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My unexpected Pride icon: indie breakup songs said all the things I couldn’t say to other boys

From John Lennon’s takedown of Paul McCartney to the Libertines’ Can’t Stand Me Now, songs by straight men about falling out with their friends were strangely romantic to me

The first buddy breakup song I ever loved was Seventy Times Seven by the emo band Brand New, which recounts a falling out between frontman Jesse Lacey and his former friend John Nolan (who later joined Taking Back Sunday and released a cutting riposte of his own). There was nothing sexual about our relationship, but it was almost giddily romantic: we were always dreaming up plans to move to the big city together and shared the delusion that, by simple virtue of being ourselves, we were destined to become cultural icons of some description (we possessed no evident talent, so the details were left vague). When I was still in the closet, these songs and others like them allowed me to articulate emotions that had to be kept secret, and because they weren’t explicitly queer there was no chance of them blowing my cover: being into the Libertines didn’t invite suspicion, and if there was any stigma attached to being a Brand New fan it involved being an emo – a damaging enough charge in central Scotland – rather than being gay.

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