There’s no masc shortage here
Lucy Dacus has done God’s work and gathered together a group of hot mascs, butch lesbians and trans men in the music video for her new single “Best Guess”.
In the video, the cast, all dressed variously in suits, white vests and chains, participate in several masc-coded activities including playing poker, boxing, arm wrestling and doing push-up competitions while Dacus (and the audience) looks on appreciatively. There are also lots of tattoos, lip biting, sexy tooth picks and making out. The song itself is a romantic love song to an unamed (although widely speculated on) girl which Dacus first debuted back in October during her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker’s show, announcing that “this song is dedicated to lesbians”. Lyrics include: “You may not be an angel/ but you are my girl/ you are my pack a day/ you are my favourite place”.
Among the cast are some familiar faces and names, particularly if you’re a lesbian who is active on TikTok. There’s Cara Delevingne, actor E.R. Fightmaster, musician Towa Bird, and Naomi McPherson from MUNA. A number of people were also cast directly via the social media platform after Dacus put out an open call. Speaking to Dazed’s Halima Jibril in January, Dacus explained, “I just did this TikTok where I was asking people to audition to be in a music video. But TikTok is going away in the US next week, so I was making perfect use of the app before it goes away. Like, hell yeah, I have a bunch of hot mascs bookmarked. It was like the call to action.”
The video in question asked people to apply, particularly, “If you are smooth or suave or can pretend to be. Maybe you’re a hot masc”. In the caption she also wrote, “Help me out, please send to the hot mascs in your life.”
The response to the video has been joyful (“I’M SO GAY AND I’M SO HERE FOR IT,” reads one YouTube comment on the video), with many people very thrilled and excited to see so many queer women, people and trans men together in the same space. While last year saw somewhat of a lesbian renaissance in pop culture thanks to the popularity of Chappell Roan, BBC’s I Kissed A Girl and Bottoms, representation for queer women is still lacking. Last year, Autostraddle calculated that one in four television shows with queer women and/or trans characters have been cancelled after one season, and GLAAD reported that the number of LGBTQ+ characters in TV is declining.
With this in mind, and the worrying attack on the LGBTQ+ community by President Trump’s government, seeing so many lesbians and queer people in one space is welcome and much-needed, and will mean a lot to a great number of people. Having said that, some people have also been pointing out that the line-up is missing representation for darker-skinned lesbians, studs and “fat dykes”, as one X user put it. This is a familiar situation in the community, where people who don’t fit into a certain ideal can often get overlooked. Writing last year in response to one of lesbian TikTok’s favourite subjects – the masc shortage – Quispe López asked, “Has there ever truly been a ‘masc shortage’, or is that just a euphemistic shorthand for a lack of masc people who fit worryingly narrow, cisnormative ideals of whiteness, thinness, and androgyny?”
In other Lucy Dacus news, the musician recently pledged $10,000 towards trans people’s gender-affirming surgery amidst President Trump’s attack on the trans community, including banning the “forced” use of pronouns and prohibiting taxpayer funds from being used towards gender-affirming care.
Watch the video above and see for yourself if it could be 2025’s answer to that k.d. lang/Cindy Crawford Vanity Fair magazine cover from 1993, as one Dazed writer has posited. Either way, the lesbian renaissance was never going to stay in 2024, no matter how much some people might’ve liked it to.