One of my closest friends says he loves being attracted to men, but absolutely hates “being gay”. I get that. And he doesn’t mean it in the sense of being a minority, like you might think at first - the way a Kenyan friend once told me she was never “black” until she went to America to study. He means it in terms of how different gay men are from straight men, how differently they form relationships compared to straight couples and lesbians. Even if the entire global population were suddenly reduced to just gay men (heaven forfend), we would all still “be gay”, and that’s the part he hates.
I woke up on Christmas morning to an unexpected message from my high-school best friend when I was 12 years old… on Grindr. That in itself isn’t a surprise, as we both came out to each other in the 2000s; the last time we saw each other was at a club night in 2007. A shocking number of boys in our high-school year group turned out to be gay - way above the 3-5% you might expect, well above even 10%. Makes you wonder if there was something in the water. And you could tell which kids were the gay kids, even if we didn’t have the words for it at the time. Some of them were good friends, most were pretty normal, but some were the worst, most vicious bullies in the school. “Vicious” because they didn’t hit you or beat you up, they bullied psychologically, the way mean girls do. Those who were the most effeminate and least able to hide their difference - and the least academically able - were the bitchiest towards others. Anything to make someone else a target, or as my friend Rick calls it, “self-hatred projected outward”.
I say this now because in terms of both the level of opprobrium he attracts and how he conducts himself, the singer Sam Smith is an absolute anomaly among gay male public figures, even before he stopped identifying as either gay or male. He’s had eight UK number-one singles, and straight people love him - women and girls form the bulk of his fanbase - but gay men don’t like him, to put it mildly. The reasons why say a huge amount about gay culture.
Let’s start with a trivial one: a gay guy on a music forum I used to read said that he didn’t like Sam Smith “because he’s an ex-fat”. The thought process this reveals is enough to leave one dumbstruck - fatness reconceptualised as a kind of original sin that you can never shake. Then there are more understandable reasons, like the fact gay men generally tend to prefer upbeat music and female singers, whereas Smith is a guy singing sad ballads. But Smith’s main crime in the eyes of the gay public? Being emotional.
When it came out that some of Smith’s songs were written about guys he had one-night stands with, this was roundly mocked by gay men online. You’re not supposed to have feelings about dudes you have casual sex with. It should be functional and mechanical, a conquest or a submission - like scratching an itch, attending to a need, ticking something off a list. The fact Smith dared to actually care about someone he hooked up with, to remember their name, to wonder wistfully about them after the fact, and worst, to admit all this? That’s a no-go. He’s needy. He’s a loser. He’s deluded to want more. We all know sex between men is supposed to be autoerotic and dispassionate; you nut and you go.
Worse than this, other songs of Smith’s were written about a straight, married colleague he fell in love with. While this definitely ventures into creepy, borderline stalker territory - if I were the guy in question I would not be comfortable with it at all - it’s also the case that pretty much every gay man has fallen hopelessly in love with a straight guy they couldn’t have, particularly in their teens or early twenties, which is when this happened to Smith too. Gay men don’t like being reminded of this.
Smith has also criticised the culture created by dating apps. "From my experience, the most beautiful people I’ve been on dates with are the dumbest, so why would I swipe [left on] people who are 'unattractive' when I could potentially fall in love with them?" Again, he was thoroughly mocked by gay men for this, but I can’t disagree with it. My best relationships have been with men who weren’t conventionally attractive. Body language, pheromones, eye contact and speech mannerisms are just some of the factors that play a huge role in attraction but can’t be judged from a dating profile. Online dating also disadvantages anyone who struggles with technology or is bad at taking selfies. In a separate interview, Smith correctly observed that these apps are causing people to lose “the art of conversation and being able to go and speak to people”.
When he incorrectly claimed to be the first gay man to win an Oscar, Smith was rightly called out (I hate that term). And yes, the part of his personality that seems to think he invented being gay is annoying. There are other rumours about him treating fans poorly that I’m not going to go into because they’re just Twitter hearsay. I’m also not saying that gay men should be expected to automatically like Smith just because he’s gay. I don’t listen to his music, and I think he comports himself in ways that often make him a very easy target.
But it feels like he can’t do right by anyone. Early in his career, gay websites attacked him for being too bland and mainstream, for his “conservatism” and for not making it clear in his lyrics that he’s singing about a man. (Smith: “I've tried to be clever with this album […] I've made my music so that it could be about anything and everybody”.) On the London gay scene before he was famous, he experienced a lot of “rejection” for being overweight. (Interviewer: “You came looking for acceptance and community and found hostility [and] body-shaming?” Smith: “You have to accept that’s your community, work through it and forgive.”) A friend who came out way back in the 1990s had exactly the same experience despite not even being overweight. The few pieces of gay media he’d secretly consumed had told him that his straight family and friends would reject him but the gay community would welcome him with open arms. Of course, it was the other way around: he was loved and supported by all those close to him, but the reaction when he started trying to socialise with gay men was - as he put it - “not in that shirt”.
So no, I don’t think Smith’s non-binary identity is all about attention-seeking or just another example of him being extra. I think it’s a sanctuary. Is it any wonder he doesn’t want to identify as a gay man when - both throughout his career and before it - the majority of shit he’s had flung at him has been from those people, his supposed peers? He’s either too fat or too gay or too emotional or not gay enough, and if he were conventionally hunky, gays would be much more likely to give him a free pass no matter what he said or did. In him, gay men see the things they dislike about themselves. Their vulnerabilities.
I don’t know what happened to those gay bullies I went to high school with. But I think it’s about time we see more pieces of teen media where the villain isn’t the jock or the queen bee but the bitchy gay kid. Because it’s an underreported truth.
I was never bullied in the traditional sense, but by the time I was in high school, the only person who was rude and purposefully mean to my face was a gay guy, who nicknamed me “Pale Ghost,” …wait for it…because I was so pale.