Is Celebrity ‘Queer Baiting’ Really Such a Crime?
nytimes.comIF YOU ARE a fan of Harry Styles, you’ve probably had a complicated couple of years. Styles contains multitudes, or at least he contains multiple narratives: At 29, he is the British reality-competition star made good, the style icon, the now-solo boy-band supernova, the “Saturday Night Live” host, the burgeoning movie star, the burgeoning movie actor (different thing) and the pop-cultural shape-shifter for whom everything is a lark, a laugh, a pose, an interesting new outfit to try on.
This makes Styles the ideal choose-your-own-adventure celebrity for the first generation of fans to have grown up fluent in the syntax of the multiverse.
You don’t have to love all the iterations of him, just the ones that resonate with you. Styles’s fans are enjoying a relatively recent phenomenon: a version of stardom in which skins are constantly being shed to reveal new skins, and old powers keep giving way to fresh ones.
He’s Madonna crossed with one of the X-Men. But recently, he and his followers have discovered something very old: Sex complicates everything, and sexual identity even more so.
