Culture Slut: On Pride Month, Queer Baiting and The Dearth Of Gay Celebs

Words: Misha MN

Well gals, we finally made it; it’s finally summer. The sun sets after 9, Aperol flows in street-level beer gardens, and the dormant sunshine slut that lives inside many of us is waking up after a very wet winter. It’s also Pride Month, which in many ways is even less tangible than the tentative british summer. 

I don’t really believe in Pride Month, it seems just like an American invention that now happens everywhere because the USified Internet said so. Pride Month means corporate sponsorships, God-awful viral rainbow Pride collections at Target, and the embarrassingly recurring jokes about how next month will be Gay Wrath. I’ve been waiting for  Gay Wrath for years, but no one wants it, they just go home after the drag brunch. Maybe we need to upmarket it with bottomless Molotov cocktails.

I know what Pride Month is meant to be. It’s the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising which kickstarted the gay liberation movement in America and began the hard work of decriminalising homosexuality. June is the month many cities hold their Pride celebrations in order to honour that noble work, but I think many of us have lost our way. A few years ago, the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race rang the bell signifying the opening of the New York stock market. The last time that many queers were at the stock exchange, it was an ACT UP protest. Times have changed, but our revolution can not be endorsed by Wall Street. In the UK, the major Pride celebrations are all throughout the summer months, each in accordance with its own local political milestones. We used to have a more widely acknowledged LGBT History month, which often seemed to sidestep the humiliating connections with late stage capitalism. 
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I don’t know anyone who celebrates Pride Month except the corporation I work for in order to afford my rent. June means I get given a rainbow lanyard with a cringe-inducing hashtag on it. June means that a printout about diversity in the workplace gets pinned to a cork board that no one looks at. June means that instead of the company logo on the screens of our sign-in machine, it’s a Coca-a-Cola advert where two male presenting hands cheers their coke bottles in front of a rainbow flag. June means that on my name tag I get a little gay flag next to the Union Jack, indicating what languages I can speak. Some people can speak Polish, Thai, Greek, Spanish, French, German. I speak Gay. Yet June does not mean that gay employees will be granted holiday for whatever local pride they want to attend if someone else has already booked that day off. 

I’ve lost faith in gay celebrities. Maybe this is just a sign of getting older, or maybe it’s a testament to how apocalyptic everything is - either way, rainbow capitalism is power, and power corrupts. When I was younger, I yearned for gay celebrities, for pop stars to make openly gay music, for big name actors to come out of imagined closets and star in gay movies. I dreamed of being the first cross dressing pop star to snog boys on the VMAs. Now, times have changed, we’ve had nearly all of that in real life, and what has it gotten us? Olly Alexander choosing the chance of personal gain instead of standing in solidarity with the Palestinian boycott of Eurovision. Jojo Siwa coming of age in real time in the kind of messy ways reserved only for former child stars. Actors being bullied out of the closet just to prove they have enough credibility to play gay. Pride is being weaponized against us.

“When I was younger, I yearned for gay celebrities, for pop stars to make openly gay music, for big name actors to come out of imagined closets and star in gay movies.”

A few years ago, it seemed that every other word on the internet was queerbaiting. Queerbaiting used to be a term for films or tv shows that “baited” queer audiences with the promise of representation or inclusion, but in reality either never delivered it or buried it in so much subtext it was unnoticed by conservative audiences, but has since come to denote any piece of media that any specific audience member deems to be Not Gay Enough. Male identifying pop stars in dresses is queerbaiting. Intimate female friendships are queerbaiting. Straight actors playing gay roles are queerbaiting. Using gender ambiguous pronouns when describing a love interest is queerbaiting. I recently read that the film Challengers is queerbaiting. I think all of this is verging on insane. What used to be a word meaning something specific (and pertinent to the social discourse of the time) has devolved into something so broad and nebulous that it can be applied to everything, and therefore has lost its meaning. It’s like what happened with the overuse of therapy speak, which has rendered terms like trauma, trigger, harm, toxic, and narcissist, almost completely meaningless. It just becomes part of the general cloud of “bad”.

The discourse on Challengers really got me thinking. If a film featuring a bisexual love triangle (or thereabouts) made by gay director Luca Guadagnino can be called queerbaiting, what else can? What makes it queerbaiting, as opposed to just a film that features some same-sex sexual tension? Is it that they don’t fuck on screen? Is that the actors aren’t gay (publicly)? Is it that Josh O’Connor now has a history of playing gay roles whilst he himself isn’t reportedly gay? Is the 2017 film God’s Own Country, a gay romance between a farmer and migrant worker, considered queerbaiting because of Josh’s role? They fucked on screen in that, or is simulated gay sex queerbaiting too?

What about other films that have entered or even helped form the queer cinema canon? Harris Dickinson, rising Hollywood star from Triangle of Sadness and The Iron Claw, started off in gay films - playing a closeted Brooklyn teen in Beach Rats, and an artistically sensitive intellectual gay rentboy in Postcards From London. In real life he has a girlfriend, so is that queerbaiting? Is it queerbaiting to transition from gay roles to straight ones, just like current romantic hero Nicholas Galitzine? Nicholas played gay in a great irish film about misfit friendships in a boarding school in 2016, and again later in saccharine royal rom-com Red, White and Blue, and then in sexy period drama Mary and George, despite identifying as straight in a recent interview.

Colin Firth plays the gay lead in Tom Ford’s adaptation of Isherwood’s A Single Man, a recently bereaved english professor on the verge of suicide. Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer (the love that dares not speak its name) rewrote the public perception of gay romance films, a perception initially engrained by two other straight men, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllanhall in Brokeback Mountain. Groundbreaking gay film The Boys in The Band, written by a gay playwright, about gay men living in pre-legislation 1960s New York, had a cast of both gay and straight actors, is that queerbaiting? Brad Davis, the hulking muscle stud sailor drenched in neon coloured light and sweat skulking around the back streets of Fassbinder’s masterpiece Querelle, adapted from a story written by gay anarchist Jean Genet, with production design and posters made by Andy Warhol, had a wife and child, so does that make Querelle queerbaiting? He died from AIDS, is that queerbaiting?

Queerbaiting in this context is meaningless. It promotes the myth of authenticity, that there is a right way to present queer art, or art in general. It doesn’t matter what someone is, just what they mean in the eye of the viewer. Does it matter that the young male hustler in Mysterious Skin was played by Joseph Gordon Levitt, or does what it has to say about child abuse, 90s New York and hedonistic nihilism mean more? Does it matter that Harris Dickinson hasn’t sucked cock (or at least, on a platform we have access to)? Have you ever seen Andrew Scott suck a cock for real? Would his performances be better if you had? Queerness is not empirical. Art is not empirical. The older I get, the less I care about the realness of the media I consume, and the more I care about the metaphysicality of it. Art is more important than flesh.

In order to quantify queerness, we have turned the means of our own unhappiness over to our oppressors. Kit Connor was forced to publicly admit to bisexuality by an angry mob baying for his blood after pictures leaked of him holding hands with a girl following his debut as one half of teen gay sensation Heartstopper. 

Individualist identity politics have muddied the waters of solidarity, just as they always have done. The focus is on the specifics of one identity, not on how to liberate us all. Sylvia Rivera, one of the mothers of Gay Liberation, rails against this in her now infamous address to the Christopher Street Liberation Rally in 1973. After admonishing the crowd for partying whilst so many of their comrades are still so downtrodden, Sylvia shouts above the thunderous boos. “I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

We must stand in solidarity with every person being thrown away by our persecutors. We must fight not just for ourselves, but for our friends. Our trans siblings, our non-white brothers and sisters, our queer mothers and fathers, our friends overseas in war zones and genocidal slaughters, there can be no Pride for any of us until there is Pride for all. Corporate comfort is meaningless. Quantified queerness is meaningless. Discourse on the minutiae of safe spaces is meaningless. Perfect queer safe spaces are useless if there is no one left to be protected by them. There is no LGB without the T and Q. Eurovision, Mighty Hoopla, Pride stages sponsored by Amex, none of it means anything if we can’t all be here together. It is not an individual's actions that makes them a worthy queer, but the way they interact with the whole cosmos of queer art. The Fraternity of Faggotry is where empowerment truly lies, where anyone who has been punched in the face for not conforming to the narrow idea of acceptability can come together, and be truly Proud.