So runs the hook of the hottest new release in pop music this week. I had a strange experience unpacking what exactly it meant.

For the first day I had “Unholy” on constant repeat, that is to say, yesterday, I just kind of assumed that it was a Gay Story.

There is plenty of context which suggests this. Sam Smith is non-binary, which falls under the whole LGBTQ+ umbrella, like gayness does. Kim Petras, the featured artist, is also a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community.

So naturally it occurred to me that the unspoken “something unholy” that the daddy is doing would most likely be gay sex, or something of the sort. That gay sex would be unholy makes sense because holiness is something I’ve always associated with Christianity, and the Church as an institution has famously been opposed to homosexuality. The story so far, then, is that the daddy is in a (straight) marriage with the mummy, but he is a closeted gay man and can only find sexual fulfillment elsewhere. This is a common Gay Story setup. In this story, he has gay sex at the body shop.

Which brings us to body shops. I had no idea what a body shop is. If you asked me, I might admit a vague feeling that it had something to do with automobiles. So I had to figure this out from context. If a daddy needs to frequent a body shop in order to have gay sex, then it stands to reason that a body shop might instead be an establishment where gay men could have gay sex. Bodies. Sex. It makes sense.

To-day I looked up the lyrics of “Unholy” out of curiosity. Genius offers annotations and analysis of its lines, and I was surprised to find out that I’ve been misunderstanding it this whole time.

Genius says the daddy is straight.

Wait, but then why would he be going to the body shop? That’s where gay men have gay sex, which I figured out from context yesterday.

No, a body shop is just a brothel. Prostitutes. Nothing about it necessarily has to be gay. In fact, Kim Petras’ verse is from the perspective of the prostitute that the daddy is seeing for (straight) sex.

But then what’s the “something unholy”, if not gay sex?

It’s just regular cheating. Cheating is unholy, regardless of whether it’s gay or not. It’s in one of those Ten Commandments.

So the daddy is not closeted and hiding his gayness from the mummy?

No, he’s just hiding adultery. That is the something the mummy would leave him for if she ever found out, not the gayness.

Oh okay.

But somehow making all the relationships in this song straight makes the story less compelling. Like, they’re both LGBTQ+ icons, you’d kind of expect that the stories they tell in their songs are LGBTQ+-specific stories designed to be less relatable to straight people—

But wait! Does the daddy have to be straight? Perhaps, if the character Kim Petras is playing is indeed the prostitute that the daddy is seeing, as Genius asserts, but if not, not. Both the Gay Story interpretation and the Genius interpretation are internally consistent, and the chorus alone leaves it delightfully ambiguous.