Janelle Monáe Frees Herself

She rose up as a ceaselessly innovative pop android. Now, she’s ready to reveal the real person waiting inside

- Brittany Spanos

Janelle monáe is crying in her spacesuit. It’s early April in Atlanta, and she’s in one of the basement studios of her Wondaland Records headquarters, surrounded by computer monitors and TV screens, one of them running a screensaver that displays images of her heroes: Prince, Martin Luther King Jr., Pam Grier, Tina Turner, Lupita Nyong’o, David Bowie. She’s about to reveal, for the first time, something the world has long guessed, something her closest friends and family already know, something she’s long been loath to say in public. As she sings on a song from her new album, Dirty Computer, “Let the rumors be true”: Janelle Monáe is not, she finally admits, the immaculate android, the “alien from outer space/The cybergirl without a face” she’s claimed to be over a dec ade’s worth of albums, videos, concerts and even interviews – she is, instead, a flawed, messy, flesh-and blood 32-year-old human being.

And she has another rumor to confirm. “Being a queer black woman in America,” she says, taking a breath as she comes out, “someone who has been in relationships with both men and women – I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” She initially identified as bisexual, she clarifies, “but then later I read about pansexuality and was like, ‘Oh, these are things that I identify with too.’ I’m open to learning more about who I am.”