The 18 best LGBTQ love songs of all time

"I mean, I've been making music about women my whole career, but I never felt the need to write 'she,' necessarily. It wasn't in the forefront of my mind," Kehlani told Hayley Kiyoko in a 2018 interview for The Fader.

"But now I've seen how people reacted to my song 'Honey,' or when I've used the correct pronouns and put women in my music videos," she continued. "Just seeing how much people felt like they needed that representation or how much it inspired them definitely encouraged me to step into this new phase of making music."

The Internet's lead singer Syd, born Sydney Loren Bennett, has said she "wanted to make this song feel like a love trance."

"I didn't write it about one specific girl or situation," she wrote on Genius. "I'm attracted to quiet, confident girls, especially intellectual girls who are pursuing their dreams like me. But I'm also really picky."

In writing her debut single, King Princess was inspired by queer literature and generations of hidden gay relationships.

The '50s are famous for valuing a nuclear family structure and clean-cut gender roles. But with "1950," King Princess plays with that perception and reclaims it for her own: "I like it when we play 1950 / So bold, make them know that you're with me."

"I was using the idea of the way that queer people had to hide their love in history, throughout our history," she wrote on Genius. "Somebody's giving you the cold shoulder to bring you in more, and how that looks very similar to the way people once couldn't be gay in public. I wanted to pay tribute to that point in history, in an empowering way."

BROCKHAMPTON frontman Kevin Abstract, born Clifford Ian Simpson, is known for dissecting intolerance and homophobia in his music, particularly in his solo work.

But "Something About Him" combines Abstract's knack for disarming, open-hearted lyricism with BROCKHAMPTON's bright, frothy production. Although it's only one minute and 34 seconds long, it's one of the most memorable tracks in the band's entire discography.

"somethin bout him bout jaden walker duh," Abstract tweeted of the song, referring to his longtime boyfriend.

"Girls Like Girls" is a synth-pop paradise of prolonged eye contact, stolen kisses, and simmering intimacy.

"Growing up, everything I did was always about girls. I took dance because of girls. I got involved in student council because of girls," Hayley Kiyoko wrote in an essay for Paper. "Not that I ever expected any of them to like me back, but I just felt comforted being around them, even if I could never date them. So there we were. The song 'Girls Like Girls' was born."

Although Kiyoko is now known by fans as "Lesbian Jesus," she wrote her defining song before she had publicly come out as a lesbian.

"In a session with co-songwriters Owen Thomas and Lily May-Young, Kiyoko was asked a very simple question: What's something that scares you? In that moment, she came out of the closet to her co-workers, and found her voice," wrote Billboard's Stephen Daw, in an essay that dubbed "Girls Like Girls" a defining song of the 2010s.

"They were like, 'All right, if you felt fearless and weren't scared, what would you say?'" Kiyoko told Billboard. "And that's where 'Girls Like Girls' came from."

The sanguine, starry-eyed "Say It First" is a far cry from Sam Smith's famously heart-wrenching ballads, but the singer's raw openness is thankfully consistent. Smith's soaring, emotive vocals elevate this slow ballad to an enduring expression of vulnerability.

"This is the only happy love song I've ever written," they told Zane Lowe. "My feelings were getting a lot stronger — it's sad that I couldn't say it first, and he never did — but I was in a most hopeful and beautiful place."

"Lucky Strike" is anchored by Troye Sivan's exquisite, vivid imagery; lines like "I wanna skip stones on your skin, boy" and "I wanna tiptoe through your bliss" create a carefree effect like visiting a surreal, floral vacation spot.

"I just felt excited to finally be getting the experience of crazy, unabashed love that I've always wanted to know and feel," Sivan told Them. of writing his sophomore album.

"I just wanted to take a second to celebrate that and document it a little bit for myself, so I can look back on it in the future and say, 'Wow, I remember exactly how that felt.'"

"We Fell in Love in October" is just one of many sincere, guileless love songs by girl in red, aka Marie Ulven. It's also, however, the best at capturing love's warmth and comfort.

While many songs are written about falling in love, "October" describes being in love — when another year rolls around, a certain season returns, and those sounds and smells and colors remind you how lucky you are.

"It's basically the first song I wrote about a girl in the first relationship I had with a girl," Ulven told The Fader in 2018. "It's about when things have kind of settled and I'm like 'F--- yeah, this is my girl. And you will be my girl.' I don't know, I love this girl."

Perfume Genius, aka Mike Hadreas, may have used the term "gay magic" as a joke in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, but it's the perfect way to describe so much of his music. In particular, the gauzy, enigmatic "Die 4 You" elegantly blurs the lines between love and sex, "to communicate a willingness to really give yourself to someone completely."

"It's about how if he truly needed me I would be there, and that wasn't always true of me," Hadreas said of its parent album, "No Shape."

"There are a lot of songs about youth and young love, especially in relation to gayness; I wanted to make sacred the other side of that."

Much of Tyler, the Creator's fifth album "Igor" explores the nuances of a failed relationship, but "I Think" is the bright, vibrating heart of the listening experience.

While it's true that "I Think" doesn't describe an untroubled or carefree romance, it does expose a tender side of the famous provocateur. Tyler describes that jittery, fluttering limbo before you expose your true feelings, evoking an iconic story of queer longing ("Man, I wish you would call me / By your name, 'cause I'm sorry") in the process.

Tyler's sharp lyricism, paired with the song's grainy, glittery production, makes "I Think" one of his most intoxicating songs yet.

Janelle Monáe, who identifies as pansexual and a "free-a-- motherf---er," said she sees pink as a unifying color because it's "found in the deepest and darkest nooks and crannies of humans everywhere."

At its core, "Pynk" is an ode to desire that's not bound by gender definitions or restrictions. But it also glistens like the eyes of a woman in love: "Let's count the ways we could make this last forever," Monáe sings, and you can almost hear her grinning. The song gracefully combines Monáe's characteristic boldness with a light, airy delicacy that flows like a summer breeze.

Tayla Parx told Insider that she wrote "Dance Alone" about the night she met her now-girlfriend.

"You know that moment where you're, like, 'Ooh, who is that?' It's literally about the moment when I saw the person who I am currently with, and I just wanted to dance with her," Parx recalled.

"We ended up dancing for hours, just having an amazing time. And I mean, like, a sweaty type of dance. Like, we should stop. We should sit down. But when you're in that kind of atmosphere..."

Indeed, "Dance Alone" effortlessly embodies that disco-ball-induced euphoria — as if it was torn straight from a rom-com set in the late '70s, with Parx playing the starry-eyed protagonist.

Frank Ocean's piercing falsetto on its own ("'Cause I've been thinkin' 'bout forevaaaa") is one of the most perfect, memorable moments in music history.

"Thinkin Bout You" is a priceless queer artifact. The lead single from "Channel Orange" was released shortly before Ocean posted that iconic thank-you note on Tumblr, which revealed the album's main source of inspiration: his first love, who was a man.

"4 summers ago, I met somebody," he wrote. "I was 19 years old. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. Everyday almost. And on the days we were together, time would glide."

"Before writing this I'd told some people my story. I'm sure these people kept me alive, kept me safe.. sincerely. These are the folks I wanna thank from the floor of my heart," he added. "I feel like a free man. If I listen closely... I can hear the sky falling too."

"Thinkin Bout You" embodies every humid, gleaming, red-raw emotion that Ocean evokes in that letter. It sounds like freedom; it also sounds like the sky falling.

"Cupid" embodies the sparkling, youthful intimacy of modern "bedroom pop," and Ryan Beatty's weightless voice thrives in this environment.

The famously diaristic subgenre is also reflected in Beatty's tender lyricism. He often juxtaposes pure, near-childish crush behaviors with subtle jabs at gender stereotypes: "Drawing hearts on my skin / With our initials in it / Ain't it nice out here, on the baseball field, when we're alone?"

"The more I allowed myself to be vulnerable writing, the better I became as a writer," he told Notion in 2018. "It sounds like such a dumb statement, but it allowed me to be more specific with my own experience and that's why writing with male pronouns, I never questioned if this word was something I should use — I just wrote the song and didn't even realize."

Shura's album "Forevher" was written while the singer was falling in love with her girlfriend — although its playful, electric second single, "Religion (U Can Lay Your Hands on Me)," was created before the two women had even met in person.

"'Religion' is a very sexy song, and I wrote it about someone I'd never had sex with, never even met," Shura told The Guardian. "It's probably one of the most physically explicit songs and I often wonder if the reason I felt emboldened to do that was because it physically couldn't happen."

"It gave me license to play around with the idea of religion as a form of devotion; devotion is closer to love, and religion is close to sex in many ways, in that it finds itself in almost every culture," she told MTV.

Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander wrote "Shine" for his then-boyfriend, adding a rare burst of unimpeded joy to the band's debut album "Communion."

"I have an intense feeling for all the songs on the album, but I feel really attached to 'Shine' because it's the most positive track on the whole album, and it was quite difficult to write a song like that," Alexander told The Advocate.

Clairo, who came out as queer while she was working on her debut album "Immunity," says she wrote the sunlit, springy "Sofia" about the first crushes she had on girls.

"Especially being a song about my sexuality, it was important to me that 'Sofia' was celebratory because it should be celebrated," she told Coup de Main.

The song is peppered with adorably intimate, honest moments: "I just wanna say / How I love you with your hair down," Clairo blushes.

"I kind of wanted to make the lyrics a little corny, 'I'll never leave you to the end of time,' 'I'll love you forever,'" she told Beats 1. "Everyone's done that. But to me, it's like, I've never done that and this is a corny song about a woman. I want to be corny."

Although it wasn't public knowledge at the time of its release, George Michael wrote "Jesus to a Child" as a tribute to Anselmo Feleppa, his longtime partner who died in 1993 of AIDS-related complications.

"I think Anselmo was the first time that I really loved someone selflessly," Michael later said, according to BBC.

The somber song is the sonic equivalent of open-heart surgery. Naturally, "Jesus to a Child" has dark and mournful overtones, but its dominant themes are gratitude, acceptance, and the lasting warmth of a conscious-altering love: "So the words you could not say / I'll sing them for you / And the love we would have made / I'll make it for two."