Jane Austen, the British novelist who lived between 1775 and 1817, did not, you might be fascinated to discover, have Twitter or Instagram accounts. So we don’t know why she never married, for whom she experienced amorous longings—though her female characters mightily swooned over the company of other women—or exactly what she thought of her father’s entanglement in British slave ownership in Antigua. Sure, Austen’s art—six novels and some other writings—may provide clues as to what was going through her mind. Or not. Novelists make their money making stuff up.
Fast forward 200 years. We have American singer Doja Cat, full name Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini, born in Los Angeles in 1995, for whom the Wikipedia subheading “Controversies” seems to have been invented. “I called a couple of people faggots when I was in high school in 2015 does this mean I don’t deserve support?” she tweeted in 2018, amid a series of apologies and deletions for calling Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator faggots when she was 20 years old. “I’ve said it roughly 15 thousand times in my life. Does saying faggot mean you hate gay people? Do I hate gay people? I don’t think I hate gay people. Gay is ok.”
Doja Cat has expressed herself in ways that can be seen as homophobic, colourist (her background is Jewish-American and Zulu South African), racist more generally and what might most politely be described as “lewd.” (More on “lewd” later.) There are weeks when it seems little that passes through the singer’s head fails to trigger a tweet.
“Wait, that person did a terrible thing, I don’t want to forgive them for it.”
What to do with artists who say and do horrible things has been a problem for as long as we’ve had art. LGBTQ2S+ people—we who have been maligned both casually and systematically through history, and through many pockets of contemporary culture—have always had to ask ourselves whether we can or should love the art while holding the artist at a distance.
“Queer people, in general, are a little more in tune with ‘Wait, that person did a terrible thing, I don’t want to forgive them for it,’” says Ian Carlos Crawford, host of the Slayerfest ’98 podcast. Originally dedicated to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show, whose creator, Joss Whedon, has been accused of bullying and creepy behaviour, Crawford has broadened the subject matter of the show to encompass pop culture more generally. “But if it’s something you love, you can still love it, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Just know the context.”
For example, should Harry Potter fans still buy into J.K. Rowling’s franchise, knowing she denies the existence of trans people and suggests trans women are dangerous? Should we be looking for evidence of transphobia in the books, just as scholars now scour Austen for signs of complicity with colonialism and slavery? (Certainly, Rowling declaring that Dumbledore is gay after the series ended instead of in the books themselves now seems shady, like she was pandering after the fact to gay fans without actually considering them in the work.)
And then, setting Whedon and Rowling aside for a moment, there’s the standard we apply to our own community members. Openly LGBTQ2S+ public figures, until the last few decades, were startlingly rare creatures. So should we expect more of them because so few of them have been available as role models? Or should they be held to a more flexible standard because famous queer and trans people have had to go through so much shit to get to where they are?
“We groan when Matt Damon talks about learning very recently that he shouldn’t say ‘faggot.’”
These are not frivolous questions. Celebrities do, indeed, seem to have special sway over LGBTQ2S+ people, embedded in many of our queer conversations and cultural expressions. Lynn E. McCutcheon, editor of the North American Journal of Psychology and co-author of several studies on the impact of the allure of celebrities, co-authored a 2021 study looking at the connection between LGBT+ people, loneliness and celebrity worship. Researchers analyzed questionnaire answers from 658 LGBT+ and straight people in the Philippines, trying to get at the importance of celebrities in their lives and how loneliness figures in the equation. Papers like this avoid declaring cause and effect, but the research did suggest that the LGBT+ subjects people had a particular affinity for celebrity admiration.
So, yes, we watch famous people very closely. We get cranky when Sean Penn, who once played American gay rights leader Harvey Milk, declares, as if it’s a bad thing, that “men have become quite feminized.” We sigh when talk show host Wendy Williams, who has a history of pandering to queer viewers, says gay men need to “stop wearing our skirts and our heels.” We groan when Matt Damon talks about learning very recently that he shouldn’t say “faggot.”
Yet we tolerate bad behaviour from some people but not others: Penn should know better, and perhaps owes the community something for what he gained by portraying Milk; he won an Academy Award in 2009 for that role. Williams might get more of a pass; fans expect her to say ridiculous unthought-through things. Damon—well, he just seems old and confused.
Obviously the biggest factor should be the seriousness of the offence: a bad joke is not the same as a sexual assault. But relatability also seems to be a consideration. Look at how many people defended Bill Cosby, whose on-screen persona was so warm and charming, despite evidence that he preyed on women.
“If even the deal-making white male star of American Beauty and House of Cards isn’t out, what option does anyone else have?”
Within the LGBTQ2S+ universe, consider actor Kevin Spacey, whose behaviour has been neither relatable nor innocuous. The star stayed in the closet until 2017, when he was accused of sexual assault by actor Anthony Rapp. The late-career revelation made it feel like Spacey was hiding a crime behind his gay identity. His years of evasion about his sexual orientation, some might argue, was harmful in itself, making it harder for younger queer actors to come out. If even the deal-making white male star of American Beauty and House of Cards isn’t out, what option does anyone else have?
As Spacey has become embroiled in further accusations and court actions, he has become a pariah in Hollywood, sufficient box-office poison to be edited out of the 2017 film All the Money in the World. The public and the industry seem to be on the same page, punishing him for his alleged wrongdoing. But that still leaves his legacy as an actor: his work on earlier classics like 1995’s Usual Suspects and 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross probably won’t hurt the appreciation of those films; he was playing a character written by someone else, one ingredient among many that made those films successful. Compare that to the works of Woody Allen, whose autobiographically-infused films are hard to watch now without imagining how he conducts his relationships. Allen’s place in film history seems likely to be permanently diminished because of his private deeds.
Seemingly following the Spacey playbook, British singer Morrissey was apt at hiding the non-artist side of himself, including his homosexuality, for a large chunk of his career. By holding the public at bay, there was something sly, self-effacing and seemingly anti-authoritarian about his public persona; for years he claimed to be celibate. He came out as being in a gay relationship in 1997, an announcement that coincided with the beginning of a couple of decades of nasty comments about race and immigrants; eventually he revealed his membership in the far-right party For Britain. It’s easy to avoid giving Morrissey money by not listening to his recent music—it’s not very good. Yet 1980s hits like “This Charming Man” and “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” are harder to give up. Though The Smiths’ best years predate our knowledge of the lead singer’s repugnant opinions, we must struggle with projecting Morrissey’s currently stated beliefs back on his younger self. We might easily presume that those views were there all along and part of the reason he was so intent on being mysterious.
“Did the closet help hide unadmirable behaviour or did the closet, in part, foster it?”
Caitlyn Jenner, famous as a former Olympian and bit player on Keeping Up with the Kardashians before coming out as a trans woman in 2015, then later becoming a conservative politician, might also be part of this “Oh, were you like that all along or did you get corrupted later in life?” dilemma. The revelation of her conservative and hypocritical views, offputting to many queer people, seemed to coincide with her coming out. Did the closet help hide unadmirable behaviour or did the closet, in part, foster it? I would suggest that decades in hiding provide an opportunity for certain famous people to frame the people around them as enemies or prey or mere spectators. Hiding your true self over a long period of time in the face of such scrutiny may make you paranoid and ungenerous in word and deed, a disposition that may remain even after coming out.
“I think it is fair to expect celebs to be virtuous,” McCutcheon tells me. “I don’t think they deserve extra privileges. However, their dedicated followers worship them, so it is only natural that they come to believe that they do deserve special treatment.”
Fans feeling duped can have repercussions. But some misfires are less serious than others. Ellen DeGeneres, who built her brand on nice, turned out to be not so nice, according to staff working on her TV show. Hardly a major sin, next to the behaviour of Spacey and Cosby. Fans feel a little silly for being naive. Yet maybe it’s not just the hypocrisy that rankles. The public tolerance for toxic workplaces has become low; as the story of how Ellen ran her show unfolded, the public related more to her downtrodden staff than the multi-millionaire entertainer who worked so hard at being relatable. Ellen’s future seems to have been shaken by the dissonance between her on-screen and off-screen persona; hypocrisy is a hard sell, even as Ellen has been working hard to rehabilitate her image as a kind person. But her place in history as the first major TV star to come out (while playing a character that also came out) still seems assured: you can be a jerk, if that’s all you are, and still be recognized as a “first.”
“I mean, Harry Styles doesn’t look cute. Be happy that you look hotter, Billy, and try to move on.”
More annoying than offensive was the time last year when Pose actor and fashionista Billy Porter claimed, against considerable evidence, that he created the conversation about non-binary fashion, seemingly because he was pissed off at singer/actor Harry Styles when Styles appeared in a dress on the cover of Vogue.
“That was a full eye-rolling moment,” says Dan James, a presenter on the U.K. pop culture podcast Loud Brown Gays. “I mean, Harry Styles doesn’t look cute. Be happy that you look hotter, Billy, and try to move on.”
James has no intention of spending any money on any cultural product that profits people whose world views he disagrees with. He read the Harry Potter series before Rowling started ranting about trans people, but he won’t buy a ticket to the upcoming Fantastic Creatures movie since it will put money in Rowling’s pockets.
James is more tolerant of LGBTQ2S+ celebrities, including Porter, who he still admires. But only up to a point. For him, dancer, singer, choreographer and RuPaul’s Drag Race regular Todrick Hall took much too long to voice his support for the Black Lives Matter movement. And when Hall did so, he wasn’t as equivocal as James would have liked. “When he finally said something a year and a half after [the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black Minneapolis man, by a white police officer], it felt performative and didn’t reflect any growth. Now I see him as inauthentic when he presents his Blackness. He was able to stand up for his queerness, but not so much his Blackness.”
These expectations—codes of acceptable conduct—emerge out of how a famous person presents themselves to the world. Hall’s personal brand is as an out and unafraid thought leader, so it can be disappointing when someone of his calibre doesn’t show up for a major issue unfolding in the public sphere. Spacey, by contrast, never came out and never shared much of his private life and thoughts with the public; he was an actor, period, and did not give us enough of himself to allow fans to emulate him. We can at least thank Spacey for that: never presenting himself as a gay role model. Being disappointed in someone whose art we admire does not have the same gut-punch as being disappointed in someone we believed shared our values.
“We tend to set ourselves up for disappointment in people who never were that virtuous in the first place.”
Perhaps we don’t really want to model ourselves after famous people, or else do so only superficially. In a 2019 paper, McCutcheon and her colleagues asked whether celebrities are admired for their morality. “These results show that admiration for celebrities is based largely on skill as an entertainer, whereas admiration for a person who is well known to us is based on both skill and morality,” they write. “Either… the morality of a celebrity is given some small consideration when choosing a favourite celebrity or… a favourite celebrity is chosen first for entertainment and social reasons, then a moral halo is placed over that celebrity’s head.” We may set ourselves up for disappointment in people who never were that virtuous in the first place.
Guy Davidson, an associate professor of English at Australia’s University of Wollongong, says that celebrities model for us what is permissible and viable, so there is always a relationship between what they say and do and the culture more broadly. In his 2019 book Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America, Davidson examines how the public lives and works of James Baldwin, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal contributed to the gay and lesbian liberation movement, even though they may not have “come out” in the way we understand it now.
Baldwin, in particular, has been having a real revival, not only for his brilliant writing but for the ways he navigated public life, particularly in confronting racism and making a career as a Black man in pre-Civil Rights era United States. There’s much to admire. But Davidson wonders if the writer is being revered at “the cost of not reconciling with more difficult aspects of his life and what he had to say.” For example, Baldwin, who lived from 1924 to 1987, was publicly out for most of his life but disassociated himself with the gay and lesbian liberation movement that grew out of the 1960s. “For Baldwin, homosexuality was a purely private matter and in connection to gay politics, he rejected labels,” says Davidson.
“I don’t want to preach how people should respond to celebrities, but we have to be careful about investing too much in them.”
Despite (or perhaps because of) Baldwin’s resistance to signing up for the gay politics of his time, he has been taken up as a role model by many contemporary Black gay writers. Even as cultural consumers declare they are yearning for authenticity, demanding clearly-stated positions from famous people, Baldwin’s aversion to grappling directly with LGBTQ2S+ politics counterintuitively may draw readers into deeper engagement with his thoughts and ideas. His singular and singularly queer (in all senses of the word) literary style enlivens and complicates every subject he touches—Baldwin’s is Black gay writing even if he’s writing about a toaster.
Though there are certainly darker corners of Baldwin’s life, he manages to maintain the power to be a role model. Being able to see a famous person’s lived experience through the filters of the oppressions that shaped it is key to appreciating them.
I ask Davidson if the ground that Ellen broke back in 1997, being the first big TV star to come out of the closet and to have risked so much in an industry that, at the time, considered coming out to be career suicide, should earn her some empathy over being a bad boss. But Davidson doesn’t want to play my game. “People like to recognize themselves in celebrities, and I don’t want to preach how people should respond to celebrities, but we have to be careful about investing too much in them,” he says.
In previous generations, what we knew about famous people was determined by celebrity-focused media outlets that often sent paparazzi photographers chasing after stars, trying to catch them in their most intimate moments. Revelations about a famous person’s non-straightness could be used by those in power to control and silence queer and trans people. (It’s clear, in retrospect, that that’s the world Spacey thought he lived in and it’s why Ellen’s forthcoming approach was so revolutionary.) Celebrities who tried to keep their personal opinions and activities private could, against their will, have them splashed across the pages of tabloids and glossy magazines—a career killer in the early days of Hollywood. We talk today of “cancel culture,” when social media goes after someone who has said something offensive, causing opportunities to dry up for the offender; up until the last couple of decades, it was often famous people surrounded by gay rumours who had their careers cancelled.
By the 1990s, as social attitudes changed, the public started to think differently about these intrusions and seemed to start caring less about the transgressive (but consensual) sexuality of famous people. For example, tabloid stories about George Michael being arrested in 1998 for allegedly performing “a lewd act” in the bathroom of a Beverly Hills park outed the singer in a humiliating way. In a previous era, it would have killed his career. Yet just a few months after his arrest, Michael released the song “Outside,” which made light of the incident with lyrics like, “I’d service the community, but I already have, you see,” referring to his court-ordered community service. The song was accompanied by a video that depicted Michael as a hunky cop leading a dance party in a public washroom. “Outside” was one of his biggest late-career hits, hitting number two in the United Kingdom. It’s impossible to think of a singer from the 1980s or earlier pulling this off.
As outrage over consensual sexual lasciviousness has decreased, the call-outs for overt racism, and carelessness about racial issues, have increased. Queers, unfortunately, can’t claim any moral superiority here. Out TV stars Alia Shawkat and Josh Thomas, for example, apologized in 2020 for making racially insensitive remarks, as did YouTuber Randy Rainbow, who also apologized for transphobic tweets.
The shift in concern from sexual scandal to racism and abuse has coincided with the rise of social media. Social media has stolen the power of the gossip rags, letting fans, rather than paparazzi, decide what’s upsetting and what’s not.
Stars themselves now have more control than ever over their public image. We don’t need to read second-hand reports and dissect blurry photos to find out what Lil Nas X has been up to and decide if it was in good taste or not—the performer posts it on Twitter way faster than the tabloids could ever imagine. Stars these days use social media to “scoop” gossip publications, and it’s often very effective. “The public is being manipulated to believe that celebs are wonderful persons, when so often what we are seeing is an illusion, created to sell product of one kind or another,” says McCutcheon.
Then perhaps we should be holding this generation’s famous people to a higher standard since they are, of their own volition, releasing their thoughts and deeds out into the world; social media faux pas are 100 percent unforced errors. Some celebrities realize this. Beyoncé is the master of revealing very little of her personal life in the media, both social and mainstream. Like with Austen, we can deduce Beyoncé’s opinions and attitudes from her artistic output and public conduct—it would shock us if we discovered Beyoncé had uttered something homophobic. But if she does have any opinions liable to upset fans, they are likely to remain off the record. “Unless she wants you to know something, you won’t know it,” says James. Indeed, the star has doubly benefited from social media’s evisceration of traditional gossip news—Beyoncé is not pursued by the paparazzi in the same way that, say, Michael Jackson was, and she also avoids falling into the traps of the social media universe.
“If you’re a true fan of me, if you’re young… my behaviour isn’t something that always needs to be followed.”
Speaking of falling into traps: Did Doja Cat’s many misfires cost her LGBTQ2S+ fans?
Well, her summer 2021 album Planet Her spent an impressive six months on Billboard’s top 10 album charts, and also last year she performed at Los Angeles’ Jingle Ball with Lil Nas X, probably the most influential out gay star in the United States right now. LGBTQ2S+ TikTokers regularly use her music in their videos. Doja Cat has thrived despite her penchant, in her younger years, for the word “faggot.”
That could be because Doja Cat, like many younger stars—including Lil Nas X—seems to lead her entire life online. This confessional approach to celebrity means fans better understand that she’s a young person working through things rather than a powerful person who should know better (ahem, Kevin Spacey). She is finding her way in real-time, rather than expressing ideas warped by years of privilege. Even if she makes bigger mistakes as she gets older, her history of transparency and growth might be her redemption.
“If you’re a true fan of me, if you’re young… my behaviour isn’t something that always needs to be followed,” Doja Cat said in a May 2020 video posted to Twitter. “I’m not perfect. I shouldn’t be doing dumb shit.”
Transparency has been difficult for LGBTQ2S+ artists until very recently, when having a career as an “out” star became possible. But out queer and trans artists know all about growth—the coming-out process forced it upon us.
Maybe that’s what we’re looking for: famous people who see their mistakes and try, sincerely, to improve. “The problem is when people say something bad and then double-down on it or go on the attack,” says Ian Carlos Crawford. “Then I think they’re a serious asshole.” True. And once we decide that a celebrity is an asshole, it’s hard to get past it. Beware, meanies.
Why you can trust Xtra
