“Girls/Girls/Boys”, from Panic! at the Disco’s 2013 album Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! is a provocative exploration of bi attraction. The song’s narrator addresses a bi woman, navigating societal expectations, casual relationships, and self-acceptance. Co-written by Brendon Urie and then-bassist Dallon Weekes, it peaked at number 31 on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart in October 2013.
In a 2018 interview with Paper magazine, Uri expressed the following when asked about queerness and old traditional masculinity roles:
If a person is great, then a person is great. I just like good people, if your heart’s in the right place. I’m definitely attracted to men. It’s just people that I am attracted to.
This ethos permeates the track, where he, the narrator, references a personal experience from his youth growing up in Las Vegas — acknowledges the woman’s attraction to multiple genders while rejecting the role of a “beard” and making it clear that he doesn’t want to have a relationship but live out their desire, if she wants the same.
Pose, you’ve gotta save your reputation
They’re close to finding out about your girlfriend
But if you change your mind, you know where I am
The lyrics resonate with the pressure to conceal queer relationships, but the chorus defiantly reframes attraction as innate:
And never did I think that I
Would be caught in the way you got me
But girls love girls and boys
And love is not a choice
The music video presents us with nude, neon-drenched visuals paying homage to D’Angelo’s 2000 hit song, “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” which itself was a celebration of bodily autonomy and male beauty.
Notably, during Panic’s 2016 Death of a Bachelor tour, fans amplified the song’s LGBT resonance by flooding arenas with rainbow lights that they created using colored paper hearts and holding them up to the flashlights on their phones.
However, it is important to mention that the song wasn’t immediately embraced as a queer anthem. Urie hadn’t yet publicly come out as pansexual at the time (he did so in 2018), and the director’s cut appeared to dilute the song’s queer potential by reframing the story as a “heterosexual” threesome occurring outside the frame (Urie was revealed to be with two women in this new ending).
Yet the lyrics’ sincerity — especially the emphasis in “Love is not a choice” — ultimately triumphed. The line became a mantra affirming queer attraction as valid, and as Urie’s identity became public and fans reclaimed the message, “Girls/Girls/Boys” evolved into a beloved bi-anthem.
What elevates this track is its refusal to simplify things. It portrays bisexuality as fluid (“Push another girl aside and just give in”), confronts stigma (“Sophisticated, manipulated”), and centers autonomy — all through Panic’s signature theatricality. Many years later, its message endures: love transcends societal judgment, and the song remains a great example of bi representation in media.