Sabrina Carpenter/YouTube
Sabrina Carpenter's latest single "Taste," taken from her brand new album "Short n' Sweet," arrived on Friday with a music video that certainly lives up to the song title.
Directed by Dave Meyers and apparently inspired by the 1992 dark comedy "Death Becomes Her," the gory video costars Jenna Ortega as Carpenter's ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend.
The two women take turns attempting to murder each other (using a variety of methods, from guns and knives to voodoo dolls) while Carpenter sings about their shared romantic connection: "You'll just have to taste me when he's kissing you / If you want forever, I bet you do / Just know you'll taste me too."
Sure enough, the video culminates with Carpenter and Ortega sharing a kiss, just before Ortega uses a chainsaw to murder the "beloved boyfriend" in question. The two women attend his funeral together and share a knowing smile over the casket.
Carpenter has been releasing music since she was a Disney Channel star in 2015, but reached a new level of fame this year with the hit song "Espresso," a cheeky ode to her feminine wiles. ("I got this one boy, and he won't stop calling / When they act this way, I know I got 'em.")
Carpenter followed that song with "Please Please Please," her first-ever No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, in which she begs her new man not to embarrass her. That music video costarred her boyfriend Barry Keoghan.
Due to her fast-growing star power, Carpenter — and her love life — have become hot topics in the public arena.
In June, the comedic podcast "Two Dykes and a Mic" featured a discussion about Carpenter's sexuality. The clip went viral after it was shared on TikTok, racking up over 12 million views and 1.2 million likes to date.
The two hosts described Carpenter as a "big time hetero," adding, "I do not think Sabrina Carpenter has a gay bone in her body."
One week later, Carpenter performed a cover of "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan, who is a lesbian. The song's muse, a queer woman, decides to pursue relationships with men instead of acknowledging her love for Roan — even though, as Roan sings, she'll never be able to outrun her queerness.
Many fans interpreted Carpenter's song choice as a sly response to the podcasters, as well as other people online who had begun to describe Carpenter as "the straightest woman alive."
Others noted additional instances of queer flagging in Carpenter's oeuvre, including "You Need Me Now?", a duet with gay singer-songwriter girl in red that was released in March. (Back in 2020, "Do you listen to girl in red?" became a meme in the online LGBTQ+ community, a sort of code to figure out if someone is queer.)
Carpenter has also hinted at her attraction to women on social media, as when Adele praised "Espresso" during a concert.
"As I got into bed last night, because [it] was a very late night for me, I found myself singing 'I'm working late, 'cause I'm a singer,' that Sabrina Carpenter song," Adele said onstage. "That song is my jam."
In response, Carpenter tweeted, "all i read was Adele thinks about me in bed <3."
Speculation began brewing about Carpenter's sexuality largely due to her live performances of "Nonsense," a single released in 2022. Carpenter went viral for ad-libbing raunchy outros throughout her Emails I Can't Send Tour, a tradition she continued while opening for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour earlier this year. Many of them include not-so-subtle innuendoes about having sex with men.
However, Carpenter said the outros aren't meant to reflect her real life, but rather to combat the shame and stigma that often comes with discussing sex in public.
"I've learned a lot more about sexuality through writing those than people think," she told Cosmopolitan. "I think people think I'm just obnoxiously horny, when in reality, writing them comes from the ability to not be fearful of your sexuality as opposed to just not being able to put it down."
