Is harry styles gay

Even as gender and masculinity are more fluid than ever, it can still rankle when male stars co-opt traditionally gay codes and styles.

Queer, in this era, means what you say it means: It can mean “I haven’t, but I’d try it” or “I don’t see myself as traditionally heterosexual” or “I don’t want anybody to think I lack imagination” or “My sense of my own sexual identity or tastes is that they’re out of the mainstream” or “I would, but only with Harry Styles” or “I don’t know yet.” “Queer” is one-size-fits-all; there is no entrance requirement. [tweet](https://www.billboard.com/culture/pride/omar-apollo-shuts-down-queerbaiting-rumors-nsfw-tweet-1235178135/), he refuted the charge explicitly (in both senses of the word) with a concise reply saying, “No I b [participating in a common consensual same-sex activity described in two words that this publication would be perfectly OK with you Googling] fr [for real].” It’s great when it’s that easy. “Queer” is used by some gay men interchangeably with “gay,” and you can just as easily identify as queer and lesbian, queer and bisexual, queer and trans. The first is “Straight; heterosexual and cisgender; a Kinsey zero.” The second is “Anything other than that.” “Queer” has come to stand in for option number two, and it has created a tent so big that some of the people inside it aren’t completely comfortable with the company they’re keeping. (And what someone deciding whether to hire an actor is entitled to ask about that actor’s sexuality is, for very good reasons, also nothing.) The price of a ticket entitles you only to good work — if you’re lucky; it doesn’t buy you the promise that you’re going to be witnessing embodied personal history. The idea that homosexuality can be teased in flourishes and gestures recalls a much more repressive era (five decades ago) in which gay performers like Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly couldn’t do more than occasionally throw a plausibly deniable smirk to their “if you know, you know” gay fan base if they wanted to remain employable. And what about his role in last year’s period drama “ [My Policeman](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/movies/my-policeman-review.html)” as a gay British cop in the 1950s prevented from living his truth by a stultifying and bigoted world? And at least one version of Styles is very [maybe-something-else](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/arts/music/pop-men-harry-styles-jack-harlow-bad-bunny.html): the one posing in a dress on the cover of a women’s fashion magazine. And in truth, “L.G.B.T.” has always been an imperfect portmanteau, since its first three letters are shorthand for “Who I’m attracted to” and its fourth is a shorthand for “Who I am.” Today, for many very young people eager to discover and announce their identities long before they’ve had any sexual experience with another person, the designation they select is much likelier to connote “This is me” than “This is what I do.” And the idea here is laudable: Nobody should have to go through life, especially adolescent life, experiencing the loneliness that comes with feeling that there’s not even a word with which they can describe themselves. A quick primer, for those of you who, like me, are over a certain age and may be more familiar with the term “gay baiting”: This is one of those squirmy evolving-language things in which, faster than you might ever imagine, a phrase comes to mean almost exactly the opposite of what it once meant. How many of you know what that label cost people to obtain?” Not that the label itself carries much weight with Zoomers; the term “L.G.B.T.,” first coined more than 30 years ago, is now seen by many young people as a relic, little more than a makeshift beta test undertaken by their parents’ generation. Right now, the most charged queer-baiting discussion is about men — not a surprise, since any trace of sexual ambiguity in a male star has always excited an intense degree of interest, suspicion and paranoia about the perceived undermining of masculinity.