Twerking with Milton by Quare Allusions in Lil Nas X's “Montero”

One of the most scintillating of rebellious Miltonic moments in the 2020 music video to Lil Nas X’s chart-topping single, “Montero, Call Me By Your Name,” occurs when the gay pop icon pole-dances his way to Hell while twerking or provocatively gyrating to an interpoetic groove accented with Milton’s allusive presence. Twerking refers to a sexually provocative style of popular Black dance. Dancers who twerk thrust their pelvises or grind their hips at a syncopated pace in a manner that suggests copulation. To some audiences’ thrilling surprise, Lil Nas indulges in this sexually provocative dance style near the end of his video. His fallen Adamic hero twerks with Satan as a regicidal precursor to a closing scene that facilitates Lil Nas X’s ultimate artistic goal: preaching an ironic and rebelliously proud “coming out” narrative of Black revolt. His bold gospel of sexual freedom inspires him to trope extravagantly with Milton’s Paradise Lost , primarily, through a poetics of fallenness that lands on demonic grounds anchored in a spirit of revolutionary dissent. A result of this allusively creative engagement with Paradise Lost is that it works to surprise pop-culture audiences by the sins of those, who, beholden to homophobic tenets of Christian orthodoxy, too often glory in consigning same gender-loving individuals to the very Hell Lil Nas dares to celebrate and reclaim.