In her infectious 2017 single “Honey,” Kehlani once sang: “I like my girls just like I like my honey / Sweet, a little selfish.”
Now, the always outspoken singer has moved past writerly metaphor into just stating things plainly. On Instagram Live over the weekend, Kehlani, much to the excitement of fans, announced that she “finally knows” she’s a lesbian.
“You want to know? You want to know what’s new about me? I finally know I’m a lesbian,” she said seemingly unprompted. In response to the news, one user cheekily wrote, “I volunteer to be Kehlani’s wife.”
While Kehlani has long identified as queer and pansexual, she has also resisted restrictive labels of her gender or sexuality. In an interview with DIVA magazine last year, the artist said she found it frustrating that, following the release of “Honey,” fans made assumptions about her orientation.
“People gave me a label I never gave myself and got mad when I didn’t fit into it,” she said, adding, “My energy has always been extremely fluid between masculine and feminine so that’s why I use ‘queer,’ and also, queer is inclusive to non-binary people. But I still prefer and am totally fine with the pronoun ‘she.’”
Kehlani first addressed her sexuality publicly back in 2018, after kissing Demi Lovato on stage during a performance of the song “Lonely.”
At the time, Kehlani tweeted that she was “not bi, not straight,” writing, “i’m attracted to women, men, REALLY attracted to queer men, non binary people, intersex people, trans people. lil poly pansexual papi hello good morning. does that answer your questions?”
Kehlani has also collaborated with other queer artists, including Hayley Kiyoko, on the artist’s 2018 single “What I Need.”
Though it is 2021 and coming out shouldn’t be earth-shattering news, in a climate where LGBTQ+ youth are still widely persecuted (including here at home, as with recent Georgia bills targeting trans youth), Kehlani is still a shining example of what fluidity and open-mindedness can look like. To demonstrate that point, following Halsey, the singer updated their pronouns to “she/they” just last month in their Instagram bio.
“I like when people are really unapologetically themselves,” Kehlani told DIVA last year. “We’re all hella young so there’s going to be things we get insecure about, because we’re thinking about what other people are thinking about us. I love when people, at least at the core of their being, can say, ‘This is what I am, this is who I like, this is what I believe in’.”
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for them.’s weekly newsletter here.
