Show me who you are on the inside. 

Divulge yourself to an audience of thousands—perhaps millions. Do you like what they see? Are you okay with it? How does it feel to have these unwashed hands inside of you, picking apart everything you think you know about yourself, tearing at it? Imagine—you are cryogenically frozen the way you are right now. There is no more that you can change, and there is no more that you can grow—this is what you need to be forever. This body and carnal person will be studied for centuries to come. 

This is what the internet did to Kit Connor of Heartstopper. At eighteen years old, he was forcibly outed by a fanbase who believed they were entitled to know his sexual identity. That’s the whole story—no more nuance or context can be given to this sentence. No more is needed, anyways.

Can real people queerbait? Or is our society so thoroughly blinded by the need for labels that the sight of flamboyant men or girls slow dancing calls for public justification? I wonder where the line is drawn—does remaining unlabelled while continuously inspiring speculation from a primarily queer fanbase count as extortion or profiting off LGBT+ communities? Is there ever a case where real-life celebrities owe their audiences the divulgence of their sexuality? 

The modern hunger for labels is a poisonous one. It is laden with the stifling of bisexual people and an alarming amount of misogyny—both veiled underneath the guise of wishing for authenticity in film and television. The demand for queerness in casting has set a standard for the perilously common parasocial prodding of actors to reveal their sexual identities publicly. This is to be done before being accepted in the limelight when portraying a queer character, and in turn, further normalized incessant digging into the personal lives of celebrities. 

I see the complications—that the importance of having queer people at the forefront of telling queer stories is an unquestionable necessity to dismantling the withstanding effects of the longtime-abolished Hays Code. The Hays Code is an old law in film and television that stated queerness could only be portrayed on screen if it was not an ‘endorsement’ of the lifestyle, which is why much of old Disney villains are characterized in styles reminiscent of drag, and why male villains, in particular, are depicted as effeminate, heavily stylized, and predatory. The Code left shattering shards of negative connotations all over the fictionalized portrayals of queer people. Having queer actors play queer characters allows for more authentic storytelling by bringing a realer and less marred perspective on queer culture to audiences who may have only been predisposed to aforementioned negative connotations. Further, it provides needed jobs and platforms for queer artists whom cisgender, heterosexual artists often steal the rightful positions of.

The wrongfulness lies not with the longing for queer actors playing queer characters—especially when the media in question revolves around the character’s direct experience as a queer person, such as coming out stories. To have cis-het actors put in such roles and act out the lived realities of a queer person leaves souring tastes in the stomachs of queer folks who turn to such programs as spaces to feel seen and understood. A cis-het actor can stop being queer as soon as the final slate is slammed shut—they may return to their privilege. Queer fans do not have such an option—they do not get to switch their identities on and off when a situation is no longer to their benefit. And what of cis-het actors being paid for their performances? Making comfortable livings out of enacting queer trauma on a sanctioned sound stage? It seems only fair to ask for more—to ask for fidelity and veracity. 

The issue, instead, lies with the false entitlement to private lives that such longing has inspired. This word—queerbaiting—has been so deeply contorted online that it now seems nobody understands why they were fighting for this kind of representation in the first place. How is it less bigoted to accuse traditionally non-masculine men of queerbaiting, when we’re supposedly fighting for the eradication of such gender norms? Internet inside jokes about Shawn Mendes having a ‘closet made of glass’ do not create safe environments for LGBT+ people online. Alternatively, they enhance the divide and encourage LGBT+ people to continue stifling their identities in fear of ridicule as they’re so used to seeing themselves made into punchlines. It’s homophobia repackaged to be digestible and consumed, for the sole reason of parasociality lending a less-than-human quality to celebrities and their identities. 

We feel that celebrity sexuality is another trivia fact to file away alongside height and birthmarks—something that should be known and even debated upon publicly without any express confirmation or negation by the public figure in question.  We turn sexuality into a commodity to be passed around between audiences—something that is ours, and not theirs. In robbing the celebrity of their sexuality being their own, we freeze people in place and make it impossible to continue to change and experiment with their sexuality as they grow older. We force a label unto them, and even if they accept this label as true, we swindle them of the ability to change. If they discover they were not gay but bisexual, or not bisexual but queer, etcetera, they are now burdened with the feeling of being indebted to share this newfound discovery as well. This is unless they wish to be accused of having ‘lied’ about their sexuality for enhanced popularity. 

In more ways than one, this Catch-22 of queer identity has thrived grossly online for the past decade. You’re marginalized for being queer, and yet told that your queerness will also benefit you. However, if you take the low-level advantages of your queerness, it becomes part of some war to be the most oppressed person possible. Queerness is wielded as currency to tell public figures of all kinds what they can and cannot do and shame them away from being truly authentic with themselves. At the end of the day, it matters not what morsels of underprivileged ‘sympathy’ one can garner from going public with their sexuality because we still exist in a society that is far more belligerent of queer people than it is accepting. We should never—not ever—pull people nonconsensually from their comfort of private self-discovery before they’re prepared to brave this. Quoting YouTuber Rowan Ellis: “Protecting queer people who aren’t out will always be more important than exposing potential queerbaiting” (The Public Dystopia of Queer Speculation). It’s a gamble that can never be won. It’s a gamble that equates labels to legitimacy. It’s a gamble that landed Kit Connor stuck in place at eighteen—accusations of queerbaiting having thrown him from the closet, needing to announce who he was to the world.

I’m almost eighteen, and I don’t know who I am. I’m not expected to know. Why should he have been?