We just lived through a sapphic-pop renaissance – but a dark age is upon us.
Last summer was soundtracked by queer femme pop songs, including Chappell Roan’s glittery chaos, Billie Eilish’s sultry LUNCH, Megan Thee Stallion’s Like a Freak, and Kehlani’s After Hours. The vibe was bold, defiant, and rooted in joy that didn’t centre cishet men – a welcome break from the norm.
Now, as summer 2025 looms, barely 10% into Donald Trump’s second presidency and amid a global surge in far-right ideology, the queer pop girlies seem to be suddenly dating men, with JoJo Siwa and Billie Eilish as two much-talked-about examples.
Then there’s Fletcher, a pop artist who built much of her fanbase on overtly sapphic themes and whose dramatic love life has been a consistent source of fascination. She’s returned with a new single, Boy, ahead of her album Would You Still Love Me If You Really Knew Me?
The song is confessional and oddly sombre, as if heterosexuality is a scandal: ‘I kissed a boy, I had no choice,’ she sings.
Rather than feeling empowered, the track – dropped on the first day of Pride Month, no less – is steeped in guilt. Its release, timed with the news that Fletcher is dating a man, sparked an enormous wave of backlash that, ironically, seemed to prove her fears right.
Many fans insist the issue isn’t that she’s with a man, but how the shift was framed. As @SoberSaturn put it: ‘She made her career off of sapphics and developed a fanbase of queer women, just to play the victim with this new album…’
Fletcher has never claimed to be a lesbian. In 2021, she stated in an Instagram story: ‘I would say I identify as queer. It’s about energy. But I am attracted to strong feminine energy, which just so happens to more likely than not be women.’
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Still, for some, this shift felt like betrayal, not nuance.
@itsmeconnor_ summed it up: ‘Let’s make sure we’re dragging Fletcher for the correct thing • she’s dating a man ❌ • she released a mid song about being in a heteronormative relationship acting like she’s going to be persecuted for it, during Pride Month in Trump’s America ✅.’
@dykezadi agreed: ‘Fletcher had the opportunity to make a really fun uplifting bi/pan anthem for Pride Month but instead she went with ‘coming out as being in a socially acceptable heteronormative relationship is so scary.’
In response, some fans pushed back, arguing that the criticism was inherently biphobic, regardless of the excuses people offered for their outrage.
@sapphic_idiot wrote: ‘It’s so f****d up that Fletcher who has always only ever identified as queer has had to apologize for being with a guy. Let her live 😭😭😭’
@sadlyundrunk added: ‘The biphobia Billie and Fletcher are experiencing this Pride Month is vile.’
This isn’t happening in isolation. JoJo Siwa recently faced similar backlash after appearing on Celebrity Big Brother UK and subsequently dating Chris Hughes.
Formerly identifying as a lesbian, JoJo now identifies as queer and attracted to all genders. Her sapphic fans weren’t thrilled, reading praise of her ‘softer, feminine side’ emerging in her relationship with Chris as a rebranding campaign that leaned into palatable heteronormativity.
What might be a natural evolution of identity is instantly reinterpreted as marketing, strategy, or betrayal.
And frankly, maybe it is a brand pivot. But how can anyone be surprised that JoJo’s identity might be for sale when they so enthusiastically bought the old brand? If queerness is treated like a product, then of course the product will evolve to stay sellable.
That’s where capitalism comes in. In a world where identity is monetized, queerness is no longer simply lived; it’s branded.
The music, the merch, and the imagery are all sold to LGBTQ+ fans like rainbow water bottles at a corporate Pride booth. And once identity becomes product, any deviation is treated like a brand malfunction.
Fletcher dating a man? That doesn’t just challenge social norms, it disrupts a profitable narrative and makes fans feel like they aren’t getting what they paid for.
The same can be said of Billie Eilish, who was recently seen kissing Nat Wolff (a male actor) after coming out as queer last year – a moment that sparked similar discourse about whether queerness can be real if it isn’t always visibly subversive.
Fans’ discomfort with their bi pop queens dating men comes from two sources: ingrained biphobia and capitalism’s hatred of ambiguity.
Queerness refuses tidy packaging while a ‘lesbian’ brand is legible and profitable because it feels stable. A queer woman who occasionally dates men? That’s harder to market, harder to rally around, and much harder to convert into merch.
As @seatt1edina put it: ‘IDGAF if Fletcher has a BF but making a song where she is so ‘scared’ of telling people she’s dating a MAN????????’ accompanied by a meme of a woman cringing.
But doesn’t the backlash prove Fletcher’s fear was valid? If she’d joyfully announced her relationship, would she really have been met with celebration – or just a different flavor of disdain?
@poet_department’s post – ‘Fletcher kissing a boy and releasing the song during Pride Month is homophobic’ – might sound absurd, but it captures how deeply brand logic has saturated queer discourse.
When your queerness is your market niche, any shift feels like a PR stunt, not a personal truth.
Capitalism doesn’t know what to do with nuance. It wants stories that are clear, identities that are fixed, and artists who behave like products. When someone does do a brand shift – say, a Taylor Swift ‘era’ – it’s done with PR polish that fans can easily follow. Queerness, by its very nature, resists that polish, so fans read it as a deviation from an unspoken contract.
This is why identity politics, when filtered through capitalist incentives, become dangerous, because they stop being about liberation and start being about legibility.
Queer people, particularly bisexual women and nonbinary people, often bear the brunt of this because the moment their desires don’t align with the marketable version of their identity, their authenticity is questioned.
However, to be clear, Fletcher isn’t a passive victim. She capitalised heavily on her queer image, including public drama with exes like Shannon Beveridge. Her fans feel lied to, not because she changed, but because the product did, and products aren’t supposed to change. It’s what you get when you make something as personal as sexuality your whole brand, and Fletcher should have seen it coming.
And yet, underlying all of this fan reaction is a deeper fear that shouldn’t be dismissed: With the rise of fascism and the rollback of LGBTQ+ rights, are some queer women gravitating toward hetero-presenting relationships for safety, consciously or not? Is queer visibility shrinking again, right when we were promised liberation?
Still, the backlash Fletcher faces reveals more about us than about her. We’ve been trained to see queerness not as a lived truth, but as something to buy into or opt out of, and in a system where queerness is monetised, fluidity will always be read as betrayal.
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