“So I love the idea of Lil Nas trying to find himself.

“My and many people’s critique of this Aristophanes story is that we don’t need another person to be whole,” Stovall says. Much of the imagery and symbolism both inside the “Montero” video and surrounding it deals with self-reflection and discovery: the song (and upcoming album) are called “Montero,” which is Lil Nas’ given name he wrote a letter to a younger version of himself on Twitter and the song’s cover art depicts him as both God and Adam in a take on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.”

Stovall says that not only does Lil Nas’s usage of the quote place him in a lineage of queer scholarship and performance, but that he also expands the trope to adhere with a 21st century notion of self-love. Lil Nas is turning that on its head with the way that his character and the serpent interact.” “It aligns women with evil it aligns sexuality with women and with evil. “The story of the garden is a tradition that is historically misogynist,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia University, says. His character is tempted into sin by a snake, who also has Lil Nas’ face. The first one takes place in the garden of Eden, where Lil Nas plays either Adam, Eve or some combination of the two. “Montero,” which was co-directed by Lil Nas X and Tanu Muino, is composed of three acts. Read more: Lil Nas X on ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name),’ LGBTQ Repression and the Influence of FKA Twigs The Garden of Eden “It says that institutionalization of homophobia is a learned thing-and that there are other origin myths available to us that are not rooted in those ideas.” “Watching this video, I was a little bit shocked just because of how much knowledge you need to have to unpack some of these elements,” Roland Betancourt, a professor at University of California, Irvine and the author of Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, says. “It’s the same thing over and over.”Īnd scholars have come away impressed by the video’s attention to detail and conceptual sharpness they say it is deeply researched and builds a powerful historical narrative that centers queerness in historical and religious spaces where it is too often erased. “I wanted to use these things that have been around for so long to tell my own story, and the story of so many other people in the community-or people who have been outcast in general through history,” he says. Lil Nas, in an interview with TIME, says he wanted to deploy this type of iconography and symbolism to draw a connection between ancient and modern-day persecution. “Montero,” across its three-minute runtime, is stuffed with Greco-Roman and medieval Christian motifs and messages in both Greek and Latin. Another contingent has also excitedly rallied around the music video: historical scholars. At the same time, the video has drawn praise, and not just among those celebrating its proud embrace of LGBTQ imagery and themes.

Latin ancient space symbol