Wow. Have you ever seen someone with so much gay anxiety? From his Rolling Stone interview published today...
Mendes admits that the attention on his personal life has caused him a lot of stress. “I’d like to say I don’t care about it, but that’s not true,” he says. This brings him to another, much thornier issue that he’s been forced to navigate: “This massive, massive thing for the last five years about me being gay.”
Examples of what he means are all over YouTube and Twitter. There are memes that pair photos of Mendes with jokes about being closeted and videos that scrutinize his gestures. On some parts of the Internet, outing him has become a spectator sport. Mendes often finds himself watching his own interviews, analyzing his voice and his body language. He’ll see an anonymous stranger comment on the way he crossed his legs once and try not to do it again. He pulls out his phone to show me his Twitter account — his name is the only recent search. “In the back of my heart, I feel like I need to go be seen with someone — like a girl — in public, to prove to people that I’m not gay,” he says. “Even though in my heart I know that it’s not a bad thing. There’s still a piece of me that thinks that. And I hate that side of me.”
Last Christmas, he was reading YouTube comments about his sexuality when he decided he’d had enough. “I thought, ‘You fucking guys are so lucky I’m not actually gay and terrified of coming out,’ ” he recalls now. “That’s something that kills people. That’s how sensitive it is. Do you like the songs? Do you like me? Who cares if I’m gay?”
So he recorded a frantic Snapchat story. “I noticed a lot of people were saying I gave them a ‘gay vibe,’ ” he told his millions of followers, sounding a little choked up as he stared wide-eyed at the camera. “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or wasn’t.”
But the video only made people talk more. Mendes mentions a text he got just the other day from Swift. They’ve been friends since she took him on her 1989 tour, when he was 16. He remembers those shows fondly — how she showed him the ropes of performing at arenas and stadiums, how she’d line up her trucks in the shape of a diamond and throw huge barbecues inside with soccer games and flip-cup. (“I wasn’t drinking,” he says. “I was just playing with water, obviously.”)
Swift was texting Mendes a cellphone video of them together, just to make sure he was cool with her posting it — a short clip of the night they were hanging out backstage at her Reputation tour and she put her glittery eye makeup on Mendes’ face, to his delight. He told her it was fine without thinking, but later that night, he woke up in a cold sweat. “I felt sick,” he said. “I was like, ‘Fuck, why did I let her post that?’ I just fed the fire that I’m terrified of.”
In the end, Mendes says, he’s happy about the side of himself shown in Swift’s backstage post. As a kid, he’d put glitter on his eyelids to make his parents laugh; he grew up with 15 female cousins, “braiding hair and painting nails. Maybe I am a little more feminine — but that’s the way it is. That’s why I am me.”
He’s beginning to see the value in letting his guard down in his music, too. “In My Blood” — the biggest hit from his new album, with more than 300 million Spotify streams — stands out with its crashing arena-rock guitars and Kings of Leon-style chorus, but also for its desperate lyrics:
Laying on the bathroom floor, feeling nothing.
I’m overwhelmed and insecure, give me something
I could take to ease my mind slowly.
Just have a drink and you’ll feel better.
Just take her home and you’ll feel better.
Keep telling me that it gets better.
Does it ever?
When the song came out in March, Mendes was in a movie theater watching Love, Simon— a comedy-drama about a closeted teenager whose sexuality is exposed by his classmates. He had a panic attack in the theater and had to leave early. Then he opened up Twitter and saw messages from people who related to “In My Blood,” from friends to a woman who played it for her daughter in a hospital. He stayed up until 3 a.m. reading the comments. “I broke down in my hotel room,” he says. “I started crying, and I was just like, ‘This is why you talk about shit that actually is real.’ I was like, ‘God, don’t ever fucking question the feeling of writing the truth again.’ ”
Shawn Mendes: Confessions of a Neurotic Teen Idol – Rolling Stone
In my experience the only people that cared so much and spent so much time worrying about being perceived as gay were deeply closeted and afraid of the truth. What a huge write up in an interview just on the subject of gay anxiety. Weird! And having a panic attack during Love, Simon? Poor guy. I’ll honestly give him the benefit of the doubt that he has some attraction to girls, but I think the guy is tormented and struggling with repressed sexuality on some level—so easy to forget he’s only 20 and been moving at breakneck speed for 4 years and probably has no time to stop and find himself.