Shawn Mendes's Soft Launch
Shawn Mendes's Soft Launch
If you live long enough, every 'The Other Two' plotpoint becomes real life.
There’s a lot ricocheting through the atmosphere of gay pop culture: the Timothée Chalamet look-a-like competition (and the subsequent arrest of one of the Timmy’s), Luca Guadagnino’s Queer trailer, Darren Criss’s frock at the CFDA’s, Kari Lake’s botched contouring, Lil Nas X and Azealia Banks feuding on Twitter and Jonathan Bailey revealing the existence of a nearly naked photo we’re never gonna see. But the headline that’s managing to bubble up the most is Shawn Mendes soft-launching what many fans have been waiting to hear for over decade: He might be a friend of Dorothy.
“Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it for so long,” he told the audience at his recent show ahead of performing his new song “The Mountain” which features the lyrics:
“You can say I'm too young/You can say I'm too old/You can say I like girls or boys/ Whatever fits your mold.”
He continued:
“I think it’s kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing and it’s so hard to just put into boxes. It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me, something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover, and still have yet to discover. The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. I don’t really know sometimes and I know other times. And it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that. I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things. And that’s all I really want to say about that for now.”
The response online ranged from “OMG it’s finally happening” to “his sexual orientation is nobody’s business” to “need his load” to “y’all have bullied Shawn Mendes for a decade and it seems y’all have forced him out of the closet” to “lol, k.” This to say, the takes really ran the gamut. As a former follower of mine tweeted:
“You’ve all been extremely weird about Shawn Mendes for years and it seems today that trend continues.”
Let’s dig into that.