Wish You Were Gay

“wish you were gay” is the sixth track off of Eilish’s fourteen-track album: “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”, which was released on the 29th March earlier this year.

The track tells the story of Eilish attempting to regain her pride and dignity over a boy she’s interested in but isn’t reciprocating those same romantic feelings by wishing he was homosexual. “To spare my pride / To give your lack of interest an explanation / Don’t say I’m not your type / Just say that I’m not your preferred sexual orientation”, Eilish sings in the bridge. The track was met with a severe amount of backlash, with Pride.com accusing the track of “queerbaiting”, which is a marketing technique used in entertainment that hints at, but doesn’t actually depict, same-sex romance. The website also said that the song was offensive to the LGBTQ+ community. Eilish also faced backlash when she explained the track in an Instagram video: “I wrote this song about a guy that really was not interested in me and it made me feel horrible so the song is called ‘wish you were gay’. And that’s so not meant to be offensive in any way. It literally means ‘I wish he was gay so that he didn’t like me for an actual reason’.
And guess what! He just came out to me like a couple weeks ago. So I wrote the song and made him f*ck a dude. I’m f*cking proud bro… except not really though because I was really into him, like so into him… he’s so hot oh my god”. With even more controversy after Eilish’s explanation, the young star cleared any misunderstanding in an interview with PopBuzz: “I want to be so clear that it’s so not supposed to be an insult” and “I feel like it’s been a little bit misinterpreted. I tried so hard to not make it in any way offensive”, and referring to the song as ‘kind of a joke’”.

There is currently no music video for the track, however there is a video on Billie Eilish’s YouTube channel titled: “A Snippet into Billie’s Mind – wish you were gay”, explaining the process behind her and her brother creating the track, which was uploaded on the 4th March 2019 and has over 2.4 million views. The audio video for the track has over 39 million views since it’s official upload to Eilish’s channel on the 4th March 2019.

Release Date: 4th March 2019

Songwriter/s: Billie O’Connell, Finneas O’Connell

Producer/s: Finneas

Label/s: Darkroom, Interscope

Chart Rankings & Certifications: The track peaked in Belgium, Hungary, the UK, Australia, Ireland and many other countries. The track has received Gold certification in New Zealand, Canada and Australia.