Man, I just can’t resist.
After a long life of avoiding the bedazzled elephant in the room, the world has forced my hand: I’m here to discuss Harry Styles Queer Bait Discourse.
Now I intend to speak about Styles and the suspicious buzz around his sexuality in a way that is not redundant and reductive, but it’s hard to boldly trod a path that’s already been pummeled by swarms of too-worn shoes. So I will begin by jumping over what’s already been said and start with this simple statement: Queer Baiting, that is the performance of an ambiguous sexuality that suggests queerness while never claiming it, is a phenomena that extends beyond the realm of dress, fashion and symbolism. If queerness is a way of being that involves (but does not exist only as a) sexuality, then it would make sense that Queer Baiting is an expansive sort of practice. Like queerness, it burrows itself into many modes of life.
I’m using queer here broadly; maybe even in it’s more arcane and offensive form. That is queer as in strange, queer as in different and thus “bad.” My grandfather, who reads each of these humble posts with rigor, is likely snickering at “queer’s” repeated use. As he made clear to me in a recent dinner: “Queer is a bad nasty word. Gay is happy. Gay is a good word. Use gay, not queer in your articles!”
What I struggled to explain to Grandpa Steve, good liberal that he is, is that his qualm is the point. Queer has been used maliciously used against us and then reclaimed by us to offer deviant sexualities as more than just a placid alternative to the norm. We are queer, not gay, because there’s something flawed with heterosexual culture.
This notion is buried in the accusations against Styles. He is accused of Queer Baiting for wearing dresses and waving symbols of gay pride — all acts that transgress straight culture — without claiming a “deviant” lifestyle such as ours. It is not merely that he is hiding his sexuality, which would not be Queer Baiting, but that he is transgressing in the ways so many of us do without the uncomfortable side effects, or you know, um . . . lifestyle (Styles has, at least to public knowledge, only dated women).
(As an aside, and to adress the “disourse” head on: I think no one, not even celebrities, owe anyone a transparent account of their private sexual life, but given that Styles’s supposed queerness has been a consistent topic for nearly a decade, one would presume that he is implicitly basking in the ambiguity and benefiting from it on some level. Whether he is wrong for doing so, is truly up to each queer person to decide for themself. As far as this writer is concerned, one would hope that whoever does such a performance, or who displays such queer-coded styles, would be less basic and annoying than to claim, as he recently did, that most gay male sex scenes in films are “two guys going at it, [which] kind of removes the tenderness from it.” Sorry Harry, I guess you think gay sex is gross. And if not, please specify, very concretely, what tender gay sex looks like to you.)
But even as the discourse surrounding Styles’s alleged Queer Baiting has mainly been focused on his fashion and symbolism, it’s his banal and playful pop, that I believe is the much larger Queer Bait. It’s a pop that, like queerness, skirts on important borders: that of the sounds of streaming and the sonics of nostalgia, of surprising moments and predictable rythyms, of specifically vivid lyrics and the general sentiments of the every-person. He Queer Baits by sopping up all the benefit of making allegedly inventive, different pop, without traversing beyond a very narrow terrain of acceptability. He Queer Baits by performing musical difference, without ever really being so. Because Styles’s music gestures towards the creative and inventive, but never really goes there. Anywhere near it. Or if he does, it’s with market-tested caveats.
“As It Was,” the lead and hit single from his latest album, “Harry’s House,” is a glaring example. At first listen, the song has some elements of indie-music: glittery synths, live drums colored by surprising darkness, ambient chords swells and distant layers. But without even deep scrutiny one can hear the crude incentives of streaming all over the place: a synth line that mirrors the chorus playing within the first five seconds, a chorus that repeats itself in zombie-fashion for easy memorability, and the fact that the whole vibe — reflective, unsure, wistful — suits itself to the needs of TikTok where the song has thrived. It is perfect background for a variety of videos with a variety of moods: sad, reflective, hopeful, pensive, chill and moody.
Like he uses the aesthetics of gender variance, he uses the loose sounds of different forms of edgey-lite musics. He constantly evokes 70s funk. Gritty 80s synth pop. Rustic canyon folk. And maybe I am arbitrarily assigning non-normative contemporary pop styles as queer-related, but compared to his male pop contemporaries, say Shawn Mendes (lol) or Ed Sheehan, Styles is offering us a vision of pop music that is different and transgressive and bold. It is sold to us, as aueteur-ish. And brave. He wears shiny jumpsuits. He makes retro music. And the way he is portrayed in culture reflects this. His image in media is a gender-expansive rockstar, free-spirit icon. But even as he flashes his unique singularity, his music serves the needs of platforms, labels and the attention economy writ large. He streams well because his music is background, forgettable and affective.
Queer Baiting, under this definition, is the backbone of the industry. It allows musicians to gesture towards transgressive artistry, but never at the expense of the sonics that feed them revenue. Sonic Queer Baiters, of whom there are many in today’s rising crop of pop stars, promise and perform a rebel’s spirit for transgression. They make seemingly bold musical choices, but they always fail to launch and go all the way. They point towards retro/different sonics, or bold themes, but there’s something so-in-allignment with the desires of the steaming-music economy about their work that beckons me to hurl the words, Sonic Queer Baiters, at them. At the end of the day, they split the difference between pop and indie by performing indie aesthetics, and thus countercultural vibes, while still giving us the same industrial gruel we’ve become far too accustomed to.
Because, when it comes down to it, they will never move against their impulse to have a chorus hit early, to be rote and incantatory. They will never not have their music work well as background. To provide a mood. To be no more than what Liz Pelly so aptly called “stream bait” pop.
Add another pre-fix to that bait: Queer. Their music gives us the feeling of artistic novelty and transgresion, just don’t go too far. Wear that cute dress bro, tonight is gonna be craaazy. Wave the flag, but don’t be a . . Rock the earrings, but don’t kiss the dude.
Unless, you do kiss the dude.
hmm