That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

Harry Styles who?

One Direction who?

Didn't really know who he was till recently.

Harry Styles’ gay sex comments spark huge debate about queerbaiting and outing
Pink News

Styles, 28, has long been faced accusations of queerbaiting – adopting a queer image for profit without being part of the LGBTQ+ community – over his androgynous dress sense and comments about his own identity.

He shrugged off the claim in a new interview with Rolling Stone magazine, saying: “Sometimes people say: ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone.”

“I’ve never talked about my life away from work publicly and found that it’s benefited me positively.”

Styles also discussed gay sex scenes in film, ahead of his own in My Policeman, saying that so much of it “is two guys going at it, and it kinds of removes the tenderness from it” – remarks that have spawned ridicule and renewed the queerbaiting debate.

Twitter users were divided by Harry Styles’ refusal to label his sexual orientation.

Other users expressed frustration at the debate, calling on people to speak about other issues afflicting the queer community instead, and said that pressuring someone to come out is not OK.

Harry Styles has been asked on numerous occasions about his sexuality.

Such questions, he told Better Homes & Gardens in April, are “outdated”. His sexuality is one of the few things he says he feels he has control over as a celebrity in the public eye.

“I’ve been really open with it with my friends, but that’s my personal experience; it’s mine,” he said.

“The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.”

Frankly, I've been working under the assumption that Harry Styles is pansexual for years, and it'd make sense if that was part of why he doesn't like labeling his sexuality; he's open to so much that the gender of the other person doesn't even really register to him.

And funny thing, as someone who writes for an Anglophile blog, I actually went out of my way to avoid talking about him during his One Direction days, making exactly two exceptions:
1) They released their video for "Best Song Ever," and made the bizarre decision to devote the first 2 1/2 minutes to a sketch where the band plays themselves and staff of their record label.



2) A surprising number of fans taking Zayn leaving the band so badly that they went as far as asking for compassionate leave to cope with the news.
I wish I was kidding

And that changed when he started his solo career and made the decision to debut his second single on SNL and play the sort of guitar that one only sees on Jazzmen or maybe rockabilly guitarists.



That intrigued me enough to look into "Sign of the Times," and he's stayed on my radar ever since.