Lil Nas X Is The Openly Gay Icon We Need On the Cover Of Time Magazine

August 15, 2019
HIS_EXCELLENCY

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thank you for this opportunity @time ❤️🤩
A post shared by Lil Nas X (@lilnasx) on Aug 15, 2019 at 6:04am PDT

Gen Zers seem to have the rest of us beat in preeeety much every category (besides the vaping! We still win there) and if you had any doubts, just check out twenty-year-old rap sensation Lil Nas X. His cover of Old Town Road went massively viral, and even broke the Billboard Hot 100 record by sitting at the top of the chart for nineteen weeks. Most importantly, after amassing legions of fans (he has 2.6M followers on Twitter), Lil Nas came out as gay on June 30th with these sweet Tweets:

some of y’all already know, some of y’all don’t care, some of y’all not gone fwm no more. but before this month ends i want y’all to listen closely to c7osure. 🌈🤩✨ pic.twitter.com/O9krBLllqQ
— nope (@LilNasX) June 30, 2019

deadass thought i made it obvious pic.twitter.com/HFCbVqBkLM
— nope (@LilNasX) June 30, 2019

Just imagine for a second what it would have been like to be a young gay and have the most popular singer in the world come out of the closet. And in such a casual and warm way. I'm not the only one who thinks Lil Nas X is doing God's werk. He covers the latest Time Magazine looking FYNE, and we learn a lot about what it was like for Lil Nas to grow up gay and finally decide to come out:

For a lot of reasons, Lil Nas didn’t initially plan to come out. He had been taught from a young age that homosexuality 'is never going to be O.K.,' and he feared he would lose fans: 'I know the people who listen to this the most, and they’re not accepting of homosexuality,' he says. While hip-hop stars like Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator have come out as queer, the spectre of homophobia still looms large.

Nas says that Pride Month revelry played a factor in his public coming out:

I never would have done that if I wasn’t in a way pushed by the universe. In June, I’m seeing Pride flags everywhere and seeing couples holding hands–little stuff like that.

He came out on Twitter just weeks after coming out to his family. Time Magazine calls Nas' tweets "a historic moment, in no small part because of how casually he went about it." the article adds:

He had some haters, but they were quickly and summarily dismissed–often by him personally. (He wrote on Twitter that the next person to say something offensive would be “getting kissed.”)

The entire piece from Time Magazine is definitely worth a read, so make sure to head HERE to catch it. Just, ugh. We really don't deserve Lil Nas! Gen Zers being all perfect and shizz. When I was young Dippin' Dots were the future. Now it's Lil Nas. How far we've come.