Is Katy ‘I Kissed a Girl’ Perry Homophobic?
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I Kissed a Girl
by Katy Perry
Capitol Records

THE SAPPHIC HIT SONG of last summer, “I Kissed a Girl,” is sung by Katy Perry, a minister’s daughter and Santa Barbara native whose debut song, “One of the Boys,” continues to inhabit the charts. No other straight songstress has so clearly captured the arousing unease that follows one’s first same-sex kiss. Of this paradoxical pleasure she observes: “It felt so wrong/ It felt so right”; and adds defiantly: “I kissed a girl and I liked it.” The off-rhyme of “I liked it” and the “taste of her cherry ChapStick” literalizes such forbidden fruit.

“I Kissed a Girl” has generated controversy from both predictable and unexpected quarters.