Twenty-Year-Old, Openly Gay Troye Sivan Is the Next Prince of Pop

Before walking into New York City's Webster Hall Tuesday night for alt-pop artist Troye Sivan's second sold-out show at the landmark venue—part of the promotional tour for his first full-length album, Blue Neighbourhood, which had a top-five Billboard debut back in December—I paused for a moment. "What do you think this crowd is going to look like?" I asked my friend. "Dude, no idea," she replied in earnest.

Here's why we were confused: Sivan is a 20-year-old, openly gay, noodle-of-a-human Aussie who was born and bred on YouTube. Sivan's sound, which I'd categorize as moody, downtempo dream pop, is something you don't usually hear on the radio, and his look—pale, pouty, blue-eyed beautiful as he is—is one you don't generally see among the generically pretty faces of pop. Therefore, I anticipated the sizable number of young emo-ish gay kids in the crowd. I expected a smattering of more mature gay men (hi, me) who have become drawn to not only Sivan's melodies but also his entrancing baritone voice and ruminative lyrics on the complexities of youth. I also expected a different smattering of more mature gay men who were there for, um, less virtuous reasons. What I did not expect, as I waited for my beer at the bar in the back of the hall, was that at the exact moment Sivan appeared on stage—foppish hair, skin-tight black jeans, billowy varsity jacket—his presence would inspire the maniacal, deafening shrieks of girls. Many, many, so many girls.

The caterwauling went on for some minutes, during which time I managed to make my way to the balcony VIP section. What my ears had already guessed my eyes confirmed: a sea of women, most of them packed toward the front of the stage to be as close to the slender Sivan as they could get. "Before I came out, when I was making videos on YouTube, I had a mostly female audience," Sivan told me over the phone this morning, after a round of performances on the Today show, "and I thought that I could potentially lose that. But coming out was critical to my well-being, and I was just floored by the unwavering support from everyone—girls, guys, and just people in general. It's been so inspiring."

For the rest of the concert, the ladies' fervor never faltered. They yelled at him. When he took off his jacket—"I'm gonna strip for you guys," Sivan teased—they yelled for him. They threw clothing at him (one fan's overly large Adidas track jacket he actually donned for the rest of the show). And when he came to the front of the stage to reach out, savior like, over the security guards keeping his adoring legions at bay, a mass of limbs lunged toward his lanky arm like an amoeba toward its next meal. "This is one of my favorite parts of the show," Sivan said as he opened a bottle of water. "Who wants to get wet?" Again, screams, charging, chants of "me, me, me!" from girls desperate for a splash.

Mind you, this is a kid who at one point in the show threw open his arms and exclaimed, "I'm gay as hell!" and frequently lost himself to his own hippy, swishy dancing during the 75-minute set. Yet it did nothing to detract from the desire oozing from the crowd. In his review of Sivan's show last year at New York's Le Poisson Rouge, VanityFair.com columnist Richard Lawson boiled it down to this: "Sivan is their swoon-worthy gay bestie, the cool boy they sit next to in art class, the dreamer down the street." In other words, he's a less threatening version of Justin Bieber, or a "more wholesome pop star," as one mother told me when I asked her teenaged daughter, What is it about Troye? The 15-year-old was more specific: "I like him because he writes his own stuff and he doesn't use Autotune," she said distractedly. "He says things in his songs in the same way I actually feel them." So, as he lyrically and sonically navigates both the physical and emotional ebb and flow of love and loss that come with impending adulthood, Sivan is a conduit for his feeling fans. And that function, by no coincidence, can awake lust in maturing devotees. 

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The fact that Sivan is so openly gay has its own significance. Let's remember, hetero passion for homo action isn't without precedent in the as-of-late pop world. One of the most prolific offshoots of the One Direction explosion was the propagation of female-written fan fiction that had the members of 1D (mostly Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson) engaged in "slash" relationships, meaning "m/m" or male on male. There have been Internet tomes dedicated to what this movement says about female sexuality and desire, but, beyond what Broadly's Miranda Popkey dubbed a "soft spot for dick" and the appeal of the forbidden is the fact that, as Slate's Laura Miller expressed to Popkey, male characters in slash are "really emotional and really talky about their emotion.... If you have two men, then you're guaranteed that at least one of them is going to be honest about his feelings." And that, Popkey conjectures, "is the main draw…the feelings revealed in slash can read as more convincing: Two men, in a relationship of equals, negotiating levels of comfort, both physical and emotional."

And Sivan, though only one side of the equation, is nothing if not honest about his feelings. ("I wanna come home to you/But home is just a room full of my safest sounds/'Cause you know that I can't trust myself with my 3 A.M. shadow/ I'd rather fuel a fantasy than deal with this alone," he pleads on "Talk Me Down.") Of course, he isn't the first brooding, forthcoming gay celebrity to whom women have flocked. There was, of course, Elton John and his infectious showmanship. Also, fluid-seeming artists David Bowie and Prince, with their androgynous sex appeal, both reflected a changing of tides. (See also: the open-ended sexuality of Dev Hynes.) These days, Sam Smith has an armful of Grammys and his own impressive female fan base. Though I'd argue there's less of a craving for Smith than for a straight man who could croon you his songs.

Whatever is at the crux of Sivan's intoxicating essence, more important is the fact that it's happening at all, right now, in this moment in pop music. 

I'm 32 years old, and while I was watching Sivan perform, I couldn't help but feel floored that a kid like this—queer, scrawny, at times awkward—could achieve a dream that I, and many other gay people, didn't think they ever could or would be able to pursue. Don't get me wrong: I'm entirely happy in my current life as an editor and a writer here at ELLE, and I'm thankful that I get to flex a creative muscle daily by writing pieces like this. But growing up, I could sing. I knew I had a voice that I thought was capable of…something.

But because I was a closeted (but planning on coming out) gay boy with a decent singing voice from Arkansas, I never really got further than regional theater. I was untrained, and feared my voice lacked the necessary stamina for the professional stage, so I wondered if there was any potential in the recording industry—but, again, was plagued with premature doubts. How, at that time and for much of the time leading up to the present, was a young gay person to infiltrate that world? To become a household name when they couldn't be—and wouldn't be—seen as viably marketable, or, more importantly, viably sexy to the all-important female fan base that buoy today's pop superstars?

So that dream never even left the gate, like it doesn't with so many young, aspiring people, straight or gay. Only regarding the latter, our confidence was, and still can be, doubly screwed by a mire of prejudice. There have been those who pursued it anyway, sure, but I'd never say that we're where we need to be when it comes to LGBTQ artists getting their due. If that were true I wouldn't even need to be writing this. "I think we're definitely moving fast to where we need to be," Sivan says, "but the lack of diversity in the mainstream is still staggering. The fact that, like, Anthony and the Johnsons is one of the only trans acts that I can think of in music makes me upset. There's so much room to grow, and I'm just trying to do my part as we go in that direction."

So Sivan—who counts Taylor Swift among his ardent supporters—is on the right track, transcending much of the bullshit, at least artistically, that's held members of our community down. And from what I can tell, he isn't sacrificing anything to do it. He isn't faking it. He isn't pandering. Throughout the show he interacted with the girls in the audience as much as he did the guys. He even unabashedly called for a round of applause for the hot, shirtless dude in the middle of the room. "Honestly, I'm just always looking for that smiling face in the audience to respond to," Sivan says. "Nothing gives me more joy than when I'm in a live show, singing a love song, and I can go grab a boy's hand. Or a girl's hand! It's about who's giving the emotion back to me."  

At one point, toward the end of the show, I noticed Sivan's dad, a very dad-like bald guy who, in between bopping to Sivan's beats, was FaceTimeing with his wife so that she could marvel at her son, too. There we were—family, girls, gays, the old, the young, the lot of us, mixed bag that we were—celebrating ourselves just by celebrating him.

It was a sight to behold, and I was proud. Proud of Sivan, proud of all those girls, and proud of music for letting him be. I just wish my teenaged self could have seen it.