“This unrequited love/To me it’s nothing but a one-man cult and cyanide in a Styrofoam cup/I could never make him love me,” he laments from the back of a cab, strings swelling around his plaintive vocals. In the searing, organ-led confessional “Bad Religion,” Ocean poured his heart out not to a priest, but to his taxi driver. Never had an acclaimed artist working in R&B and hip-hop spoken so bravely and openly, and when Channel Orange arrived, tracks like “Thinkin Bout You” (with the line “My eyes don’t shed tears, but boy they pour when I’m thinkin’ ’bout you”) and “Forrest Gump” (“you run my mind, boy”) carried deeper meaning. “If I listen closely … I can feel the sky falling too.” At the end of the letter came catharsis: “I feel like a free man,” Ocean concluded. “It was my first love, it changed my life,” he wrote, detailing how he attempted to come to grips with this revelation through his songwriting. Just days before that record’s release, spurred by speculation from journalists who’d attended pre-listening events and noted his use of the masculine pronoun in certain songs, Ocean posted an open letter to his Tumblr in which he recounted falling for a male companion when he was 19. A sprawling and gorgeous blend of R&B, hip-hop, rock, pop and funk, the album came stocked with vivid, poetic accounts of unchecked materialism and addiction, but its showstoppers were songs that seemed to chronicle Ocean’s own heartache, specifically his one-sided affection for another man. Ocean’s lauded 2012 debut, Channel Orange, marked a watershed in the music industry. But along with Endless, the visual album that preceded it, and Boys Don’t Cry, the magazine that accompanies it, Blonde is the artist’s boldest, queerest project to date. The track, like the encounter, is fleeting, and it’s the only explicit reference Ocean makes to a male partner or love interest over the course of the record’s 60 minutes. “I know you don’t need me right now/And to you it’s just a late night out,” sings Ocean. His date talks too much and is thinking short term. After this new acquaintance takes him to a “gay bar,” their incompatibility becomes apparent. In the short interlude “Good Guy,” Ocean describes a blind date with someone he met through a mutual friend.

The word “gay” shows up just once on Blonde, the long-awaited sophomore album from Frank Ocean.

Frank ocean albums in order