In a 2019 essay for The New Inquiry titled “On Heteropessimism,” scholar Asa Seresin described a “straight pride parade” that had recently taken place in Boston. A throng of mostly queer people showed up to heckle the event, poking fun at black-and-white striped straight pride flags that looked like carceral jumpsuits with chants of “Heterosexuality is a prison!” “Compared to the heady possibilities of the queer world to come,” Seresin wrote, “heterosexuality appears unbearably drab and predictable.”
So leave it to Lady Gaga, famously neither drab nor predictable, to make being straight sound fun again. “I could be your girlfriend for the weekend/You could be my boyfriend for the night,” she sings on “Garden of Eden,” a standout from her newly released seventh studio album, Mayhem. It’s far from her smuttiest come-on (hard to beat “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”) or cheekiest play on gender (“I wanna be the girl under you/I wanna be your G.U.Y.” comes to mind); luckily, the rest of the track isn’t afraid to bare its fangs. Over peak Ed Banger electroclash, Gaga invokes MDMA, nine-inch stilettos, and some good old-fashioned blasphemy, envisioning the site of original sin as a warehouse rave with God in the DJ booth. But “Garden of Eden” saves its best trick for last: a mechanized, squelching breakdown—courtesy of co-producers Cirkut and Gesaffelstein—that’s precision-engineered to unite IDM bros and career Little Monsters. Even Adam and Eve deserve their shot at leaving it all on the floor.
