Chappell Roan Allowed Me to Embrace My Inner Stan

My partner and I once played a game where we tried to pinpoint the exact lyric from "The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess" that cemented our Chappell Roan obsessions. For him, the answer was obvious. He can never resist the cockeyed refrain in "Naked in Manhattan" when Roan implores a friend to "touch me, touch me, touch me, TOUCH ME!!" But I have a harder time narrowing it down. "Long hair, no bra, that's my type" is an all-timer. I feel "Call me hot, not pretty" on a cellular level, like "girl math" but for flirting.

Maybe what hooked me wasn't even a lyric, but the motorcycle rev in the first track, "Femininomenon" — a ridiculous, growly non-sequitur that's a little boastful and obnoxious and totally out of the blue. It sets up an album that's dripping with surprises, and one that's been on constant repeat in my head ever since.

I'm clearly not the only bisexual who feels this way. The ruby-haired pop artist originally from Missouri has the world's queers in a (consensual) choke hold, drawing record numbers to her festival shows all summer long in 2024, from Boston Calling to Outside Lands. "Midwest Princess," her debut studio album, sold its millionth copy at the end of August last year. In November, she teased her latest single, sapphic country bop "The Giver," on "Saturday Night Live," which already has its own do-si-do choreography for fans to learn. But perhaps what's most impressive is that Roan spent weeks trailing Taylor Swift at number two on the Billboard 200 chart last year — all the more stunning after the 2023 Eras-mania that whipped the world into a blonde frenzy.

While everyone was shelling out their life savings for a chance to see the Eras Tour last summer, I was doing somersaults in my brain trying to figure out why I couldn't relate. As much as I wanted to be swept up in the cultural moment, I didn't feel anything.

It wasn't that I didn't know a good chunk of her discography — Swift has been making commercially successful music since I was in sixth grade. I loved "Fearless" and "Teardrops on My Guitar" as much as the next romantically confused minor. But as Swift and I grew up, we grew in different directions. What I would learn about my body, my desires, and my politics made me feel I didn't belong in a fan club that looked more like a Big Ten sorority than a women's lib conference, at least from the outside.

If I wanted to be a superfan like the other girls, I would need a pop star who could bridge those worlds and others — someone to lace romance with rebellion, raunch, and raucousness. If I was ever going to feel anything close to Swiftie-level devotion, it would be for someone who's tender and yearning but knows what she wants. Someone who shows the world how playful, how powerful, how multifaceted sapphic love is. Who wears her heart on her sleeve and blood-red lipstick smeared all over her teeth.

Chappell Roan — in lots of tulle and drag makeup, in her miniskirts and go-go boots — has made me a stan for the first time in my life.

I discovered her album in late summer 2023, as I was nearing the end of a relationship with a woman who ultimately decided she couldn't split her focus between me and her PhD in robotics. Obviously the robots won. Several months earlier, I had ended a relationship with a big-hearted boy who, despite his best efforts, would never really understand my queerness. I had just moved into a new apartment with a friend I loosely had a crush on, my work life was unstable, and I was about to be love-bombed and ghosted by a parade of confused Tinder men.

The walls of my metaphorical house were held together with masking tape. It was then that this tornado of a Midwest princess swept through, shattered the windows, leveled the ceilings, and broke something open in me that I'd been intermittently trying to access and snuff out since middle school and the dawn of the T-Swift empire: my desire.

For queers, the "sin" of our pervertedness is deeply ingrained. Messaging from all sides — media, lawmakers, neighbors with homophobic lawn signs — tells us we have dirty minds. That we want what's unholy, unnatural, and unspeakable. Like so many young, queer people, I was bent in the shape of that shame. Roan throws her shoulder pads back, her cleavage high. I am perverted, she proclaims. I am kinky. I am feral. And aren't I majestic?

Not only is Roan charting a new path for queer self-expression, she's rewriting the rules of celebrity, asserting that her fame doesn't make her public property. Months before an explosive acceptance speech at the Grammys, in which she demanded better wages and health insurance for artists, her social media post firmly insisting that her fans give her space, treat her like a human being, and respect her privacy sparked massive controversy over how celebrities, especially women, should act. "Women don't owe you shit," she wrote in her statement.

Core to being a Chappell stan — a Chaperone? A Pony? A Popstar? — are some of the most precious tenets of queerness: setting and respecting boundaries, protecting and uplifting ourselves and our communities, and being unapologetic about who we are and what we need.

In my current romantic relationship, a mutual Roan stanhood was one of our earliest points of compatibility. But once, on a date with someone else, I played Roan's "Tiny Desk" performance on YouTube. She was good, the date said, "but it's just 'girl music.'"

Yes, I said. Exactly.

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.