Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” Video Is a Sexy, Sapphic Fever Dream, Janelle Monáe has announced their first album in five years, The Age of Pleasure, and dropped a new single, “Lipstick Lover,” complete with a steamy, summery visual to boot.
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Janelle Monáe has announced their first album in five years, The Age of Pleasure, and dropped a new single, “Lipstick Lover,” complete with a steamy, summery visual to boot.
This is our oasis made with love, rooted in self-acceptance, throbbing in self-discovery, and signed with cherry red kisses from me to you,” the singer said in a statement to NME. “Lipstick Lover” is, Monáe decreed, “our freeassmothafucka anthem inspired.
The video would best be described as a queer oasis, set at what appears to be a pool party in paradise.
After Monáe is woken up with a kiss, the singer can be seen embracing a woman’s ass, taking an exceptionally sensual hit off a blunt in another woman’s hand, and masturbating on a bed covered with candy-colored sex toys.
And that’s not even the half of it, nor does it account for the cornucopia of gloriously queer action throughout the video that doesn’t even involve Monáe.
Even so, Monáe’s work has always been implicitly queer. Their first three musical projects follow a character called Cindi Mayweather, a robot who is persecuted by humans.
As it turns out, Cindi was sent to save the residents of a town called Metropolis (named for the 1927 sci-fi film) from The Great Divide, a “secret society that uses time travel to suppress freedom and love.”
In their early conceptual work, Monáe explored existence (and resistance) as a Black queer person without ever explicitly identifying as such, with Cindi Mayweather serving as a screen of plausible deniability.
In fact, Monáe evaded questions about their own sexuality for many years, once telling Rolling Stone in 2010 that “the lesbian community has tried to claim me, but I only date androids.”