Janelle Monáe

Janelle Monáe is a pansexual musician, actress, and cultural icon who came out as pansexual in a Rolling Stone cover story in 2018. "Being a queer Black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker," she told the magazine. The disclosure, framed with characteristic defiance and joy, resonated enormously with LGBTQ+ audiences, particularly Black queer fans who had long intuited the queer subtext in her Afrofuturist, android-themed music and imagery. On screen, Monáe has become one of the most compelling dramatic actresses of her generation: her performance as Teresa in Moonlight (2016), Barry Jenkins's Oscar-winning film about a gay Black man coming of age in Miami, was a study in maternal warmth and moral complexity. She appeared as Mary Jackson in Hidden Figures (2016) and delivered a sharp comedic turn in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). Her album Dirty Computer (2018), released the same year as her coming out, is widely considered one of the defining queer pop albums of the decade.