Colton Tran and Todrick Hall | I Like Boys / 2019 [music video]

THE SHOUT OF OUT

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todrick Hall (performer, composer, and artistic director), Colton Tran (director) I Like Boys / 2019 [3.21 minutes] [music video]

 

The always revelatory Todrick Hall finally confronts his own mother (played by Luenell Campbell) in what hardly is a surprise to any of us who have long watched his over the top music videos: “I like boys.”

    He sits his mother down for “the big reveal,” a kind of strutting, stuttering, overstated coming out in which his poor Bible-reading mamma goes into a visual meltdown as before one even knows it Hall, in full drag in the desert, walks through a door—no closet on either side of this symbolic gesture—as he continues to torture the poor “bitch.”

Mama come, come doll, take a seat

There's someone you know that you've got to meet

So brace yourself for the big reveal

He's about my height when he's not in heels

Some boys play basketball

He played house with ratchet dolls

It's not Santa Claus, it's time for applause

It's comin' out the closet

Mama, I like boys, I like pecs

Like them arms when they flex

Like that print in them sweats

Tell them girls, "Thank you, next"

I like when they text me sexy pics of 'em

Like them abs when there's six of 'em

Tell them girls I'm sorry

I like boys

Mama, boys like me (I like boys who like boys)

Mama (I like boys who like boys)

Work (I like boys who like boys)

Mama (I like boys who like)

Boys like me, yeah (boys like me)

Yeah, they do (boys like me)

Ooh (boys like me)

Motherfuckin' boys like me (bitch)  

     And for a long 3 minutes and 21 seconds Hall reiterates his total pleasure in the male body, as boys, dressed and half-dressed jump and dance in the desert, revealing next to everything. It’s glorious epic scene wherein Hall is carried on camel, a white door, and male shoulders across the screen.

    Unlike so many pretty gay boy singers, Hall never leaves you wondering, shouting out his sexuality in nearly all his musical videos to the high heavens and taking his marvelous dance routines into technicolor absurdity.

     Hall is high camp, which I’ll take any day over the pleading of a gay aspirant for love from what might be a male or even a female admirer.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).