Halsey may be known for her unique hair styles and moody chart-topping songs, but she has a lot more on her agenda than just creating music. The Closer singer is an open book, discussing her miscarriage at age 20, her battle with endometriosis, the stigma around her sexuality (she is bisexual), and her experience growing up with a Black father when she herself looks white.
In a great profile on Vulture, the 22-year-old singer and songwriter, whose real name is Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, uses an anecdote to illustrate how presumptive people are about her and her father just based on their different appearance.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
"When I was little, if someone saw me and my dad walking through, like, a grocery store parking lot, women would come up to us and be like, ‘Sweetie, are you okay?’” she says. "Because they saw a little white girl walking with a black man." Because many people (especially her haters and online trolls) do not know this about her, she constantly is responding to the notion that she was raised with an amount of white privilege. "Maybe people won’t accept that I’m half black, but they could be not accepting me because I am, and that’s much worse," she says.
In addition to speaking on the difficulties of navigating her way around negative people who do not truly understand her back story, she has found a passion project in supporting Planned Parenthood. She donated $100,000 to the nonprofit in January. As an artist who is known for her outspoken interviews and over-the-top music videos (her "Now or Never" video was a nod to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet), she has a quality suggestion for the social media team over at Planned Parenthood.
"Cecile's been updating a fact about the organization every day on Twitter, and it's getting lost," she says of the Planned Parenthood president. "Kids digest information in video, in comics, in photo slides. That's why BuzzFeed is so fucking popular."
So, she proposes an idea for the nonprofit, one that is totally Halsey: "Take Nick Jonas and sit him down in front of a camera and do a bit where he locates the female reproductive organs. They need to engage in a way that is not defensive — that's not about the war on Planned Parenthood."
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Let's get Halsey the password to the Planned Parenthood Twitter page, stat.