time warp

That time Carly Rae Jepsen gave us a video with a queer twist—and the gay-for-pay star who still regrets it

By · 12 comments · Updated on January 26, 2024
Image Credit: “Call Me Maybe,” 604 Records Inc.

By now, it shouldn’t come as a shock to say that the most fervent of Carly Rae Jepsen’s fans are gay.

We’re no musicologists, but it would seem the devoted queer fanbase began to congeal around the release of the Canadian pop princess’s pitch-perfect third album, Emotion in 2015. Though favorably reviewed, it failed to produce a radio single as successful as her previous record, thus giving us no choice but to stan. (We gays love an underdog, you see.)

However, Miss Jepsen was already laying the groundwork with her breakout single, “Call Me Maybe,” which was released 12 years ago this week—on September 20, 2011.

Look, you know the song; it was everywhere. But its ascension stateside was slow and steady. And by the time it began to climb the Billboard chats in the U.S., Jepsen was ready to strike while the iron was hot with a memorable music video.

Of course, this wasn’t just any music video: It was one with a clever, gay “twist” ending that made the visuals just as iconic as the track itself, proving that Jepsen was already in dialogue with her LGBTQ+ fans well before many of us were even calling her “mother.”

Playing into the song’s lyrics about falling head-over-heels for someone you just met, the video casts Jepsen as a suburban girl who can’t keep her eyes off the hunky boy-next-door (played by Holden Nowell).

Total ally that she is, Jepsen’s video finds excuses for the neighbor to take his shirt off while mowing the lawn—in a sweltering slo-mo shot many of us will never forget—and looking all sexy in his tank top while fixing his car.

In the final seconds, a lovesick Jepsen goes to write her number down for the guy, and that’s when it happens: He locks eyes with one of her male bandmates instead, and shares his number with him.

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Honestly, it’s a pretty brilliant subversion of music video tropes, and totally worthy of applause: You could see a lesser person/pop star (or at least their team) wanting to avoid something so blatantly gay—so as not to “alienate” a “mainstream” audience. But Jepsen did it anyway, just as she was starting to make a name for herself.

Almost immediately, we knew this women had our back. And she hasn’t let us down since.

But there’s a downside—there always is, isn’t there?—though it’s no fault of Jepsen’s….

Nearly a dozen years later, “video vixen” Holden Nowell’s face (and body) is one we haven’t quite been able to shake. The Calgary-born model-turned-actor with icy blue eyes and a svelte yet muscular physique felt like a real discovery for the “Call Me Maybe” video—so much so that he was honored among People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive” the following year.

At the time, Nowell seemed cool with all the attention the clip had gotten him—and why wouldn’t he be? He even gave an interview to his local LGBTQ+ magazine Gay Calgary saying he “really like[d]” the video’s ending, despite not being “sold” on it at first.

Related:

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This duo gives exactly as much gay energy as the pairing warrants.

A couple years later, however, Nowell changed his tune. In an exclusive interview with iHeart Radio in 2018, the model didn’t have the fondest memories of the video—and had been trying his best to move past it:

“It’s what people began to recognize me as and know me as, and it was only that,” Nowell shared. “It was really difficult for me and really frustrating. I was always the ‘Call Me Maybe’ guy, everywhere I went, and after awhile I got really sick of hearing that.”

Fair enough—no one likes to be viewed as a one-hit wonder.

There’s also the fact that he was only paid $500 for his day of filming and was promised royalties that he never saw a penny of. In the interview, he blamed it on some “shady” dealings allegedly going on at his modeling agency, but also didn’t “have anything positive to say about Carly Rae,” who he claims never reached out after the video’s success.

But ultimately, it sounds like Nowell was never too comfortable with the “gay twist” to begin with: “The fact that they had to make me gay at the end of the video… it was all very… I didn’t like being known as the gay guy in the ‘Call Me Maybe’ video. It was just something I wasn’t used to.”

To be fair, the model also said he thinks “people should be allowed to love who they want to love,” but the iHeart Radio piece does note he’d been observed using “gay” as a pejorative on his social media channels, so… we still have our eyes on you, Nowell.

Now a self-described “father, evangelist, and rap legend” performing under the name SixXx’Tre, it would appear he’s finally moved on from his gay-for-pay music video days.

Meanwhile, we still can’t get “Call Me Maybe”—or that legendary music video—out of our heads.

Related:

5 homoerotic music videos that were too hot for the censors to handle

Cheers to the artists who live provocatively and embrace sexuality, and may the art ahead of us be even wilder than these.

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