In 2025, Australian singer-songwriter Betty Who said she was “holding space” for lesbian pop star Reneรฉ Rapp to meet a man and realise he was the love of her life ten years down the line. The same year, Dance Moms alum JoJo Siwa, who had previously identified as a lesbian, began a relationship with a man live on British telly during Celebrity Big Brother. Fletcher, a queer songwriter who had spent most of her career writing about relationships with women, released “Boy”.
Genevieve Glynn-Reeves, who fronts North-west art-punk trio Gen and the Degenerates alongside guitarist Sean Healand-Sloan and drummer Evan Reeves, was paying attention.
“Favourite Jumper“, the band’s new single via Marshall Records, is what came out of it. The song’s narrator catalogues ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends in lived-in detail you don’t get in a generic queer anthem: a jumper left behind by an ex on her new girlfriend’s body, a girl with a boyfriend living overseas who asks to use the shower and means it differently, a question that lands in the final verse about whether it would be okay to leave a toothbrush at someone’s place.
The chorus is a chant: “Like boys like girls like boys like girls / like whatever’s in between like the whole damn world”, with parenthetical asides (“I’m such a stereotype”, “I wanna get it right”, “I like what I like”) delivered like the singer is mid-conversation with herself.
The broader case sits in Glynn-Reeves’ own words, which she’s been laying out alongside the release. As a bisexual with what she calls a “torrid fascination with pop culture”, she approached the Betty Who / Siwa / Fletcher cluster the way Charlie approaches the mailroom in Always Sunny. She drew a range of conclusions.
The first, that publicly speculating on someone else’s sexuality is weird. The second, that she does understand the disappointment LGBTQIA+ fanbases feel when an artist they love seemingly capitulates to the straight agenda. From there it gets sharper.
“Whenever the right wing is on the rise there is this puritanical pressure placed on women to be virtuous,” she says. “Women are villanised for being overtly sexual and treated as if they don’t have agency or control over their own bodies. We see this reflected in rhetoric around bisexual women settling down with men and almost relinquishing their queerness to try and feel safer. I think this is the perfect time to rebel against that and be as slutty and queer as possible.”
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The underlying assumption the song is set against is older than any of the 2025 events. The belief, as she puts it, that relationships women have with other women are unserious flights of fancy. The expectation that all queer women are “secretly deep down, straighter than we are making out”. A kind of heteronormative cha cha slide where lesbians turn out to be bisexual, bisexuals turn out to be straight, and the straight girls who don’t fancy marriage and kids are “ticking biological time bombs” who’ll start pursuing any man within a given radius the second they hit 35. The reverse pattern holds for queer men, where bisexuality gets read as a cover for being gay. “It is very interesting that the default is always to assume people are far more attracted to men than they are claiming to be,” she observes. “It’s giving patriarchy.”
She’s accustomed to pushback. “I have been accused of being a contrarian from time to time (mostly by my mother). Maybe, as the men in my Instagram comments like to tell me, I am demonic and in need of religion. It could of course be that I am at my core a thankless slut. I suppose I will never know.”
Her own current relationship factors in. Glynn-Reeves and her partner both identify as non-binary, and the world tends to read them as a straight couple. Her partner, the one with the beard, cooks most of the meals, picks the wallpaper, shows her arty films she’s not quite informed enough to grasp fully. Glynn-Reeves, who favours floaty skirts and low cut tops, is in a lot of ways “the boy one”, the one who earns more money, who has to be reminded to just listen and not try to immediately solve the problem, the one who can parallel park. “This isn’t an exact science (I avoid taking the bins out at all costs).” Her point being that even a relationship presenting as heteronormative is still queer if the people inside it are.
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That this set of observations is being released alongside a danceable art-punk song with a chant-along chorus is the point. “This is really just a fun party song of sorts, from the point of view of a bisexual person (guess what, it’s me), discussing previous experiences in a fun way, but also attempting to reconcile an honest and healthy relationship with a partner, with the totality of that sexuality and sexual history,” she says.
“Favourite Jumper” was produced by Michael Champion (Wet Leg, Swim School) and Paul Whalley (The Wanted, Louis Tomlinson). Whalley mixed it. Felix Davis mastered. The band’s stated reference points are Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem and the dancier end of art-punk, with a Chappell Roan-shaped pop hook bolted onto the chorus.
The video, directed by Matt Chandler for Clash Entertainment and produced by Louie C. Evans-Kelly, casts Shani Ross as the current girlfriend, with Jack Goldsmith, Sofi Furio, Aaliyah Sharnell and Nathan Langford rotating through as the exes. Glynn-Reeves wrote the song.
“Favourite Jumper” dropped on 22 April alongside Gen and the Degenerates’ UK support run with Hyphen, which opened 29 April at Leeds Brudenell Social Club and played through Glasgow G2 (30 April), Newcastle Digital (1 May), Manchester Bread Shed (2 May), Nottingham Bodega (4 May), Birmingham Castle & Falcon (5 May), London Scala (7 May), closing at Cardiff Clwb Ifor Bach on 9 May. The band have previously played Truck, YNOT, The Great Escape, the main stage at 2000 Trees, Sziget and Reeperbahn on the continent, and SXSW 25 in Austin, where they were one of the most talked-about acts. They’ve also toured the US as a support in venues over 2000 capacity.
The line she’s been putting in her tongue-in-cheek social captions captures the whole position: “Perhaps in an age of trad wives and puritanical pressure we need our bisexuals to be louder and more promiscuous than they have ever been before. It might not be possible to turn the tables but we can at least give the tables a cheeky wink and the middle finger.”
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