Sam Smith and the embarrassing terribleness of LGBTQIA+ culture

Pop music – and specifically pop music stardom – has an incredible power to transform people into things they are not. The pop sphere enjoyed by my generation as teens transmogrified Morrissey into a sex symbol, Neil Tennant into an intellectual and Simon Le Bon into a surrealist poet. 

More recently, pop’s alchemical potency has made Ed Sheeran someone people like to look at and Adele someone people want to hear from describing her emotional upsets at great length. But there are limits, and the singer Sam Smith has done us a favour by smashing into them. 

In his new video – let’s not be detained discussing the song, a painfully generic flimsy soul confection – Smith cavorts with a gaggle of bum-twitching, writhing sexy dancers. That sounds ordinary enough, you will say. What I’ve kept back is that Smith himself is attired in a lacey basque and displaying full décolletage surmounted with silver nipple caps.