The woke crowd has gone too far. And I say that as a Greens-voting, pronouns-having, women-loving barista with patchwork tattoos and half-bleached hair. I am the woke crowd. But there’s a new wave of queer kids marching the online halls with opinions so ‘woke’ they circle back around to homophobic—and they need a harsh reality check.
The issue on the table is this: some queer kids are becoming increasingly infuriated that celebrities are ‘queerbaiting’. That is—they’re mad that these celebrities act a little gay sometimes, without announcing to the world that they are, in fact, gayer than a maypole. What they deem ‘wrong’ is that these celebrities seem gay, but they aren’t actually. They’re just pretending. Ross Lynch doesn’t want to get a lap dance from Troye Sivan; he’s just doing it so gay people will stream his music. Billie Eilish isn’t actually sapphic and making in-jokes with fellow queers; she just posted ‘I love girls’ because she knows her fanbase is full of lesbians and wants to lead them on. They’re taking advantage of the queer community by pretending to be part of it. Or so these people claim.
Their solution, of course, is to harass these celebrities—burn all photos, boycott all merch, send death threats to them and their family—until they finally admit they’re queerbaiting, or they come out of the closet and prove they’re allowed to be ‘acting gay’.
It’s an issue that simply shouldn’t exist. These self-proclaimed heroes that ‘call out’ these celebrities are obsessed with finding problems in every heteronormative nook and cranny, taking offence to nothing but whispers. For members of a community built on acceptance and love, their readiness to shun people who aren’t comfortable in announcing their sexuality is a bitter slap in the face. It’s four steps backward in the progress their queer elders fought so hard to achieve—their fight to let queer people just exist without having to define themselves by what gender they want to sleep with.
In the name of ‘queer activism’, they’re forcing people out of the closet. Which tops the list of Things Not to Do to Queer People, whether you know they’re gay or not. You should come out when you’re ready—not when someone else wants you to, and certainly not when hordes of teenagers on the internet force you to because they threaten to destroy your career if you don’t.
It never occurs to them that these celebrities aren’t in the position to come out. Being caged in the online queer bubble makes you blind to the real world—which is far from rainbows. Out of 195 countries, same-sex marriage is still only legal in 38. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting took 49 queer people from us. The 2022 Club Q shooting took five. Last February, 16-year-old Nex Benedict took their own life after being beaten up in their school bathroom for being nonbinary. There exists a constant looming threat to queer people that when the wrong person finds out their sexuality, they’ll be attacked—or worse. Consider the fact that celebrities live in the very public eye, that their privacy is never guaranteed, and try figuring out why some of them choose not to come out.
Try.
When I asked around for examples of celebrities who had been forced to come out, or celebrities who had been cancelled for not coming out, I got back a list of 27 names (yes, I counted). Among the list were Tyler the Creator, Sabrina Carpenter, Jaden Smith, Megan Thee Stallion, Harry Styles, Doechii, Ariana Grande, and Kit Connor.
Kit Connor’s case is particularly interesting, because he encompassed the entire issue in a few short words. After he was harassed for queerbaiting, he took to Twitter (now ‘X’, but I refuse to give in to Elon Musk): ‘I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of [Heartstopper]. Bye.’ His tweet evoked an international empathy parade, where people lobbied their agreements to each other. ‘Yes, he’s right, he’s so right, nobody should be harassed into coming out before they’re ready, what a horrible and terrible experience this young man has gone through.’
Two days later, the masses were back to accusing Harry Styles of queerbaiting for starring in the film My Policeman.
The desperate need for people to come out—complete with glittery rainbow streamers, Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ blasting, and big balloons that spell ‘I AM QUEER’ because anything less than that is apparently ‘too vague’—is more prevalent online, but since society is so linked with the internet now, it’s an affair that concerns everyone. It’ll be difficult to fight the Twitter cancel-culture hivemind, but the handbrake needs to be pulled.
At the end of the day, your sexuality is nobody’s business—and celebrities aren’t the exception. Your concern shouldn’t be whether or not Pedro Pascal likes making out with men in his free time. It should be in helping create a world where it wouldn’t matter if he did—a world where Prince Harry coming out as bisexual would be just another Tuesday.
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Aster Ren Kivy is a pronoun-having barista and aspiring writer fuelled by spite, maladaptive daydreaming, and D&D.