Is last christmas a gay song

Christmas is a potent time of year for my family and I. A close family friend is fighting a losing battle to cancer, as my family deals with the worst financial hardships we've ever seen -- this will be the third year I show up Christmas day empty-handed.

is not a gay song, but it became an anthem for the LGBTQ+ community due to its themes of heartbreak and loneliness. InI split up with my partner of three years, someone I had met on the internet and struggled to stay with through complications like distance and him being in the closet to his family.

And almost no existing versions of it capture the same beautiful, sublime sorrow. Yet for many, Christmas remains a difficult and -- global warming will excuse the pun -- hard to weather time of year for many people not only in America, but around the world.

“Last Christmas” is such a uniquely beloved song that it inspired a film of the same name, and an internet game that people play each holiday season—but that’s just a small part of. There are few covers by gay or queer artists that have made waves within the public consciousness; Savage Garden's Darren Hayes chucked a version onto a Rosie O'Donnell Christmas album that fell into the bargain bin of 90s ephemera.

And indeed, "Last Christmas" seems to chug valiantly along with a metallic, iron-tasting grief, like curling up alone beside an aluminum tree on a rainy Christmas eve. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a well-documented phenomena, though psychological studies like those conducted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention confirm that suicide rates in America actually drop in the winter and rise in the spring and summer.

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Last Christmas The Comfort : It's a huge company with s of employees from

Anyone who has been forced to endure American public radio in December is familiar with the usual parade of old Christmas hits; many recorded with big bands and famous period singers from the 40s and 50s onward. George Michael, the singer, came out as gay 14 years after the song's release, but he said it was not about his sexuality.

A cursory google of the words "Grindr" and "loneliness" together yields handfuls of articles and psychological studies going as far back as that all seem to say the same thing: for all the good the digital age has done in bringing us closer together, gay and queer men feel further and further alienated from one another.

Already contributed? It is an odd staple of holiday radio; while it is certainly not the only holiday classic to deal with loneliness, alienation and more mature themes like adultery, it is one of the few holiday pop standards to evoke issues of gay loneliness and alienation -- possibly being the only gay popular Christmas song.

Bing Crosby was writing tributes to soldiers who missed spending Christmas with their families in the '40s, and Elvis was warbling about blue Christmases in the 60s. There is literally nothing in the song to evoke any festiveness besides a sprinkling of silver bells and the word "Christmas" itself.

But, aside from modern reworkings of old songs like "Silver Bells" and "Silent Night," two original Christmas songs survived the synthetic, neoliberal capitalist wave pools of the 80s and 90s: Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You," and Wham!

Join today and support our work. Join the HuffPost Community. There is no shortage of sad Christmas songs, and there certainly is no shortage of covers of "Last Christmas" that fail to dig deeper into the song's pine-scented layers of melancholy. Log in to hide these messages.

The song "Last Christmas" by Wham! And inTaylor Swift churned out a candy-cane country pop cover, failing to retain any of the original's devestation but hitting a respectable 28 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart.

It is as immaculate a pop song as it is a modern Christmas carol; no universal tidings of peace, but the gentle closing of a door on a massive, personal wound. I survived a year of intense heartbreak and loneliness that will no doubt carry into It was a year where I found myself more and more turning to social dating and hookup apps like Grindr to ease the pain of feeling isolated and undesirable.

As Christmas time rolls around again, here are six key facts about "Last Christmas" by George Michael and Wham!. It is both sublime and utterly devastating -- Michael's falsettos, whispering grief in a melody almost Greensleeves-like in its simplicity survive the datedness of its synthetic 80s sheen.

While it's too early to tell whether streams or sales of Carly Rae Jepsen's cover will the days of anyone at her record label merry and bright, it has racked up overstreams on YouTube in the three weeks between its release and the time of this article.