Sam Smith feels experiencing joy as a queer person is ‘quite a dangerous place’: ‘We’re all masters of pain’
metro.co.ukSam Smith has opened up about their journey to achieving joy after announcing that they identify as non-binary. The Dancing With a Stranger singer adopted the pronouns they/them in 2019 and explained they always had a ‘little bit of a war going within my body and my mind’.
Since then, Sam, 30, has embraced their queer identity through their music and fashion sense, which they said has helped their mental health.
However, getting used to their newfound sense of freedom has been a work-in-progress as Sam has said in a new interview: ‘I think joy for me, and for a lot of queer people, is quite a dangerous place. ‘We’re all masters of pain, and I think it’s actually a very courageous act to step into the queer joy of it all.’ In 2019, Merriam-Webster made the groundbreaking move of introducing the word ‘they’ as a singular gender-neutral pronoun for those who identify as non-binary into its dictionary.
Reacting to the development, Sam told Billboard magazine: ‘I can speak on behalf of all of my queer friends and say that recognition like that, and just people talking and understanding us like that, is just the best feeling in the world. ‘Because there’s nothing bad happening here, it’s all love.
