1999–present
Lil Nas X Now: Grammy Winner Speaks Out About Arrest and Felony Charges
Lil Nas X has opened up about his arrest and time in jail. The Grammy-winning rapper, whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill, pleaded not guilty to four felony charges on August 25 after he was accused of assaulting police officers in Los Angeles.
“That was a terrifying last four days,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram Story on August 26. “But your girl is gonna be alright.”
Lil Nas X was found roaming around Ventura Boulevard on Thursday, August 21, wearing only his underwear and cowboy boots. TMZ later released footage of him walking around fully naked. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the 26-year-old rushed at officers when they approached him and was subsequently arrested and hospitalized for a possible overdose.
While he was initially booked on a misdemeanor battery charge, he is now charged with three felony counts of battery against a police officer and one count of resisting arrest. After entering his plea, Lil Nas X was released on a $75,000 bail and ordered to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings.
Christy O’Connor, an attorney representing Lil Nas X, said the “Old Town Road” singer wasn’t under the influence of illegal substances at the time of his arrest. NBC News reports he is due back in court for a hearing on September 15.
Who Is Lil Nas X?
Lil Nas X is a Grammy Award–winning rapper and singer known for the hits “Old Town Road,” “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” and “Industry Baby.” Nas rose to fame in 2019 when his breakthrough hit “Old Town Road” went viral, enjoyed a record 19 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, and later earned him two Grammys. The Georgia native released his debut album Montero in 2021, which featured the pop-rap hits “Industry Baby” and “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” as well as the more personal tune “Sun Goes Down,” which addresses coming to terms with his sexuality. In March 2025, he released an EP titled Days Before Dreamboy.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Montero Lamar Hill
BORN: April 9, 1999
BIRTHPLACE: Lithia Springs, Georgia
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries
Early Life
Lil Nas X is the stage name of Montero Lamar Hill. He was born on April 9, 1999, in Lithia Springs, Georgia. His mother called him Montero in honor of the Mitsubishi Montero, a car she liked. After Nas’ parents separated when he was 6, he and his siblings went to live with their mother and great-grandmother in an Atlanta public-housing project that was known for drugs and violence. About four years later, a custody battle resulted in Nas and his older brother moving to the Atlanta suburbs to live with their father and stepmother.
Nas has said he was aware he was gay since he was 5 years old. As he got older, he witnessed the bullying and homophobia people who came out had to deal with and decided he would always stay in the closet. His father was a gospel singer, and Nas had to attend church. Religion also colored how he viewed his sexuality. “I even thought, ‘If I have these feelings, it’s just a test. A temporary test. It’s going to go away. God is just tempting me,’” he told British GQ in May 2021.
Throughout high school, Nas kept his head down. His main focus was online life as a superfan of Nicki Minaj. On Twitter as @nasmaraj, Nas interacted with other Minaj admirers, known as the Barbz, and learned how to get attention on social media.
Nas later enrolled in the University of West Georgia to study computer science but soon realized that he didn’t enjoy college. It was then that he started writing songs and found that he loved creating music. To his father’s dismay, he decided to drop out of school to pursue a career as a musician.
Songs and Album
After leaving college, Nas lived with his sister while sharing his music online. He saw the popularity of country-trap videos, which mixed country music and a Southern style of hip-hop. With a beat purchased online for $30, he created his own country-trap song titled “Old Town Road.” “It was the first song I genuinely formulated,” he told Rolling Stone in May 2019. “I was like, ‘I gotta make it short, I gotta make it catchy.’”
Nas posted the tune to SoundCloud in December 2018. His social media abilities helped the tune go viral on TikTok and spread to other sites. It was around this time that he adopted his stage name, Lil Nas X. “Nas” drew on the Twitter account he ran while a devoted fan of Nicki Minaj and “X,” the Roman numeral for 10, represented the number of years he thought it would take to find fame. He was quickly proved wrong.
Success with “Old Town Road”
In March 2019, “Old Town Road” made it onto three Billboard charts: the Hot 100, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, and Hot Country Songs. Then it was removed from the country chart. Billboard’s official reasoning was that Nas’ song did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music,” but many wondered if his being a Black man had influenced the decision. (Billboard said race was not a factor.)
Amid this controversy, the song reached No. 1 on the Hot 100. That April, he released a remix of “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, the 1990s country star and father of Miley Cyrus, who Nas knew from Bill Ray’s role on Hannah Montana. With help from remixes by Cyrus and others, “Old Town Road” set a record for staying atop the Hot 100 chart for 19 weeks. It remains the longest No. 1 streak of any song this century, though Shaboozey tied the mark in 2024 with “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
In 2020, Nas and his collaborator won two Grammy Awards for “Old Town Road.” The hit song was recognized as the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance and the Best Music Video. Nas had also been in the running for three of the most prestigious awards—Best New Artist, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year for his first EP—but didn’t win in the categories.
Debut Album Montero
After the success of “Old Town Road,” Nas signed with Columbia Records in March 2019. His next songs “Panini” and “Rodeo,” featured on his EP 7, received attention but didn’t reached the heights of “Old Town Road.” In January 2021, Nas released the children’s book, C Is for Country, about himself and a character named Panini the Pony. It quickly became a bestseller.
Two months later, the singer released the single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).” The song, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, explicitly addressed his sexuality, with the title referencing the 2017 gay romantic drama Call Me By Your Name starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. The accompanying music video drew on visuals linked to the Christian faith and the idea that being gay meant being denied salvation. The video, along with a tie-in release of “Satan Shoes,” drew ire online, but Nas responded, “The love outweighs the hate by like a hundred.” His mastery of social media allowed Nas to swat back at critics while bringing attention to his work.
At the same time, Nas shared a heartwarming message to his younger self on social media. “I know we promised to never come out publicly, I know we promised to never be ‘that’ type of gay person, I know we promised to die with the secret, but this will open doors for many other queer people to simply exist,” he wrote. In May 2021, Nas performed “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)” and the more personal “Sun Goes Down” on Saturday Night Live. His pants split during his performance, and he later tweeted that this wardrobe malfunction hadn’t been planned.
The singles laid the foundation for his debut album Montero. Ahead of its September 2021 release, Nas shared photos in which he sported a prominent pregnancy bump. “I’m like a mother sending her child out into the world,” he explained to People. The record, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, featured collaborations with Elton John, Miley Cyrus, Megan Thee Stallion, Jack Harlow, and Doja Cat. The track “Industry Baby,” featuring Harlow, topped the Hot 100.
That same month, Nas received the Suicide Prevention Advocate of the Year Award from The Trevor Project. “If using my voice and expressing myself in my music can help even one kid out there who feels alone, then it was all worth it,” he said in response.
Montero earned Nas five more Grammy nominations, bringing his career total to 11. The title track competed for Record and Song of the Year, as Montero itself garnered a nod for the Album of the Year. However, the singer left the 2022 ceremony empty handed.
New Music: Days Before Dreamboy
After a hiatus, Lil Nas X returned in January 2024 with the upbeat single “J Christ” followed by the emotional “Where Do We Go Now?” Another single, “Light Again!,” dropped that November and appeared in Nas’s EP Days Before Dreamboy. The eight-track collection arrived in March 2025 with no advanced fanfare.
His upcoming sophomore album Dreamboy is set to arrive later this year. However, an exact release date has yet to be announced. In April 2025, the musician was briefly hospitalized after suddenly experiencing partial facial paralysis. He has since made a full recovery.
Is Lil Nas X Gay?
Today, Lil Nas X is such a proud standard-bearer among gay men that it might seem unthinkable that the singer once promised himself he’d never share his sexuality. However, as his fame grew in 2019, Nas decided to stop hiding. He first came out to his sister and brother, then shared the truth with his father. His father at first asked if Nas was being tempted by the devil but came to accept and fully support his son.
At the end of Pride Month in June 2019, Nas publicly came out. After appearing at a Pride concert at the Glastonbury Festival, he instructed his fans to “listen closely” to the lyrics of his song “C7osure (You Like)” to reveal he was gay.
Nas knew sharing this information could alienate some of his peers and fans in country and hip-hop and was the target of homophobic comments by some rappers. Still, he stood by his decision. He later explained to XXL Magazine in September 2021, “I honestly felt like it was kind of my duty. Especially if I wanted to move forward.”
Since 2023, he has posted on his social media accounts about being bisexual. That January, he shared on X (formerly Twitter), “would y’all be mad at me if i thought i was a little bisexual.” However, in a documentary later that year about the Grammy winner, he refers to himself as gay.
In 2021, Nas briefly dated dancer Yai Ariza, who appeared in his music video for “That’s What I Want,” but ended the relationship just months later. “I’m at this point in my life where I finally realized that I don’t want to fall in love,” he told People at the time. “I’m so focused on my music career, and love takes a lot of time. It’s a lot of responsibility, and I don’t think I’m ready to have that extra responsibility on my shoulders right now. When it happens, it’s going to happen.”
Net Worth
As of August 2025, Lil Nas X an estimated net worth of $9 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Quotes
- There’s always gonna be fear when you’re doing something that’s literally life-changing. But you just have to do it, you know?
- Not to sound self-centered, but it feels like I’m chosen, in a way, to do this stuff.
- Seeing digital numbers, it’s a good feeling. It goes so quickly, though. You have to keep going.
- If using my voice and expressing myself in my music can help even one kid out there who feels alone, then it was all worth it.
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Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
