Billie Eilish made headlines this week with the release of her new single “Wish You Were Gay,” but not quite for the reasons she had hoped. While fans had hoped the song would be a queer anthem, they later found the song to be offensive, with Eilish saying that she wished a boy who didn’t love her back was gay. “I can’t tell you how much I wish I didn’t wanna stay/ I just kinda wish you were gay,” she sings.
In a new interview with PopBuzz, Eilish responded to the significant backlash to her song, saying that she felt there was a miscommunication going on about her intentions. “First off, I want to be so clear that it’s so not supposed to be an insult,” Eilish said. “I feel like it’s been a little bit misinterpreted. I tried so hard to not make it in any way offensive.”
The main criticism of Eilish’s song came from her LGBTQ fans saying that she was queerbaiting her audience with the song’s title and ultimately fetishizing gay men and using them as props in order to get a guy that she likes.
Eilish elaborated on what the meaning of the song was, saying that she was not supposed to come off as the victim. “The whole idea of the song is, it’s kind of a joke,” she said. “It’s kind of like ‘I’m an ass and you don’t love me. And you don’t love me because you don’t love me and that’s the only reason and I wish you didn’t love me because you didn’t love girls.’”
Going even further, Eilish said that the song could be switched around and the premise would still make sense. “It could be a girl interested in a girl and maybe that girl likes girls also but she doesn’t like her back,” Eilish said. “And then it’s like ‘Well damn. I wish you were straight!’ You know what I’m saying? It could be exactly the other way. I wish you were straight because you didn’t like me because you like boys.”
Check out Billie Eilish’s full response to her controversial song below:
