Jesus kissed his friends. I don't think homosexuality is what this is about. It' s a fraternal love in my mind.
I have a bootleg where Sufjan introduces the song with a rushed, kind of sloppy background on the song, which I think really alludes to the mood he's going for:
"Basically, we were going through the woods (I was at summer camp, I was with my friend, we met this guy, I met this kid; he was only 8 or 9 years old, he had really big ears, his name was Franco, and we were like cabin buddies and we had to like, always go swimming together and go canoeing together, and I was kind of annoyed with him, but I didn't have any other friends, so it didn't really matter.) We stuck together, you know, and we went out camping once and we had to stay in these tents, and uh couldn't sleep very well. There was all these bugs in the tents and we just started shaking around and we had to run outside for a while and we had to shake off the bugs. Then the bugs were chasing us. They were mosquitoes we think; they could've been spider or scorpions. And then running, we kind of got lost and we were so far away from the camp that suddenly we saw this waterfall, and it was at night and there was a moon, and there were crows, and then we saw all these vultures and we thought 'that's not good'. Then out of the sky came this huge monster and it had wings and it had huge eys and it had fangs and it had 6 tongues coming out of its mouth shooting fire. And it had stripes like a bee or a wasp, and it was making a buzzing sound, so we knew it was the predatory wasp, and it was going to get us."
Judging by what and how he introduces it, it seems more like a kids adventure song with a brother rather than a homosexual encounter. He's 8 or 9 in the song too, which is a little young if that's what he was going for. Also he expresses his slight disgust for Franco, and their relationship seems much more likely to be friendly like little kids are than sexually attracted to eachother, which is a more mature emotion. I'm sure a load of gay people want Sufjan to write a song about being gay, but I think it's sad that you can't say you're in love with your best friend without someone yelling 'queer'. |
