Queer Music News: Devon Cole hosts a gay pool party; Darren Hayes "reclaims 'Homosexual'"

Singer Darren Hayes is a total ‘Homosexual.’ (Courtesy photo)

A smattering of what’s going on in music by LGBTQ artists and the artists we love.

Alt-pop singer and feminist Devon Cole drops “Hey Cowboy”

The new single from Cole is out today along with the video premiere that includes one fabulous gay pool party.

“‘Hey Cowboy’ is a song where I’m embracing my sexuality (and my affection for cowboys). I love songs that are a little flirty, a lot flirty. It’s downright fun to own my sexual appetite and sing freely about it. I get fired up (in a good way) hearing women sing candidly and unapologetically about sex. Especially when it’s raunchy. ‘Hey Cowboy’ is the first song of mine where I’m stepping into that,” Cole said in Friday’s song announcement.

Previously, Cole’s single “W.I.T.C.H.” has tallied 33 million streams to date. Billboard stated that the single “bounces along with a natural confidence that sells the radio-ready hook and puts its feminist message first.”

Watch “Hey Cowboy” below:

Darren Hayes from Savage Garden new album Homosexual out now

Breaking away from what he describes as the “controlling image” of a major label at the beginning of his career, Hayes is reclaiming his truth. With Homosexual, Hayes stated that is also reclaiming a word that was used to shame and vilify. Now, fans are introduced to the Darren Hayes who has always been there but now at his most vulnerable.

“I named my album ‘Homosexual’ for a variety of reasons,” Hayes said in a press release. “The most obvious is that I’m a gay man who grew up in an era when that word was used to shame and vilify people like me, so I wanted to reclaim it. I’m also a recording artist who came up in an era where being openly gay was frowned upon and I experienced firsthand, the attempted erasure of my true identity from the marketing department of a major record label. But perhaps the most important reason I chose this title is that in 2022, I’m living in a time and in a country where the freedoms of LGBTQI+ people are more at risk than they’ve ever been.”

From Hayes’ publicity:

Through each of the 14 tracks on Homosexual, Hayes is in confession mode, revisiting his painful teenage years, examining his relationship to his sexuality and reclaiming the experience of surviving a violent childhood and bullying; ridding himself of shame through the lens of queer joy. There’s a deliberate nostalgic musical nod to the safety of the pre-2000’s dance floors and queer sub-cultures that were the soundtrack to his personal coming out story. It’s also a deeply personal insight into relationships at mid-life, set against a musical backdrop of synth wave and post-disco.

Hayes first introduced the music off Homosexual with the release of the vibrant club banger “Do You Remember?” and the effervescent “Let’s Try Being In Love”. Elsewhere on the album is the deeply personal single and music video “Poison Blood” articulating Hayes’ experience with depression and suicide, and “All You Pretty Things,” his tribute to the 49 lives lost in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida and his love letter to the LGBTQ community and its pioneers, past and present, responsible for the freedoms we have today, calling for us to celebrate the memory of the lives lost through dance.

“Moments like the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill in Florida, or the constant attacks on trans people, have made it clear to me that now is the time to be as loud as possible about who I am. So on the front cover of my album, I’m proudly lounging upon my version of a stairway to heaven. Emblazoned across me, in the brightest hot pink neon, is a word the 11 year-old me used to be terrified of. I lounge proudly underneath the electric buzz of this symbol, this term that used to be used to denigrate people like me,” he said. “Now it’s my word. Now it means whatever I want it to mean. If you haven’t worked it out yet, I think it means something magical, amazing, unique and essential. My name is Darren Hayes. And I’m a proud Homosexual.”

Watch “Do You Remember” below:

Carly Rae Jepsen releases her fifth studio album The Loneliest Time

Queer fave Carly Rae Jepsen has a new album out today that has already spawned four single including the title track, a disco-lite inspired duet with Rufus Wainwright.

The video for “The Loneliest Time” was directed by GRAMMY Award winning director Brantley Gutierrez and features Jepsen and Wainwright calling out to one another during the loneliest time of the night.

The Loneliest Time is available today via all digital outlets.

Watch the video for the title track below: