Frank Ocean, the R&B Musician, Uses Tumblr to Describe His Love for a Man On Saturday morning I sat at the dining room table in Frank Ocean's Los Angeles home and, for about three hours, spoke with him about love. It's the type of thing that, if you've spent time with his music, songs he writes for others and songs he sings himself, you can't help but do. He's one of the sharpest observers of broken, cancerous relationships working in popular music today, usually drawing characters who pine for people they can't have and people who create force fields around themselves to make sure no one gets too close. Mr. Ocean can be one of these people himself. I'd met him a few times over the past year and a half, and he was always affable but a little distant. During our conversation for the profile that's going to appear on the cover of this Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, though, he was warm and expansive. Most people loathe divulging details of their personal lives, which makes all sorts of sense. And I don't think a public figure's personal life is inherently off-limits, especially in cases where it so clearly has an impact on the art that gets made. But Mr. Ocean was hyperarticulate about his love life, about a pair of relationships that had been weighing on him. He spoke with the sort of insight and directness you expect from someone you've known for years. Still, I noticed he was avoiding gender-specific pronouns. Mr. Ocean is studious and precise, making points through things unspoken, so this absence felt notable. Once during our talk, I caught myself using the word "she" to describe the person in one of his relationships, and Mr. Ocean didn't blink, though he didn't exactly nod in assent either. I filed it away. Writing the piece, I made a point of avoiding referring to the sex of the people Mr. Ocean had been discussing. It was an instinctual choice. Something about the quiet way Mr. Ocean spoke about love was in fact loud enough to stick with me a couple of days later, as I reviewed the transcript of the conversation and began to write. When I spoke with him again on the phone, an hour or so before finishing the article Tuesday evening, the issue of whether he'd been avoiding full transparency was still a cloud in my mind, not fully formed. I didn't press the point. There was, in fact, more. In a letter written on Dec. 27, 2011, and posted to Mr. Ocean's Tumblr Tuesday night, he gave details: "4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19. He was too. We spent that summer, and the summer after, together. It goes on from there, a story about passion and confusion and fear and forgiveness. It paralleled one of the relationships we'd talked about, one where he was the one left feeling stung. The additional information in the story was heartbreaking: he'd fallen in love with a man who couldn't reciprocate. "He did his best, but he wouldn't do the same," Mr. Ocean writes of the night when he first confessed his full feelings. He had to go back inside soon. It was late and his girlfriend was waiting for him upstairs. In our interview, Mr. Ocean talked of hiding behind his work, about chasing professional success as a buffer against the frustrations of his romantic life. And in his letter he writes: "I wrote to keep myself busy and sane. I wanted to create worlds that were rosier than mine. "Channel Orange" (Island Def Jam), his first studio album, which will be released this month, is anything but rosy, though. And there are hints of this particular struggle. Some of the lyrics circulating ahead of the album release suggested that Mr. Ocean was, indeed writing about love for members of either sex. On "Bad Religion," he appears to spell it out: This unrequited love To me it's nothing but a one-man cult And cyanide in my Styrofoam cup I could never make him love me Never make him love me. In writing about Mr. Ocean and the album, I thought seriously about that and also about the fact that Mr. Ocean tells a great story. There are no rules that say a male songwriter can't write from the perspective of a straight woman, or that all love stories are to be taken literally, or that a man singing about love for a "him" was really doing anything more than delivering a lyric. But the unchecked and all-too-easy assumption that would have led me to fill in a "she" or a "her," where none was specified - that's something that should be rejected, a society-shaped norm that is in fact a fiction. It shouldn't be an issue, Mr. Ocean's announcement about his sexual orientation. He knows from broken hearts. That's enough. Let's learn from him.