By Danny Tye
When it comes to Omar Apollo’s identity – both as a queer man and as a Mexican-American, he prefers showing to telling. Discussing his hesitation to come out publicly, motivated in part by his conservative upbringing, he told Attitude, “I like to suck dick, why do you have to know that?”. Omar Apollo on the film Queer, his music, and age-gap relationships.
Illustration by GAY45.eu
Apollo admits that relocating to Los Angeles from his hometown in Indiana enabled him to speak more openly about his queerness, and recounted the experience of coming out to his traditional Catholic family in his 2023 song Ice Slippin – “Home is where you’re supposed to be […] If I take back my words, would you return to me?”. In spite of the difficulties of his upbringing, Apollo owes much of his musical style and success to his heritage.
Born to Mexican immigrant parents in 1997, his musical education came from his mother’s taste for ranchero and bolero singers, such as Los Panchos and Pedro Infante, combined with his father’s love for The Beatles, and mediated through the Catholic Church. He credits the unleashing of his musical talent to mandatory participation in the church choir, and to the guitar his parents bought him at the age of 12.
Though the church served as a place for him to hone and demonstrate his craft, he soon felt creatively stifled by it. As he recalled in a feature piece in Remezcla, “They never listened to me… I had all these ideas; I had arrangements; I had transcribed some shit and made it different, made it prettier.” He branched out into secular music by watching YouTube covers and copying the fingerwork, which then led to him posting similar covers himself.
Though his Latinidad had already made him a target for harassment at high school in small-town Indiana, this early musical expression worsened the matter. Still, Apollo feels no resentment – as he said in Fader, “I loved the attention. […] I was like Whatever, and kept doing it. Of course, now they’re all like Oh my gawd, Omar!”
He crossed the bridge from low-level Soundcloud artist to international celebrity almost instantaneously – after being lent $30 by a friend to upload his music to Spotify, his 2017 song Ugotme gained tens of thousands of streams overnight, reaching 15 million within a year. His first two EPs, 2018’s Stereo and Friends the year after, further elevated his image. After a tour across the US and Canada, he recorded his first mixtape, Apolonio, in 2020, which featured collaborations with Kali Uchis and Ruel and led to NME dubbing Apollo the “new master of steamy bedroom jams.”
His two albums have both merited acclaim. 2022’s Ivory, featuring a second collaboration with Uchis, earned Apollo recognition for his ability to interweave genres and influences, from indie-pop and R&B to traditional Mexican music and Latin trap. His album God Said No, released last year, featured a spoken-word feature from Pedro Pascal discussing grief, interwoven with a general theme of heartbreak and anger following the breakdown of a romantic relationship. In Pitchfork’s review, where the album earned a 7.4, Apollo was praised for going “beyond downbeat balladeering,” and weaving his “sadness, anger, and self-doubt through a collection of anthemic choruses and disco-tinged pop tracks.”
God Said No was demonstrably less bilingual than much of Apollo’s previous output – the only Spanish lyrics come midway through the album on the track Empty, where Apollo sings “I sing in another language so that you can’t understand me.” At the same time, Apollo began to speak more openly about the harsh reality of growing up queer in a Mexican Catholic family. After largely shying away from discussing the topic explicitly, he reflected in GQ: “All the rules, man. Can’t be gay, can’t cuss, can’t do drugs. I’m just like, ‘What am I supposed to do?”
As well as speaking more openly about himself and his background, Apollo has begun to branch out into different creative ventures. A month after releasing God Said No, he confirmed his starring role in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival this week. The film – an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ 1985 book of the same name, which went unpublished for over 30 years due to censorship fears – will feature a sex scene between Apollo and Daniel Craig, which has been highly anticipated in the queer press.
Much of the chatter surrounding this scene pivots on the age gap between the two actors. Craig, a veteran actor most famous for his James Bond prestige, is 56 years old; Apollo, aged 27, is nearly three decades younger. Of course, representations of queer age-gap relationships are nothing new to Guadagnino’s filmography, with his 2017 adaptation of André Aciman’s romance Call Me By Your Name infamously starring a then-21 year old Timothée Chalamet as Elio, the 17-year-old summertime lover of an older researcher named Oliver, played by a then-32 year old Armie Hammer. Nonetheless, the Queer scene, described by IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio as “the most explicit gay sex scene I can remember in any mainstream movie,” comes with much anticipation from a queer audience who are not used to such internally-common relationships displayed so candidly and sensitively on screen. “It was a vibe,” Apollo said of filming the scene with Craig, “[we were] drinking gin and tonics.”
Revolving around what Guadagnino describes as “the fever dream of connection and disconnection,” Queer has allegedly faced a mixed response from distributors and in press previews. Nonetheless, Apollo’s acting debut, as well as a script crafted by Justin Kuritzkes, the screenwriter from Guadagnino’s most recent queer-coded release, Challengers, will no doubt entice queer cinemagoers.
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