• April 9, 1999
• Lil Nas X was born Montero Lamar Hill in Lithia Springs, near Atlanta, Georgia. His mother named him after the Mitsubishi Montero because she wanted the car but never got one.
• The first gay mainstream rapper, Lil Nas X struggled to come to terms with his sexuality throughout his teens. An ardent Nicki Minaj fan, he found solace in running the @NasMaraj fan account on Twitter.
• When he was still known as Montero Hill, Nas enrolled at the University of West Georgia, where he majored in computer science, but dropped out after a year so he could concentrate on his music. The young rapper slept on his sister's couch and supported himself working as a cashier at Zaxby's chicken chain and as an attendant at the Six Flags Over Georgia theme park.
• When Montero Hill started writing and recording songs, he adopted the name Lil Nas X in tribute to the rapper Nas. "When I started doing music, I was like, 'I want to have fun with this," he told Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show. "And every new rapper's name is Lil, Lil, Lil. 'What if I was Lil Nas? That'd be funny.' So I was like, 'Alright, bet. I'll be Lil Nas.' And I added the X later on."
• He self-released a debut mixtape called Nasarati in July 2018. Nas X subsequently admitted to The Guardian the record was "just me acting really hard... because it felt like that's what I had to do."
• A few months later, Lil Nas came across a beat on YouTube by a Dutch teenager named YoungKio, which he bought for $30. The rapper penned some lyrics, which he described to Genius as having a "loner cowboy kind of vibe." He titled his country-trap hybrid "Old Town Road." The song blew up as a result of memes on TikTok, becoming his breakthrough hit.
• "Old Town Road" spent 19 weeks at #1 on the Hot 100, breaking the record for the longest run at the top of the tally.
• In June 2019, Nas X publicly came out as gay, the first artist to do so while having a #1 record.
• Since coming out, Lil Nas has been a LGBTQ trailblazer, incorporating gay themes in his songs and videos. By cultivating an image as a hedonistic and flamboyant gay rapper, his aim is to "open doors for many other queer people to simply exist."
• Lil Nas X attended the same high school in Georgia as Brockhampton founding member Kevin Abstract, though they didn't know each other at the time.

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