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Today, despite pretty much everything else for queer and trans people being terrible, we’re living in something of a golden era for LGBTQ+ representation. Shows like Heartstopper (which itself rose to popularity on Tumblr), movies like Fire Island, and even fiction-based podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale don’t have to queerbait to pander to audiences; we now have a glut of popular media that isn’t afraid to put queer characters and relationships front and center. But queerbaiting, which was once a rallying cry for accountability for an exploitative creator-fan dynamic, has become an accusation that might ultimately harm, rather than help, LGBTQ+ people.
How we lost the narrative on queerbaiting
As with terms like “gaslighting,” “love bombing,” and “gatekeeping,” “queerbaiting” was a once-useful phrase that has become so overused that it’s nearly lost any kind of coherent meaning. Queerbaiting was once chiefly used to refer to fictional characters, and applied to films, TV shows, and other media that led audiences on to believe someone was queer. Today, it’s increasingly being used to refer to real people, mostly celebrities, who look or act queer without explicitly saying or coming out as queer.
Take some of the aforementioned examples. When Kit Connor was accused of queerbaiting for merely holding hands with Heartstopper costar Maia Reficco, he subsequently deleted his Twitter wholesale. Harry Styles, throughout his solo career, has been accused of supposedly capitalizing upon queer aesthetics for wearing “women’s” clothing and refusing to clarify his sexuality, with the latest round of ire sparked by an August interview in which he said his sexuality “didn’t matter.”
It’s something we’ve seen from all stripes of public figures: When Love, Simon author Becky Albertalli came out as bisexual in 2020, she noted that she felt like she was forced to do so because of the way she was accused of capitalizing off of queer stories as a straight person. When Normani released a music video in which she and Cardi B sensually embraced, it inspired queerbaiting accusations — ignoring that the rapper is outspokenly bisexual. Even My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way has been accused of queerbaiting, despite stating publicly that they “always identified a fair amount with the female gender” and that they use both he and they pronouns.
In a lot of cases, people who are being accused of “queerbaiting” simply haven’t defined their sexualities in concrete terms for the public. While it might be frustrating to see celebrities whom we assume (key word being “assume”) to be cis and straight adopt queer aesthetics and practices, no public figure owes us any information about their sexuality. In the end, queerbaiting accusations strip public figures of their humanity and complexity and turn them into characters for our consumption.
Sexuality and gender are complex. The labels we use to describe our identities can help us find community with others who share similar experiences.But it’s also worth remembering that labels are meant to describe our interiority, not encapsulate it entirely. What bisexual means to me, for example, is probably entirely different from what it means to a lot of other people who might use the same label. That doesn’t make any of us less bisexual; it just illustrates that words only go so far in describing who we desire, and how. If we expect others to know exactly who they are at all times, and to have arrived at the conclusion of their sexuality and/or gender with no further complications or questions, that discourages people from exploration and curiosity. And aren’t those core aspects of what queerness should be all about?
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