Following his Met Gala appearance Monday night with model Hailey Baldwin on his arm, “Shawn Mendes is secretly gay” jokes erupted on Twitter yet again. Public speculation about the 19-year-old’s sexuality has followed him since he became a high profile entertainer, and has become a frequent target of meme culture across the internet, despite his multiple assertions he is straight.

Shawn first addressed the viral rumors in a 2016 Snapchat video. “I’m frustrated because in this day and age people have the audacity to write online that I’m gay as if it were a bad thing,” he said then. “I just wish those one percent of people would grow up. I love you guys.”

Humor has long been a coping tool for queer communities, especially online, and jokes at the expense of (mostly) heterosexual favs are a centerpiece of “stan Twitter,” where fans of pop stars duke it out for supremacy in the court of cultural relevance. Within these communities, underhanded insults about everything from the appearance to singing abilities of rival stars are commonplace. It’s hilarious and toxic, depending on who you follow.

That’s all to say that Shawn is hardly the first celebrity to get ripped to shreds on Twitter, and while Shawn is a major cutie who has displayed great allyship to the queer community, getting gay people to stop making gay jokes about a straight white guy is not exactly priority numero uno in our culture today.

Yet these jokes are a worthy prompt to discuss internalized homophobia within the queer community — and, in some cases, the outright hypocrisy required for people who suffered from similar scrutiny while in the closet to make them. Using a sassy GIF of Shawn as a reaction image to cap off a joke is one thing. But it’s something else entirely when its punchline relies on whether someone is living in a “glass closet,” and that has often become the case with Shawn.

Many of the jokes about Shawn are wrapped up in bottom-shaming and misogyny, with the punchline being that gayness itself is laughable. Shawn’s mannerisms, which are sometimes read as flamboyant, are rendered as damning evidence of his queerness, with the comedy stemming from the idea that he just won’t come out even though everyone knows he’s gay. It implies there’s being something embarrassing about being in the closet.

This idea that someone is hiding their sexuality just because they exhibit certain behaviors, because they talk a certain way, or because they like certain things isn’t new, and comedy that relies on it to do the heavy lifting doesn’t subvert any norms. It merely replicates heteronormative social and cultural conventions, the kind that have made queerness feel dangerous and wrong for ages — and led to the kind of persecution we’ve been fighting as a community to end.

That’s the problem with many of these jokes. They’ve become an earnest investigation into someone’s sexuality disguised as humor, which is something many gay people ourselves have been subject to in our lives — the over-analysis of mannerisms and the intense scrutiny Shawn has received is reminiscent of bygone chapters of my life in the closet, even if the dynamics at play (Shawn is a celebrity, I was a kid in rural America) are vastly different. Famous or not, what impulses are we channelling when we make a teenager the subject of such a thing?

To be clear, it’s the parsing of his every move and the insistence that he must be gay that’s at issue, not gayness itself. There’s nothing wrong with wondering if someone might be gay, because there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t even think every “Shawn Mendes is gay” joke is a bad joke. It depends on context. It’s when the supposed shame around a hypothetical secret gayness is wielded as a cudgel that it goes a bridge too far. It takes an individual’s sexuality out of the hypothetical and into the realm of public speculation, which demands us to excavate the truth and makes a project out of someone’s private life.

Aside from Shawn Mendes being an actual human being with feelings, and aside from it being common courtesy to respect how someone identifies, it’s worth it to make sure we’re not replicating heterosexual narratives around gayness in our Twitter memes. Otherwise, the joke’s on us.

John Paul Brammer is a New York-based writer and advice columnist from Oklahoma whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, NBC, BuzzFeed and more. He is currently in the process of writing his first novel.

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