October 27, 2023

Words Are Futile Devices: The Inarticulable Queerness of Sufjan Stevens

'My body moves in mystic ways.'

If you are queer and happen to have some relationship to Christianity, chances are you’ve encountered Sufjan Stevens’ music at some point. The American songwriter and multi-instrumentalist looms large in the minds of many queers trying to reassess their religious convictions thanks to his earnest but thorny lyrical accounts of a lived Christian faith, his fanciful, almost mythopoeic imagination, and his obsession with sensuality, desire, and the body. (These qualities were once lovingly satirized by Daniel M. Lavery in ‘Songs You’ll Never Hear on a Sufjan Stevens Album’, which included such entries as ‘I Had a Pretty Good Time at Bible Study and No One is Dead’ and ‘The Gender of the Person I’m Singing About Isn’t Ambiguous at All’.) Stevens’ music has formed an indelible part of the texture of my own evolving understanding of my faith and queerness, to the point where many of his songs are almost part of my vocabulary. 

And yet, Stevens himself has remained a somewhat enigmatic figure, keeping his personal life, including his sexuality, largely private from the media. Despite his prolific output and increasing ubiquity, especially in recent years, he’s one of the few living pop musicians to retain some aura of mystery around himself. Stray tidbits from interviews and snatches of hearsay have come to be passed around his audience as part of his piecemeal mythology – such as the anecdote that his sprawling box-sets of Christmas albums originated with Stevens accidentally burning a spatula in his Brooklyn apartment, the smell of which led him to a personal revelation regarding the birth of Christ, or the time a boyfriend of mine claimed to know someone who knew someone who knew an ex-lover of Stevens’ who confirmed his queerness, long a subject of speculation. 

Much of that speculation was put to an end following the release of Stevens’ most recent album, Javelin. In a devastating Instagram post, Stevens dedicated the album, which seems to be nothing less than a treatise on the nature of love, to his late partner, Evans Richardson IV, who died in April 2023. Many fans interpreted this as Stevens’ official coming out, given that it’s the first time he’s publicly and directly spoken about his love life. But this ignores the rich textures of queerness that already reside in Sufjan Stevens’ music, public persona, and lyrics, which are all the more powerful and resonant for what they leave unsaid. 

I first encountered Sufjan Stevens’ music while attending a Christian liberal arts college. Among those of us sick of the Hillsong worship anthems that characterized chapel services on campus, Stevens’ name was passed around (alongside the likes of Derek Webb, Wovenhand, and mewithoutYou) as an example of Christian music that didn’t suck. Stevens was unapologetic about his faith – with the overt lyrical quotations of scripture and references to Jesus by name, no one could ever accuse him of being one of those too-coy, ‘surprise’ Christian crossover musicians that seemed rampant in the 2000s. But the literary allusions and vulnerable introspection that also characterized those lyrics, and the lush orchestral arrangements that accompanied his songwriting, put him a far cry away from anything you’d hear in a megachurch at the time.  

For visits home during my freshman year, I carpooled half of the ten-hour drive between campus in Pennsylvania and my parents’ house in South Carolina with a friend a few years older than me who lived in Virginia, Stevens’ hit song ‘Chicago’ from his 2005 Illinois album playing on repeat. Having featured in countless film trailers during the late ’00s, ‘Chicago’ was the perfect fuel for my inflated self-image as an idealistic wanderer; its lyrics were seemingly purpose-built to imbue any road trip with earth-shattering import. ‘If I was crying,’ Stevens croons on the track, ‘In the van, with my friend, / It was for freedom / From myself, and from the land. / I made a lot of mistakes.’ What a song to introduce to any too-serious eighteen-year-old straining to assert an identity independent from his parents, trying and frequently failing to build his own meaningful connections with other people, while barreling down the interstate! 

About a year later, I got my hands on my own copy of Illinois, which stayed in perpetual rotation in my car’s CD player along with Deas Vail’s Birds and Cages, including when I made the long drive between home and campus. At the Midtown Scholar bookshop in Harrisburg, I bought a copy of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, inspired by the second half of ‘Come On! Feel the Illinoise!’ in which the poet appears to Stevens in a dream after the singer has cried himself to sleep over the folly of humankind. (I devoured the book during my family’s vacation to Panama City Beach in Florida that summer.) 

Illinois captivated me. Part of Stevens’ abortive ‘Fifty States’ project, in which he proclaimed he would write and record an album themed around every state in America, it’s sprawling in scope; intimate, confessional songwriting sits alongside and often blurs with literary character sketches and obscure bits of local history and folklore surrounding the titular state, woven together with Stevens’ deep familiarity with Christian scripture and theology. The orchestral arrangements are bombastic and expansive, rife with blaring trumpets, fluttering woodwinds, and cooing choirs. The tongue-in-cheek song titles (such as ‘They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!’ and ‘A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But for Very Good Reasons’) add a sense of camp to the whole affair. Stevens’ wispy tenor voice, which frequently sounds on the verge of tears, flattered my tendency to adopt melancholic yearning as an affectation. If my closeted self, trying ever so hard to be pious – or, failing that, to want to be – had any inkling that this album by a Christian singer-songwriter also sounded … well, kind of fruity, it at least didn’t deter me. 

Much of the conversation surrounding the homoeroticism of Stevens’ songwriting has, with good reason, revolved around ‘The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!’, a deep cut from Illinois that apparently recounts a childhood memory – either that of Stevens or an unnamed, possibly fictional speaker. Describing a friend who is ‘bit seven times’ and ‘runs washing his face in his hands’, the speaker first makes to tease his friend before this gives way to something more tender. ‘Touching his back with my hand, I kiss him,’ Stevens sings, before noticing that the titular wasp has landed on his arm. The song builds to an epic crescendo, with Stevens repeatedly belting out ‘We were in love,’ over a cacophony of criss-crossing countermelodies. 

(When I first heard this song, I, perhaps protesting too much, interpreted the wasp as symbolizing the tendency to harm those we care about. I still think there’s an element of that, but I’m now more inclined to see it standing in for the recognition of a desire that we’re not ready to admit as part of ourselves, and the way we can lash out when this happens.) 

The queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that to interpret art and literature from a queer standpoint is to take up the position of ‘the child or adolescent whose sense of personal queerness may not (yet?) have resolved into a sexual specificity of proscribed object choice, aim, site, or identification’, who reads ‘for important news about herself, without knowing what form that news will take’.1 From this perspective, to read queerly is not necessarily to wield my own identification as queer as the thing that determines textual meaning. On the contrary, reading queerly can show that my encounter with the text can call the stability of my identity into question, can show it to be in flux or reveal parts of myself that remain unknowable or surprising even to myself. I was twenty years old, considered myself heterosexual, and desperately longed for companionship with other men, an ache I mostly soothed by forming extremely intense platonic bonds with my male friends that would inch right up to some invisible threshold, only for one or both of us to pull away once they got too close. Stevens’ songs, and especially ‘The Predatory Wasp’, contained news about myself, my desires, and the shape of my relationship to other men that I refused to bind with a name, but that I could access in the form of his elliptical and yearning lyrics.  

It would be extremely tempting – as many people have done – to ascribe the clichéd contours of the closet to his lack of any straightforward verbal declaration of his sexuality, speculating that Stevens has remained closeted due to some lasting trauma or angst. From one perspective, his frequent fixation on loneliness and melancholy in his songs would seem to support this reading. I’m rather more inclined, though, to speculate that he simply wasn’t that interested in discussing it in interviews, in the same way he often avoids directly elaborating on his Christian theology outside of his songs. In both instances, the songs already more than speak for themselves. 

I can’t say for certain how I would have reacted had Stevens publicly stated his own sexuality at the time. My guess is that the queer longing palpable in his songwriting was able to resonate with me precisely because it was unspoken; to refocus that depth of feeling through a two- or three-word utterance would have had me putting up my defenses. As much as Stevens has become the poster child for vulnerable self-excavation through music, his ’00s albums tend to obscure his own persona in favour of fictional characters and historical figures. Even on Seven Swans (2004), probably the closest Stevens will ever come to recording a straightforward worship album, it isn’t always clear whose perspective he’s inhabiting. Because Stevens kept so many aspects of himself shrouded in mystery, his songs likewise occupied a space of ambiguity that allowed them to be both haunting and comforting. Listening to his songs made me feel both deeply edified and horribly exposed, which I suppose is another way of saying that it felt like praying. 

A popular meme surrounding Stevens’ music poses the question, ‘Is this Sufjan Stevens song gay or about God?’ Close listeners will know that the answer is often both. Like Leigh Nash and Matt Slocum of Sixpence None the Richer – another formative band for me that I’ll write about someday – Stevens frequently turns the oft-maligned slippage between devotional and romantic or even erotic feeling in contemporary Christian music into a provocative site of reflection. In ‘Vito’s Ordination Song’, he sings as God calling Stevens’ real-life friend Rev. Vito Aiuto to ministry, beckoning him to ‘Rest in my arms, / Sleep in my bed’ and reassuring him that ‘There’s a design / To what I did and said’. ‘From the Mouth of Gabriel’ similarly juxtaposes the mystery of the Annunciation with the scene of a lover striving to make amends ‘In a struggle between loves and lies’, with God through Gabriel saying, ‘Forget about the past, / And I’ll try to make things right’. Perhaps most provocatively, the last line of ‘To Be Alone with You’ abruptly pivots from a meditation on Jesus’s crucifixion to a spontaneous confession of queer loneliness, with Stevens singing, ‘To be alone with me, you went up on a tree’ before murmuring, in a near whisper, ‘I’ve never known a man who loved me.’ The turn casts many of the song’s other lyrics in a different light, especially the singer’s declaration that Jesus ‘gave up a wife and a family’ ‘to be alone with’ him. For Stevens, prayer and pillow talk and anguished confessions and ‘stumbling words at the bar’ bleed over into each other, each one in turn framing and refracting our views of one another; he’s remarkably attuned to the way spiritual life is impossible to disentangle from all the other aspects of human experience. 

This guiding principle of Stevens’ music has surfaced with increasing urgency in much of his post-2010 material, in which the self-effacement that characterized his earlier albums have given way to rawer and more directly personal storytelling. While The Age of Adz (2010) is littered with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the work of folk artist Royal Robertson, it’s in service of chronicling Stevens’s struggles with an existential crisis brought on by fame and a debilitating chronic health condition. Carrie and Lowell (2015) is even more intimate, detailing Stevens’s fraught relationship with his mother, their difficult reconciliation, and the complexity of his grief over her death. On these albums, the rich literary detail of Greetings from Michigan (2003) and Illinois are supplanted by starker, more sensual imagery and disarmingly frank admissions, still viewed through the prism of Stevens’ faith but with a more earthbound ambivalence. 

‘Futile Devices’, the album opener from The Age of Adz, is a hushed acoustic number that stands in contrast to the rest of that album’s harsh electronic bombast. In it, the singer recites a litany of almost banal details of domestic life with another person before confessing, ‘you are the life I needed all along. / I think of you as my brother, although that sounds dumb, / And words are futile devices.’ The song stopped me in my tracks at the age of twenty-one, driving to my job at the local shaved-ice stand in the summer of 2012. I’d just spent a semester abroad at Oxford and my mind was on two separate men for whom I had aching feelings that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, name. (We’ll talk about each of them in turn some other time.) The song’s admission of its own failure to capture the singer’s feelings struck right at the heart of what was unsayable about the bonds I felt with these men; to face the obvious source of my preoccupations was, then, an impossibility. 

‘Futile Devices’ was later used in the Italian gay coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name (2017), adapted by James Ivory and Luca Guadagnino from André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name. At roughly the midpoint of the film, after young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) has confessed his feelings for his father’s American grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer, whose casting may make the film difficult to watch for some in retrospect), Oliver makes himself scarce, leaving Elio to agonize over his feelings and his decision to share them. When I watched the film alone in the cinema following its release, the familiar opening chords of Stevens’ song were almost too much to take – this was my song for agonizing over men, damnit! -- especially coming off the heels of two separate breakups in the previous year, one of which was with one of the men I’d originally pined for to the tune of that song years before.  

While not exactly a groundbreaking film, Call Me By Your Name is an evocative portrait of gay desire and the blend of fumbling awkwardness and reckless abandon with which it can manifest. Many exchanges between characters in the film were ones I recognized from my own life: Oliver’s expression of concern that he will ‘mess [Elio] up’ repeated almost verbatim what a casual summer flame had said to me to caution against us getting too serious; the knowing-but-wilfully-not-knowing way Elio’s father says to him, ‘You two have a nice friendship’, recalled the sidelong glances and offhand remarks male friends and I had received when our closeness was all too apparent. What stays with me from the film is not the infamous scene in which Elio masturbates into a peach, but its aftermath: the way he is overcome with self-consciousness and frustrated desire at the tender playfulness with which Oliver reacts to the event closely mirrored, at the time, my own anxieties around sex. (‘Cinema is a mirror of reality, and it’s a filter,’ a friend of Elio’s mother expounds in one scene, a sentiment that might as well be the film’s thesis statement.) Elio and Oliver eventually consummate their relationship, but the film’s resolution is bittersweet: the summer ends, and Oliver returns to America to marry a woman. By the final shot of the film, I was inconsolable: as Elio reconciles with his dashed hopes of ever reconnecting with Oliver, the camera holds on his eyeliner-streaked face staring into the fireplace for the full duration of the closing credits while the entirety of Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Visions of Gideon’ plays. 

Stevens’ contributions to the film’s soundtrack cemented him as a gay icon on a much larger scale than he had been before. Despite his continued shying away from the public eye, he seemed to be aware of this newfound status, releasing two new singles, ‘Love Yourself’ and ‘With My Whole Heart’, for Pride Month in 2019. 

To be honest, those songs are … fine. Empowerment anthems have never really been my jam, any more than conventional contemporary Christian worship songs; though ideologically they seem to be coming from entirely different places, both art forms tend to boil down deeply felt and complex aspects of life into nonspecific platitudes. By contrast, much of the potency of Stevens’ songwriting from a theological perspective comes from his willingness to dwell at the frayed edges of faith, the points at which the things we say we believe break down. ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’ does this to particularly devastating effect, with the song’s narrator recounting his relationship with a terminally ill lover. ‘Tuesday night at the Bible study,’ he sings, ‘We lift our hands and pray over your body, / But nothing ever happens.’ The song concludes with the narrator extolling 

the glory that the Lord has made, 

And the complications when I see his face 

In the morning in the window. 

O, the glory when he took our place! 

But he took my shoulders and he shook my face, 

And he takes, and he takes, and he takes. 

It’s a note of uneasy tension to end a song on, and it’s a tension that permeates much of the rest of Stevens’ catalogue. Many of the songs on Carrie and Lowell, especially, are attentive to the inadequacy of religious language even as they affirm the singer’s faith. When the singer reflects on his experiences of parental abandonment on ‘Should Have Known Better’, he breaks down, entreating God to ‘be my rest, be my fantasy.’ With this simple lyric, Stevens both reaffirms his reliance on his faith in God for consolation, while acknowledging that anything he might imagine God to be is, inevitably, a fiction in the face of a far more unknowable reality. He revisits this theme on ‘The Only Thing’, asserting that the only thing assuaging his suicidal ideation is ‘signs and wonders’, but juxtaposing biblical imagery such as the prophetic writing on the wall from the book of Daniel with the more fanciful image of Perseus slaying Medusa and the mundane sight of ‘sea lion caves after dark’. 

This turn in Stevens’ songwriting towards the failures of language and the wholehearted embrace of mythmaking could not have arrived at a better time for me, trying to make sense of what a life of faith meant and looked like outside of the protective bubbles in which I’d been raised and educated, without the dogged insistence on certainty that had made those environments ultimately unliveable for me. While I mostly bounced off of his next album, 2020’s The Ascension – I found most of its songs too generically depressive, lacking the narrative and emotional specificity that gave his no-less-downbeat previous two albums resonance – its title track similarly met me where I was at that time. Critiquing his own self-image as presented in his music, he laments, ‘To think I was acting like a believer / When I was just angry and depressed.’ I’ve written elsewhere about the misgivings I started having about my faith around the time this album was released, but Stevens’ own self-interrogation gave language to the questions I was asking myself about what purpose my devotion served: was it an earnestly held belief? An affectation? A rhetorical device? ‘What now?’ Stevens repeatedly inquires at the song’s conclusion, asking it of the listener as much as he is asking it of himself. 

‘The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts’, another song from Illinois, fixates on Superman as both a messianic figure and an impossible object of homoerotic desire. Stevens waxes poetic about the hero’s ‘Yellow tights, golden eyes’, all ‘Parted hair and part unknown’, before conflating him with Jesus: ‘There are things you have said / Raised the boat and raised the dead.’ In true camp fashion, the image’s ludicrousness, its kitsch, its oversignification, its inadequacy and failure to encompass what it evokes, are precisely what lend it potency. These descriptions give way to the chorus, in which Stevens and his backup singers declare, in unison, ‘Only a real man can be a lover, / If he had hands to tremble all over. / We celebrate our sense of each other, / We have a lot to give one another.’ 

Meaning that our flat signifiers from pop cultural kitsch can lead to genuine revelations about our collective responsibilities toward love. Jesus is not like Superman except for where Superman can provoke reflection on what salvation means. Love for God both is and isn’t like erotic desire, and each can tell us a lot about the other. Theology is a fiction that sometimes (not always) leads toward truths. The verbal speech act of coming out forecloses potential meanings and resonances as much as it reveals them, and both the foreclosure and the revelation are worth paying attention to. I do not know Sufjan Stevens; we have never met, and he’s doubtless lived a life very different from mine – and yet, his music has indelibly shaped me and my idea of who I am. 

And I hope he’s doing okay. He seems to have had an incredibly rough year.