Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! My name is Evin and welcome to my first ever article for WVAU! A fun fact about me is I adore love songs. There’s truly nothing better than music that yanks at the depths of your soul and no better genre does that than the love song. The yearning! The pining! The lyrics that are so emotionally charged they make you want to burst into tears! I love all of it! 

As a queer person, love songs by queer artists have always held a special place in my heart. I remember going on YouTube in middle school, looking up “gay songs”, and listening to playlist after playlist of queer artists singing about love and emotions and feelings I knew I had but was too scared to express outside of my YouTube search bar. So, in honor of my love for queer love songs and how deeply they have impacted me, I am going to take you on a journey through just a few of my favorites for Valentine’s Day. 

The effervescently flamboyant Sylvester is going to start us off with a bang! He found footing within San Francisco’s queer and disco communities and in 1978 released the album “Step II” and, along with it, his disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” As someone who loves disco, this song is absolutely intoxicating and really is disco at its best. There’s nothing like a synth keytar and heavy electronic effects that transports you straight to Studio 54. As a queer man, hearing an openly gay artist sing about his passions and desires and how his lover is making him “feel mighty real” is so empowering. These hot and heavy lyrics laid down over an absolutely electric disco backing is a recipe for a song I have and will continue to listen to over and over.

If you’ve heard Macklemore’s “Same Love”, then I guarantee you’ve heard this next artist (even if you didn’t know it). Mary Lambert, a featured artist on “Same Love” who provided the vocals for the chorus, took what she had done for the Macklemore hit and created a whole song for her debut EP “Welcome to the Age of My Body.” “She Keeps Me Warm” is a tearjerker in the best way, making you want to cry out of an overwhelming sense of happiness (of which I have done multiple times to this song). The song reads like a heartfelt love letter written on the cover page of your favorite novel. The adult contemporary vibe, slow tempo, and emotional lyrics sound like it’s straight out of the soundtrack for a queer woman’s dream Hallmark film. “She Keeps Me Warm” was one of the songs that showed up constantly in the YouTube “gay songs” playlists, and I listened to it every single time. It is, and forever will be, one of my favorite artistic expressions of queer love put to music. 

Last, but certainly not least, is “i wanna be your girlfriend” by girl in red. Now THIS is a song for the yearners. If “She Keeps Me Warm” was a love letter written in a novel, then “i wanna be your girlfriend” reads like paragraph after paragraph of fervorous texts sent at 2 a.m. when you know you should be asleep but can’t stop thinking about them. girl in red’s bold declarations of love, lust and intense desire being laid over the simple instrumental and ethereal backing vocals emphasize the lyrics even more. They are unequivocal and demand to be heard just as a proclamation of passion like this should. I remember first hearing this song in high school and being so moved by the raw, unfiltered longing that girl in red was able to convey. If you haven’t heard this song and are thinking of listening to it for the first time: Be warned because there will be tears. Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.