However, my first instinct was not to call a 16-year-old girl (as that’s what age she was at the time – she just recently turned 17) ‘cringey’.
Okay, as a lesbian, I’ll admit that on my first listen (which was a few months ago, when the demo version was widely available on Youtube), I, too, kinda rolled my eyes at how silly it was. NME reported on the backlash Eilish was receiving, and included a tweet in their article, in which one fan said, “Got excited because I thought that wish you were gay song was about fancying women, but it turns out it’s about wishing the boy that rejected you was gay so he had a ‘valid’ reason. Luring in LGBTQ fans with a title like “wish you were gay” then singing about a boy who doesn’t love you back is more than just unsatisfying, it feels like a slap in the face to a marginalised community starving from the sparse array of queer pop music.
