In a music landscape that has rarely made room for bi+ men of color,
artist Ryan Xavier is carving out a lane of his own — loud, sexy, intentional, and unmistakably bisexual, Mexican, and Latino.
Sitting in the Embracing All of Me space, Ryan traces a journey that began long before TikTok virality or club stages. It started with a Mexican boy in Austin, Texas, absorbing everything from country to Florence + the Machine, trying to make sense of the kind of bigness he felt inside. Performance wasn’t just a hobby; it was the first place he could be expansive.
But the world didn’t exactly hand him a blueprint for what a bi Latino top hip-hop artist could look like. As Ryan puts it, “Bi is almost the absence of a preference.” And in a culture that demands clarity — gay or straight, this box or that one — trying to create art from a space of fluidity invites misunderstanding, projection, and erasure.
Research backs this up: bisexual people experience higher rates of invisibility and invalidation than both gay and straight peers (Human Rights Campaign, 2022). Yet Ryan refuses to shrink. Instead, he turns that absence into artistry.
His latest single, Texas On, is born from that refusal. What started as a Travis Scott–inspired beat became a declaration — not just of state pride but of identity pride. The visuals, originally imagined as a big group of Latinos, transformed into something far more intimate and unmistakably bi: a man, a woman, Ryan between them, owning the gaze instead of being defined by it. “I had no other choice but to put them together,” he says. “How else do you make it visually clear that I’m bi?”
What grounds Ryan’s work isn’t spectacle, though. It’s intention. Every lyric, every visual choice, every TikTok post is guided by a single question: Where does the art I want to make meet the people who need it? That overlap is where Ryan believes his community is built.
And maybe that’s why this has been his most successful year yet!
For hip-hop artists and creators who feel hesitancy or shame about their sexuality, Ryan offers a message rooted in both compassion and defiance. He knows how intimidating it can be to step into a genre that has historically policed masculinity and sidelined queerness.
But he also believes the power of the work lies in claiming your lane anyway. “Rap is just metaphors and rhythm and words,” he reminds us — a space wide enough for every kind of story, including yours.
His advice is simple but radical: define who you’re making music for, and stop trying to win the approval of people who were never your audience. When you stop waiting for the world to validate you, you free yourself to create with honesty, depth, and courage. And somewhere out there, someone who thought they were alone will finally see themselves — because you decided to be visible.