Two weeks ago, Harry Styles hosted Saturday Night Live (SNL), making his appearance his second time hosting and fourth time as a musical guest.
During his monologue, he thought back to his previous times hosting and touring, saying “Back then, people seemed to pay a lot of attention to the clothes I was wearing, something called queerbaiting,” he then continued, “And some people accused me of it, but did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know everything about me, Dad!,” ending the sentence in comical exclamation. He then came back to this, as he was encircled by female SNL cast members, ignoring them entirely and instead pulled in cast member Ben Marshall for a kiss and announcing, “Now that’s queerbaiting!”
“Queerbaiting” is the colloquial term for “attempting to attract an LGBTQIA+ audience by hinting at same-sex relationships,” according to Pink News, or when a character is implied to be queer, but it is never actualized on screen.
Harry Styles has been in the public eye since he was sixteen years old, with the media watching him go from dressing like your average teenage boy to being on the cover of Vogue in–le ghast–a dress. He has donned makeup and skirts on multiple occasions and otherwise transcended the line between masculinity and femininity in photoshoots or other promotional material.
“She,” track eight on his sophomore album “Fine Line,” is rumored to be about a man getting in touch with his feminine side. Before Marshall, he kissed James Corden at least twice and if you end up on the right side of Twitter, his bandmates as well.
All this considered, Harry Styles has never officially come out, publicly dated a man or expressed wanting to identify as something other than a heterosexual man. And yet, he dresses as Dorothy for Halloween, his concerts are oftentimes a sea of pride flags, and he’s hosted the Met Gala in a sheer black jumpsuit other famous men wouldn’t be caught dead in. This leaves the public feeling very confused and wanting answers.
The press pries and peeks, and yet they can’t map out who he is. Thus, the easiest thing to do is to point fingers and say he’s faking it.
You would have thought Harry Styles murdered someone with his bare hands with the reaction that came after he appeared on the cover of Vogue in a dress. It was just a normal Tuesday for me, as normal as things could be during the pandemic, and people acted like there was blood on his hands.
People decried him as an effeminate man, a celebrity who wasn’t manly enough. The other side thought he was performatively benefitting from queer aesthetics without having to suffer the consequences that people who are publicly queer face. So, which is it? To me, the answer is neither.
The umbrella term “queer” offers security of one’s identity without conforming to a label. There isn’t really a clear threshold you magically dance across to be considered worthy of “queerness.” Otherwise, the default assumption is that you are cisgender and heterosexual, and this is what is marketed and pushed towards you.
Similarly broad is the concept of gender, which is much broader than traditional categories of simply “male” and “female.” Queerness and gender go hand in hand in this respect, being broad and intersectional. Masculinity and femininity are thought of as strict constructs, and Harry Styles is just someone taking a painted finger to it and blurring the lines, crossing a “Fine Line,” one might say.
Wearing eyeshadow or skirts does not inherently devalue you as a man. I see it as being secure in your masculinity, so much so that you do not feel threatened by femininity. Harry Styles shouldn’t have to explode for this to be made clear. I think that the example he is setting of being comfortable in his masculinity is a valuable one in a world of looksmaxxing, manosphere men, and that outweighs the criticism of “queerbaiting.”