Welcome to MONTERO : The Devil and his Inability to Disappear from Popular Culture
By Georgie Crespi
The Devil’s status as a cultural icon is so widely accepted that he doesn’t just have a place in folklore and religion: he has his own Wikipedia page. His list of names alone are extensive — the Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub — and while academic studies focusing on the history of the Devil are substantial, with works like Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition, and Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World[1] offering detailed analyses of the Devil’s historical and literary development, these works rarely address why the Devil remains so popular in contemporary pop culture. In Devilish Consumption: Popular Culture in Satanic Socialization, Asbjørn Dyrendal explores how popular culture contributes to satanic identity formation,[2] but there is still much to be investigated about how personal perceptions and the media shape modern representations of Lucifer.
One consistent thread throughout the centuries of portrayals is the Devil’s connection to music — a form of expression often linked to rebellion. Lil Nas X’s ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name),’ released in 2021, is perhaps one of the most recent songs (with 1.9 billion plays on Spotify and 11 million likes on YouTube, as of this writing) to combine the character of the Devil and popular music to explore forms of rebellion. Looking at this song by Lil Nas X allows us to analyse both the Devil’s role in medieval times and how his position has changed in contemporary media.
The Devil is always outside of the binary of ‘normal’ due his form as an angel. Angels are not technically male or female; they are genderless and fluid. In scripture angels are described as having multiple wings (Isiah 6:2, Douay-Rheims), the cherubim have four faces and bodies full of eyes. (Ezekiel 10:12-14, Douay-Rheims) Through masculine pronouns are sometimes used, these reflect the need for grammar rather than biology. The biblical imagery shows angels as genderless, transcendent, and fluid in form, beyond human categories of sex. Lucifer, in modern media has been portrayed by men and women. Gwendoline Christie’s portrayal of Lucifer Morningstar in the Netflix series Sandman, is particularly ambiguous since her character lacks gendered pronouns. This makes the Devil a perfect figure for artistic representations of queer rebellion. Lil Nas X’s storyline within their music video shows that they reject Heaven (or are rejected —this is debated) and then find their place within Hell, a location that is usually seen as awful. The lyrics and the music video reveal how the Devil has been repeatedly used to escape the binary strictures of dominant society, and this piece will argue that the modern, pop culture Devil offers queer artists a way to subvert dominant hetero-normative discourse and create a space of rebellion, liberation, and acceptance for themselves.
Lil Nas X’s MONTERO: Reclaiming Hell
Lil Nas X’s ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)’ uses the figure of the Devil to symbolize rebellion against heteronormativity. In the music video, Lil Nas X descends into Hell after rejecting Heaven’s virtue and purity, embraces Satan, and deliberately subverts the traditional Christian binary of good and evil. The devil, in this context, becomes a liberating figure. The video’s imagery led some right-wing politicians to declare the song ‘evil content.’ Likewise, a Newsweek article in 2023 highlights Republican politicians taking offense with the use of Satan in pop culture and music, focusing on the Grammy performance of ‘Unholy’ by Sam Smith and Kim Petras, which Ted Cruz calls ‘evil’ and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests was a ‘demonic performance.’ Even pastors are worried about the so-called rise of ‘demonic activity,’ according to the article. The use of queer imagery and inclusion of French drag queen Paloma was even at the center of the 2024 Olympic opening ceremony controversy. However, what many fail to recognize is that subversive sexual content, music, and the Devil have been connected since medieval drama.
The medieval and early modern literary traditions often portrayed the Devil as a subversive figure and include sexual references. The morality plays of Mankind (c.1470) offer a few moments of this within its narrative. In Mankind[3], the vices (who work for the Devil) sing a ‘Crystemes songe’ (Christmas song) with the lyrics, ‘But he wyppe hys ars clen, but he wyppe hys ars clen’ (l.339) [But he wipes his arse clean, but he wipes his arse clean]. Alongside this lyric is the pun of of ‘hoylyke’ (l.343) [holy-like] which would have sounded more like ‘hole-lick.’ Pugh in their article discussing Queer Allegory within the play suggests that the character of Nought requests Mercy to ‘Anon of wyth yowr clothes, yf ʒe wyll play’[4] [ take off your clothes, and then we will play] (l. 88). On the surface, this is simply Nought telling Mercy to get rid of his priest vestments, but the pun of ‘play ‘does invite interpretation of undressing and sex.[5] This is just one morality play, but what is clear is that the demonic and homosexuality have often been connected. The backlash that Little Nas X faced was also part of the medieval period. The contemporary, conservative politicians cited above echo the sentiments expressed by the Lollards and the antitheatrical movement between the 14th and 16th centuries, bemoaning human beings taking on the role of Satan and other biblical figures while performing morality plays such as Mankind. The most famous of this is ‘A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge’ a polemic that denounced the staging of biblical history as a kind of blasphemy, insisting that no mortal should impersonate Christ, the saints, or even the devil, for such mimicry turned divine truths into profane spectacle.[6] In the sixteenth century, writers such as Philip Stubbes (1583) and Stephen Gosson (1582) extended this critique, portraying the theater as a space of moral corruption and spiritual danger. Philip Stubbes argued in The Anatomie of Abuses that ‘heathenry, paganry, scurrility, and devilry itself, is equal with the word of God; or that the Devil is equivalent with the Lord’[7] (140) and Stephen Gosson suggested that ‘Playes are the inuentions of the deuil, the offrings of Idolatrie,’[8] Attending to the devil’s central role in historical drama is therefore crucial: without this perspective, we overlook how representations of the devil (and their intersections with queerness) remain embedded in cultural debates to this day. Without studying the Devil’s importance throughout historical drama, we are unable to see how issues around the Devil and queerness continue to be in the public eye.
In ‘MONTERO,’ the Devil is not the villain but a figure of empowerment. Lil Nas X’s embrace of Hell and Satan symbolizes a rejection of societal condemnation and a celebration of personal freedom. The official music video starts with a monologue: ‘In life we hide the parts of ourselves, we don’t want the world to see. We lock them away. We tell them no. We banish them. But here? We don’t. Welcome to MONTERO.’[9] The opening monologue tells us that the music video and song is all about the hidden parts of us and that Lil Nas X is attempting to showcase parts of himself that he must keep hidden. IN ‘MONTERO,’[10] the music allows him to be free.
The imagery during the monologue is inspired by the Garden of Eden, as it’s a lush dreamlike paradise filled with trees, flowers and colours. The colours are saturated and otherworldly, recalling medieval depictions of Eden as a place both divine and strange. Later we see a serpent, slithering down the tree with the face of the Devil. Lil Nas X is using a medievalized version of Hell, littered with references to manuscripts, stories and portrayals of old, highlighting how the medieval and the present are thoroughly connected. The idea of Lucifer being represented by a snake in the Garden of Eden is in countless medieval manuscripts, such as British Library Additional MS 11695, f. 40r, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 p.41, and BL Harley 2838 f. 4v, where the serpent has feminine features and long brown hair. The first verse is sung as a duet, with Lil Nas X’s portraying both Adam and the Serpent. The Serpent says, ‘If Eve ain’t in your garden, you know that you can.’[11] As Lil Nas X is playing both characters, and one is not presented with traditionally ‘feminine features, the lyrics and dual-characterization reflects that queer sexuality is indeed natural, and has always been present: even if Eve — a woman — is not in the garden, Adam can still experience knowledge and pleasure. Before the scene changes, the camera zooms in on a tree with a quotation in Greek: ‘ἐπειδὴ οὖν ἡ φύσις δίχα ἐτμήθη, ποθοῦν ἕκαστον τὸ ἥμισυ τὸ αὑτοῦ’ [After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half][12]. This line, taken from Plato’s Symposium, is about the concept of finding ‘a soul mate’ and in ‘MONTERO,’ Lil Nas X will not judge himself for the soul mate that he has chosen, even if it not Eve or any other woman.
However, others may judge Little Nas X, as the trial scene shows. He wears pink and the judges wear blue.[13] The colours once again separate Lil Nas X from the rest of society, where only girls wear pink, and invokes the gender binary and its constraints. In the video as the second verse begins, he is walking down the courtroom aisle with two guards: ‘I wanna sell what you’re buying / I wanna feel on your ass in Hawaii / I want the jet lag from fucking and flying / Shoot a child in your mouth while I’m riding.’[14] After he finishes these lines, he is pushed towards the ground. The use of physical force, and the fact that this physical force occurs after the explicit language, represents once more how society has often tried to simply ignore or ‘shove down’ feelings of homosexuality. The lyric ‘shoot a child in your mouth while I’m riding’ explicitly references oral, non-procreative sex, an act that has historically been condemned as sinful or deviant. Yet, multiple songs exist with explicit lyrics, yet there has not been the same sense of outrage to songs like ‘Candy Shop’ by 50 Cent and ‘If you Seek Amy’ by Britney Spears play openly on the theme of oral or non-reproductive sex, yet their heterosexual framing renders them socially permissible. The backlash against MONTERO thus reveals how cultural discomfort does not stem from sexual explicitness itself, but from the visibility of queer sexuality.
Lil Nas X is then pictured with handcuffs[15], invoking a Christian Martyr, using imagery of the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate (Mark 15:1, Douay-Rheims) The judge shakes his finger at Lil Nas X[16], who then shows his cuffed hands. Similarly, in the passage in the bible, Jesus is bound, led away and delivered to Pilate by the chief priests. This parallel casts Lil Nas X as a contemporary Christ figure, condemned not for sacrilege but for existing outside heteronormative structures. His punishment becomes a spectacle of moral panic, much like Christ’s trial before the crowd. Having Lil Nas X play every character in the scene, from the guards to the judge to himself, shows not only society’s persecution of queerness, but what often occurs due to society’s persecution: self-hatred. The last detail of this prosecution scene is that instead of a cross, Lil Nas X is sentenced to death by stoning.[17] The stones in the video are butt plugs; some of them are pink, but the one that hits Lil Nas X is silver with a purple gem[18] (if you stop at 1:45-1:46) in the video you will be able to see this small detail). It is not on the screen for long, but the use of butt plugs is linked to homosexuality as well. While they are a sex toy any person or couple can use, they tend to be associated with gay men and symbolize once more that Lil Nas X is dying simply for his inability to fit heteronormative values. The choice of a purple gem further deepends this symbolism. In the BIBLE, Christ is dressed in a purple robe as the soldiers mock him as the King of the Jews. Purple, a colour of royalty and humiliation, therefore, ties Lil Nas X’s execution to Christ’s, suggesting that his punishment for queerness mirrors Christ’s persecution. In reclaiming the colour purple, Lil Nas X transforms mockery into power, turning shame into spectacle and defiance.
Once Lil Nas X is killed, he is still offered a chance at Heaven. As he ascends, he is covered in a solid, translucent material.[19] Once he rejects Heaven and heads towards Hell, however, he gets rid of this material covering, able to express himself more freely. This is a direct inversion of typical Christian narratives, where Heaven is the ultimate goal. Instead, in ‘MONTERO,’ Hell becomes a place of liberation, where Lil Nas X can fully express his identity and sexuality. Lil Nas X’s hell is deeply inspired by Dante, as we see the levels of Hell passing by as Lil Nas X goes down the stripper pole.[20] But unlike Dante, he does not include the frozen core of Hell; instead, the core is filled with fire. This is because Hell and its association with fire is a lot more popular than the frozen aspect of Dante’s iconography. The video’s lyrics are interrupted by a dance break, the infamous Satan lap dance. Interestingly, Satan’s chamber has a Latin inscription: ‘Damnant quod non intelligent’[21] [they condemn what they do not understand], adding to the new identity of Hell as a liberating place. Since this scene is followed after the judgement scene in the music video, we can assume ‘they’ refers to conservative critics who denounce queer expression without understanding it. This also links to the beginning of the music video where Lil Nas X’s monologue says, ‘In life we hide the parts of ourselves, we don’t want the world to see. We lock them away. We tell them no.’[22] It is only in Hell where Lil Nas X is able to tell them yes. The imagery of Hell is clear to the reader, and they can see Lil Nas X is not covered in the solid, translucent material like he was when he was ascending to Heaven, but fully himself. Religion has been used to mould people to heteronormative ideals, but once they are allowed to be free, they can break away from those moulds. The journey to Hell is not a fall from grace but an act of self-acceptance to a place where those who are condemned can be free.
The fact that Lil Nas X can go to Heaven in this version of the story once more highlights that the judge made the wrong call in condemning Lil Nas X, and that God is accepting of all his creatures and their decisions when it comes to love and relationships. The fact that Lil Nas X is allowed into Heaven but chooses not to go reflects that Heaven would still have a hierarchy, and Lil Nas X wants to be ‘free’ of all restrictions. Before the song’s release, Lil Nas X posted a Tweet saying, ‘I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist.’ This explains why the video does not simply end with Lil Nas X in Hell dating the Devil. Instead, in one last act of liberation, Lil Nas X, snaps Satan’s neck, removes his horns, places them on himself, and gains wings, finally and truly liberated.[23] He can live life without any restrictions, ‘simply able to exist’ as he has become the ruler of his own life that religious or social standards.
Satan, Lucifer, the Devil: whatever his name, he continues to be cultural phenomena. Influential in media, both in deeply religious contexts and outside them, attention to the evolving portrayals of the Devil highlight the enduring power of the demonic as a symbol of rebellion and transformation. Lil Nas X’s use of Satanic imagery, for instance, serves as a rebellion against heteronormativity and ideas like homosexuality is a sin or the Westboro Baptist Church’s slogans and actions. By willingly going to Hell and giving Satan a lap dance, Lil Nas X reclaims agency for himself and liberates other LGBTQ+ individuals. Thus, Satan offers a place for those outside the bounds of society and allows them to challenge societal norms. This act of reclamation finds a striking precedent in the medieval period, particularly in morality plays such as Mankind where the Devil’s servants perform parody and obscenity to unsettle religious authority. Their bawdy wordplay suggests that even within a Christian framework, the demonic expressed forms of desire and inversions that resonate with queer subtexts. Both Lil Nas X and the medieval players use the Devil to explore identities cast as sinful or deviant. The outrage surround Lil Nas X’s performance echoes the same anxieties that once surrounded medieval drama, from the Lollards’ condemnation to the antitheatrical tracts of Stubbes and Gosson. Across time, the devil endures as a figure through which artists question who is permitted to speak, to desire, to perform. Satan is thus not merely a symbol of evil, but a means of queer expression, transformation and defiance.
Author Bio:
Georgina (Georgie) Crespi (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Reading in Berkshire who has presented at BritGrad, Leeds Medieval Congress, The Marlowe Society of America and the Medieval English Theatre 2025 annual meeting. She is also a PhD Member of the Medieval English Theatre committee. She has been supported by The Patricia Yates Commemorative Fund 2024 from the Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies at Reading. She has an interest in palaeography in which she was selected to attend the Digital Palaeography Summer School 2024 at the University of Gottingen in Germany and the ATR ATRIUM Summer School in Berlin in 2025.
Works Cited:
Garrison, Jennifer. ‘Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance.’ Exemplaria 31 (2019) (1): 46–62.
Pugh, Tison. ‘Excremental Desire, Queer Allegory, and the Disidentified Audience of Mankind.’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119, 4 (2020): 457-483
Further Reading:
Shaad D’Souza, ‘Satanic Panic Is Back—and Queer Artists Like Lil Nas X, Sam Smith, and Demi Lovato Are Being Targeted,’ Billboard (April 2023), https://www.billboard.com/culture/pride/satanic-panic-queer-artists-lil-nas-x-sam-smith-demi-lovato-1235254289/.
Diane Rodgers, ‘Review of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe,’ Shura Sheffield Institutional Repository (2019), https://shura.shu.ac.uk/23113/3/Rodgers_book_review_satanic%28VoR%29.pdf.
Brock Thiessen, ‘How Satanic Panic Shaped the Pop Culture of the 1980s,’ Exclaim! (August 2019), https://exclaim.ca/film/article/how_satanic_panic_shaped_the_pop_culture_of_the_1980s.
Garrison, Jennifer. 2019. ‘Mankind and the Masculine Pleasures of Penance.’ Exemplaria 31 (1): 46–62.
Stephen Hahn, ‘Justice and the Devil in America,’ Sightings (June 2021), https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/justice-and-devil-america.
Michelle Fletcher Dean, ‘From QAnon to The Sandman: How Demons Found a Place in Popular Culture,’ The Conversation (November 2022), https://theconversation.com/from-qanon-to-the-sandman-how-demons-found-a-place-in-popular-culture-193363.
Pugh, Tison. ‘Excremental Desire, Queer Allegory, and the Disidentified Audience of Mankind.’ JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119, no. 4 (2020): 457-483.
Scott Collins, ‘The Ten Greatest Pop Culture Devils,’ Vulture (September 2007), https://www.vulture.com/2007/09/the_ten_greatest_pop_culture_d.html.
James Whitbrook, ‘Satan’s All-Time Greatest Pop Culture Moments,’ Gizmodo (January 2016), https://gizmodo.com/satans-all-time-greatest-pop-culture-moments-1756012594.
Ari Shapiro, ‘Hail Satan! Is Trending: How the Devil Is Firing up Pop Culture,’ New York Post (April 2019), https://nypost.com/2019/04/18/hail-satan-is-trending-how-the-devil-is-firing-up-pop-culture.
Lucy Mangan, ‘Sam Smith and the Return of the Satanic Panic,’ New Statesman (April 2023), https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music/2023/04/sam-smith-return-satanic-panic.
Maryam Rahim, ‘The Devil You Know, or Thought You Knew,’ Traversing Tradition (November 2019), https://traversingtradition.com/2019/11/18/the-devil-you-know-or-thought-you-knew/.
Notes:
[1]Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
[2] Asbjørn Dyrendal, ‘Devilish Consumption: Popular Culture in Satanic Socialization,’ Numen 55.1 (2008): p. 95 [68-98].
[3] Ashley, Kathleen, and Gerard NeCastro, eds. 2010. Mankind. Middle English Text Series. (Kalamazoo Medieval Institute Publications. 2010)
[4] Pugh, Tison. ‘Excremental Desire, Queer Allegory, and the Disidentified Audience of Mankind.’ JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119, no. 4 (2020): 478 [457-483].
[5]Pugh, ‘Excremental Desire,’ 478.
[6] Davidson, Clifford, ed. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge. (Kalamazoo Medieval Institute Publications, 2011) pp.93-116
[7] Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. London, 1583.
[8] Gosson, Stephen. Playes Confuted in Five Actions. London, 1582.
[9] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) (Official Video),’ YouTube video, 3:11, posted September 17, 2021, from Lil Nas X, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k (accessed August 5, 2025), 00:01-00:10.
[10] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 0:01-0:18.
[11] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 0:48-0:50.
[12] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:08-1:13.
[13] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:14-1:46.
[14] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:14-1:25.
[15] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:33-1:37.
[16] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:35.
[17] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:42-1:46.
[18] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:45-1:46.
[19] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:47-1:56.
[20] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 1:57-2:19.
[21] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 2:29-2:39.
[22] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 00:01-00:10.
[23] Lil Nas X, ‘MONTERO,’ 2:56-3:02.
