In his article, “On Queering in Mainstream Pop”, Stan Hawkins argues that the queer identity of male pop musicians such as Robbie Williams or Justin Timberlake “comes over as a white, heterosexual lad misbehaving and having a good laugh, which must be reassuring for a wider public. Yet on another level his image is fluid, queer, and homoerotic in culturally obvious ways” (Hawkins). Is it really so safe to assume that the homoeroticism present in the performance and music of these musicians is as “obvious” as Hawkins contends? I would argue that the heterosexual pop music consumer is not so much being “reassured” of Williams’ and Timberlake’s heterosexuality, as they are totally oblivious to any signs that may suggest otherwise. This is not so much to propose that pop audiences are ignorant or misinformed as it is to defend the process of a semiotic understanding of culture. After all, a signifier is a learned concept that requires repeated exposure and conditioning for it to be read as a signifier at all. In other words, how can a ‘straight’ listener decipher the queer codes of a musician if they cannot read the signs and codes of queerness itself??

Gay, lesbian, and transgenderedness has only recently (within the past 5 years) been subject to exposure in mainstream media (ie. Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Transamerica, etc.), and gay musicians have only been ‘coming out’ regarding their sexual orientation since the mid 1980s (at the earliest). Combine this with the fact that pop musicians have, since the 1950s, been naturalized and accepted as strange, eccentric, and different, and it can be seen that ‘queering’ in pop music is not necessarily immediately equated by the listener with signs of homosexuality. Things such as the heavy makeup, costumes, sparkles, camp, and androgyny of groups such as Kiss or Queen can just as easily be read as signifiers of rock & roll as they can of queerness.

As Simon Frith has noted, pop music listeners have a tendency to identify personally with pop musicians and fans tend to associate the identity of the star with their own identity (Frith, “Towards an Aesthetics of Popular Music”, 1987). If this is true, then any listener is going to manipulate the signs projected by the pop musician according to their own orientation and experience, regardless of the orientation or intention of the musician. Love is blind? No! More like, perception is in the eye of the beholder.