“Bloom” by Troye Sivan, Thursday, April 6, 2023 (warning: frank discussion of explicit sexual acts)

Spring is a time of youth and renewed life. Flowers are blooming and pollen is swimming in the breeze. We have seen this happen year in and year out, perhaps never really thinking about how Mother Earth is regenerating herself. Indeed sex is all around us as the bees inseminate the flowers in the garden. The vibrancy of springtime in a garden is an appropriate cloak for today's song as Troye Sivan wraps the metaphor of young horniness in the beauty of the natural world in the title track to his second record Bloom. While Sivan's track is undeniably queer, the journey into the garden feels universal--a trip that all will take when leaving youth behind.

TAKE A TRIP INTO MY GARDEN. Troye Sivan's sophomore record, Bloom, takes the singer-songwriter into more adult themes. The singer's previous work Blue Neighbourhood intentionally steered away from overtly sexual topics. When Sivan made the music video trilogy "Wild," "Fools," and "Talk You Down," Sivan created a space for exploring same-sex attraction during youth without overly sexualizing love. He told Advocate "I feel like gay relationships are sexualized in the media and I just wanted to show a romantic, adorable, puppy love situation between two little boys because that’s something we never ever see." And while some of the tracks on Blue Neighbourhood are explicit due to language, most of the songs deal with love and acceptance for one's sexuality. But Sivan's 2018 record has been described by Out as the singer's "sex record." At the age of 23, Sivan told stories about losing his virginity at the age of "Seventeen" to an older man. The video to the album's lead single "My, My My!" takes a cue from Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty" video, with Sivan dancing provocatively, and the Saturday Night Live performance of the song left Sivan dripping wet.  

I'VE BEEN SAVING THIS FOR YOU. Troye Sivan revealed to Dazed that "Bloom" was about "being the receptive partner losing his virginity." The gay community calls the receptive partner the bottom and performing this role as bottoming. There are not many songs about gay sex, and much fewer about bottoming. Sivan is opening a curtain to the queer community to a much more sexually fluid and open generation of younger millennials and Gen-Z. The video for "Bloom" feels like a New Wave video from the '80s blurring the line between masculine and feminine. While the album Bloom may have not been a runaway success in the general market, Sivan leaves a positive influence on the gay community, particularly the members who shame "fems," or men who are on the more feminine side. Of course, one celebrity doesn't completely change the number of men with 20 miles who are only "masc4masc" but Sivan as a pop star gives queer folks a role model for what can be on the feminine side, authentic, and sexy.

Read the lyrics on Genius.