Depending on how liberally you define “openly” and “queer,” Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails could be considered an openly queer artist, given his transparent ties to the leather community. Personally I wouldn’t, but I’ve seen people try to make an argument. It’s been a 30-year point of contention from fans, though, that Reznor might be a little more queer, a little less openly. What? Oh, the last article took the high road on speculation—well I don’t give a damn. It’s Pride Month, and if you’re fighting for queer rights, you’d better support queer wrongs, too. We do this shit all the time—I mean, you’ve read a fanfic before, right? Right? 

So, now it’s time to put a decades-long whisper campaign into ink. Time to lay out every verse that’s given folks in ‘Frisco a glimmer of hope. Time to chronologically explicate all the turns of phrase that angsty theatre majors have heard a bit of themselves in. Time to show you why Trent Reznor is gay.*

*Well, bi. Trent’s got a wife. They kiss and they dance and they make music together and I’m not sure either of them have any clue what boots sound like, but I’m not here to take this away from them.

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“The Only Time” – Pretty Hate Machine

Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine featured a more synth-poppy, commercially accessible tone than the band would come to grow famous for, but it nonetheless showcased Trent’s trademark depressive and nihilistic lyricism. And it was really horny. Take, for instance, the refrain of “The Only Time.” “This is the only time I really feel alive.” It’s not exactly a secret what he’s talking about here. However, the background of the rest of the track adds some potential flair to it.

A hallmark of Pretty Hate Machine’s sound is the extensive use of religious imagery, and this track is no exception. Trent’s hung up on some kinda Christian guilt around the action he’s getting. His “moral standing is lying down,” and an unsung lyric in the liner notes, “I can’t help thinking Christ never had it like this.” It’s feeling like a little more than standard-issue depravity, too. I mean, whatever slings and arrows he’s got in his bedroom might be perverse, even degenerate, but immoral? And it’s not like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were policing what Big J thought crossed a line between the sheets, so this guilt has gotta be coming from some object of fervent religious reprehension. It’s in the chorus, too, when Reznor told us, “Maybe I’m all messed up/Maybe I’m all messed up in you.” Could just be love, but it’s striking a lot of the same chords as before. And even back in the first verse: “Lay my hands on Heaven and the sun and the moon and the stars/While the Devil wants to fuck me in the back of his car.” Sorry, Trent, you said his car?

His?

You can say “her” if you want to dude, the rhyme scheme’s fine either way. I don’t think you’d be shaking any foundations by calling the Devil a she, either; temptresses and succubi have been around for a pretty long time. Unless you’re trying to tell us something. “Nothing quite like the feel of something new” indeed, I guess. Occam’s Razor would say that that line pertains to Reznor’s introduction to S&M hijinks or even just a new lover, but there’s a new barber in town, and he’s got homosexuality on his mind. Under this light, a lot of the prior imagery comes into focus, but it also recontextualizes the chorus. Trent isn’t exactly new to fucking and sucking, so why does he lament this being “the only time [he] really feel[s] alive”? Well, I think he’s experimenting, discovering things, awakening something within himself. We all go through it, Trent.

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“Kinda I Want To” – Pretty Hate Machine

If we read “The Only Time” as Trent Reznor introducing the possibility of his homosexual tendencies, then this song crystallizes how he feels about them. And, well, it’s not positive. There’s still a lot of religious shame baked into what Trent is doing. He’s bargaining that “maybe God will cover up His eyes.” As much as he’s enjoying it, it’s obvious that Christian doctrine deeply influences how Trent perceives his own actions. The Gay™ is still clearly a moral wrong. It’s something fundamentally incorrect, something punishable, and so it shows through with a little self-reproach. He even lays it out for us: “I know it’s not the good thing/And I know it’s not the right thing/But kinda I want to.” Just put a pin in that for now, because we’re going to come back to it.

Oh, and lest you think this one’s about adultery:

“There’s a devil sleeping in my bed/He’s watching you from across the way.” 

Again with the male demons? Look, man, we get it. Fooling around with another man is evil. Leviticus 18:22 and all that. Can we please just be more original next time and move on?

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“Gave Up” – Broken

Reznor’s second release as Nine Inch Nails, Broken, is an EP steeped in hatred. When it isn’t being directed at his overbearing record label, it’s turned upon himself. “Gave Up” is half self-loathing anthem and half potential breakup song, with a salt rim of gay undertones. The opening, “Perfect little dream, the kind that hurts the most/Forgot how it feels—well, almost,” seems to be about a past lover. Trent also says of this fling, “Smashed up integrity/Smashed up what I believed in… Smashed up all that was true.” You look at the presumed essentialism of heterosexuality, you look at the earlier strong ties to religion, and it figures Trent might be pointing to something here. Zip around to the pre-chorus, and he’s shouting, “It took you to make me realize/It took you to make me see the light.” What exactly have you realized in these past two years, Trent? Doesn’t sound like it’s the light of God you’ve been seeing.

Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’d like to see you come up with a better explanation. Look, maybe I’m biased. “It took you to make me see the light” was my status on some socials back in late October, and it stayed that way for too long. Far too long. Far, far too long.

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“Suck” – Broken

There’s a lot to unpack with this one, so we’re just gonna jump right into it. The first verse is pretty run-of-the-mill, and contains a lot of what we’ve already seen. It’s Trent’s bread and butter: God’s abandoned me and I’m so sick and twisted and yeah yeah yeah, we’ve heard the tune before. But in the second verse, things start getting tougher to unravel. It looks like we’re leaning straighter than before with “she makes it sweeter than the sun,” but things get cloudy from there as Trent continues, “I bow my head to confess/The temple walls are made of flesh.” Hmm. Okay. Bowing one’s head is pretty strongly associated with one specific action, and it isn't often one with a “she” on the other side. You’d definitely have walls made of flesh there, too. Maybe Trent finally learned to be more discreet with pronouns. On the other hand, it’d be weird for him to be calling himself the “temple” when he thinks he’s so sinful. And, I mean, you could make the bowing work for giving head regardless of the parts, though it’s… more difficult in some scenarios. Oughta give the clear answer some credence, right? However, in the spoken outro, Trent mentions “a thousand throats,” which seems inconsistent with the female anatomy, at best. Whoof. Well, it was a very narrow margin, but I don’t think I’d be the first listener to give this one a stamp of Pretty Damn Gay. Got dicey for a second, but I’m calling it case closed.

I feel like I’m forgetting something. Am I forgetting something? You’d tell me if I was forgetting something, right?

Oh, yeah. THE SONG IS CALLED SUCK. HE SAYS SUCK EIGHT GODDAMN TIMES.

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“Heresy” – The Downward Spiral

NIN’s 1994 magnum opus, The Downward Spiral, is a concept album widely agreed to be semi-autobiographical. The third track, “Heresy,” disavows Christianity, being vocally critical of the Catholic Church and its stances on the AIDS crisis in the process. Now, for one thing, it was pretty rare to see artists that weren’t inside the community sing about HIV. You’d have artists like Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Prince that spoke out, alongside anyone hired for Philadelphia… and precious few others. That list grows a hell of a lot quicker when you factor in your Elton Johns and George Michaels and plus, Trent Reznor is angry at the Church about this. Really, profusely angry. If you didn’t know better, it’d be easy to mistake his virulence for offenc—oh.

The astute among you may recall Christianity causing Trent a lot of grief earlier on. There’s a lot of reason to believe that “Heresy” is him holding a grudge for those feelings. Take the line “He tries to tell me what I put inside of me.” It could be a shot at consubstantiation. There’s a weak possibility that it refers to religious demonization of drug use. But I feel like we had a theory that Trent’s religion was getting all up in arms about him putting something else inside of himself. Oh, right. Men. What was he saying earlier? “I know it’s not the right thing/And I know it’s not the good thing”? Sounds an awful lot like someone was having their beliefs dictated for them. The next line, “He’s got the answers to ease my curiosity,” solidifies this link even further. While Catholicism can be disparaged as anti-intellectualist broadly, there’s only one kind of curiosity that’s pertinent both to Reznor and to the AIDS crisis: sexual curiosity. It’s sure as hell been seeming like Trent’s gayness/gaiety’s been suppressed (or eased, so to speak) during Pretty Hate Machine. Heteronormativity is a valid criticism of Abrahamic religions, but it’s not too difficult to read it as a personal grievance here.

Now, I want to take this one a step further here, but I need to note that I’m going to venture well out of reasonable territory and into tin foil cap land. I’ve always thought there was something a little plosive about how Trent delivers the “my” in “my curiosity.” Like he’s pushing it out a bit. To spare you the linguistics, if you close off the air from the nose in an “m” sound and push it out of the mouth, you get a “b.” By curiosity… Bycuriosity… bicu—I think we’ve got a word here! Bicurious was definitely a term in its nascence around the 90s, but I did find a couple hits of it being used in magazine classifieds, so it was probably in wider oral use. It could’ve worked as a sort of shibboleth, only noticeable to those who understand its meaning. I mean, if that’s what Trent was hinting at, “He’s got the answers to ease (my/bi)curiosity” would certainly be a little more direct about the gay thing. Now, do I think this is a plausible argument? No. Do I think anybody else was making this connection back in the 90s? Not really. But it’s fun to think about.

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Unfortunately, Trent was mostly done with his gay arc by 1999’s The Fragile and was too busy being depressed for other reasons. “There was a time where it used to mean just about everything…” to him, but not any longer (though perhaps, during “Please,” “...just like now”). It’s true that on “Starfuckers, Inc.” Trent sings: “And when I suck you off not a drop will go to waste,” which is a pretty gay thing to say, but it’s used entirely in a metaphorical sense, as supported by the subsequent line about ass-kissing. Unfortunately, Mr. Reznor was also through with making good music once the new millennium rolled around. The 2005 song and prospective Whitney Chewston caption “You Know What You Are?” offers a potential retrospective on Trent’s battles with identity, but is more likely explained by intravenous drug usage. Beyond that, there’s sexual stuff, but not a lot that feels like it’s coming from a place of gayness. Clearly men haven’t been at the top of his mind lately. And, let’s face it, it’s been a while since the ‘90s. Times have changed, and if Trent wanted to say anything about this, he’d have probably done so by now. It’d make good publicity for him, if nothing else. It would land him in the headlines of the tabloids, and probably drive up ticket prices for the next tour, too. 

The whole theory starts to fall apart the harder you look at it, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it. It doesn’t stop people from hearing their own struggles, their own angst in Reznor’s words. It doesn’t stop a kid from being able to feel like there really is someone out there that knows their pain. Queer people have learned to look past verisimilitude to see reflections of themselves; look at Voltron or the OG She-Ra. This whole debacle might be lacking in veracity, but for 30 years that hasn’t stopped people from convincing themselves that they had a true queer role model to soundtrack their anger. Maybe that’s just as good.