explained.
Sivan became frustrated with being manipulated by straight men who treated him like a dirty little secret, “I felt as though it was like, you would do all of this talking, talking, talking and then do whatever and then still like, but ‘Whoa bro I’m not gay.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay girl, whatever. That’s fine.’”
The Australian singer-songwriter said he started writing the song in the shower after talking to a straight friend who “really wants to hookup with a guy” when he’s been out partying. “We ended up writing the rest of the chorus, and it switches and it says, ‘give me a call if you ever get desperate, I’ll be like one of your girls,’ which I think really summarized the way that I ended up feeling about myself afterwards, which is like, you’re this experiment or this last resort of like,” Sivan confided. “If you don’t find a girl to hookup with, secretly call your gay friend Troye and he’ll come over and do it for you. It didn’t leave me feeling good a lot of the time.”
He admitted to finding this “annoying,” saying, “Sometimes it literally just felt like an ego stroke where it was like, I’m going to flirt with you and then immediately pull the rug out from under your feet as soon as I start showing interest or vulnerability in that situation.”
Something To Give Each Other is now available on all music streaming platforms.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
Ariel Messman-Rucker is an Oakland-born journalist who now calls the Pacific Northwest her home. When she’s not writing about politics and queer pop culture, she can be found reading, hiking, or talking about horror movies with the Zombie Grrlz Horror Podcast Network.
