The singer-actor’s interviews tend to be full of unequivocal statements about the value of kindness, creativity and following your own path. His latest spread in Rolling Stone largely follows suit, dropping such bombshells as “It’s okay to be flawed…I make mistakes sometimes,” “If I have kids someday, I’ll encourage them to be themselves,” and, when they get to therapy, that “So many of your feelings are so foreign before you start to properly analyze them.” Well, if you were Harry Styles, why would you go any further than that in a public forum? Again, the interview sees Styles sidestepping the subject of his sexuality – a habit that has seen the star, whose penchant for non-binary fashion lead the media to chase a more declarative identity statement, accused of ” queerbaiting” in more fervently fair corners of the internet. “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only been in public with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve been in public with anyone,” he says — a perfectly reasonable stance, even if some might argue that his apparent relationship with Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde is seen more or less in public. However, when the conversation shifts to his burgeoning film career, Styles is somewhat more on the subject of sexuality — and he’s doing himself few favors. His growing candor is prompted by My Policeman, a British prestige drama that opens in Toronto next month: Styles plays the lead role of a closeted gay policeman in 1950s Brighton who begins a relationship with a man while marrying the woman he has fallen for. for him. It is a specifically queer story dictated by the UK’s criminalization of male homosexuality. Its gay screenwriter, Ron Nyswaner, has specialized in LGBT+ narratives through a career that includes Philadelphia, Freeheld and Soldier’s Girl. Its director, the play’s star Michael Grandage is queer, as are Styles’ co-stars Emma Corrin and David Dawson. It’s disappointing, then, to read Styles playing down the film’s queerness in a way that reeks of bygone panic: “It’s not like, ‘This is a gay story about these guys who are gay,’” he says, as the article emphasizes what “ A very human story” is the film. “It’s about love and wasted time for me.” This is an age-old tactic to make the gay issue more appealing to timid, potentially prejudiced majority audiences. It’s the same mindset that made “love is love” the standard slogan for bringing allies to Pride and queer-rights. Everyone likes love, right? Can’t we all be united on this front and leave it at that? The more you emphasize love, however, the less you have to think about sex—which is, of course, the main sticking point for many anti-queer fanatics. Styles softens this point as well, serving up the supposed universality of this gay romance: “I think everyone, including me, has their own journey of discovering sexuality and becoming more comfortable with it.” It’s true that if you accept ‘sexuality’ as a general term for sexual consciousness and activity, though the sense remains that Styles is using the language of empathy as an evasion: as long as My Policeman is presented as a film for everyone, the question of why she starred in it—and, by the growing faction of activists who argue that queer-identifying actors should be cast in queer roles, is largely avoidable. However, Styles stumbles more when it comes to the film’s actual sexual content: “So much of the gay sex in the film is two men doing it, and it kind of takes the tenderness out of it,” he says. “There will be, I imagine, some people who watch it and were very much alive during that time when it was illegal to be gay, and [Michael] he wanted to show that he is tender and tender and sensitive.” Certainly, in this regard, Styles is expanding on a line started by his director: in a June interview with Vanity Fair, Grandage stated that he wanted the sex scenes to “literally show something about ‘making love’ with broad sense. of the word, which was choreographically interesting and not just some kind of sex drive.” Styles doesn’t have to pull too hard to toe a discreet, tasteful party line, but there’s an implicit bias in his words that’s surprising from a purported queer ally, not to mention – perhaps less surprisingly – an apparent lack of queer cinematic awareness. representation. What movies has he watched, for starters, to support his bold claim that “two men going at it” accounts for most of the gay sex on screen? If he dabbles in the explicitly sensual arthouse cinema of Alain Guiraudie and Julián Hernández – or just loads up on gay porn – he’s fair game, but in the mainstream crossover bracket that My Policeman is aiming for, honest gay sex scenes are a conspicuous rarity . Think Call Me By Your Name, with its pan-on-a-tree premise that blows the breeze when things heat up between its two male lovers, or Moonlight, a queer film that relies more effectively on the absence of sexual expression, or even in the short, it eclipsed Brokeback Mountain’s “going at it” passage, and it’s clear that gay movies still have to play by strict rules to break through. Is there anything definitively non-tender about honest, thrusting sex between two men? Or is Styles just unwittingly falling for an age-old strain of homophobia – the kind that doesn’t declare homosexuality as long as its physical reality is censored out of sight? My Policeman may yet turn out to be as intimate and emotionally gripping as those early marketing feelers want us to believe. Styles may well be amazing in this. But for Generation Z’s biggest pop icon to promote his first openly queer work in such quirky, coyly old-fashioned terms is a disappointment.
