MONTERO
(Call Me By Your Name)
by Lil Nas X
Columbia Records
LIL NAS X’s 2021 music video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” challenges traditional categories. This multitemporal fantasy is divided into three acts representing the biblical book of Genesis, Græco-Roman mythology, and the Harrowing of Hell, retold with a queer, Black protagonist. Identities and spatiotemporal realities overlap, collide, and destabilize, fitting one of the possible meanings of “queer” posited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Tendencies (1993) as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality, aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” The music video for “Montero” queers time, space, and identities.
First, “Montero” is both an absent identity and an imaginary place. Montero is in fact the given name of Montero Lamar Hill aka Lil Nas X, but no one called by that name appears in the song lyrics or in the video. In a tweet posted around the same time as the release of the “Montero” single (March 26, 2021), Lil Nas X addresses his former self:
dear 14 year old montero,
i wrote a song with our name in it. it’s about a guy i met last summer. i know we promised to never come out publicly, i know we promised to never be “that” type of gay person, i know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist. you see this is very scary for me, people will be angry, they will say i’m pushing an agenda. but the truth is, i am. the agenda to make people stay the fuck out of other people’s lives and stop dictating who they should be. Sending you love from the future.
—lnx
This personal statement reflects a common narrative expressed by many LGBT individuals. Early in our development, upon realizing that we’re different, many of us try to adapt those differences to fit heteronormative expectations. But this meek and fettered queerness can crush spirits and hinder happiness—it’s an extension of “the closet.” Lil Nas X’s confession draws attention to the mechanisms of heteronormativity, including the transphobia still lingering in many of our queer social circles. In Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, Darieck Scott explains that there is a “near-absolute split between Blackness and homosexuality, a perception that contributes to an intermittently prevailing discourse in the culture at large which ignores even the simple fact of the existence of Black gay people.” “Montero” is cast as a shade of the former shame from which emerges Lil Nas X, a radically queer artist.
His music video, which Lil Nas X codirected with Tanu Muino, opens with the claim that Montero is a place without shame, as the narrator explains: “In life, we hide the parts of ourselves we don’t want the world to see. We lock them away, we tell them, ‘No.’ We banish them. But here, we don’t. Welcome to Montero.” This opening garden sequence of “Montero” is a queer utopia; the first act is a retelling of Genesis complete with Lil Nas X performing a mashup of Adam, Eve, and a medieval minstrel, plus a separate characterization also played by Lil Nas X: the seductive snake. But it isn’t exactly the Garden of Eden. The inhabitants are not naïve and inexperienced. The world is not new. In fact, the landscape is marked by ancient ruins, signified by off-kilter columns, crumbling aqueducts, and two toppled temples that resemble the forecourt of the Pantheon. Moreover, a nearby tree is inscribed with a quotation from Plato’s Symposium:
ἐπειδὴ οὖν ἡ φύσις δίχα ἐτμήθη, ποθοῦν ἕκαστον
τὸ ἥμισυ
“Now when our first form had been cut in two, each half in
longing for its fellow.”
The reference is to Aristophanes’ recounting of the mythological origins of love in The Symposium, where he posits that humans were originally created as round bodies with two sets of faces, arms, and legs. Because the gods felt threatened by these creatures, Zeus decided to cut these early humans in half, leaving each bisected part to search for the severed partner. This origin narrative of love accounts for diverse sexual preferences, as each subject desires the gender to which they were bound in the early days.
“Montero” presents a new Paradise, and the logic of love is firmly rooted in a Greek tradition, which recognizes intimacy between same-sex partners, particularly men, as inherent to civic identities. Greek quotations, Roman ruins, and the absence of any industrial or modern architecture suggest a medieval setting. In the popular cultural memory, the Middle Ages are temporally located after the decline of the Roman empire and preceding the Renaissance. “Montero” is a postmedieval re-creation of the Middle Ages. And yet, the characterizations and queer narratives are futuristic. The lavender-dominated dreamscape of “Montero” challenges the traditional restraint associated with visual representations of the Middle Ages. It is simultaneously prehistoric, ancient, medieval, modern, and futuristic.
“Montero” exists in queer time. The Judeo-Christian vision of Paradise was pristine and perfect, lost over time with no hope of return. A utopia—unlike Paradise—evolves as a result of the past. “Montero” does not depict a perfect place now lost; it is a future not yet experienced, and yet deeply informed by the past. By retelling the opening of the Book of Genesis with same-sex desire, Lil Nas X recreates a queer new Paradise. It is a new beginning—a second origin. The disjunctive temporal references in “Montero” provide a queer revision of the past, or a potentially queer future embedded within the cultural cycles of empires and destruction. When heteronormative capitalism crumbles under its own corruption, queer pastoral liberty will flourish. “Montero” also represents a reclamation of the artist’s former self, who was associated with the shame of deviating from heteronormativity. Now, Montero is a multi-temporal safe space.
Lil Nas X’s public display of radical queerness is an open invitation for redemption. Not only does he queer the opening of Genesis, but he also queers the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended into Hell just after his crucifixion to offer salvation to the righteous, including Adam and Eve, who had died before Heaven was a possibility for human souls. Lil Nas X’s character in the final act of “Montero” does not simply harrow Hell. He assassinates Satan. Flaunting his sexuality as he pole-dances into the depths to bump and grind on the Devil’s lap, Lil Nas X caresses the leather-clad Lord of Darkness before snapping his neck. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman observes that “gay men, lesbians, and other ‘perverts’ have served as figures for history, for either civilization’s decline or a sublimely futuristic release from nature, or both.” Lil Nas X’s characterizations work across temporalities and cultures, from Greek and Roman mythologies to Christian mysteries situated within a futuristic medievalism, to liberate humans from damnation by simply defeating the Devil altogether. As he extends absolution from shame to everyone, Lil Nas X portrays a queer hero—a queero!
Elan Justice Pavlinich is professor of English literature at Wabash College, Indiana.
