Colman Domingo and Sabrina Carpenter vs. The Cryin’ Conservative Girlies

Sabrina Carpenter didn't just drop an album last week –she detonated a glitter bomb of queer joy straight into the culture wars. On Aug. 29, the Grammy–winning pop star released Man's Best Friend alongside the music video for her disco theme anthem "Tears," and internet has been gagging ever since.

The video is Carpenter at her most audacious; a shimmering camp fantasia that borrows lovingly from horror classics, especially The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Carpenter slipped into Susan Sarandon’s role as Janet, a doe-eyed ingénue stranded at a haunted mansion.

Inside, she’s greeted not buy ghouls but by Colman Domingo in full drag, serving a deliciously wicked version of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Around them swells a house party queer misfits –sequins, lashes, and sweat baptized under Carpenter’s mirrorball beat.

The reception? The girls have been eating it up. Spotify crowned the No. 1 global debut of the year for a female artist, with more than 9 million streams on its first day. Carpenter called Domingo “truly incomparable, magnetic and fantastic,” reminiscing about the filming until dawn – “Wish we we’re still dancing in the street at 4 a.m.”

But whether there’s queer joy, there’s always someone clutching their pearls. Enter the usual cacophonic conservative chorus top –those perpetual rainclouds of fun –who blasted Domingo’s drag transformation as “bullsh*t.”

To which Domingo, just so happens to be an Oscar winner, responded with a shrug in the verbal equivalent of a hair flip, “Calm down brother. It’s a character. Like all the characters I play. Enjoy the video and have the fun possesses. Dance it out! It ain’t that deep.”

And then, and true camp fashion, Domingo double down with RuPaul’s mantra, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” Suits, dresses, uniforms –he reminded us they’re all drag. The conservatives came with pitchforks, and Domingo brought poetry.

The tea is that the backlash says more about the fragility of heteronormativity than it does about Domingo or Carpenter. Conservatives had made a cottage industry of demonizing drag, transness, queerness itself. They twist joy into threat, sequins into scandal, self-expression into sin. Their fury isn’t about a music video; it’s about losing their monopoly on defining what’s “normal.” And honestly? Let it crumble. The future belongs to the kids who see Domingo in heels and Carpenter in glitter and think, damn, that looks like freedom.

This isn’t new, of course. Queer art has always been policed, from the disco dance floor is rated in the 70s to Black trans women harassed for daring to strut down a street in daylight. What’s the difference is that now, stars like Carpenter are refusing to apologize for aligning themselves openly with queer culture. She didn’t tuck her joy into the shadows –she centered it, mainstreamed it, and invited her fans to come dance in the margins. That’s why the conservatives are big mad.

Domingo’s presence takes it to another level. He’s not a pop star borrowing camp for shock value; he’s an artist with deep roots and queer storytelling, from Euphoria to his Tony-winning stage work. His drag turn in “Tears” isn’t parody –– it’s testimony. And when he punctuates the moment with a rallying cry to “protect all the dolls,” especially trans women, it becomes more than spectacle. It’s solidarity.

Meanwhile, Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend is already shaping up to be one of these year’s defining pop projects. “Tears” it’s just a opening salvo, a disco gospel for the glittering-drenched and unashamed. If the conservatives want to keep crying about it, Carpenter has already given them a soundtrack.

So yes, the anti-LGBTQ brigade is out in full force, shouting about sin and slipping on their own outrage. But Domingo and Carpenter are too busy dancing, laughing, and breaking streaming records to notice. And that, more than anything, is the lesson –that joy is resistance, that drag is power, in the music is too loud and good to be drowned out by anyone’s tears.