How Lil Nas X Used Queer Iconography to Reclaim Hell for the LGBTQ Community

Rapper Lil Nas X gained fame in recent years with groundbreaking hits like “Old Town Road” and “Panini,” and his recent record “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” is no different. As reported by Ben Sisario of The New York Times, “Montero” still sits atop the Billboard Hot 100 and the Rolling Stone Top 100, both in the United States, with upwards of 47 million streams during its first week. The three-minute-long video has sparked outrage and controversy from the Christian community for its religious imagery, which includes a variety of Greco-Roman and medieval Christian motifs written in both Greek and Latin. The conversations that followed, however, are exactly the kind of discussions that Lil Nas X sought to stir up: “I wanted to use these things that have been around for so long to tell my own story, and the story of so many other people in the community — or people who have been outcast in general through history,” he said to TIME Magazine’s Andrew Chow. Through “Montero,” Lil Nas X has successfully reclaimed his identity as a proud gay Black man by taking the conservative religious belief that homosexuality is a sin resulting in gays being “doomed” to Hell, and casting it in a brand new — and debatably far more appealing — light on behalf of the LGBTQ community.

"Montero” opens with a voice-over in which Lil Nas X welcomes the viewer to Montero, where individuals no longer have to banish or hide away the parts of themselves that they’re scared to let the world see. Lil Nas X is then seen in the Garden of Eden portraying both Adam and the snake that seduces him with a flash of its third eye, sealing the interaction with a kiss. The tree of knowledge is also shown, inscribed with a Greek phrase that translates to “After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half.” In his article, Chow breaks down the deeper religious meanings behind Lil Nas X's latest masterpiece. Chow writes that this phrase, taken from Plato’s Symposium, is in reference to "an origin story of mankind in which humans were originally two bodies stuck together — some man and man, some woman and woman, and some man and woman. When the bodies were separated by Zeus, each body longed for their other half, which is used as an explanation as to why we feel love and desire for different types of bodies." 

This particular passage of Symposium may be recognizable amongst the queer community: Chow quotes scholar of classical studies and ancient mythology Vanessa Stovall, who explains that this passage has long served as a source of inspiration and fascination in historically queer spaces. Columbia University professor Joseph Howley says that this is “an early example of homosexuality and bisexuality represented as being familiar or acceptable in ways they are not always in our society today." In alluding to this famous work by Plato, Lil Nas X is calling attention to the hypocrisy that is interwoven into religious homophobia, as the history of the Christian church provides proof that there was once a more ambivalent relationship to homosexuality than the far-right conservative views that we see with modern Christianity.

In the following scene, Lil Nas X is seen in chains being brought into the Colosseum where he is judged by alternate versions of himself wearing Marie Antionette wigs and a crowd of stone figures flinging rocks toward him. After he’s struck and killed by what some online forum users have interpreted to be a thrown butt plug, Lil Nas X ascends toward Heaven and is greeted by a male angel resembling the Greek mythological figure Ganymede. As per Chow's article: "Ganymede was a boy whose beauty was so intense that Zeus turned into an Eagle and carried him to Olympus, and he has long been a symbol of homosexuality." Lil Nas X then grabs onto a pole, and pole dances his way to Hell while scantily clad in thigh-high stiletto boots and tight underwear. He lands in Hell and struts over to Satan, where the ground surrounding him is inscribed with the Latin phrase "they condemn what they do not understand." Lil Nas X then mounts Satan for a 20-second lap dance before snapping the demon’s neck and crowning himself the King of Hell, complete with glowing eyes and black wings.

The video is impressive in various aspects, though the most commonly agreed upon is its intense attention to detail. Various scholars have agreed that it paints a descriptive historical narrative of the persecution of queer people by religions like Christianity, something Lil Nas X took extreme care to call attention to. The “Montero” music video has morphed into a spectacle of queer media, being both heralded by queer people for its message and visibility and condemned by the far-right and religious sects for those same reasons. Lil Nas X’s work here, through lyrics and imagery, metabolizes the sense of fear that has long been instilled in queer people by the Christian faith: he takes the idea of gays being sent to Hell for their sins and flips it on its head as he embraces both Hell and Satan with open arms — and legs — by bringing his queerness and, by virtue of who he is as both a person and artist, his race, to center stage. In challenging the idea of heteronormativity as a default, Lil Nas X wages war on the idea that queerness should be kept private and out of the view of the public, for the sake of comfortability for nonqueer individuals. In “Montero,” Lil Nas X unabashedly tackles and critiques the institutionalization of religious homophobia through displays of queer iconography juxtaposed with recognizable Christian imagery and references.

Scholars Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, authors of Sex in Public, wrote an analysis regarding what they described as “radical aspirations of queer culture building,” which “Montero” is almost to a tee. Berlant and Warner wrote about the importance of these instances of queer culture, in which queerness was not just permitted, but celebrated, producing “changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent.” With “Montero,” Lil Nas X reimagines Biblical scenes through the queer lens: in the Garden of Eden, he (the snake) seduces himself (as Adam); in the Colesseum, he’s recast as a Christian martyr, in reference to the tradition of Roman Catholics who were traditionally murdered for their faith. Roland Betancourt presents perhaps the most consequential argument in Chow's article: that this ascension to meet Ganymede should be seen as a scene of salvation: not that he is going to Heaven, but rather that the “same-gender consummation is legitimized by Pagan gods." All of these allusions to traditional Christian ideas and imagery serve the same purpose: to reinvent the world as we know it into a place called Montero, where people are able to fully embrace themselves in all their otherness, whether it be racial, sexual, ethnic or gender-based. “Montero” makes a new space where queer culture can be written, rewritten, and celebrated without the fear or shame that has long plagued members of the LGBTQ community through institutionalized religion-based homophobia.

Above all else, “Montero” is a thorough critique of Christian theology surrounding gayness and sin, and presents us with a version of the world in which the two no longer have a causative relationship. In embracing Hell and Satan at the end of the video, Lil Nas X asserts pride in his identity as a gay man of color, who likely would have been persecuted by the church had it occurred at another time and place. In the “Montero” music video, Lil Nas X embodies the same hubris that heterosexual people have been able to enjoy since the dawn of time: celebrating themselves and their identity in public. Conservatives have chided Lil Nas X for this, citing claims that the queer eroticism depicted in the video will be a bad influence for young viewers, whom they say his music is geared toward. However, Lil Nas X has never been a children’s artist, despite his songs being huge hits for that age group. Moreover, queer people have spoken out about the video and praised Lil Nas X, saying that the “Montero” video is something that will speak to young queer people for generations to come and finally present them with an alternative narrative, separate and more encouraging than that of the Christian faith that tells its followers that gay people go to Hell. Through images of queerness intermixed with religious lore, Lil Nas X is able to claim a new sense of public intimacy that has long been off-limits to queer people due to heteronormative policing. In casting and recasting himself in a number of different roles, he demonstrates how conservative Christian doctrine had once turned him into his own worst enemy — judgmental, ashamed, secretive. But in Montero, a land where there is no restrictive narrative, Lil Nas X is able to embrace himself fully and live his truth, freeing himself from fear and shame and finally ending Satan’s reign to claim the throne for himself, all without any help from Heaven.

“Montero” is a very important piece of queer media, and broke boundaries in a way that no other artist has achieved before. In an extremely polarized world, conservative and far-right doctrine, religious or otherwise, can be what separates queer people from the rest of the world. It confines an entire community to the margins, forcing them to live in the shadows and wage daily battles with shame and fear of persecution and violence. In 2021, we still see far too many violent acts of homophobia and transphobia — these “doctrines” are ending people’s lives. In breaking them down and rewriting them through the lens of the queer and “othered” individual, Lil Nas X was able to take back the power and reclaim Hell for the entire LGBTQ community as a place where they could be accepted, rather than being shunned and ostracized from Heaven because of who they truly are.