Do we like Sam Smith?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of public queer advocacy, charity work and nothing harmful in their own words turned up; the only blemishes are song-copying disputes, not conduct.
Smith is a British pop star who came out publicly as non-binary in 2019 and uses they/them pronouns. Accepting the Attitude Person of the Year award that October, they called the previous year a “second coming out” and urged everyone to live as loudly and queerly as possible. That is the through-line of the whole career: queer and out front.
The scandals are mostly paperwork. Smith settled out of court with Tom Petty over similarities between “Stay With Me” and Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”, giving Petty and Jeff Lynne a 12.5 per cent writing credit; a source close to the case said Smith’s team didn’t fight it. A separate suit by songwriters alleged “Dancing With a Stranger” copied their song; a judge threw it out in 2023, but the Ninth Circuit revived it in 2025 and said a jury should decide.
The recent news is a happy one. Smith confirmed their engagement to designer Christian Cowan in a New York Times interview, and Hazel Eyes, the album that followed, is a run of love songs. Smith told the paper there is “something radical about being queer in this time” and singing love songs, and said they won’t let the poison they read and see change how they love.
The good stuff is real and goes back years. In 2018 Smith fronted War Child UK's birthday fundraiser, asking fans to donate instead of giving gifts, and had passed £17,000 by the time it was reported. In 2017 they said they would give a third of ticket sales from a Sydney Opera House show to Australia's equal marriage campaign, after saying the country shouldn't be having a poll on the issue.
Overall, the record is thin on anything that would make a queer fan wince. The copyright disputes are the sort every hit-maker seems to cop, and the Petty one ended with Smith sharing credit. The one gap is that I found little on Smith's views beyond queer rights and charity, so there is no climate record to report either way.