Art & Creativity Quote by Neil Tennant

Neil Tennant is doing a very Pet Shop Boys move here: taking something that’s often treated as confessional and making it structural. The first sentence resists the culture-war demand that sexuality be a tidy identity badge or a tribal purchase. “Restricted” is the key word - it’s not moral panic he’s rejecting so much as the narrowing. In pop culture, sexuality gets policed in two directions at once: conservatives want it hidden; liberals sometimes want it legible, branded, and narratively useful. Tennant’s pushback lands between those pressures.

Then he pivots to craft: “our sexuality doesn’t have to be a cultural choice” sets up the punchline about “five main performers,” and that jump matters. He’s arguing that desire and identity don’t just live in lyrics or headlines; they’re audible in arrangement, voice, persona, and collaboration. The subtext is that pop’s most interesting work often comes from multiplicity - not a single authentic self, but a set of selves you can inhabit without filing paperwork.

The slightly odd phrasing (“That’s an amazing variety of music…”) reads like an interview splice, but the intention is clear: stop treating sexuality as a genre box. Tennant, coming out of a band that turned gay sensibility into sleek, mainstream synth-pop without apology, is defending the freedom to be both specific and unpinned. It’s a case for range over rules - aesthetically and personally.