The American Far-Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing? — Part 1: The Panopticon
On November 13, 2020, Harry Styles appeared on the cover of American Vogue magazine wearing a lovely periwinkle gown and a black blazer. Styles was blowing a blue balloon on the cover, a 21st- century play on elegantly smoking a cigarette, and the bottom of the dress was not visible. Buried inside the article, there was a full-body view of the dress, its train fanning out onto the yellowing summer grass. Styles’ hand was on his hip, his chin jutted out, eyes squinted against the wind that was blowing through his curls. As writer Hamish Bowles put it, “striking a pose for [photographer Tyler Mitchell] that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition.” This was the photograph that Vogue chose to promote the magazine with on Twitter on November 13, with the caption, “”There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means — it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”: Read our full December cover story starring @Harry_Styles here: http://vogue.cm/Pdns6GQ”
On November 14, 2020, the American far-right discovered Harry Styles. Within the span of several days, Styles was attacked by Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson’s Fox News TV show, Donald Trump Jr., Senator Ted Cruz, and many others. Meanwhile, think piece writers got busy writing articles about how privileged he was for any of the support he received on social media while the right-wing attacks were ongoing. As a queer, gender-nonconforming fan trapped in my house during a pandemic, it was a hell that’s hard to describe. For several weeks in 2020, the entire world pressed a megaphone to my ear and told me that everything I liked, and everything I was, was not okay.
I think if you asked a randomly selected netizen, they would probably assume that was the end of it. The American far-right [Ed. Note 1], being highly distractible creatures, must have eventually forgotten Harry Styles and moved on to other moral panics. Nobody could blame you for thinking this — publications trading in Harry Styles news have rarely mentioned any subsequent far-right attacks. Instead, left-wing queers have opted to publicly shame his gender non-conformity and sexual fluidity [Ed. Note 2] via accusations of “queerbaiting,” i.e. pretending to be queer for money and fame. I have no interest in humoring this, because it is a waste of time. The far-right perceives Styles to be queer, and they think that left-wing queers attacking one of their own is hilarious. They have delighted in vilifying and degrading Styles’ clothing and sexuality largely unopposed. In the last two years, Harry Styles has become the celebrity face of the destruction of white masculinity on the far-right, and the predominant left-wing response has been to twist the knife.
Trigger warning ahead for homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, sexism, and misgendering. I will do my best to try to communicate the message without causing too much harm to other queer people, but eliminating all of the negative language and messages would be impossible. Please take breaks whenever you need them — some of this stuff gets rough.
One additional note — this essay series exists primarily to contextualize Styles’ online abuse for people who are fans of or neutral about Harry i.e. the generally well meaning. I would appreciate it if the essay was not shared with bigots as a “gotcha” on social media as just writing it already puts me at risk for harassment. Thank you!
The Following Year
In the year that followed what came to be known among Harry’s fans as “Vogue Week,” right-wing attacks continued with no mainstream opposition. In December 2020, right-wing political commentator and theocratic fascist Matt Walsh made a video about Styles’ mild response to the controversy that, to date, has 20,000 likes and almost 4000 comments. [Ed. Note 3] In the video itself, Walsh brought up conservative talking points that would come to define culture war discourse in late 2021 and 2022 — Drag Queen Story Hour, transgender children, and fearmongering about queer individuals who live beyond binaries — calling all of it “bizarre and disturbing.”
Also in December, Fox News host Raymond Arroyo attacked Styles for being feminine in a segment on the Ingraham Angle called “We Want None of In 2021.” Arroyo suggested that Styles should remove his pearls and wear pants. Everyone thought this was extremely funny for some reason and trended #foxnewsjerksofftoharrystyles. The news media responding to Styles’ attacks by the far right with a tone of amusement (when they bother to talk about it at all) became a consistent pattern from then on.
February brought an article from the far-right publication Breitbart about Olivia Wilde’s praise of Styles taking the role of Jack in Don’t Worry Darling — “Olivia Wilde Praises Harry Styles for Playing a Supporting Role ‘To Allow for a Woman to Hold the Spotlight’” The article mentioned that they were dating and used Wilde’s post as an excuse to imply Styles was a beta male. It got 42 negative comments, with several mentioning that he wore a dress, and a few joking that he was gay or transgender. Wilde’s post drew significant criticism on Twitter from feminists who felt Styles was being over-praised for doing the bare minimum.
In a March Facebook post, founder of conservative news website and media company The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro used the controversy to advertise political commentator and right-wing activist Candace Owens’ new Daily Wire show.
It’s impossible to say how many of the 56,000 people who liked the post were on board with Candace’s attack on Harry Styles, but it’s clear from the way that the post is promoted that Ben Shapiro believed her commentary on his outfits was a defining moment for her as a commentator. The Daily Wire taking on Candace Owens as a commentator has shaped the homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic rhetoric of the site, and, as we will see, it likely influenced the publication’s obsessive behavior towards Styles and his then-partner a year later — Olivia Wilde having told Candace on Twitter that she was “pathetic” after her criticism of Styles.
In October, Matt Walsh made another video bluntly called “Men Should Not Wear Dresses” in response to Billy Porter criticizing Styles for wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue (in this case because Porter chose to perceive Styles as a heterosexual man instead of as a queer man who dates women). Walsh twisted the “queerbaiting” conversation into one that framed the two men as trying to “capture” womanhood in a game and claiming they were “ridiculing the feminine.” His video garnered 6200 likes and 1800 comments. Someone from the queer community choosing to be biphobic about Styles put both of them in the crossfire of an angry fascist. This has happened several times since, as we will see.
(It is worth noting that while Matt Walsh was accusing Styles of coveting womanhood, traditional news was busy writing dozens of articles about how privileged he was to go without criticism for wearing women’s clothes. Articles reporting on the “controversy” or using the opportunity to make commentary about Styles’ alleged heterosexual privilege were published in NPR, Paper Magazine, the Advocate, LGBTQ Nation, Insider, Rolling Stone, Queerty, Today, Attitude, Billboard, CNN, and many others.)
The transphobic ghoul libsoftiktok (famed for radicalizing the Club Q shooter) tweeted about Styles dressed as Dorothy in November. The post was liked 5400 times and retweeted without commentary 387 times. As you can see by searching from:libsoftiktok drag show, this was an unusually high level of engagement on their anti-LGBTQ content even in April of 2022, and remains a medium-level of engagement a year since the tweet was posted. In response to the dress, Vogue published an article called “Harryween and the Problem with Boys in Dresses,” which, while attempting some form of positivity by concluding it was fine for him to wear a dress (thank god for someone graciously giving him permission), continued to launder the idea that it was appropriate to argue about Styles’ sexuality and gender presentation in major publications.
Also in November, Breitbart ran an article on Harry Styles’ beauty line Pleasing, making sure to emphasize within the article that this was the same person who wore a dress in Vogue. This post had 186 comments, and the rhetoric in them was escalating. Many folks insisted that he was mentally ill, that he was a freak, and that he was transgender. Commenters also tried to work around Breitbart’s commenting policy against outright homophobic slurs. Unsurprisingly, there was also backlash from left-wing queers eager to criticize Styles for “queerbaiting”. . .again. He was also widely ridiculed on twitter for a green JP Gaultier sweatshirt dress he wore in a Dazed photoshoot promoting Pleasing. With a cursory search for “Harry Styles grinch” one can immediately find a tweet with almost 1000 retweets and almost 10,000 likes. Memes about “the gender norms beating his ass” circulated widely across platforms.
Around this time, an intentionally camp photograph of Styles wearing suspenders with pink leggings and a “pilgrim” hat began to circulate on Twitter and TikTok. Some tasteless fans found the image “disturbing” and turned it into a rude meme. Over the course of the next year, “pilgrim Harry” would leak out of the fandom to become shorthand for Styles’ gender non-conformity being clownish and embarrassing. For example, the popular Twitter account @musicstruggles1 posted it with the caption “what the hell was this” in November 2022 to the tune of almost 292,000 likes and 14,000 retweets without commentary. They followed it up with the transphobic tweet, “this outfit is so bad it looks like what a government psyop would wear to make the idea of genderless clothing seem ridiculous” which received almost 32,000 likes and 439 retweets without commentary. The mockery has been so persistent and aggressive that r/popheadscirclejerk, a subreddit that loathes Styles, has banned the image.
The trauma this has exacted on Styles’ queer fanbase cannot be understated. Many Harry Styles fans, with no other way to cope, engaged with the homophobia over and over in a truly heartbreaking display of prolonged digital self-harm. Unfortunately, as seen above, some Harry fans would attempt to mock his clothing before other people could get there first. The line between left-wingers who wanted a laugh, defensive stans, and the hateful right-wing was often blurry and hidden by anonymous usernames and celebrity avatars.
Unfortunately, right-wing hatred would only continue to get worse in the following year. By November 2021, right-wingers had made significant headway into permanently associating Styles with the fall of white western masculinity. Soon, he would inspire increasingly violent rage whenever he appeared in their followers’ feeds. His stratospheric rise to fame in the spring of 2022 would create a terrifying media circus by the fall that would see Styles publicly ridiculed for his sexuality and gender presentation and lied about by both fringe and mainstream news publications. Additionally, the bigotry he faced would prove contagious, producing both a right-wing and mainstream obsession with his then-girlfriend that would only cease months after they broke up in November 2022. Right-wing obsession with him would persist, culminating in an attempt to integrate Styles’ Gucci HAHAHA collection into their QAnon conspiracy theories in December 2022.
Series: “The American Far-Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing?”
Ed. Note 1: While the New York Post, FoxNews.com, the Daily Mail, and other tabloids have all leaned into the Harry Styles hate train, the mass appeal and center-right nature of these publications means that analyzing them is simply too much work for one person. This piece will specifically focus on the American far-right, with analysis limited to the social media, videos, and podcasts of Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Candace Owens; posts from prominent anti-LGBTQ activist libsoftiktok; articles from far-right publications Breitbart and The Daily Wire; on-air Fox News and Newsmax commentary from right wing thought leaders; and other niche far-right thinkers and publications, where appropriate. Facebook shares will be elucidated through CrowdTangle free Chrome extension, when possible. Breitbart comments are tabulated by clicking on the “comments” link, not by the number of comments the article page says it has in the byline, as they inflate the numbers on the main page to make the articles appear more popular.
Ed. Note 2: Styles has repeatedly said that he likes men and women, that he does not label his sexuality, that he has no ulterior political motive to dressing androgynously, and that he is a man. As a shorthand, I will be describing this as “sexual fluidity and gender non-conformity” and/or “queer/queerness” throughout the essay. Analysis of the bigotry he faces will be focused on the meanings that bigoted people project onto him using the words academics have agreed upon to discuss those bigotries, e.g. homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, transmisogyny, etc. “Misgendering” will be defined throughout this essay as assigning pronouns or gendered words to Styles that he does not use for himself, e.g. she, woman, it, he/she, they, etc.
Ed. Note 3: This was Styles’ response to the controversy.
