It’s when the supposed shame around a hypothetical secret gayness is wielded as a cudgel that it goes a bridge too far. I don’t even think every “Shawn Mendes is gay” joke is a bad joke.
There’s nothing wrong with wondering if someone might be gay, because there’s nothing wrong with being gay. To be clear, it’s the parsing of his every move and the insistence that he must be gay that’s at issue, not gayness itself. Famous or not, what impulses are we channelling when we make a teenager the subject of such a thing? They’ve become an earnest investigation into someone’s sexuality disguised as humor, which is something many gay people ourselves have been subject to in our lives - the over-analysis of mannerisms and the intense scrutiny Shawn has received is reminiscent of bygone chapters of my life in the closet, even if the dynamics at play (Shawn is a celebrity, I was a kid in rural America) are vastly different.
That’s the problem with many of these jokes. It merely replicates heteronormative social and cultural conventions, the kind that have made queerness feel dangerous and wrong for ages - and led to the kind of persecution we’ve been fighting as a community to end. This idea that someone is hiding their sexuality just because they exhibit certain behaviors, because they talk a certain way, or because they like certain things isn’t new, and comedy that relies on it to do the heavy lifting doesn’t subvert any norms.
