Namely, it is an accusation that can only be made at icons and idols whose pedestals render their inner lives, to us, a great and distant fiction - more soap-opera projection than any material fact. But it is also this context that betrays the fundamental instability of launching queerbaiting critique at living people and not the fictional contexts whose creators it was designed to produce accountability from. It's easy enough to see the logical leap from criticism of on-screen characterisations, to applying that same critique to the characters and expectations that celebrities ostensibly play and play with, as part of their branding.
It was a criticism not of an individual's romantic politics or wardrobe choices, but one lodged at storylines and producers, at cowardly directors and censored scripts.īut as the partition between brand and celebrity has worn threadbare in an age of Kardashians and Jenners and Keeping Up, so has the distinction between authentic emanations of agency and those in which they are simply vessels for the marketable. Representation often remained firmly stuck in the innuendo, glances and inferences of the 20th century's celluloid closet. In Harry’s case, this manifests as frustration that his purported bisexuality continues to be inferred and winked at rather than explicitly declared by him, or that some sort of irrefutable evidence has not emerged proving that he does indeed also fuck men.īefore its widespread applications to those in the public eye, the critique of queerbaiting began its life as an accusation launched at the machinery of literary and cinematic storytelling the act of paying lip service to often more explicitly queer canons and source materials, but sanitising them, to not alienate more conservative markets and sensibilities. Much of this criticism can be distilled down to a celebrity's queerness as only valid if declared explicitly in public spaces and conversations, or if performed to expectation.