Front and center at New York's Radio City Music Hall, Troye Sivan knows exactly what we want. In a sheer emerald Valentino top, the 23-year-old singer slinks and stomps and wiggles his beautiful green bean of a body across the stage. He grooves his hips the way I imagine a more coordinated person dances in front of a mirror. Sivan knows we want to scream, and dance, and watch him fling his arms out and twirl around the stage that is his and his alone. He also knows we—we horny, endorphin-filled, glitter-covered masses—want to cry.
A few songs into a set chock-full of-A grass-fed bops, Sivan brings up a young yarmulke-and-fleece-clad man named Judah. From the pocket of his fuzzy vest, Judah produces an engagement ring, which he presents to his boyfriend (also yarmulke-and-fleece-clad). There's a proposal! What looks like a yes! A kiss! The crowd erupts in hysterics, the sort of shared experience that only occurs when something pure and beautiful is observed by gleeful hordes. Sivan ushers them off the stage with a triumphant “Mazel tov!” and flings his green arms out, launching himself into his next song. This is a cause for celebration, after all.
Sivan has been making good things happen for people all year: There was Bloom, his euphoric, dance-y single about getting fucked; and then his record of the same name (“a carefree-happy-gay-love album,” in his words). Tonight he's transformed one of New York's biggest concert venues into a space of his own, where he can perform and invite queer couples onstage to get engaged if he wants to. All of this cements Sivan as the earnest, poreless, tireless pop star we need.
But his most unexpected achievement comes this November, in Boy Erased, the Joel-Edgerton-written-and-directed-and-acted-in drama about gay-conversion therapy. In the movie, Sivan appears as a jarringly divine vision: He's the gamine but weary boy Lucas Hedges's main character meets at a camp horrifically named Love in Action, where newly outed young people are expected to list and renounce their “sins” (that's hate-speak for gay stuff). Sivan's character periodically guides Hedges's through the trauma of denying one's identity. The role is important to Sivan, but it also took an emotional toll on him. During filming, “it started to feel really isolated from the rest of the world,” he tells me. “All day, every day, all we heard was this negative rhetoric about LGBTQ people.” Scripted homophobia still hurts the soul. “So it started to feel very real after a while.”
Turns out the best way to recover from months of acting out conversion therapy is returning to your real world. “I remember feeling so relieved to go back to my life, which feels almost comically gay now: I got to make this super-gay album, and shoot these music videos, and live with my boyfriend in L.A., and get coffee in West Hollywood every morning.” Because even a queer spirit guide—one who comforts and celebrates the LGBTQ community with his songs, his shows, his performances—needs a break once in a while. Plus he's hesitant to decide what he's up to next: “I get a little freaked out when I imagine my career as a game of chess. What's the next right move?”
Sivan just wants to feel inspired, challenged. “I have this theory: The only way to stay relevant is if you stay true. If you're making something you genuinely love all the time,” he says, “hopefully, surely, somebody out there is gonna love it, too.”
Marian Bull is GQ's food and travel editor.
This story originally appeared in the December 2018/January 2019 issue with the title "The Blossoming of Troye Sivan."
