Former One Direction band member Harry Styles came under fire recently when he was accused of queerbaiting by music critics and general audiences, who claimed that Styles had profited off his perceived ‘queerness’ due to his adopted LGBTQ+ aesthetic.
Queerbaiting is largely an accusation that’s levelled at non-queer people who appropriate queer culture and aesthetics without properly crediting the community they’re alluding to. It is often manifested as a marketing ploy that suggests queerness, but never actually delivers it.
Harry Styles has built a career on being a ‘soft boy’ of sorts, known for his refusal to conform to a traditionally masculine standard, wearing dresses, and also adopting a flamboyant persona. He is even due to play a gay man in the upcoming movie ‘My Policeman,’ which has further fuelled the flames of fans demanding information about his sexuality.
Through it all, Styles has remained vague, telling interviewers that he, like everyone else, was “figuring out his sexuality” and making comments on the movie, which has an explicitly gay romance, saying things like, “It’s not like this is a gay story about these guys being gay. It’s about love and about wasted time, to me.” This has also rubbed queer fans the wrong way, with many interpreting this to be a form of gay erasure that takes away the already limited representation available to the queer community in popular media.
Styles choosing to remain so vague in his answers has enraged many, leading to accusations of queerbaiting, as queer fans continue to hang on to every word coming out of Styles’ mouth in the hopes of having themselves represented in the likeness of an international pop star.
While Harry Styles is one of the more recent examples, queerbaiting or accusations of it have been around for ages. Queerbaiting as a concept has been most popular in long-form media such as television shows where characters are written and stories are developed to keep viewers hooked and coming back for more.
Fans of shows like ‘Supernatural,’ ‘Sherlock,’ ‘Community,’ ‘Supergirl,’ and a plethora of others can attest to the egregious acts of queerbaiting they have been suckered into consuming, for decades.
One of the most popular examples of queerbaiting in literature and film is seen in ‘Harry Potter,’ with books that drew in a lot of queer youth due to its addressing of a community that is ‘other’. After the series was out, author J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was in fact a gay character. There was the implication that her later works would explore that aspect of his character, but ultimately this was not mentioned.
Here, it is also important to make the distinction that queerbaiting is not synonymous with bad representation. If there’s a very poor representation of a queer character, we may be inclined to say there was some baiting, but that is not the case – there was an actual queer person there, unfortunately, but it’s just not good.
In cases like Harry Styles and also other celebrities in popular media like television shows, we have to ask the question of where we draw the line for queerbaiting when the underlying goal for many of these movements is freedom of expression, free from the constraints of societal norms, and to be rid of labels. How does that factor in when you demand labels in this way?
What the queer community has to say
Addressing the topic of how far we as a community can go when expecting others to be role models for us or to be the representation we crave, Ursula Bastianz noted that it largely came down to your platform and how much you stood to profit from it. According to Ursula, the possibility of demanding that the characters we see on screen perform to our expectations depended on influence and responsibility.
“I think this topic is one that must be navigated with care. To say that one should be allowed to express oneselves and do so while maintaining one’s privacy is absolutely correct. That being said, I also feel like in a situational sense, as individuals, our levels of responsibility and accountability is susceptible to change.
“For example, if you take celebrities and the everyday man, the latter is far less likely to profit from hinting at but not actually acknowledging LGBTQ+ representation. But if you’d take a celebrity who hints that they may be a part of the LGBTQ+ community, they stand to profit from the community as a whole by teasing queer fans who just may find more than an ally tugging at their willing heartstrings. I suppose this is fine when it happens once or twice, but when you make a business out of it, an objective person can definitely question that celeb’s moral compass,” she said.
She also added that we must look deeper into intentions, although noting that these celebs still had a responsibility, given the profit that they could potentially make. “Are they teasing you to stay relevant, are they doing it to cement a growing fan base, or is it genuinely because they’re private individuals? We will never really know, but the fact remains that with great power comes great responsibility, and being queerbaited isn’t pleasant, so I suppose all we can do is hope our heroes aren’t just after our money.”
Vasi Samudra Devi too shared her thoughts: “There is a lot of queerbaiting and also queer coding in media. Queer coding in Western media basically comes from the fact that for the longest time, there was media censorship of queer imagery, and people in countries like the US adopted this necessity of coding their characters with queer traits. Often they would be villains and ‘othered’ characters, in order for people to hate them. Whereas queerbaiting is the complete opposite – it is where you are teasing but don’t really follow through with the content,” she said.
“Harry Styles doesn’t address this queer question and that is very true. Personally, I think it is pretty awful of him to exploit his audience this way. By saying that he doesn’t want to label himself and through not really addressing the topic, he can continue to profit from queerness. It’s really disheartening to see these types of actions and they are mostly done by bigger media networks and studios.”
Addressing the concern of whether these celebs are obligated to disclose their personal identities, she said: “The negative part here is how we as fans desperately want to see ourselves represented, so we keep returning hopefully. Then it becomes all about the tease, which they don’t follow through. This queerness isn’t even explicit or relatable and it is brushed off to a side.”
Here, Vasi was referring to an experience that many queer people have noted as a common one. Several other Lankans from the queer community recalled how they would watch shows such as ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’ as teens in the ’90s, waiting for Xena and her ‘best friend,’ Gabrielle, to become an official couple, as the show continually alluded to. Many of them shared how they always felt queerbaited by the show and added that it was incredibly invalidating to see how their experience was so blatantly denied or ignored.
They shared that as part of a community that did not often, if ever, see themselves reflected in popular media, these relationships depicted on screen must mean something. To these communities, they are not mere characters, but possibility models.
Erasing the queer narrative
Queerbaiting is harmful in its potential to continue the stigmatisation of the LGBTQ+ community, considering that it prevents society as a whole from seeing LGBTQ+ people as normal, everyday people who are part of our culture, who can live regular, everyday lives out in the open.
In baiting but never fully showing queerness, popular media implies that something about these expressions and identities are invalid or not worthy of being fulfilled, which can then lead to queer identities being erased, dismissed, or told that they do not matter.
However, it is also important to remember the inherent values of collectives like the LGBTQ+ community – inherently, the community has attempted to foster an environment where society does not force individuals to choose words to define, or confine, their experiences of gender and sexuality into forms that are pleasing and recognisable to the masses.
To demand these declarations, even if it is from a public personality, will be a bitter and ironic inversion of what has been demanded of the queer community at the hands of non-queer folk for years. It can even be seen as a kind of queer gatekeeping, forcing stars to out themselves. While it may at times feel as though these stars who hint at being queer want to have their cake and eat it too, it can also be accepted as a byproduct of an equitable queer praxis.