“I see the look in some of these kids’ eyes - that hunger for information about gay people,” she said. “But I love it when you try to save me - ’cause I’m just a lady.” Which means the stakes for “Cheap Queen,” at least as King Princess sees them, are especially high at a time when pop music is broadening its representation of different points of view.
Inspired by Patricia Highsmith’s “The Price of Salt,” a landmark of gay literature, “1950” introduced a self-identified genderqueer artist writing proudly about same-sex romance: “I hate it when dudes try to chase me,” she sings in her slurred, slightly raspy voice over a slowly tolling piano groove. It wasn’t merely the pressure to live up to expectations that was getting to King Princess, whose real name is Mikaela Straus.
