The ‘outing’ of Shawn Mendes reveals the hypocrisy of Gen Z

The Canadian singer has become the latest popstar forced to publicly discuss their sexuality after being hounded by their so-called ‘fans’

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Canadian pop star Shawn Mendes has been forced to make a statement about his sexual orientation. He told a concert at Colorado’s Red Rocks amphitheatre on October 28: “There’s this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it so long. It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me, something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover, and still have yet to discover. It’s kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes. The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone.”
But who had pressured him to make this confession, particularly in this day and age, when you’d imagine a celebrity’s sexuality would be no big deal? Was it the press? Was it Bible Belt evangelicals? No. It was his own fans.
“This thing about my sexuality”, as Mendes put it, consists mainly of people on the internet goading, snickering and whispering behind their hands. A recent example – an Instagram post of a photo session just days before the announcement is adorned with replies in their thousands along the lines of “I know what you are”, “Are we still trying to pretend he isn’t gay”, “When will he come out lol”.
The 26-year-old singer has been contending with rumours about his sexuality for years: in 2016, when he was 17, he posted a video on Snapchat saying, “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or if I wasn’t”. His long-term relationship with fellow popstar Camila Cabello – they stopped dating in 2021 – was widely mocked by social media users who suggested she was his “beard” masking his real sexuality.
The pair have never addressed the rumours. But on The Jay Shetty podcast in September, Mendes said “it’s so hard not to be affected” by “millions of people commenting” on their relationship. They received further attention earlier this year, after Sabrina Carpenter’s Number 1 single Taste was construed to be about her ‘love triangle’ with Mendes and Cabello.
Mendes isn’t the first 21st century star to receive such insinuations from supposed admirers. In January, the oeuvre of Taylor Swift was pored over in frighteningly obsessive detail in a 5,000 word essay in The New York Times by journalist Anna Marks. The piece is mind-bogglingly thin stuff, searching – very, very hard but very, very tenuously – for evidence in Swift’s songs and performances that she is secretly ‘queer’. The findings – if you can call them that – range from Swift’s rainbow-coloured outfits to certain choreography in her Eras tour. It’s the kind of screed you’d expect to find on a message board deep in the folds of the internet.
For a generation that prides itself on being accepting and tolerant, some fans seem an awful lot like the people in supposedly less enlightened times who were goading, snickering and whispering behind their hands at Liberace, Johnnie Ray or Noël Coward. Worse still, in Mendes’s case, the speculation is based on ancient stereotypes – that Mendes has a ‘girly’ voice, that he’s not ‘manly’, as if it was 1954.
Mendes’s new song The Mountain tells us, “Some days, I have a change of heart / You can say what you need to say / You can say I’m too young, you can say I’m too old / You can say I like girls or boys, whatever fits your mould.” Stand back, Arthur Rimbaud! It all feels so timid and insipid, so frightfully, fearfully tame.
I promise this won’t turn into ‘eeh bah gum when I were a lad’, but at the age of 14 I was merrily singing along in my bedroom to the lyrics of Marc Almond’s Catch A Fallen Star from his 1983 album Torment and Toreros – a bracing portrait of various varieties of sexual activity – and I’m afraid 41 years on I still cannot contemplate repeating any of them here. The lyrics of today’s pop stars feel like a steep decline into wishy-washy pre-60s blither.
But the furious speculation that surrounded idols like Tab Hunter, Johnny Mathis or Rock Hudson in the days before homosexuality was legalised (let alone ‘celebrated’ endlessly – and tediously – with LGBTQIA+ Pride) survives. Not so long ago a male friend of mine was in a relationship with a middlingly successful Hollywood actor who was terrified of being exposed. They had to meet on private jet rendezvous in far-off places. That sounded incredibly glamorous and romantic from the outside. But all the time I kept thinking, why all this concealment, in this day and age?
And why, in the 2020s – and among young people more than any others – does this urge to demand ‘the truth’ about a pop star’s sexuality remain? There are several reasons, I think.
The first is the feverishly febrile nature of teenage girls in packs. The hysteria surrounding male pop idols has been with us for decades, and has been categorised in the main as good clean fun, a rite of passage for some girls in early puberty, screaming and trying to tear to shreds generations of pretty boy singers from The Beatles to One Direction.
But fairly recently, overlaid on this, has been an even stranger obsession with fantasising about these boy pin-ups getting it on with each other. This was a niche interest that the internet has put a rocket under. Fandom on the internet takes the cathartic emotions released by artistic expression and magnifies them into a pathology.
One Direction fans, known as the Directioners, concocted a totally fictitious sexual relationship between two of the boy band’s members, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, dubbing it ‘Larry Stylinson’ and filling large corners of cyberspace with ‘evidence’ and eye-popping fan fiction and artwork. The gossip reportedly caused issues in the boys’ personal relationships, as well as feuds within the band; earlier this year, Tomlinson told a Brazilian news outlet that there was “nothing I can do to stop those who believe in this conspiracy”.
A combination of this kind of fantasy, and of sneery eyebrow-raising – mostly, it has to be said, from gay men – has got Mendes to this point. He isn’t the first singer to reflect on the difference between public image and private reality. Kate Bush once memorably recalled how she realised her early highly sexual image was considerably in advance of her understanding of her own sexuality.
It’s amusing to recall my own teens in the 80s when there were sexually ambiguous male pop stars by the bucketload. Such was the naivety of the general public that people didn’t catch on about Frankie Goes To Hollywood or the Pet Shop Boys. The pre-declaration Pet Shop Boys even had a song with the memorable refrain, “Everyone knows when they look at us – of course they do, it must be obvious”.
Another factor – and one that was mooted by Neil Tennant when he revealed he was gay in a 1994 interview with Attitude magazine – is that being open about your sexuality means that you are forever pigeonholed as a gay artist, and forever connected with gay culture. The worst thing about being gay has always been gay culture, with its vapid banging noise and political naffness. (For straight people, imagine that heterosexuality was routinely associated with either Katie Price or Jeremy Corbyn.) Who in their right mind would want to be linked to any of that farrago, and obsessed over by its powerful priesthood of social media nutcases?
Also, openness about your sexuality will still inevitably change how people view you as an artist. You will go from being the singer Joe Bloggs to the gay singer Joe Bloggs, and that may well have an impact. This is not, I think, because the listening public are homophobic, but their interest in you may well tail off. You may get filed into ‘something for the gays’ and they will find they can’t identify. A friend once confessed to me that she found a gay actor playing a heavy flirting scene with a woman ludicrous, and it took her very much out of the moment. This effect on your popularity doesn’t always happen – it certainly didn’t to Elton John or Freddie Mercury – but it must be a worry.
But the main reason for the Gen Z obsession with ‘coming out’ in general, and with Mendes in particular, is because sexual orientation has become their cult totem. The white middle class youth need the ‘queer’ identity because it’s a route for them to accrue the necessary points for oppression, and thus a sense of identity and purpose in our rudderless world. (Their only other option is a self-diagnosed ‘neurodiverse’ condition, hence the abundance of ADHD and Asperger’s in their social media bios).
They demand kindness, awareness and authenticity – which in practice means everybody picking a flag, even if it’s a bespoke one, and sticking to the party line. So Mendes must confirm and confess to the Inquisition.
Fans need now to pin, mount and label their idols like butterflies. It’s all enormously unhealthy. And this demand for everything to be codified, indexed and noted runs smack into a problem with singers – that there is an illusion of intimacy between poet/performer and fan.
The confessional, soul-baring character of much modern pop music – from Swift and Olivia Rodrigo to Mendes himself – means that holding anything back is viewed as suspicious, or phoney. Mystery is – or rather it was – a part of stardom, but it has no place in the Instagram age of the constant delivery of ‘content’: unfiltered, direct from the artist. Now everything must be nailed down and quantified.
“Leave me alone but buy my albums” is not a feasible strategy. But this is where Shawn Mendes, regrettably, finds himself.
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4/5