What Shawn Mendes’ ‘Gay Outing’ Reveals About Gen Z’s Hypocrisy

For a generation that prides itself on being accepting and tolerant, some fans look a lot like the people in supposedly less enlightened times who were prodding behind their hands, chuckling and whispering to Liberace, Johnnie Ray or Noel Coward. Worse, in the case of Mendes, the speculation is based on age-old stereotypes – that Mendes has a “girly” voice, that he is not “masculine,” as if it were 1954.

Mendes’ new song The Mountain tells us, “Some days I change my mind / You can say what you gotta say / You can say I’m too young, you can say I’m too old / You can say I’m like girls or boys, whatever suits you. Stand back, Arthur Rimbaud! It all feels so timid and insipid, so terrifyingly, terrifyingly tame.

I promise this won’t turn into ‘eeh bah gum when I was a boy’, but at the age of 14 I was happily singing along in my bedroom to the lyrics of Marc Almond’s Catch A Fallen Star from his album Torment and Toreros from 1983. – a bracing portrait of different forms of sexual activity – and I’m afraid that 41 years later I still can’t bear to repeat them here. The lyrics of contemporary pop stars feel like a steep descent into the weak cheerfulness of the pre-1960s.

But the raging speculation surrounding idols like Tab Hunter, Johnny Mathis or Rock Hudson in the days before homosexuality was legalized (let alone endlessly – and boringly – ‘celebrated’ with LGBTQIA+ Pride) survives. Not long ago, a male friend of mine was dating a moderately successful Hollywood actor who was terrified of being exposed. They were supposed to meet at a private jet rendezvous in faraway places. That sounded incredibly glamorous and romantic from the outside. But all the time I kept thinking: why all this concealment, at this time?