Two faces: the closet, the iron masks and «Mentes diabólicas»

There's a person who smiles at you in the lift. Asks after your boyfriend, tells you what a lovely couple you make, holds the door. And there's another person, who turns out to be the very same one, who that night at the family dinner comes out with the old «I've got nothing against them, I just don't want it rubbed in my face». Two faces. One ID card.

«Mentes diabólicas» has a verse that sums it up better than I can:

Bajo el sol somos iguales, en la sombra se disfrazan («Under the sun we're all the same; in the shadows they wear disguises»)

That line is the heart of this post. The full lyrics are published, and on the song's own page I've already talked about how it's built: famous sayings in quotation marks, and a chorus that tells people exactly where they can go. Here I want to come at it from another side. I want to talk about why hypocrisy, a flaw as universal as they come, hits us in such a particular way: the queens, the dykes, trans people, anyone who's had to spend a stretch of their life wearing a face that wasn't theirs.

Because we know about masks. We've worn them. And anyone who has worn one can spot everybody else's from twenty metres away.

Two masks that don't weigh the same

The first thing to say is uncomfortable: every one of us who has been in the closet has lied. We've said «a friend» when it was a boy. We've invented girlfriends for Christmas lunch. We've switched the pronoun in a story halfway through the sentence, with that mental emergency stop anyone who's done it will recognise. We've smiled at some uncle's poof joke so nobody would suspect a thing.

Is that hypocrisy? Technically, it's pretending. But it isn't the same thing, and the difference is the key to the song.

The closet mask is something you put on because it's cold outside. It protects you. You don't use it to hurt anybody; you use it so nobody hurts you. It's a defensive lie, and whoever wears it pays a very high price, because living in disguise is exhausting. Every day is a show you never chose, for an audience that has no idea it's sitting in a theatre.

The mask «Mentes diabólicas» is talking about is something else. The lyrics speak of «máscaras de hierro», iron masks. And you don't put on iron to keep out the cold: you put it on so you can strike without showing your face. It's the mask of someone who fakes virtue in order to judge others, who preaches one thing and practises the opposite, who hugs you only to measure your back before sticking something in it.

One mask you wear out of fear. The other, out of convenience. And once you finally take off the first one, once you come out and can breathe, the second becomes unbearable. You've paid far too much for your own honesty to put up with other people's lack of it.

The same old theatre

The song opens with the idea that the world is a stage where we're all acting. It's an old thought, one that's been doing the rounds in literature for centuries, and it's almost always been read with a certain melancholy: we all play a part, what can you do, that's life.

Said by someone queer, that line sounds different to me. Less resigned, more accusing.

Because we learned very early on that the theatre existed. We learned there was a correct way to cross your legs, to move your hands, to laugh. We learned to police our tone, not to say «how cute» about a jumper, to work out exactly how much camp we could let slip in each place. Plenty of straight people never realise they're acting, because the part they were handed fits them comfortably. We did realise, because the costume pinched us everywhere.

So when someone from that audience who never noticed the show comes along to lecture you about authenticity, you can't help laughing. Or seething. Or both, which is more or less what the chorus is made of.

What embraces in the dark

There's a line in the second verse that strikes me as one of the most visual in the whole lyric:

Traición y mentira, en la noche se abrazan («Betrayal and lies embrace in the night»)

I love it because it turns two abstractions into a couple. It doesn't say betrayal and lies exist, or that they go together. It says they embrace. That they're intimate. That they seek each other out once the lights go off, like two secret lovers who pretend not to know each other by day.

And that's exactly what the hypocrite does with his own flaws: he keeps them in a secret affair. In public, he and the lie aren't on speaking terms. He's a man of his word, a woman of principle, someone you can trust. But when nobody's looking, they meet in a doorway and snog.

There's a delicious irony in using the image of secret lovers to talk about hypocrisy, in a song written from a queer planet of all places. For centuries, the thing that embraced at night, in hiding, was us. Our love was what had to be covered up. We were accused of leading a double life when it was society that wouldn't let us lead a single one.

The lyric flips it. Now what hides in the dark isn't two boys in love in a park; it's betrayal. The one who has to hide isn't whoever loves differently, but whoever lies. It's a small settling of scores with history, tucked into a line that lasts three seconds.

The mask with a filter

You can't talk about masks these days without talking about phones, either. If the world was already a stage, social media has given it spotlights, numbered seats and an applause counter.

We all edit what we show. That's not hypocrisy, that's common sense: nobody posts the photo with the bags under their eyes and the wonky bun, or hardly anybody. The trouble starts when the edited version is used as a weapon. When someone who spends all day posting quotes about kindness, self-love and good vibes devotes their off-camera hours to making life hell for whoever's next to them.

Everyone knows that character. The one who puts a rainbow on their profile picture in June and doesn't lift a finger the rest of the year. The brand that drapes itself in flags during Pride and pulls the campaign the moment a handful of outraged people write in. The positivity guru who blocks anyone who asks an awkward question.

The song isn't about social media, but its question fits it like a glove: under the sun we're all the same, fine, but what happens in the shadows? What happens when the livestream ends?

The one who preaches by day

There's a figure who turns up again and again in the news, in any country and any decade, who might as well have been written for this song. The very serious gentleman who spends his public life talking about the real family, about decency, about what's natural and what isn't. The one who votes against, who signs the manifestos, who goes on the talk shows to explain that children need a mother and a father. And who one day turns up in a photo, a leaked chat or a sauna, doing exactly what he preached against.

No need for names. Everyone has a few in mind, and if not, just wait a few months.

The song has a line for that character too, one of those sayings that have been around for centuries: hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. What fascinates me about the idea is what it really says underneath: the hypocrite needs virtue. Without it he'd have no disguise. He needs a rule to exist so he can break it in secret while demanding everyone else obey it.

And when the rule in question is your very existence, the tribute gets especially twisted. Because that gentleman isn't just lying. He uses his lie to make sure you can't live without yours. He takes his mask off at night, somewhere nobody can see, and by day he puts on the iron one so that you'll never be allowed to take yours off.

If there's anyone the chorus is aimed at by name, even though it never names him, it's him.

The wolf smiling in the group chat

It would be very convenient to stop there. The hypocrite as a distant villain: the politician, the bishop, the pundit. But the song doesn't stop there, and neither do I.

There's another saying in quotation marks in the lyrics, the one about man being a wolf to man, and it works far better on a small scale. The colleague who calls you «sweetheart» at the coffee machine and then tells the boss you're a bit much. The friend who urges you to dump your boyfriend and a week later is seeing him. The group chat that's all hearts until you leave the conversation and the carving-up begins. The neighbour on the landing who has the lowdown on the whole building, whose portrait I already drew in La vecina cotilla, though she was more endearing than diabolical.

And, if we're being honest, inside our own community too.

Because having worn a mask doesn't vaccinate you against putting on another. Look at the dating profiles that say «discreet, no fems», written by people who spent years being called faggot for moving their hands. Look at the guy who goes to the Pride march covered in glitter and on Monday mocks his camp colleague to fit in at the office. Look at the woman who defends diversity in a talk and then, in private, tears the trans girl in the group to shreds over how she dresses.

The smiling wolf has no sexual orientation. He can be anywhere, including the gay bar you go to every Friday. The lyric puts it with a bluntness I love: «cada uno en la farsa, su papel bien marcado», everyone in the farce with their part clearly marked. Nobody gets out of having a part. The question is whether you use it to hide or to bite.

Better a critic who says it to your face

Among all the insults, there's a line in «Mentes diabólicas» that runs in the opposite direction and that, for me, is the most important in the song. It says, more or less, better the critics who show themselves honestly.

It's a line that could slip by unnoticed between all the «hypocrites» and «miserable people», but it makes something crucial clear: the song isn't against criticism. It isn't the tantrum of someone who can't stand being contradicted. Quite the opposite. It would a thousand times rather have someone tell it to its face that they don't like something than have someone applaud in front and rip it to pieces behind.

Anyone who puts things out on the internet gets this. Over these years of releasing singles I've learned to tell two kinds of negative comments apart, and I went into it calmly in Lo que aprendí de los comentarios negativos. There are the ones that tell you plainly what isn't working for them, and you learn from those. And there are the ones that tell you nothing but tell everyone else, and you learn nothing from those; you just suffer.

The honest critic does you a favour even when it stings. The hypocrite does you harm even when he's smiling. And the song picks its side without a second thought.

There's something almost tender about that line. In the middle of such a furious lyric, a very simple request suddenly appears: tell me. Not behind my back, not in the group chat, not at the family dinner. Me. Whatever it is. I'll cope with it better than with your smile.

Answering without manners

And then there's the chorus. That «meteros por el culo vuestras críticas», shove your criticism up your arse, which doesn't leave much room for interpretation.

Someone might wonder whether it was necessary. Whether a song about hypocrisy wouldn't be more elegant if it stuck to the famous quotations, the world as a stage and the broken mirrors. I don't think so. I think the rudeness is precisely the argument.

Think about it for a moment. What's the hypocrite's native language? Good manners. The hypocrite never shouts. Never swears. Is terribly polite. He attacks you with an «I'm only saying it for your own good», with a «don't take this the wrong way», with a «you're so brave to go out dressed like that». His weapon is courtesy, because courtesy lets him wound without leaving a mark. If you answer him in the same register, you're playing on his pitch and you lose, because he's been training all his life.

The chorus walks off the pitch. It smashes the crockery. It says exactly what it thinks in the coarsest words it can find, and in doing so it exposes the contrast: here's someone who speaks plainly, and over there is someone who never has. Vulgarity becomes a form of sincerity. It's like saying: I may be crude, but at least I don't have two faces.

That's a very Spanish tradition, by the way. The outburst as an act of honesty, the row on the communal patio where somebody finally says what everyone was thinking. And it's also a very queer tradition: the insult thrown back with more wit and more volume than the original, which is something I come back to whenever I say that camp isn't a joke, even if you laugh.

Two songs, the same cry

Anyone who knows my catalogue well will have noticed something: the chorus of «Mentes diabólicas» doesn't live only in this song. It comes back in «Hipócritas», a single from another album in the trilogy, «El día de la liberación».

That's no slip. Some cries have to be let out more than once, and this is one of them.

What's interesting is what changes from one to the other. In «Mentes diabólicas», which belongs to the first album, «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the chorus is surrounded by philosophy. The song watches from a certain distance, with the library open: the world as a stage, the wolf, the tribute vice pays to virtue. It's almost a treatise, with outbursts scribbled in the margins.

In «Hipócritas» the distance disappears. I wrote an introduction for its music video on YouTube that left no doubt about the tone, and what I still like best is how it ends: «Esto no es rabia. Es libertad.» This isn't rage. It's freedom. In that text I talked about the people who play at being beings of light while hiding all their crap behind a smile, and I said that on planet Gayfolk there's no room for their masks.

If you play the two back to back, you can hear the shift. First you understand the hypocrite, you study him, you place him in his historical context. Then you run out of patience for studying him and simply show him the door. It's a path anyone who's had a two-faced person close to them will recognise: at first you try to understand them, and one day understanding them stops being your job.

If you fancy hearing the whole trilogy with that kind of connection in mind, I have a guide on how to listen to the Gayfolk trilogy from start to finish.

The price of taking off the mask

There's one thing I don't want to leave out, because it's what makes this song more than a settling of scores.

When someone comes out of the closet, they do something the hypocrite never will: they give up the comfort of the mask. They accept they're going to lose things. A friend, a relative, a job, some peace of mind. Some people lose almost everything. And they do it anyway, because living with two faces costs them more than any loss.

That decision gives you a very specific kind of authority. Not moral superiority, mind you, because nobody is a better person for being gay. But first-hand knowledge of what honesty costs. And from there, the hypocrite stops looking like a complex character and starts looking like someone who simply wouldn't pay the price. Someone who wants all the perks of the mask and none of the costs.

That's why the song's contempt isn't gratuitous. It comes from someone who knows the weight of a disguise and has taken it off, looking at someone who could take theirs off and prefers to use it to do harm.

If you're still in the closet and you've read this far, know that none of this is about you. Your mask is cardboard, it's for the cold, and you'll take it off when you can and if you want to. I wrote you a letter a while ago, in case it helps: Carta a quien todavía no se lo ha dicho a nadie.

Broken mirrors

The last strong image in the lyrics is lies being exposed in broken mirrors. I love it as an ending, because it takes the song back to the start: to the theatre, to the masks, to the face you put on for others.

A broken mirror doesn't lie, but it doesn't give you a whole picture either. It shows you in pieces, cracked, from odd angles. That's what happens when someone's mask slips: a new, complete person doesn't suddenly appear, just fragments. A comment that doesn't fit. A photo that contradicts a speech. A message sent to the wrong group. Bit by bit the pieces come together, and what you see can't be unseen.

Hypocrisy almost never comes apart all at once. It comes apart in pieces, and every piece cuts a little.

I suppose that's why the chorus has to be so blunt. Because after picking that much glass up off the floor, you've no appetite left for finesse. What you want is to tell the truth good and loud, in exactly the right words, and get on with your life.

The full lyrics of this and all my songs are in Letras, and the universe they all live in, with its invented characters and its planets, is in Planeta Gayfolk.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Mentes diabólicas» about? It's about hypocrisy: people who behave one way in the light and another in the shadows, who fake virtue while judging everyone else. It mixes famous sayings about the world as a stage and about masks with a very direct chorus aimed at hypocrites and their criticism.

Which album is «Mentes diabólicas» on? It's part of «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the first album in Mike Sain't Louis's Gayfolk trilogy. It's on Spotify and all the other platforms.

How is it related to the song «Hipócritas»? They share a chorus. «Hipócritas» belongs to «El día de la liberación» and takes up the same cry in a more personal, direct tone, while «Mentes diabólicas» surrounds it with quotations and reflection.

Who makes the music for «Mentes diabólicas»? Mike Sain't Louis is a lyricist, composer and music producer, and calls himself the first AI songwriter: he writes the lyrics and directs the production, and the music and vocal performances are generated with artificial intelligence.