The American Far Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing? — Part 2: All That Glitters
Warning: The rhetoric in 2022 gets very ugly very quickly. If anything you read causes you to feel pain, take a break to eat a snack or tell a friend you love them. It is important to take care of your mental health; this essay will still be here when you feel better.
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!
Two Years Later — 2022
Before Harry’s House
On April 15, 2022, Harry Styles was the headliner at Coachella Music Festival. He wore a glorious rainbow sequin jumpsuit, waved a bisexual flag during his song Treat People With Kindness, and duetted with Shania Twain on “Man, I Feel Like a Woman.” Breitbart reported on the story on April 17 with the headline, “Coachella: Harry Styles Proclaims ‘Men Are Trash’ Between Duets with Shania Twain.” The article reminded Breitbart readers that Styles had worn a dress, that he sold nail polish, that he had been accused of appropriating queerness, that he donated to left-wing causes, and that he supported BLM and Joe Biden. It was cross-posted to the Breitbart Facebook page with the caption, “Speak for yourself, junior. And while you’re at it, can you define what a “man” is?”
This article received 675 comments on the Breitbart website, many of them misgendering Styles, calling Styles slurs, saying he didn’t know the difference between men and women, and claiming that Shania Twain had damaged her own career by associating with him. On Facebook, it received 1000 comments and a combined 1400 likes, smiles, and angry faces. The article was shared from its Breitbart post on Facebook 119 times to a total CrowdTangle audience of 4,516,837 users.
The same day, Greg Kelly, host of Greg Kelly Reports on the independent conservative news network Newsmax, posted a photograph of Styles in the rainbow jumpsuit on Twitter with the caption “I think Harry Styles would benefit from 3 years in the Marine Corps.” The post received over 10,000 likes and was retweeted 672 times without comment. Kelly complained about Styles on his TV show on both April 18 (titled Emcee of a Roman Orgy as a reference to Styles) and April 19 (titled HE’S A VETERAN as a reference to Styles’ fans ratioing him on Twitter on the morning of April 19). Kelly’s rants were winding and unhinged, full of homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. He shamed Styles for dating an older woman with children, for not serving in the military, and for the clothes he wore. Kelly expressed disgust that he spent time with his then-girlfriend’s children, and that he had many children in his fanbase. On April 19, he also brought on a priest to comment on Styles’ proximity to children, saying that it left him feeling “very negative” about how there’s “no sense of shame anymore.” USTVBD did not measure Kelly’s audience on April 18 or 19, but a Nielsen count on May 23 showed an average of 304,000 people. Kelly also uploads his TV show as a podcast; the listener count of this is unknown. It is worth noting that Greg Kelly’s celebrity discussions are rare, and they are usually defending something bigoted a celebrity did. In 2022, Greg Kelly spoke of no other celebrity two days in a row, and no other celebrity he spoke of did anything as innocent as sing in a rainbow jumpsuit.
The few mainstream news and commentary outlets that reported on backlash to Styles’ rainbow jumpsuit focused on the Twitter dogpiling of Greg Kelly, which Paper Magazine, Queerty, and the Mary Sue found to be hilarious. Only The Recount, archived by Yahoo News, bothered to preserve video of one of Greg Kelly’s unhinged rants. It is worth noting that these rants did not exist in isolation, but rather existed in the context of a political commentary TV show that airs almost every day. The same week that Greg Kelly complained about the dangers of Harry Styles’ rainbow jumpsuit, he also fear mongered about the “transgender visibility movement’s media dominance.” Harry Styles’ visible queerness was displayed on Facebook to over 4 million conservatives and shamed on a transphobe’s TV show two days in a row, and nobody did anything but laugh about it. Seven months later, this lack of coverage would lead to Buzzfeed News reporting verbatim on a setup tweet pretending to be about queerphobia aimed at Sam Smith, claiming Harry Styles never faced queerphobia of his own for wearing a rainbow jumpsuit and was afforded special privileges for “performing queerness,” as opposed to how he would be treated if he was the genuine article.
In late April, Styles interviewed with Better Homes and Gardens magazine. In the interview, he discussed his personal boundaries and his discomfort with putting a label on his sexual orientation. The Twitter account PopCrave chopped up and posted his quote about his sexuality in a way that allowed their followers to believe Styles thought people should all get rid of their labels: “Harry Styles to @BHG on not labelling his sexuality: ‘The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody & being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, & it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.’” The post was angrily quote retweeted 14,800 times and received 710 angry comments. Twitter users framed Styles as using a “faux-queer gimmick,” claimed he was “reap[ing] the benefits of being gay-adjacent without any of the oppression,” and accused him of wanting to “rub [queer] identity out.” They also made fun of an artistically cut hole in his sock, because no Harry Styles hate mob is complete without insulting his clothes. Thankfully, the right-wing did not formally chime in, but their silence would not last. That May, Harry Styles would ascend to a new level of right-wing notoriety.
Going Up
In May, The Daily Wire began what appears, in hindsight, to be a coordinated campaign of Harry Styles slander. Between May 23 and December 21, The Daily Wire published twelve articles with Styles’ name in the title. They also discussed his relationship, career, and gender expression in half a dozen listicles and think pieces. The majority of the news articles were written by conservative journalist Amanda Harding, whose Twitter account contains numerous homophobic and transphobic tweets. To simplify the discussion of the Daily Wire’s coverage of Styles in the summer, fall, and winter of 2022, I will limit my analysis to Harding’s articles, as well as the affiliated commentators I have mentioned previously: Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Candace Owens.
The first article The Daily Wire published about Harry Styles in 2022 was titled “Mick Jagger Denies Harry Styles Comparison, Says It’s A ‘Superficial Resemblance’ And He’s More ‘Androgynous.’” The article is locked to users who don’t subscribe to Daily Wire+ but, like all locked Daily Wire articles, can easily be archived and accessed through printfriendly.com (get rekt Ben Shapiro!) In the article, Harding makes sure to mention that both Styles and Jagger wear heavy eye makeup and dress in “flamboyant outfits that grab attention.” She claims (falsely) that Styles has worn ball gowns on red carpets, mentions his Vogue dress, and provides a quote where he talks about blurring gender lines. This article was reposted to 17 conservative pages on Facebook, including mocking reposts from Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh, the latter of which captioned the article, “They are both known for wearing heavy eye makeup.” The comments are full of people questioning the masculinity of both men. According to CrowdTangle, this article reached a total of 16,538,190 followers, though this is likely an overestimation since an individual can be counted more than once if they “like” more than one of the Facebook pages.
The only publication that reported on the social media reaction to this article, MEAWW, framed the Twitter backlash to Jagger’s statements as entirely one-sided and entirely emanating from Styles’ fanbase. If it weren’t obvious by now, this was not the case. R/popheads, like r/popheadscirclejerk, is well known for being full of queer people who hate Styles, and their post about the article had 357 comments. Most of the comments were insulting and the thread contained extensive debates about whether or not Styles was queerbaiting, as well as whether or not the gender norms were “winning” when it came to the clothes he wore.
Despite being framed as a villain of the queer community by Twitter shut-ins, Styles continued to support his community, even helping a fan come out at Wembley stadium in June. Breitbart covered this coming-out event with their article, “Watch — Pop Star Harry Styles ‘Helps’ Fan ‘Come Out’: ‘You’re Officially Gay, My Boy.’” Quotations in the title of the post dog whistled the growing narrative of LGBT people “grooming” children and belittled the concept of coming out. The article mentioned that this was not the first time Styles has helped a fan come out at his concerts, and reiterated that Styles supported Joe Biden and gun control, posed in women’s clothing, and owned a non-gendered beauty brand. Breitbart’s 147 commenters accused Styles of “grooming” children, belittled queer people, and claimed he was spreading disease.
The article was shared onto Breitbart’s Facebook page with the caption “Rich Elite Gun control pusher and Joe Biden supporter Harry Styles — who posed in women’s clothing for Vogue — encouraged a fan to “come out” at a concert in Wembley, England, on Sunday night, proclaiming, “You’re officially gay, my boy!”” It received 277 total interactions and was shared nine times. Despite the low engagement, it was this article that was my gateway into keeping an eye on the far right’s fixation with Harry Styles. The accusations in the comments of spreading disease seemed to take the discourse to another emotional level, and it made me feel very concerned about the direction things were headed. Nobody seemed to notice or care that Styles was being tied up in increasingly violent “groomer” conspiracies.
In July, The Daily Wire posted about Styles twice in one week — “‘Harry Styles And The Cult Of Celebrity’ Course Offered At Texas State University” (July 20) and “Owens: Bring Back Manly Men” (July 23). The first article, written by Amanda Harding, made note in the final paragraph that Styles dressed flamboyantly, that he was on the cover of Vogue, that he didn’t label his sexuality, and that he was a proponent of LGBT causes. The article garnered 115 comments, mostly disparaging left-leaning higher education with some homophobia and transphobia thrown in for spice. It was shared on Facebook to conservative pages 17 times to a CrowdTangle total of 13,673,636 followers. Followers of those pages shared the posts 73 times to their personal Facebook pages, and the article received 2,473 interactions in total.
The second Daily Wire article, “Owens: Bring Back Manly Men” was far more popular. In the article, Owens rehashes her criticism of Styles’ appearance in Vogue magazine, reasserting society’s need for “manly men.” She, like Greg Kelly, invokes World War II veterans when talking about the lack of masculinity in society today. Owens positions Styles as someone trying to destroy cultural standards, saying that the left is “teaching grown adult men to ignore gender norms and to play God” and “teaching your children to do so as well.” According to Owens, “this has become much more than a celebrity wearing a dress [. . .] It’s in your home now and it’s taking everyone it can.”
“Owens: Bring Back Manly Men” was posted to Facebook 56 times and shared from conservative pages onto personal pages 772 times. Overall, the article was interacted with 131,177 times to a CrowdTangle follower count of 18,305,486 people. Perhaps the one saving grace is the fact that Owens’ piece is a Daily Wire+ article, which means that most of the people interacting with it on Facebook didn’t read it. However, it is both striking and concerning that Owens recognized the continued rhetorical power of Harry Styles’ dress a year and a half after he wore it. No other feminine male celebrities were mentioned in her piece; she trusted that her readers would interpret his cultural ubiquity to mean that their anxieties about feminine men were legitimate.
(If you need to take a break after reading the last several paragraphs, I encourage you to do so. It was hard for me to write; please take care of yourself.)
Rolling Stone
On August 22, 2022, Harry Styles graced the cover of Global Rolling Stone magazine. The cover claimed that Styles was “the new King of Pop” and the article called him “the world’s most wanted man.” He spoke about his two new films, Don’t Worry Darling and My Policeman, as well as about touring and the media frenzy surrounding his life. Olivia Wilde was also interviewed for the article; both talked around their relationship with the interviewer. It would be impossible to fully cover the backlash to this article, as it was tremendous. In the interest of time, I will only be focusing on the inevitable abuse Styles received for his statements on gay sex and his own sexuality in Rolling Stone.
For ease of reference, the full quote on gay sex that became widely debated on August 22nd was: “According to Styles, Grandage wanted to highlight what sex is really like between two men in the scenes between Tom and Patrick. ‘So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,’ Styles continues. ‘There will be, I would imagine, some people who watch it who were very much alive during this time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] wanted to show that it’s tender and loving and sensitive.’”
It is worth noting that Grandage himself had talked about the sex scenes with Vanity Fair two months earlier: “Grandage says that they were carefully choreographed to avoid prurience: to ‘quite literally show something that was about ‘lovemaking’ in the broadest sense of the word, something that was choreographically interesting and not just some kind of thrusting sense of sex going on.’” The following controversy was entirely based out of Styles’ attempt to artfully rephrase what the director of his film had already said about the gay sex scenes in it. Keep in mind before reading the subsequent passages — nobody had seen the film yet, and they had no idea it was very sexually explicit.
Shortly after the article dropped, Indiewire reposted Styles’ quote to Twitter about the tenderness of the sex in My Policeman, excerpting it in the least flattering way possible to get clicks — “’So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it.’ Harry Styles talks about the queer sex scenes in his upcoming #MyPoliceman: https://bit.ly/3T9Nzl6” This post was quote retweeted with insulting comments over 22,000 times, most of which were homophobic and condescending, and several of which were violent. A tweet mocking Styles posted by Grindr’s official account received 96,000 likes and was retweeted 11,500 times without comment.
Once enough people were riled up on Twitter, the think piecers decided to weigh in. Styles’ comments on gay sex in film were ridiculed or condescended to in Dazed, The Week, The Guardian, Indiewire, The AV Club, Out Magazine, and many other news outlets. Publications suggested he might be “loading up on gay porn,” accused him of being “wholly unaware of the challenges facing LGBTQ people around the world today,” and said that “one of the most queer things he’s done in public” is being “prudish and annoying.” On Facebook, Indiewire paired their accusations of his ignorance with claims that his film would be “another sexless gay love story”– again, despite the fact that nobody had seen it yet.
On August 23, Breitbart decided to weigh in on the situation with their article, “Never Woke Enough: Harry Styles Slammed as Homophobic — ‘Queer People Don’t Need Him and He Better Stop Speaking for us.’” In the article, they pulled Styles’ quote about gay sex, said he doesn’t label his sexuality, and claimed that “fans” were criticizing him for “’speaking for queer people’ when he ‘doesn’t even want to claim’ the LGBTQIA2S+ community.” The author plugged a handful of hateful tweets into the article, and then pivoted towards reminding Breitbart’s audience that yes, this is the same man who wore women’s clothing in Vogue. The last line of the article chillingly made note of the fact that Styles has been thinking about having children with his girlfriend one day. Forty people commented on the article, most of them to laugh at the ‘left eating itself’ and to mock Styles for saying that gay sex could be tender.
Breitbart posted the article to Facebook the same day with the caption, “The LGBTQIA2S+ community is blasting rich Elite Harry Styles: “Queer people don’t need him and he better stop speaking for us. He stole queer culture for his benefits and fame, period.” The post garnered 415 comments and was shared from Breitbart’s Facebook page 17 times, for a CrowdTangle total of 4,503,393 followers. On Facebook, discussions centered predominately around the queer community eating itself, with some homophobia thrown in for fun. “Progressives” bullying Harry Styles only served to feed into the stereotype that queer people are intolerant of straight people, that queer people have an agenda, and that most of the problems queer people complain about are trivial.
Once the 24-hour news cycle had chewed through Styles’ comments on gay sex, it was time for Twitter and the mainstream media to turn towards their favorite Harry Styles conversation — queerbaiting. In the last week of August and the first week of September, numerous publications wrote for-or-against think pieces about whether Styles was pretending to be gay for money. On August 27th, an opinion piece called “Harry Styles Walks A Fine Line” appeared in the actual New York Times. The opinion piece is long and strange (it cites tattoos on his feet as evidence of queerbaiting and claims we are owed his sexuality because his tickets are expensive) but settles on the general idea that Styles is selfishly closeted and not invested in queer liberation. On Twitter, the New York Times’ post (which rudely implies Styles is closeted) was liked 1600 times and retweeted without comment 290 times. Searching for the article on Twitter produces dozens of results. According to CrowdTangle, the article was exposed to a total of 18,778,242 Facebook followers. On September 15th, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) gathered a panel with representatives from GLAAD, Still Bisexual, and PFLAG National to debate the article (and Styles’ alleged closet) on their Facebook page.
On August 30th, The Daily Wire decided to chime in. Amanda Harding wrote a Daily Wire+ think piece called “The Mystery of Harry Styles Refusing to Define His Sexuality.” The article lists off everything Styles has ever said about his sexuality and claims that his ambiguity is why he is so popular with Gen Z as “identifying as cisgender is now akin to being square.” If you are wondering “wow, why is the literal fascist publication The Daily Wire seeming to agree with the idea of queerbaiting” it’s because the concept of a real person queerbaiting is a fundamentally conservative idea that the left-wing has been mindlessly parroting for years. It’s literally “the gay agenda” but woke. I’m so tired. Anyway.
The article was posted to conservative Facebook pages 18 times, with CrowdTangle measuring the total followers of those pages as 17,276,287 people. Three commentators from the Daily Wire reposted it with commentary of their own — Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles. All three of them shared similar messages, but Knowles’ messaging was particularly illuminating due to its brevity. According to Knowles, “Indulging his attention-seeking exhibitionism is only going to further exaggerate his influence on impressionable young people.” Conservative straight people believe that all queer people are fundamentally attention-seekers who are faking their queerness. The conspiracy theory that children are being “groomed” into queerness by older queer people is merely an ugly offshoot of the idea that some expressions of queerness are inauthentic and paired with sinister motives.
Up next: Don’t Worry Darling and My Policeman. If you are reading this when part 3 is already up, I urge you to take an intermission. Go on a walk, make some food, drink some water. This is a lot of very negative content, and it is not getting better from here.
Series: “The American Far-Right Hates Harry Styles. Why is Everyone Laughing?”
