In a Rolling Stone cover profile, the pop star Shawn Mendes revealed he’s been struggling with anxiety around his “feminine” behaviour. That should perhaps not be surprising in a heteronormative society that polices male femininity. What was different in this instance, is that the policing is being done not by homophobic hypermasculine dude-bros, but by the gay community itself. Mendes detailed how gay social media users had turned speculation about his identity into a “sport”, how they had made him the subject of endless memes, and latched on to microbehaviours in interviews as evidence of his homosexuality. He described waking up in a panic after he had dared to wear glitter, thus feeding the fire that he’s “terrified of”.

These revelations sparked a wave of self-examination in the gay community. Many prominent figures showered Mendes with support, while others snorted. Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander tweeted: “It must be really intense to be the subject of so much interrogation.” Adore Delano of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame tweeted a simple, “lol”, in response.

Why did the incident prompt such disparate and emotional reactions from gay people? The reasons are manifold and complex. Cultural gayness has a fraught history in pop culture. Ever since Aids began to pick off members of the queer cultural elite in the 80s, femininity and queer signifiers (ahem, like glitter) became red flags for disease and moral corruption. The tabloid media systematically crucified gay people, using these feminine signifiers as tracking beacons. Closeting oneself and cloaking one’s femininity became a matter of survival, and not just for celebrities.

Since then, we have fought hard to reclaim the right to this femininity. Many gay people, myself included, find belonging in cultural gayness and worship of the feminine through female pop divas and gay male stars such as Alexander and Troye Sivan. This cultural gayness binds our community (especially online), and femininity is the glue. There was uproarious joy when Sivan’s album Bloom celebrated this flamboyant gayness so freely.

Given this context, we should look with empathy at the gay people who have sought to project a sexual meaning on to Mendes’s perceived femininity. For many of us, the ability to celebrate femininity and connect it with actual gayness brings us joy. It is a hard-won freedom – some of us spent our teenage years trying to uncouple the two, and convince our persecutors that they weren’t related. And it is understandable that some gay people were defensive. The sense that we have a right to assert a narrative about Mendes may stem in part from our historic war to liberate femininity in pop culture, and from our own individual battles to celebrate the femininity that accompanies our own gayness.

The defensiveness also comes from a place of defiance. After all, why is heterosexuality the only acceptable default setting? People are assumed straight until proven gay – why not the other way around? Many gay people bristled at Mendes’s comments, recognising his aversion to the gay label as the familiar spectre of internalised homophobia. Mendes alluded to this with self-awareness, saying, “I hate that side of me”. It is worth carefully considering why being assumed gay is enough to make a man wake up in a “cold sweat” – many gay people snorted at his discomfort at being thought of as something that is central to our identity. Why should we get in a flap about someone who lives with straight privilege, because he is sometimes read as queer? When actual queer people are still murdered for their feminine presentation, it’s unsurprising that many rolled their eyes at Mendes.

But despite all these important qualifying factors, it feels as if we are scoring an own goal by defending our right to presume Mendes’s sexuality. For some gay men like me, femininity is how our queerness manifests. We fit neatly into certain gay stereotypes, spaces, and online communities – these stereotypes were bravely reclaimed and still oppressed, yes, but they’re not a universal representation of sexuality. Queerness is not really about finding comfortable new categories to put everyone in, it’s more about blurring them entirely, right?

By putting Mendes in the pigeonhole we want him to belong in, we reinforce the binaries that have punished our community for centuries. If we cannot permit men to be feminine without also being gay, then what has our end goal become? Are we content to retie the bonds of heteronormativity on to someone else’s wrists? The rigid expectations of the gender binary still cause queer people, especially trans and gender non-conforming people, agony every day. Why are we helping to transmit them? The reason so many gay people supported Mendes is that we know what this feels like. In the 90s, the tabloids made money from toxic speculation about pop stars’ sexuality – are we really going to take up that mantle? Surely in 2018 it’s time to correct the mistakes of history, not to repeat them.

• Brian O’Flynn is a freelance writer, student and pop culture enthusiast based in Dublin