Seven years ago when Kehlani first hit the scene with her dynamic mixtape, Cloud 19, she wasn’t cookie-cutter. She was fluid, sexy and unapologetically bold. Since then, the now she-they identifying artist has evolved into a mama and grown as an artist.
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In her newest cover story for Advocate, a magazine that describes itself as “your source for LGBTQ news since 1967,” she opens up about how she’s raising her daughter in a “progressive, loving environment” and her feelings around her mainstream success as a queer artist. The Oakland native expressed, “I have a lot of privilege.” This privilege stems from Kehlani describing herself as “bisexual and on a gender spectrum” and “cisgender-presenting, straight-presenting.”
“I didn’t even really have to come out in my private life,” she explains. “I don’t walk down the street and people look at me and go, 'Oh, I bet she’s queer. Or I bet that she’s into women' or anything like that because of the way I present. That’s all privilege and I think that there are quite a few artists who were truly at the forefront but weren’t able to make the strides that I was able to make being 100 percent myself because of the way they present and the biases and the phobias of the American public and the world.... I’ve been lucky, super lucky.”
She is thankful that this generation is so fluid in expressing themselves, especially in terms of identifying. She is also “appreciative” of those willing to provide teachable moments when she “missteps or [says] something wrong or when [she] truly [doesn’t] understand.” It’s those types of lessons that Baelani is instilling in her parenting of two-year-old, Adeya.
She expressed, “There’s a lot of societal standards and they’re just old and outdated. Things like you have to go about life one way and you’re raised to find something you’re not passionate about and stick to it and make certain amounts of money...and then not help anyone and just hoard everything. Anything you could imagine that we’ve been taught is our purpose, I just want my daughter to know that it’s OK to feel you don’t agree with any of that and it’s OK to march to the beat of your own drum.
They feel, “Too many kids, they grow up with these incredible, beautiful dreams that aren’t anything like what we’ve been told we have to do. And then they hit teenager years and they’re like, Oh, s***. I have to fall into the assembly line.” However, with the “progressive, loving environment” she’s raising her daughter in, societal pressures are one thing she’s definitely keeping away from. The singer mentioned by allowing her daughter to read queer books and see “healthy queer couples,” she won’t feel “this is different from normal.” It will just be.
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