Stop Talking About Shawn Mendes' Sexuality
The formula of a modern-day, cookie cutter pop star looks a little like this; they must look the part, sound the part, dress the part. They must be beautiful, yet bashful; hard-working, yet effortless; faithful, yet flirtatious. These are the conditions that have allowed young, talented individuals to be fed into the snapping jaws of fame. But what happens then when a star evolves past the prescribed outline of their fame? The answer perhaps lies with what Shawn Mendes, the kind of bright, beautiful and buoyant star that fame loves to funnel into its prescriptive straitjacket, has said this week that he should never have had to.
In videos shared to TikTok, the Canadian singer-songwriter revealed ‘the real truth’ about his sexuality, telling a theatre full of fans on the Colorado stop of his For Friends and Family Tour that he’s really ‘just figuring it out like everyone.’ Talking about the almost decade-long fascination with his sexuality, he said: 'It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me. Something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover and still have yet to discover it.' This is the same star that cancelled his ‘Wonder’ tour after seven dates to focus on his mental health.
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Mendes has ticked the boxes of being a modern-day pop star since he was plucked from virtual obscurity after going viral on Vine in 2013. He did as he was presumably told by those in the music industry and sang songs that made hordes of young people wail and scream along in tandem with him. His popularity on Vine caught the attention of talent manager Andrew Gertler, who led to Mendes signing with Island Records in 2014, aged 16. His first single, ‘Life of the Party’ was released in June 2014 and debuted on the Billboard Top 25. He became the youngest artist to debut that high on the charts. Yet alongside the hits and the acclaim that have followed, he has been long since been plagued by rumours of his sexuality.
In a 2020 appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Mendes said that ‘everyone’ has been calling him gay since he was 15 years old. He said he had issues with the way his voice sounded and how he crossed his legs when he would sit and that he 'really suffered with that'. In 2018, when he was aged 20, he told Rolling Stone that he felt pressure to be seen with women in public ‘to prove to people that I’m not gay.’
Today, Mendes is a 26-year-old man. He can be straight, gay, bisexual — or choose to defy labels entirely — but he does not owe us any kinds of explanations nor admissions. Mendes became famous for his singing, not his sexuality — so it should be his talent, and not his sexual preferences, that people pay heed to. If the last few years have taught us anything, it ought to be how much more we, as a society, need to do to protect young stars from the crippling pressures of fame. 'I was really young when I started. I was 15 years old,’ Mendes added while speaking on-stage this week. ‘The truth is that I didn't get to do a lot of 15-year-old things and discover parts of myself that you do at 15.'
Mendes is evolving – let's just hope that the poisonous pantheon of public opinion can too.
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