Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega kiss in the music video for “Taste”

And indeed, the video ends with Carpenter and Ortega kissing, just before Ortega murders the “beloved friend” with a chainsaw. The two women go to his funeral together and smile knowingly over the coffin.

Carpenter has been releasing music since she became a Disney Channel star in 2015, but reached new levels of fame this year with the hit “Espresso,” a cheeky ode to her feminine charms (“I got this one boy, and he won't stop calling / When they act like that, I know I got 'em.”)

Carpenter followed that song with “Please Please Please,” her first-ever No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, in which she begs her new man not to embarrass her. The music video also featured her boyfriend Barry Keoghan.

Due to her rapidly growing fame, Carpenter and her love life have become hot topics in the public eye.

In June, Carpenter's sexuality was discussed on the comedy podcast “Two Dykes and a Mic.” The clip went viral after being shared on TikTok, garnering over 12 million views and 1.2 million likes to date.

The two presenters described Carpenter as “straight through and through” and added: “I don't think Sabrina Carpenter has a single gay leg in her body.”

A week later, Carpenter performed a cover of “Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan, a lesbian. The song's muse, a queer woman, chooses to enter into relationships with men rather than confess her love for Roan – even though, as Roan sings, she will never be able to escape her queerness.

Many fans interpreted Carpenter's song choice as a backhanded response to podcasters and other people on the internet who had begun calling Carpenter “the straightest woman in the world.”

Others noted other instances of queer-flagging in Carpenter's work, including “You Need Me Now?”, a duet with gay singer-songwriter girl in red, released in March. (Back in 2020, “Do you listen to girl in red?” became a meme in the online LGBTQ+ community, a sort of code for figuring out if someone is queer.)

Carpenter has also hinted at her attraction to women on social media, such as when Adele praised “Espresso” during a concert.

“When I went to bed last night because [it] was a very long night for me, I found myself singing 'I'm working late, 'cause I'm a singer', that song by Sabrina Carpenter,” Adele said on stage. “That song is right up my alley.”

In response, Carpenter tweeted: “All I read was that Adele thinks of me in bed.

Speculation about Carpenter's sexuality began largely due to her live performances of “Nonsense,” a single released in 2022. Carpenter went viral for improvising raunchy outros during her Emails I Can't Send Tour, a tradition she continued when she opened for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour earlier this year. Many of them contain not-so-subtle references to sex with men.

However, Carpenter said the outros were not meant to reflect her real life, but rather to combat the shame and stigma that often comes with publicly discussing sex.

“I've learned a lot more about sexuality from writing these books than people realize,” she told Cosmopolitan. “I think people think I'm just disgustingly horny, but really, writing these books comes from being able to be unafraid of your own sexuality, not from just not being able to put them down.”