Riley Mac, poet and co-founder of monthly New York reading series “Straight Girls,” pens a Pride month op-ed on the death of lesbian celebrities.
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Pride month just ended and I’m trying to reconcile the culture war in my mind. Lesbians in my friend group are dating men. Queer celebrities JoJo Siwa, Billie Eilish, and Fletcher are dating men, revelations that came within weeks of each other. I bitch and moan and wonder, is being a lesbian really so insufferable? What the fuck is going on?
For whatever reason, “lesbian culture” is a fraction of gay male culture IRL, so when celebrities give us a morsel, we get on our knees and stick out our tongues. When a female celebrity tells us she’s queer and commodifies her queerness, we have to believe her. She doesn’t owe proof of her queerness, right? “Sexuality is fluid,” I keep reading in comment sections, Reddit threads, and thinkpieces. Yeah, totally! But when I read, “Sexuality is fluid,” it’s never about men. I keep trying to imagine the inverse. Gay-identifed men falling in love with women. Of course it happens, right? But why not nearly as often? And definitely not in the Internet-celebrity-public opinion-pop culture panopticon. Well, if female sexuality is more fluid, I’ve benefited from it, I say to myself. I think about straight women I’ve fallen in love with who ended up being not so straight. If I can enjoy that, why does once obnoxiously loud and proud celebrities like JoJo Siwa, Billie Eilish, and Fletcher falling in love with men bother me so much?
Fletcher, a lesbian-identified pop singer who built her entire career around a very normie, white lesbian cult following, had a bizarre reverse coming-out this Pride Month. She scrubbed Instagram of her gay past, adopted a clean girl aesthetic, and released a single called Boy. Look up the lyrics. In the chorus, she equates making some lesbians upset by dating a man to a queer coming out experience. It’s bizarre and I’ve never seen anything like it. Her self-victimization implies that we live in a post-gay utopia, where the horseshoe has curved so far around that she needs to apologize for loving a man. As if.
Some lesbians are similarly upset with Billie Eilish for dressing like a stud, sitting on a pile of panties in Charli XCX’s Guess Remix video singing that she was gonna, “Eat that girl for lunch,” before being spotted smooching Nat Wolff on a balcony in Venice. She’s never publicly dated anyone but cisgender men, but in her defense, she’s always identified as bisexual. Did Billie Eilish post a rare, hyper-feminine bikini pic shortly after the Nat Wolff reveal? And is the timing a bit on the nose? Sure. But she’s young, and it’s her right to oscillate and experiment with her queerness and gender identity, even if she dates a man. Plus she didn’t tell her queer fans to fuck off as a result.
Loud, proud, and obnoxiously cringe, JoJo Siwa launched an adult pop career last year and wanted everyone to know she’s a lesbian and drinks alcohol. She wore hideous costumes, had no filter, and was seemingly very young and naive. The Internet hated her and bullied her mercilessly. I saw her cringe as earnest and uncalculated. I loved it. I defended her to anyone with ears. Fast forward to JoJo Siwa on Big Brother UK and we all know what happens next. She emotionally cheated on her partner with Love Island’s Chris Hughes and came out as queer, not gay. On June 1st, Chris Hughes hard-launched their relationship by posting an image on his Instagram story of him and Siwa naked under the covers, her head on his chest. Post-Big Brother, JoJo Siwa’s comment section has done a complete 180. The people love her and Chris together. “She’s glowing.” They say, once again, that sexuality is fluid and it’s beautiful she’s finding herself. “You’re becoming the JoJo we know and love again.” More disturbing comments read, “America is healing,” (I’ve seen this multiple times) and, “She just needed that vitamin D.” I wonder how everyone would react if JoJo had left a man for a woman on TV.
Naturally, after being bullied so heavily, JoJo loves being loved. She’s gone on to say that she regrets how she started her adult pop career and feels embarrassed by it. She went on the Viall Files podcast and spoke about the lesbian community “coming at” her. And of course, she’s presenting as more feminine now. In one reel, she dons a tight black shirt with a big bow graphic, a nod to the old JoJo. She canceled her entire tour and all of her Pride appearances, presumably because her team needs to figure out a rebrand that appeals to a new fanbase. Not “the queers.” She wants you to know that this is the real her. Thanks to Chris Hughes, she’s back.
But I’m not mad at the bisexuals I know who used to identify as lesbians. I’m mad at these celebrities. I’m disturbed by how frivolously JoJo and Fletcher went about publicizing their new relationships, how their “coming outs” mirror the cliche sentiment that a lesbian just needs to meet the right man. I know what you’re thinking. This is all so biphobic. But during this Christofascist presidency, when the existence of trans people is practically criminalized, and corporate America has completely abandoned their rainbow flag-waving politics, the optics of JoJo Siwa and Fletcher’s queerness, or lack thereof, reads less as an ode to sexual fluidity and more like an ad for gay conversion therapy.
It gets tricky to reconcile everyday life and online discourse. I love celebrities and the Internet, so I’m in the trenches. I live in New York and that’s its own microcosm, but my “lesbian community” is made up of lesbians and bisexuals who are cisgender, transgender, non-binary, and etc. But a lot of the online celebrity-lesbians-dating-men conundrum resurrects an old school biphobic lesbian boogeyman as the problem. I won’t deny the existence of that boogeyman, but I think it’s moot. What I’ve been afraid to say outright is that in Trump’s America, we shouldn’t be centering “angry lesbians” in conversations about celebrity biphobia. We should point our critiques at the dominant culture that centers men and praises a “return to form.” Queerness need not be demonized any further. Fletcher and JoJo can fall in love with men, but these bizarre attempts to scrub their queer identities are outright disturbing. It’s time to stop fighting in the comments and zoom out. Or maybe I need less screen time. As if.
