The Butterflies Don’t Check First

Coming out in 2018 is still, depending entirely on where and who you are, one of the harder things a person can do. The cultural permission may have expanded in parts of the world, but the private experience of getting there—sitting with the self-doubt, the silence, the reckoning with what you actually want—doesn’t automatically get easier because the discourse says it should.

Dutch singer Naaz wrote Loving Love about exactly that gap. The production is relaxed, the delivery confident, and the message direct: love doesn’t reduce to one approved configuration. I find it genuinely awful when people can’t be with the person who gives them butterflies, just because that person has the same gender as them, she said, adding that she’d experienced firsthand what it costs not to be accepted for who you are or want to be—the self-doubt that follows, she wouldn’t wish on anyone. Love can’t have rules, can’t have limits. It has to be real. Everything else is completely irrelevant.

It sounds like a statement but feels more personal than that. Which makes it worth more than most statements.