Frank Ocean's Tumblr post
Revisiting an 'intimately sincere and profoundly brave' non-labelled love story
On American Independence Day in 2012, R&B star Frank Ocean uploaded a screenshot of a text file to his Tumblr site. Typed in all caps, Ocean’s two paragraphs (around 750 words) talked about his first experience of love, which had involved another man. Unlike many other celebrity declarations around sexuality, this wasn’t presented as a single statement of fact, nor was it mediated by the mainstream media; Ocean told the world his own story in his own way.
Storytelling
Ocean began the post with a complication: his emotional state for the previous three years. “I’ve screamed at my creator, screamed at clouds in the sky,” he writes, “for some explanation. Mercy maybe”. We then learn that, four years earlier, when he was just 19 years old, Ocean met someone. There’s no grand announcement that the “someone” is a man. Ocean simply refers to “him” in the context of the story: “Most of the day I’d see him, and his smile, I’d hear his conversation and his silence”.
Later in the post, when Ocean drives to LA to tell his first love how he feels, his openness isn’t reciprocated: “he said kind things, he did his best, but he wouldn’t admit the same”. It’s this unrequited love that led Ocean to write music, in order, he says, to keep himself, “busy and sane… to create worlds that were rosier than mine”.
By the end of the piece, Ocean looks back at the experience and appreciates what he had that summer. He thanks the someone and the people he later shared his story with: “these people kept me alive, kept me safe”. He ends the post saying, “I feel like a free man”.
Showing not telling
Ocean’s letter is all about showing not telling. He doesn’t make a statement that he’s gay or bi. He simply talks about his first love (a man), while also mentioning relationships with women. He doesn’t explicitly identify the extent to which his experience affected his mental health. Instead he shows us he was searching for a “rosier” world and needed to be kept “alive” and “safe”.
Owning the story
Sharing a story like this on Tumblr was relatively unusual at the time, as two contemporary examples show. Two days before Ocean’s post, American soccer player Megan Rapinoe publicly came out, stating, “for the record: I’m gay” in an interview with Out magazine. Two months earlier American actor Jim Parsons’ sexuality was revealed in a New York Times profile, which included this line: “Mr Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship”. While Rapinoe’s own words are quoted, both pieces are edited and presented by a commercial publication. And both label the celebrities as “gay”.
Ocean circumvented these intermediaries. He owns his story and he shared it in on his own fluid terms, without defining himself by labels. It made, says British rapper and radio host Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles, for an “intimately sincere and profoundly brave statement… that would go on to empower a generation”, a view echoed by writer Alex Frank: “Ocean’s post symbolises the entire potential of the internet in a single moment: a self-published, identity-forging, community-building piece of content. He could not have set a better precedent for regular young kids sharing their lives online—gay, straight, bi, trans, questioning, whatever”.
That precedent was all about telling stories. In an interview in GQ published a few months after his Tumblr post, Ocean himself linked its impact with the fact that he told a relatable story, in which people feel familiar emotions. “You can’t feel a box. You can’t feel a label,” he says. But you can relate to experiences and emotions: you can feel a story.