Like, I'm with everyone that this is a song about a hookup being kept at arms length and questioning if sex alone is enough, however my gay-dar is off the charts with this song. I cannot see how this song could be about a man and a woman hooking up. People are reading "girlfriend" as "friend that is a girl" but I think everyone is just reading these lyrics from a super heteronormative place and not taking any other context clues (like the fact that he refers to the same person on the phone with a girlfriend as a boy apparently separate from himself).
I don't have it in me to analyze the song in its entirety at the moment, but the lines, "But I was scared to go much further with it," "Calling up your girlfriend/Just trying to make her understand," "So many questions/She's going to catch you out boy," and the line "Now she's the only thing that ever made you feel like a man," parts taken together seems, to me, to paint a picture of a guy wanting to hookup with this other guy he's dancing with but scared he's reading the situation wrong--maybe this guy isn't gay, and at the time this song was released this was even more dangerous a situation than it is now if he happens to get it wrong (see also: the line about his luck being a button he can't stop pushing).
Then he does end up leaving with the guy, though, and finds out he had a girlfriend and the guy has to call her on their walk home and explain why he's going to be out so late. The singer's perspective, then, is that this guy's girlfriend is going to figure him out at some point and that he thinks this guy is fighting so hard to keep this girlfriend in his life, despite him being interested in men, because she "makes him feel like
man" (i.e. offers him masculine status that society generally denies gay men--she's a "beard," so to speak). The song then, overall, seems to be questioning how/lamenting the fact that this guy who seems to be attracted to men only ever hooks up with other men (due to his having a girlfriend to think of) rather than having the meaningful relationships/love/tenderness with men he probably would prefer.
If that isn't what this song is about, it damn well should be because that is a way more unique, complex, and important story than just yet another dude wanting to have sex with a girl but then catching the feels.
Like, I'm with everyone that this is a song about a hookup being kept at arms length and questioning if sex alone is enough, however my gay-dar is off the charts with this song. I cannot see how this song could be about a man and a woman hooking up. People are reading "girlfriend" as "friend that is a girl" but I think everyone is just reading these lyrics from a super heteronormative place and not taking any other context clues (like the fact that he refers to the same person on the phone with a girlfriend as a boy apparently separate from himself).
I don't have it in me to analyze the song in its entirety at the moment, but the lines, "But I was scared to go much further with it," "Calling up your girlfriend/Just trying to make her understand," "So many questions/She's going to catch you out boy," and the line "Now she's the only thing that ever made you feel like a man," parts taken together seems, to me, to paint a picture of a guy wanting to hookup with this other guy he's dancing with but scared he's reading the situation wrong--maybe this guy isn't gay, and at the time this song was released this was even more dangerous a situation than it is now if he happens to get it wrong (see also: the line about his luck being a button he can't stop pushing).
Then he does end up leaving with the guy, though, and finds out he had a girlfriend and the guy has to call her on their walk home and explain why he's going to be out so late. The singer's perspective, then, is that this guy's girlfriend is going to figure him out at some point and that he thinks this guy is fighting so hard to keep this girlfriend in his life, despite him being interested in men, because she "makes him feel like man" (i.e. offers him masculine status that society generally denies gay men--she's a "beard," so to speak). The song then, overall, seems to be questioning how/lamenting the fact that this guy who seems to be attracted to men only ever hooks up with other men (due to his having a girlfriend to think of) rather than having the meaningful relationships/love/tenderness with men he probably would prefer.
If that isn't what this song is about, it damn well should be because that is a way more unique, complex, and important story than just yet another dude wanting to have sex with a girl but then catching the feels.