Lil Nas X Is Done Being an ‘Acceptable Gay Person’

Like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift before him, Lil Nas X has joined the camp of pop stars releasing tour-centric movies. His entry, however—Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero, which premieres Saturday night on HBO—is lighter on actual concert footage, and instead uses the backdrop of his first headlining tour to track the ongoing evolution of the artist, and the person, Lil Nas X wants to be.

If you’re a casual Lil Nas X fan, observer, or even hater, you might assume that the person he wants to be is simply a bigger and more dominant version of his wisecracking, media-savvy, terminally online persona. After all, his most recent single, “J Christ,” released earlier this month, dials up his affinity for meme-able, semi-shocking, viral-hungry stunts.

Long Live Montero, though, hints that there’s turmoil brewing beneath the surface of that cool exterior. And while that may not be a totally novel thesis for a pop star documentary—“fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!” describes pretty much every single one of them—Lil Nas X’s story at least stands apart because he’s a queer Black man trying to find his place not only in the bigger pop culture world, but also in the more insular world of his own family.

Long Live Montero follows Nas on the U.S. leg of his 2022 tour, from the first date in Detroit to the last in San Francisco. We see footage of his pre-tour rehearsals, learn about the sets and stage design, and hear from Lil Nas X about his desire to not be totally type-A about things. “I like a little bit of chaos,” he explains. “I don’t want to be perfect… I guess I’m just allergic to something that’s too good.” At the same time, he’s wondering if he’s going to be able to actually have fun on stage, or if he’ll just “freeze up and go back inside of my dad’s balls.”

The spectacular, albeit brief, concert interludes answer that question: Lil Nas X comes alive during his shows, and we see a few choice songs, like “Panini” and “Industry Baby,” performed almost in full, in remarkably hi-fi quality. He’s magnetic in front of a crowd, moving fluidly and confidently, which stands in stark contrast to much of the rest of the documentary that primarily focuses on his much more subdued life off stage. In most interview shots, he’s lying down in bed, shirtless, from his home in Los Angeles, where he still lives out of suitcases because he’s always on the move. (He has, however, had time to transform his bedroom wall into a giant collage of pop culture figures he loves, including Bad Bunny, Maddy from Euphoria, and Viola Davis.)

That interview setup seems intentional—it shows us he’s being vulnerable and stripping himself bare, if you will. At the same time, he’s choosy about what he wants to actually open up about. We hear a lot about his pre-show poops, for example, but when talk turns to his spiritual and religious journey, he’s strangely vague about the parts of himself he’s still “learning to accept.”

Where Lil Nas X does get the most vulnerable and serious is when the focus shifts to his family, who we meet at tour stops in New York and his hometown of Atlanta. Four of his brothers appear in the film, and it’s clear that although Nas says his relationship with them is “super tight,” there’s still some wonky dynamics there. One brother, Lamarco, says they had a love-hate relationship growing up, but eventually started to like each other more, “and then, boom, he got rich. And there you go.”

Lil Nas X later reflects on the effect that fame has had on his personal relationships, lamenting that he wants to be able to go away with his family “without just me paying for it,” and that he wants to be able to have more “meaningful” conversations with them. (It seems he’s succeeded in some instances; one brother, Tramon, mentions that Nas helped him “be real with myself” upon coming out as bisexual.)

His relationship with his parents seems similarly tricky, mostly because of his sexuality. He admits it “still feels really weird being flamboyant or closer to myself” around his stepmom, and explains that he often feels disconnected from his parents because even after he came out, his sexuality has always been “the elephant in the room.” His success has only compounded matters: “I’ve seen my family become much more accepting of what I am and people like me, and I think that is super dope and beautiful,” he says. “But I don’t know, I feel like it’s a lot of things that people may want to say but don’t. They don’t want to lose me as an asset.”

At one point after a show, we see Lil Nas X trying on a short skirt and a T-shirt featuring several different LGBT flags on it. He’s clearly self-conscious about wearing the outfit around his family, asking multiple people around him if he looks “stupid.” He later explains: “That skirt is low key a big transitional moment in my life that was so small but such a big thing. It’s easy to go to a music video set and do some super fruity shit. But to walk out in front of both sides of your family and wear this little skirt and a shirt that has every version of the LGBT flag on the back of it is really freeing, almost. Not almost, it actually is.”

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He’s right—it’s strange to see him fret about wearing a simple skirt when we’ve seen him in far more risqué outfits in music videos and on red carpets. But it’s clear that, at least as of 2022, his private persona was still catching up to his public one.

That started to change on the Long Live Montero Tour, though. He explains that before he came out, “I was so against doing anything feminine or bringing that side out at all, or even having gay men on stage with me. At first, I wanted to stay the ‘acceptable gay person.’ Like, ‘This is the one that doesn’t shove it down our throats, this is the one that keeps it to himself.’” On this tour, however, he says he realized the value in surrounding himself with other Black gay men, and found that he’s more himself around his dancers than his own family.

For as surprisingly self-serious as he is in this tour documentary, though, Lil Nas X insists he actually doesn’t want that to be how people think of him. “I feel like at the top of this year, I tried to be this full-time serious and, I don’t know, just completely dedicated to being this serious artist that everyone’s going to take serious and blah blah blah,” he shares. “And then I realized I have the most fun as an artist when I’m being a fun artist or just this happy, playful being. I think that’s a really vital part of me.”

As he attempts to reconcile those two sides of himself, and as he seemingly readies his next album era—he’s already dropped two singles this month, so his sophomore effort is likely imminent—Long Live Montero reminds viewers that even the celebrities with the most outsized personalities are sometimes falling apart behind the curtain. (Literally—there’s a scene toward the end of the doc where Nas vomits backstage and humbly tells the crowd from behind the curtain that he needs a minute to collect himself.)

Sometimes it’s nice to see the smaller (and yes, more serious) side of a superstar.