Queerbaiting and Percentage-gays
By Samuel Leighton-Dore
British pop-star Olly Murs recently caused a stir within the LGBT community by publicly claiming to be 20% gay. Not bisexual – just 20% gay. While I’m not entirely sure what all the PC outrage is about, it does raise an interesting subject for consideration: the meteoric rise of queerbaiting in the entertainment industry.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, queerbaiting usually refers to the fabrication of gay subtexts in TV shows, books, or movies that fail to deliver the goods. In particular, shows like Supernatural have been accused of taking advantage of their Tumblr-drunk LGBTIQ audiences. Basically, it’s kinda like having a straight guy grab your ass at a party, only to have him turn around and shout “NO HOMO!” in your face.
It’s an entirely shallow, non-committal way of getting little homo hearts racing; building an engaged queer fan-base without running the risk of isolating straighties.
Because gay men seem particularly susceptible to straight-acting/masc men, it makes perfect sense that we’d love nothing more than fantasizing about our chances with a guy like Olly Murs. But is it a positive reflection of society’s growing acceptance of sexual fluidity? Just a case of honest curiosity? Or could it be something more – a deceptive tactic employed by straight men to capitalize on their boyish good looks, gaining some insidious level of personal gratification by collecting the wayward affections of gay men?
If the latter, Murs certainly wouldn’t be the first celebrity to do so, with Sacha Barren-Cohen recently claiming that he’s 23% gay – “but it fluctuates”.
“There are times when I go down to 17%, sometimes I’m 31% – it depends on the situation. When I was doing Borat and I had the testicles at my chin, I was a 31%.” He said in February.
While it’s obviously great that we have men in the public eye who are so comfortable speaking about their sexuality, it’s all beginning to smell a little like a fucked up publicity stunt. I mean, should we really be cool with men who date women (I’m not talking about bisexuals, I’m talking about men who exclusively date and fuck women) hypothetically dipping their toes into the gay pool for a cheap thrill or headline?
In reality, these percentage-gays can’t back up the talk with the sissy-that-walk.
It’s a tricky debate, especially when you take into consideration the Kinsey scale, which would suggest that it is, in fact, possible for men to be incidentally gay. Using this scale (which ranges from 0-6) 48% of surveyed Americans between the ages of 13-20 said they didn’t identify as exclusively heterosexual. So that leaves room for 52% of young Americans who identify as something other than straight.
If anything, it’s clear that with the increasing visibility and acceptance of LGBTIQ people in society, politics and the mainstream media, others have felt permission to re-evaluate and adjust accordingly their own perceptions of sexual identity.
Which is fucking great.
Yet, when steeped against a long history of community pride and sexual ownership in the face of adversity, it can sometimes be challenging to view these seemingly flippant claims of sexual elasticity as anything more than exploitative and on-trend.