German metal group Accept received some minor controversy in America for perceived gay themes on their 1983 album Balls To The Wall: The cover art depicted the lower half of a man holding a pair of wooden balls while wearing a leather jacket and black underwear, some editions included a fold-out poster of the band members posing nude together, and the songs "London Leatherboys" and "Love Child" seem to be about gay men. The band have maintained that only "Love Child" was intentional (despite the title, "London Leatherboys" was meant to be about bikers, not leather men).
The cover◊ of Orleans' album Waking and Dreaming features the group's members shirtless, with their arms around each other.
Depeche Mode: Martin's predilection for leather bondage gear onstage (plus all the boys' make-up preferences) perpetuated the association with gay subculture throughout the '80s, in the public's imagination. Not to mention this album cover◊
"Jolene" by Dolly Parton. It's clearly meant to be the singer begging Jolene not to steal her man, but she sure does go on about how beautiful Jolene is...
Your beauty is beyond compare With flaming locks of auburn hair With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green Your smile is like a breath of spring Your voice is soft like summer rain And I cannot compete with you, Jolene
Subversion of that for "Galway Girl", originally written and sung by Sharon Shannon, then quite a few other male singers. So this was Les Yay then straight.
When it initially came out there was a lot of confusion/fan arguments about whether the Terry referred to in the Bruce Springsteen song "Backstreets" was a boy or a girl.
Joan Jett singing a cover of Crimson and Clover... "Well I don't hardly know her...but I think I could love her."
Ian Gillan Deep Purple wrote the breathtakingly homoerotic song "Smooth Dancer" featuring such lyrics as "I want to be inside of you" and "I loved you once and I wanna love again", for bandmate Ritchie Blackmoore.
"Don't go" by Fefe Dobson is loaded with this within its chorus.
Don't go! / Boys and boys should be together. / Don't go! / Girls and girls could rule the world!
John Lennon wrote the song "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away", supposedly about the fact that Brian Epstein was homosexual (at the time, homosexuality was a crime in the UK).
The last verse of "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da," where Paul accidentally swaps Desmond and Molly, giving the implication that Molly has taken over the shop for Desmond to start a music career in drag.
"Well, you should see Polythene Pam. / She's so good-looking, but she looks like a man. / Well, you should see her in drag dressed in her polythene bag..."
"Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman / But she was another man / All the girls around her say she's got it coming / But she gets it while she can..."
And George refers to his guitar (and everything else in the world) as "diverted...perverted...inverted."
On a similar note, "Oh! Darling," in which the singer desperately begs his darling not to leave him, declares that he'll never make it alone, and laments not being needed anymore.
"Goodbye": Paul Mccartney sings "far away my lover sings a lonely song and calls me to his side". Emphasis on the "his", naturally.
Considering Freddie never came out during his lifetime (and for good reason, given his birth country of Zanzibar has shut down tributes to him for that very reason) and the rest were allegedly straight, Queen was just dripping with Ho Yay.
"Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy," "I Want to Break Free," "My Fairy King" - 'Nuff said.
"Bicycle Race" - The lyrics look standard enough on paper, but, well, listen for yourself.
Could "Get Down Make Love" paint a more vivid picture? "I suck your mind/You blow my head"?
"Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to...a Real Motherfucker of a Gentleman)" - Actually addressed to their former manager, but written to sound like a breakup song.
"We have a new routine. Been working on it for three weeks or more. I pretend I'm a queer and the sax player pretends he's a queer, too, and later on in the show, (this'll kill ya) we kiss each other so that it looks to the audience like we kiss each other on the mouth. (heh). when we go... into a fast number, God, the people love it! Wait... till... we... get to Las Vegas!"
Punky's Whips is Ho Yay incarnate. The story goes that drummer Terry Bozzio was lusting over a picture of Punky Meadows, the androgynous guitarist of the glam group Angel. Once he discovered that Punky was male, it "shook his manhood". Zappa found this hilarious and proceeded to craft a song about it, with Bozzio as the singer. The result? Ten minutes of wildly homoerotic yelping over how much he wants to bone Punky, with good helpings of If It's You, It's Okay and Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?. The fact that Terry is performing the song wearing only a pair of shorts doesn't make those claims of heterosexuality particularly convincing.
My Chemical Romance (stage antics aside) have some pretty Ho Yay-worthy lyrics, with song titles like "You Know What They Do To Guys Like Us In Prison". Said song has the lines,"Just two men like God had made us", "I kiss your lips again", and "my cellmates are killers / They make me do push-ups in drag".
"House of Wolves" sounds like their usual Awesome Music, until you get to the chorus: "Tell me I'm a bad man / Kick me like a stray."
If not only for the fact that the song makes his voice unrecognizable, there seems to be some Ho Yay in the song "Sexy Back" between Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. In particular, the chorus is a call-and-response between Timbaland and Timberlake, where Timbaland's lines are probably meant to be about a female third party, but could also be interpreted as being about Timberlake (e.g. "let me see what you're twerkin' with / look at those hips")
And I lay by the ocean making love to her with visions clear.
The soundtrack to the 1987 teen flick Summer School features a song performed by then-newcomer Elisa Fiorillo called "Jackie", in which the singer romantically fantasizes about someone of the same name. On top of Jackie's gender never being explicitly identified throughout the track, the second verse opens with the lyric, "I woke up smelling your perfume," a curious line to be addressing to a heterosexual guy in most situations, especially backthen, but which is more conventional if Jackie is supposed to be female. In fact, these lyrics are such a prominent case of Les Yay that subsequent covers by Blue Zone, Joanne, and Redzone changed them to, "I woke up thinking it was you."
The jarring slant rhyme in Mr. Brightside makes one suspect he indeed "wants it all":
Turning lovesick lullabies,
Choking on your alibis,
But it's just the price I pay,
Destiny is calling me,
Open up my eager eyes,
'Cause I'm Mr. Brightside.
And there's definitely something going on in "Somebody Told Me (That You Had a Boyfriend Who Looked Like a Girlfriend That I Had in February of Last Year)."
There is a popular possible interpretation that the "boyfriend" is in fact the girlfriend who either is bi or came out as lesbian after breaking up with the singer.
I am wrapped around your finger from the lips to the tongue Even if this is something that cannot be allowed the flames jump higher still
Or two (three?!) guys - there are plenty of male versions. Even if the song is hardly subtext, it can cause Ho Yay between real-people singers who do covers, and there are certainly enough.
There are also a lot of songslikethis, with almost three-wayHo Yay. Complete with Len in drag.
Pete Townsend's album Empty Glass has a couple of things that make you go "Hmmmm..."; the first song, "Rough Boys", certainly seems to be about trade, with lyrics like "Rough boys/Don't walk away/I wanna buy you leather/Make noise/Try and talk me away/We can't be seen together", while another song, "And I Moved", is all about a large mysterious man coming into the singer's room, and with lyrics like "And his hands felt like ice, exciting" and "And he laid me back just like an empty dress", there isn't much doubt as to what's going on.
"I See You" really smacks of a pre-coming out crush.
Dropkick Murphys' "Wicked Sensitive Crew":
(Ken) ...but do thugs have posters on their bedroom wall of that dude from The Darkness in that creepy meat suit (Record Needle Scratch) zip it so low you can see... ah... (crickets)
Very unexpectedly from quirky British band Half Man Half Biscuit - "So me and the ombudsman are gonna do what we can, when the evening sun goes down".
Kris Allen's The Truth. It's a fairly typical breakup song, written by Pat Monahan from Train. The album version has just Kris singing, but someone came up with the bright idea to have Monahan sing part of the song for the single version, making it sound like they're breaking up with each other.
Te Amo by Rihanna is described in one review as "Girl meets girl. Girl speaks different language to girl. Girl loves girl. Girl doesn’t love girl. Girl sad. Girl sad."
Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've by Buzzcocks is a song about, well, falling in love with someone you shouldn't've. Lead singer Pete Shelley, an out bisexual, later confirmed the song was written about a man he used to live with.
The band's songs in general are full of this trope. Shelley's lack of pronoun usage in his lyrics means their often romance-oriented songs can be applied to any and all sexualities.
Morrissey and Johnny Marr. Morrissey has said the only post-Smiths song that was specifically written for Marr is 'Angel, Angel, Down We Go Together.' "I love you more than life"...repeat to end.
Franz Ferdinand: "Michael" from Franz Ferdinand (2004) is a song about a man being attracted to another man while out clubbing. More ambiguously, "This Boy", "Do You Want To" and "The Dark of the Matinee" have Ho Yay elements as well.
Faith No More lead singer Mike Patton has made many a lewd comment during songs, such as "...so cum in my ass you dirty cocksucker" at 2:49 here (the female audience members seem particularly pleased). Also, when Patton invited band member Roddy Bottum (who came out as gay in 1993) to write a song, the result was "Be Aggressive", a song pretty blatantly about oral sex between two men. Bottum expected Patton to be embarrassed by this fact, but Patton thought it was hilarious and the song was the second-most played during live performances.
E-Rotic's "Queen of Light" is a confession of love to the titular Queen. It's also sung by a girl. Conclusions may be drawn.
The Swedish humoristic Christmas song Vår julskinka har rymt ("Our Christmas ham has escaped"), in which two men named Werner and Werner, who apparenly at least live together, discover that their Christmas ham has escaped from the oven and they don't know what to do, because the relatives will arrive within the hour.
"Can't Stand Me Now" by The Libertines was written after Pete was released from jail, where he was for breaking into Carl's apartment when he was forbidden from playing with the band untill he got cleaned up. They sing to each other on the song, wich starts with Carl saying "An ending fitting for the start / You twist and tore our love apart" and has a chorus in which both sing "I know you lie/All you do is make me cry/I'm still in love with you" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZrWuw3ZAXI To quote Pete Doherty himself: "On the demo of 'Can't stand me now' it's just me singing it to myself but basically I got turned on I think by the idea of putting the words in his mouth, making them so personal, so he's singing them back to me."
"You're my Waterloo" written by Doherty about Barat.
A lot of Belle and Sebastian songs have this. There's at least one flavour of Yay in "Seeing Other People"; either it's two boys kissing just for practice, or it's a girl and a guy — the latter of which is suggesting that the girl should perhaps turn her attention to girls. "Judy and the Dream of Horses" has a decidedly bisexual protagonist. "Jonathan David," in addition to the homoerotic Biblical reference, can be read to be a guy pining after another guy, who's pining after a girl — if read in a certain way.
Paul Simon: Just what were the singer and Julio doing down by the schoolyard that was so scandalous, anyway? (Paul Simon has apparently said in an interview that he doesn't actually know, but "assume[s] it was something sexual", whatever exactly that means.)
Maaya Sakamoto has several love songs to women, the official explanation being that she's singing from a male perspective. This, however, doesn't stop songs like "A Happy Ending" (perhaps the most blatant example) from sounding kinda gay.
Leonard Cohen's much-covered "Hallelujah" has the singer (male) addressing a person (gender not specified) with whom he has had a sexual relationship. However, the "you saw her bathing on the roof / her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you" bit suggests that the person in question has also been in a relationship with, or at least been attracted to, a woman. So it's either a man singing to a bisexual woman or a man singing to another man (also bisexual).
The person bathing on the roof is probably intended to be Bathsheba, and the person watching David (as mentioned in the first verse "that David played and it pleased the Lord"). In the verse beginning "you saw her bathing on the roof", it's an omniscient narrator singing.
In Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me", the person the singer wants to kiss her apparently has a flowered hat. So it's either a woman or a real man.
Their cover version of The La's "There She Goes" doesn't change the female pronouns, making some listeners (especially those who aren't aware it's a cover) perceive it as a love song to another woman. Word of God is they just didn't want to alter the lyrics.
Sandra’s "Crazy Juliet", from her third album Into a Secret Land. The song is about a woman who feels chastised by marriage, and Sandra wants some midnight action with her to restore some excitement to her life. Considering Sandra’s enormous gay fanbase, the lyrics probably resonated with a lot of closeted homosexual men married to women in the 1980s.
The final song on Spagna’s Dedicated to the Moon, "Girl, It’s Not the End of the World", is ostensibly just the singer comforting a woman who just suffered from a breakup, but due to the whispered "come on, come on, come on, come on, girl" interludes, it simultaneously comes across as a sexual advance.
Country singer Sara Evans has a song called "You've Never Seen My Face" that was included on a The Early Years, a compilation of tracks she recorded before signing with RCA Nashville. In it, the narrator confronts her father for disapproving of her relationship with her boyfriend. Her argument? He's never held his hand, been called his baby, kissed his lips, or felt his warm embrace. You can guess the implications, at least for the hypothetical experiences to persuade him.
One way to interpret at least the lyrics of Mumford and Sons' "White Blank Pages" would be a gay man (since the vocals are male) singing about his heartbreak over his lover staying in the closet and with a woman.
Kamelot's "Descent of the Archangel"; one man singing to another (well, a male character singing to another, but both played by the same vocalist).
Name a pleasure
One...a few
Any form
Of lust in you
Will tremble at my touch
Roy Khan's previous band, Conception, had a song Angel (Come Walk With Me), that was very similar in theme and had just as much Ho Yay.
There's a she-wolf in the closet / open up and let it free [howl]
Je te donne, a duet between Jean-Jacques Goldman and Michael Jones, is about the chemistry between a songwriter and a musician. It says a lot that the song's chorus is often used for declarations of love, or even for marriage vows.
The B-52s do this constantly, having had 4 gay members (one of whom died). With the exception of the guy who died, the rest of the band came out in 1992. That didn't stop them slipping in veiled references:
Rock Lobster features the line "Boys in bikinis, girls with surfboards"
52 Girls has the girls singing the virtues of a lot of other girls. Unclear whether or not it's unintentional..
Dirty Back Road really is about butt sex.
Strobe Light features the line "I want to kiss your pineapple".
Cake is a veiled reference to lesbian sex.
Song For A Future Generation humorously has most of the band pretending to be straight with Ricky Wilson's spoken line "i like computers and hot tamales" being spoken in the most camp voice imaginable.
Wig features pretty camp dialogue at the start.
Theme For A Nude Beach features the line "I am a man" sung by a woman.
Hot Corner features the line "He's a mess but he's really pretty" sung by Fred, who had come out by this point.
Fred's solo career is loaded with this but the Just Fred era "What I Want" is explicitly about gay sex, which is why it wasn't included on the album.
Rob Thomas's "Lonely No More" contains the lyric "I wanna feel you move inside of me"
I'll hang onto what she said, it sounds perfect in my head in their song "Everything"
"Everytime" had "I'll hang onto what she said, it sounds perfect in my head"
The Architecture in Helsinki song "Contact High" is sung by a boy, to a boy. ("Am I guilty? Boy, you decide...")
The Spin Doctors' cover of KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way (I Like It)" features guest singer Biz Markie singing the song as a duet with lead singer Chris Barron (KC's version was sung solo with backup). Now, it's possible that they're both singing to the same girl, but the back-and-forth gets a bit Ho Yayish, and can be seen as them singing to each other.
Markie: When I get to be in your arms... Barron: When we're all...all alone? Markie: When you whisper sweet in my ear... Barron: When you turn, OH YOU TURN ME ON!
"Tall Boy" by Har Mar Superstar is partially just an Ode to Intoxication ("tall boy" is slang for a large can of beer), but is full of blatant, deliberate innuendo that can also be read as sexual desire for a literal tall boy: Part of the refrain is "Where's my tall boy? / To satisfy my needs / feel like drinkin' / So come on get inside of me". The song also has him referring to himself as "the queen of the party". In truth, Sean Tillmann wrote the song with the intention of giving it to Britney Spears - when it was rejected, he decided it fit his Har Mar Superstar "persona" and just recorded it himself without changing any content.
Even The Cars get into this with the 1977 demo version (not the album version, however) of "Ta Ta Wayo Wayo." The song's about the features of a beautiful city, and includes the line "the girls are so pretty"; in the last verse, this is switched to "the boys are so pretty."
When I get to Surf City I'll be shootin' the curl And checkin' out the parties for a surfer girl
Know Bob and Shawn - No BS sing the line "Do you still get a thrill when you see me coming up the hill?" which refers the act of performing fellatio when doing their cover of K.T. Oslin's "Do Ya".
You think you're undetected Your moves would go unnoticed Well, why does that lead me to you? What redeeming value Do you think you'll find next? And will you land on your feet just like I do?
Oh so you want him And you dog him That's no problem He's just another lover You can do him You can use him 'Til you lose him
Marilyn Manson did a cover of "You're So Vain", but unlike most, did not bother to change the gender of the subject.
Selena Gomez: "Who Says" is basically about a girl telling another how pretty she is.
Little Big Town's song "Girl Crush" generated controversy in country music circles over the perceived ho yay in its lyrics. Then again, you hear lines like "I wanna taste her lips/ yeah because they taste like you" from a female vocalist, it's not exactly surprising that more conservative listeners would take issue with it.
The Filk Song "I Ship It" is a shipper's anthem. The third verse describes this kind of shipping.
They keep on saying they're not gay, but yeah I really doubt that, This can't just be a bromance, who would write a show about that? I think the subtext in the second season's pretty clear, Don't tell me I need to calm down— I don't care, I ship it!
The aforementioned Sam Tsui did a cover of "Love Me Like You Do" by Ellie Goulding with fellow singer Alex Goot. While the original was a solo, this one is clearly supposed to be a passionate romantic duet and it's being sung by two men.
Similarly, Sam and his previously mentioned friend Kurt Schneider also did a duet cover of "Clarity" together. Once again, their version turns the song into a romantic duet whilst the original was a solo, and it's being sung by two men.
Iggy Pop's Candy is about Iggy's character singing about how he misses a former love named Candy, who joins in later on to sing how she also misses him and hasn't found a lover like him since. Or does she? The female singer goes unnamed and never directly addresses Iggy's character, mentions how "Down on the street, those men are all the same, I need a love" and eventually joins the chorus praising Candy. Is she Candy singing about how all men other than Iggy are only interested in her for the sex, or is she someone who can't fall in love in men after meeting Candy? You decide!
"I never loved a man (the way that I love you)" by Aretha Franklin: The songwriter's likely intention: the singer loves her new male lover more than her previous men. Some listeners' preferred interpretation: the singer loves her new female lover more than her previous men.
Ludacris' "Area Codes" has the line "I bang cock in Bangkok." Presumably, he's talking about his own cock banging women, but you would be excused for reading it as him having sex with men in Thailand note Coincidentally, in addition to its reputation for sex tourism Thailand is known as a global destination for sex change operations due to the affordability of surgery, the number of surgeons experienced in the operations, and the relative ease with which you can get on the operating table for one compared to many countries, so the cock he bangs could easily still be heterosexual.
Lee Ann Womack's "I'll Think of a Reason Later" has Les Yay in spades. The narrator is envious of some Denver woman for marrying a guy she knows, causing her to lash out in ways that seem to suggest more than a simple obsession, like scribbling over her newspaper photograph with a marker. Just as the title suggests, it seems as though the narrator is dancing around a particularly elusive cause for her lapse in politeness. To cap it all off, the insults during the spoken-word outro are delivered not in a tone of malice but of playfulness, complete with nervous giggling.
U2 has "Until The End of The World". Bono has said it was inspired by the homoerotic elements he perceived in the story of Judas and Jesus.
Led Zeppelin: there's a call-and-response sequence in "You Shook Me" where Robert Plant sings a melodic line, and Jimmy Page imitates him on guitar. On the live BBC version Plant goes into some blatantly orgasmic moaning and Page follows right along.
Michael Bublé's infamous cover of "Santa Baby" is a prime example of this. Considering the odd changes to the original lyrics, like changing the request for a duplex to Canadian hockey tickets or Buble calling Santa various forms of "buddy" and even "papi..."note "Papi" means "daddy" in Spanish. It sounds less like a new reinvention of a holiday classic and more like a man desperately trying (and failing) to assert how straight he is. It probably would have been significantly lessHo Yay if he just sang the song without any changes!
Flight of the Conchords: "Bret, You've Got It Going On," which contains the line, "Why can't a heterosexual guy tell a heterosexual guy that he thinks his booty is fly?"
"Raw Ramp" by T. Rex, where a misogynistic tirade is followed by an admonition to his fellow men, ending in "embrace your brother, dance in the mud like a Palomino stud, come on; hold my hand."
"Telegram Sam," an ode to the male members of his entourage, in almost every line. Especially coupled with "Main Man."
"I Need A Doctor" is basically a beautiful five-minute tribute to Eminem and Dre's deep bond. Highlights include Eminem crying in the booth over how much he loves him.
In "My Dad's Gone Crazy", Eminem and Dre come out:
Eminem: I'm out the closet, I've been lyin' my ass off All this time, me and Dre been fuckin' with hats off Dre: Suck it, Marshall!
Eminem loves to represent himself and Dre as the iconic slash pairings from fandom history. In the video for "Without Me", and in the lyrics of numerous songs from The Eminem Show onwards, they're represented as Batman and Robin (famously, so gay that they caused a moral panic). In the video for "We Made You", they dress as Kirk and Spock (the pairing that created the term 'slash'). In the 2022 Super Bowl promo, Eminem is shown crafting rhymes in midair in a Sherlock-esque mind-palace before ditching it at a text from Dre (which he bugs out about), implying Johnlock.
Eminem's role in 50 Cent: Bulletproof is a corrupt detective who serves as an informant. There is a scene where his character visits Fif, and tries to greet him by kissing him, which makes Fif reel back in disgust. In the following scene, Em watches sadly, drinking beer, as Fif parties with hos.
Eminem's verse in "EPMD2" contains the line, "I hit 50 via text / Told him that I love him 'cause I don't even know when I'ma see him next". 50 later explained that this was a reference to a text Em had sent him which read, "when you gon fly me in private, so I can land on that dick?" (Waxing Lyrical — a lyric from 50's song "Pop Smoke"). Fif thought it was hilarious, replying, "you said a line a bitch was supposed to say, and made it sound cool".
Overlapping with Foe Romance Subtext — in "Bump Heads", 50 sings to his Arch-Enemy Ja Rule, "I know you want me, baby".
"Stan" is about a deranged Loony Fan of Eminem who wants to 'be together' with him. The song leaves it deliberately ambiguous as to whether this is because Stan is bisexual or just the result of his obsessive overinvestment, but Stan as a character is at least somewhat sympathetic. It's not an uncommon reading of the song to think that Stan and Marshall should have got together, and Eminem has occasionally supported that reading.
In "Bad Guy", Eminem is murdered by Stan's brother Matthew, who seems to be especially disgusted by the homophobia in his song "Criminal", which seems to imply Matthew knew Stan wasn't straight. After drugging Em, he ties him up and says, "who's the faggot now?", before eventually murdering him in the name of his brother "and Frank Ocean".
"My Darling" combines this with Screw Yourself for a truly bizarre Solo Duet in which Slim Shady sings to Marshall Mathers that he's his darling, they're meant to be together, and that Slim wants Marshall's soul, mind, heart and body. The song ends with Marshall embracing Slim as the chainsaw sounds in the background reach a fever pitch.
Slim Shady EP also contains some other Screw Yourself elements between Slim and Eminem, with Slim claiming he molested Eminem, and him (in his Evil Sounds Deep true form) screaming at Eminem that "you're nothing without me!"
Eminem's cameo in The Interview is based on his reputation for homoeroticism when he unexpectedly comes out on a chat show, surprised everyone else hasn't figured out yet that he's gay ("I left a breadcrumb trail of gayness"). When questioned on a lyric from his song "Medicine Ball" ("I said, nice rectum, I just got a vasectomy, Hector, so I can't get you pregnant when I bisexually wreck ya"), Eminem looks misty-eyed and claims that Hector 'was a real guy'.
In Eminem's Diss Track against Fred Durst, he accuses Fred of copying his style, then says he's 'peggin' him with the bottle of dye that he bleached his head with'.
Russian pop duo Vintazh's song "Yeva" is said to be about love for an idol (specifically for Yeva Polna, the titular "Yeva"), but many fans believe that it's actually about a lesbian relationship and that they only said otherwise to avoid censorship. Regardless of whether it was intended to be so or not, the song is full of Les Yay.
Нервные мои пaльцы глaдишь, *You're stroking my nervous fingers,
Нежные мои губы любишь *You're loving my tender lips
Fittingly enough, the lines from "Yeva" shown above are taken directly from the song "Begi Ot Menya" ("Run From Me") by Gosti iz Budushego, another pop duo of which Yeva Polna herself was the singer for. "Begi Ot Menya" is itself full of Les Yay, as it's clear through the use of the female grammatical gender that the subject of the song is another woman.
Given the fact that it's a duet between Lera Kozlova and Anya Rudneva, combined with there not being any gendered words used to refer to the subject of the song, Ranetki's "Nyet Mira Bez Tebya" ("No World Without You") is unintentionally tinged with Les Yay.
Music Videos
The music video for Guns N' Roses' November Rain becomes screamingly hilarious (and makes a lot of sense) if you pretend it's about Axl and Izzy's bitter breakup, while Slash vents his confusion and fear over Mommy and Daddy breaking up in the form of a guitar solo.
The video for 'Crazy' by Aerosmith. You could choke on the Les Yay between Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler. Also, Girls of Summer has some moments... Rumor has it there was even going to be a kiss in "Crazy," but Steven Tyler nixed it.
"Over And Over" makes more sense if you view it as a love story between Nelly and Tim McGraw. Given that it was a mainstream hip hop/country song released in 2004, it was probably unintentional that the singers looked like they were serenading each other. However, not showing their actual love interests except in photographs to go with the 'lost love' theme of the song, in addition to splitting the screen between Nelly and McGraw while they went about their lives looking wistful and sad, made it seem like they were pining for each other, not the girls.
The members of Bon Jovi seem a little touchy feely in some of their videos... For example in You Give Love A Bad Name and Livin' On A Prayer they often have their arms around each other, lean really close to each other to sing into the same mic, smile at each other a lot and look at each other for a long time, and play each other's guitars.
Britney Spears and Madonna in Me Against the Music. The plot of the video is essentially Britney pursuing Madonna around a nightclub and a maze while they both steadily lose clothing and sing suggestively to each other. At the end, Britney actually has Madonna pinned up against a wall and is about to kiss her when Madonna (inexplicably) disappears, leaving Britney looking disappointed.
The All-American Rejects' music video for Give You Hell plays out like a break-up between Tyson Ritter and... Tyson Ritter.
"Telephone", with Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, is dripping Les Yay of epic proportions between Beyonce and Gaga. In the prison sequence, Gaga has an interrupted heavy makeout with two butch lesbians.
In this video of Sean Lennon and M's duet "L'eclipse", they just seem to be quite friendly with each other... until the ending. You must watch all the way to the ending.
Check out Vanilla Ninja's video of "Tough Enough". Two of the girls are frequently inches away from making out, especially near the end.
The video of O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei. Arms-around-neck action everywhere.
A lot of their music videos have the two girls singing very close to each other (one facing ahead, the other in profile). This video for "Money Money Money" they actually look come close to kissing at 1:10.
In any performance of "Mamma Mia", a part of their choreography is to turn to face each other at the "My, my, I should not have let you go" part of the lyrics.
I've Sound's PV for "See You" features a brief scene of two members of the (all-female) group kissing, although it's in such tight close-up that it's hard to tell which ones.
For a song called "Sexy Bitch", Akon and David Guetta seem to barely interact with the women. Instead, they hold hands, jump into the pool together, and are generally extremely close throughout the video.
In "Raise Your Glass", P!nk is seen in bed with a young nun.
Never mind that, the explicit version of "Sober" has her engaging in some very heavy petting with some kind of clone of herself. It's also the only version available through certain outlets.
The video for Amanda Palmer's "What's the Use in Won'drin?" seems to be setting up a story of a battered wife who's secretly in love with a female friend until the last thirty seconds or so, when it makes a distinct turn for the darker.
Palmer does it again in her music video for "Do It With a Rockstar," which features her in bed with a female fan (warning: video is NSFW).
Rammstein are mentioned earlier up the page, but their music videos are sometimes filled to the brim with Ho Yay. Mann Gegen Mann is the obvious example, but Haifisch also applies. While every other band member is dreaming about killing Till, Paul is imagining Till spanking him. Make of that what you will.
Crowded House's video for "Something So Strong" is quite suggestive of this. The fact that they look like they're serenading each other and the almost-kisses are prime factors. Just take a gander.
Ditto the video for "Now We're Getting Somewhere" where they're rolling around in the snow with each other. As you do.
Portishead's "Glory Box" has a music video with doubleHo Yay. There's loads of sexual and romantic tension between the guys, but they're all played by women.
The video for "MASQUERADE" by Versailles contains two very, very brief◊ scenes◊ of Kamijo and Hizaki slow-dancing with each other. Later, there's another slow-motion shot of Hizaki—which then fades into a shot of Kamijo singing the first lines of the song's chorus: "I can't leave you alone / When I close my eyes..." Despite being barely seconds of footage, it was enough to send fandom wild.
The video for "Shame" by Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow of Take That (Band), which features the two slowdancing with women while their eyes are firmly locked on each other, caressing, gazing lovingly at each other, and undressing together.
Take That in general were pretty infamous for this sort of thing back in the nineties, to the extent of causing quite a lot of gossip. Most notably, their very first music video Do What You Like, which features all five of them wearing leather-and-chains bondage gear, wrestling in jelly and whipped cream. And then there's the uncensored version (NSFW), which features the exact same thing, but with more semi-nudity - bare arses are shown. With them all lying right next to each other, face down on the floor, of course.
The video of The Killers' "Just Another Girl" is sung byMusic/Brandon Flowers, yes, but has Dianna Agron as the face - a girl singing about another girl.
Please Don't by K. Will. The video makes it seems as though Seo In Guk has a crush on his female friend (played by Sistar's Dasom,) and it's not until the end of the video that you realize he wasn't in love with her, but rather her now husband. The video ends with him sitting in the car, ripping a picture of the three of them (from Dasom and Ahn Jaehyun's wedding) in half, before pushing it together, making it look like Jaehyun is leaning his head on Inguk's shoulder. The entire video's sort of heart breaking, but also known for being one of the only music videos in mainstream Korean music that obviously features a guy (or girl) liking another guy (or girl.)
Heart Attack by Korean girl group LOONA was received as a lesbian love story. LOONA's 10th member, Chuu, pines over LOONA's 9th member, Yves. In the video, she does everything she can think of to get Yves' attention. She takes photos of her, listens to her song, copies her dance moves, and gives her increasingly larger apples to try to win her affection. While all this happens, she sings very lovey-dovey lyrics, such as "this must be what falling in love is / dipped you inside my white heart, made it red." To put the cherry on top of this very gay cake, the description of the video explicitly states that Chuu is in love with Yves.
Marilyn Manson's video for "Dope Hat" has him snog Twiggy Ramirez.. Later on, in the music video for (s)AINT, he has a threesome with Eric Szmanda and former bassist Gidget Gein, both men.
The Veronicas are a pair of (fraternal) twin sisters who have a habit of being very touchy-feely with each other in their videos, Hook Me Up being the biggest example.
Holland's videos show him kissing men. He's one of the few Korean idols who is out of the closet. "Neverland" and "I am not Afraid Anymore" are the most blatant.
GFRIEND's music videos plot is based primarily on friendship, but is also perceived as gay coded by the audience. Especially after Navillera, where Yerin falls in love with Eunha and confesses her love to her. A subplot in the overall storyline, but it was confirmed by the members as part of the story.
Finnish pop-rock band PMMP's music video for their song "Rakkaalleni" is full of Les Yay. The song itself is about a deteriorating romantic relationship, most likely a married one due to the line "on lapset liian pieniä" ("the children are too young"). Since Finnish doesn't have grammatical genders or gendered pronouns, it could be interpreted as either a straight or lesbian relationship.
Olivia Rodrigo: By only taking the music video of "deja vu" into account, one might be forgiven for thinking the song is about the breakup of two female lovers. The way Olivia longingly stars at the new girl while hiding is most telling; the scene of her wrecking the TV screens in rage can be interpreted as the heartbreak for not being able to be with the girl anymore. Furthermore, the other girl wearing the same outfits as Olivia can be seen as missing her ex-girlfriend so much that she can only wear Olivia's clothes and go to the places where they had dates alone to reminisce. It doesn't help that the (male) ex the lyrics refer to doesn't appear anywhere in the video.
The music video for Vintazh's song "Play" has a bit of Les Yay.
◊ of Orleans' album Waking and Dreaming features the group's members shirtless, with their arms around each other.
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