A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - How Love, Simon’s Author was Pushed Out of the Closet

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

In 2018, I called “Love, Simon” a “gay movie made by a straight woman for straight people.” Today, I tell you why I was wrong. Support me on Patreon! Huge thanks to Blueland for sponsoring today’s show. Get 15% off a cuter, more sustainable way to clean at www.blueland.com/fruity Find more of Becky. Find more of A Bit Fruity. Find more of Matt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A BitFrudy. I'm so happy that you're here. If you like this show and you would like to support it and also perhaps want more of it, you can join our Patreon. It's now live. You are going to get a monthly bonus episode. So this first one, which will be up by the time this podcast episode is up, is about this article that the New York Times just published, which is a 5,000 word speculation on. Taylor Swift's sexuality. We're over on Patreon going to be doing a close reading of that and examining the ethics of publishing something like it and put it in the context of these larger conversations around things like queer baiting, which is also why we're here today. So it'll tie in nicely. And today we are joined by Becky Albertali, who's made a name I recently learned is Becky Goldstein. She's a Jew. She is an author and a former psychologist. She's best known for writing the

2015 young adult novel Simon versus the Homo Sapiens, which in 2018 was adapted into the movie that you and I both know, Love Simon. But then in 2020, the Hulu series spin-off Love Victor. Love Simon was the first gay teen rom-com to be released widely by a major film studio. Becky, I am so grateful that you're here today and talking to me, especially because long ago, you could have written me off as a prickly asshole and told me to fuck off for reasons that we'll get into soon. But, uh, well, you know, welcome to A Bit Fruitie. I am really excited to get into this topic and to talk about it with you. I think we're going to touch upon a love. of stuff that I'd like to talk about.

A small part of me was a little nervous going into this episode because I have to do something that as a stubborn homosexual is like the most difficult thing for me to do, which is admit that I was wrong about this. And that's also why I think making this episode is important because I think a lot of other people, and I say this with care and with compassion, but I think a lot of people are wrong about the way that they approach this topic. And the topic is queer baiting. Queer baiting is a term that at one point meant something relatively specific, and in recent years it just does not mean anything at all. And it also means everything. It's like loke. According to

dictionary.com, here's the definition, like the original definition of queer baiting. It's the practice of implying non-heterosexual relationships or attraction in a TV show, for example, to engage or attract an LGBTQ audience or otherwise generate interest without ever actually depicting such relationships or sexual interactions. So the way I think of queer baiting, it's like, or at least how we originally understood queer baiting was like, it's when an author or a screenwriter or whoever's making media, they're like dangling a carrot of queerness. in front of, you know, a queer viewer's face, you know, they're baiting the queer. They're baiting us into seeing ourselves in a certain character or storyline without ever

actually explicitly showing homosexuality or queerness in a way that would alienate the homophobic portion of their audience. There's a precedent for this. So in the 1930s, until the 1960s, there was something called the hate. code, which was basically a set of industry guidelines for motion pictures that dictated what could and couldn't be shown in film in the U.S. It really limited the ability of screenwriters to depict homosexuality. And so depicting queerness through subtext became like basically the only way that you could do it. We don't live in that time anymore. And so people want more. And a lot of

people find subtext to be insufficient. But in recent years, this conversation around queer baiting has leapt off the pages of fiction and is now frequently used in cultural discourse to describe real people, not characters. It's used often on social media to refer to celebrities and entertainers who brand themselves with queer aesthetics, you know, like if a popular male celebrity paints their nails or wears dresses, or if a female celebrity is comfortable being physically affectionate with other women, people will accuse said celebrities of queer baiting. You know,

like, you're dangling the idea that you could be queer in front of us to, like, bait us into buying your albums or whatever. Like, I don't even know exactly how that works, but it's this idea that they're using this, you know,

marketing tool to profit off of our community. They may not be gay or at least they never, you know, they might be queer, but they never come out in, a way that's sufficient to the people accusing them of queer baiting. Popular targets of said discourse include Harry Styles, Billy Elish, Demi Lovato, Kit Connor, Bad Bunny, Cardi B. We will get into all of them.

But another popular target of the queer baiting discourse was Becky Albertali. Upon the release of Love Simon, people had a lot to say about Becky, her sexuality, her ability to tell the story of a young gay boy coming out, especially in a piece of media that would be promoted on a global scale, which is really rare for stories like that still. So before we get into the discussion of your life up until the point of writing that book, the book becoming a movie, the backlash that ensued, the major life event of yours that followed the backlash. I want to briefly mention how we first communicated. When Love Simon came out in the movies, first of all, it was like the only thing that anybody was talking about.

And I was like 19 or 20. And I had just kind of started making content. And I was early in college and I had a little bit of a following, but, you know, not much. But someone had asked me what I thought about Love Simon. I was an insufferable, uppity little twink. Look, maybe you still think I'm insufferable. But I'm not as uppity and annoying as I'm. I was then, if you can believe it.

And so on my Instagram story, I responded with something to the effect of like, well, love Simon. It's a gay movie for straight people. And I didn't really think anything of it because, you know, like everyone else, I went to the theater and I saw Love Simon. At that point, I felt very critical of any movie, book, TV show that, you know, depicted queerness in a way that I could not immediately identify with, which I think is a big problem. But at the time, I was just annoying. And so I put that on my Instagram story and forgot about it. Later on, Becky has a major life event, which she will describe. I know. Who's

dangling the carrot now? It's me. And you wrote about all of the backlash that your book and the movie adaptation got and someone commented on your post and they were like yeah I remember when Matt participated in that exact harassment I remember seeing that I was tagged in said comment you responded back and you were like that's so disappointing I loved Matt and I was totally horrified and I sat down did some reflecting and then I sent you a long message and I was like Hi, Queen, I'm sorry. You were kind enough to have allowed me to grow in that moment. I want to think that I will hold that grace for other people in the future.

And, you know, this is all to say. I'm so, again, happy and grateful that you're here today. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. You're lovely. I remember that message. And that message was beautiful. I think, like, you know, this discourse is really complicated because I think, you know, a lot of

of ways it was like uncharted territory for a lot of us. My understanding of the landscape, like the media landscape, has shifted significantly even during the time period when I've been like in the thick of it. I am not very prickly except for about this one topic. Where does the story of Becky and her relationship with herself and with queer people and with Simon and with the press and the back, like, where does it all begin? Just, I'm, I'm going to sit back. So I wrote Simon versus the Homosapians Agenda during this period of time where I had just had my older son. He was finally sleeping through the night somewhat a little bit. So I was feeling human again. Professionally, I had this little like window of time that I had been gifted by

circumstance because I had left my psychology job when I had my son, but I couldn't go back or find a new job in D.C. where I was living because we had planned to move to Atlanta where I grew up. You know, it was the first time in my life when I was not working or in school. It was one of those things that I'd always wanted to do. write a book. I know that's very unusual for people to have that on their bucket list. I figured I would give it one shot. Was Simon your first book? My first book, my first manuscript. Talk about hitting a home run out of the gate, my goodness. I mean, it was very surreal. It was unexpected. You know, I had been doing enough internet research to understand what a long shot this was.

So I sort of went in with no expectation that this would ever be a book. But I think I had a vague idea that I'm like, well, this is the kind of thing my kid ever needs. It'll be there on my laptop. It got a literary agent very quickly, sold to a publisher very quickly. You know, I've really since come to understand just how unusual that is. And it's not because Simon was the best book in the world by any means. It just sort of found its way to the right people at the right time. When I think about the way Simon overperformed.

Was that immediate? No. Like, it had a little cult following from the beginning, I would say. But, you know, a couple months after it came out, you couldn't find it in stores. Like, it never hit the New York Times list. It has never and will never hit the New York Times list. You set out to write this book, this one book that you just is on your bucket list to write a book. Why a teenage coming out story?

That was the question, right? When I look back on it, it's ridiculous that I didn't consider the most obvious possible answer to it. But at the time, I had this whole logic, almost like a chain of coincidences that I, like, built into a narrative in my head where it was like, oh, because, you know, the queer community is really important to me. You know, I had and have a lot of friends who are queer, like, you know, that's interesting that you've always been drawn to queer people. And I, as a psychologist, kind of in my previous professional life, I, like, I mean, I wrote my dissertation on best practices, basically, for affirming therapy with queer clients. I volunteered for like a decade with a group for kind of gender nonconforming kids, just ages like five to 12-ish. And you go back even further, even in high school, I did like a whole big final project on like queer themes and anime. I don't know. The sense of the time for me to be writing Simon because I was like, oh yeah, because, you know, oh, and I started working with this group

because this psychiatrist knew the psychiatrist that I worked for, the children's, you know, but it was like my entire life. I have very clearly gravitated toward. this community and I didn't even think to wonder about that. It's very much like I don't know. I remember being in high school when gay marriage was being heavily debated and you know it feels like a joke now but you know I would always really go to bat for like no I think gay marriage should be legal like and I was very passionate about it and whenever you get questioned of like well why do you care so much about that you're like well I just I just really like those people I just really like equality. I'm just, but it's not me. It's for, you know, my friend. When I tell you, like,

circa 2018, 2019 or something, I would get myself worked up in defense of closeted authors, because that was when I was like kind of in my era of I totally understand why you're asking me that question. This is because I'm constantly, I'm constantly asked, like, are you straight? Are you, you know? And so I went through a period of being like, I actually, you know, have started to kind of step back a little bit from answering that question because, you know, I am aware that for some authors out there, they may be closet. Like, I really thought I was the champion for these, like, closeted authors who weren't me. I was their ally. You didn't think of yourself as a closeted author. You thought of yourself as a straight author who was an ally to queer people.

It evolved, but yes, yeah, definitely that for a while. Then there was a period of time where I was like, I just don't feel like I have the space to even think about it. There is a period of time where I was like, if I were Gen Z, I would probably identify as bye. I don't know. I feel like every young gay kid has that like, you know, when their parents ask them or when someone at the family asks them at the holiday, it's like, So any, you know, any girls, you know, for the little gay boy? And he's like, I'm just really focused on school right now. You know, we've all had that. Yeah. Well, you know, it was tricky. Like, so for me, there's this element of not wanting to overstep, not wanting to take up space.

I became aware kind of as Simon started getting bigger. And Simon did, especially around 2018 when the movie came out and also like leading up to that. Simon started getting more attention than I felt comfortable with as this outsider who I'm like, I'm not even supposed to be here. And certainly, you know, there were people who felt that way and there were also people who felt the exact opposite. I really quickly want to just take a minute to give a huge shout out to Blue Land for sponsoring this episode and helping make this show possible. When you buy cleaning solutions, you know, your mirror cleaner or multi-purpose cleaner or hand soap or dish soap, the main ingredient in any of those things is water. And a lot of what you're paying for is the shipping weight of the water.

Blue Land is on a mission to eliminate single-use plastic by reinventing cleaning essentials that are better for you and the planet. The idea with Blue Land is instead of buying bottle after bottle after bottle of your hand soap or your dish soap or any of those spray bottle cleaning solutions, you just buy one of Blue Land. land's very chic forever bottles, fill it with water, pop in a Blue Land cleaning solution tablet, and bam, you have your cleaning essential. And when you run out, instead of having to buy a whole another bottle, you just fill it with water again and pop in another cleaning solution tablet. Those refill tablets start for as low as $2.25, so it's not only eco-friendly, but it's quite budget-friendly as you save money over time. Right now, Blue Land is offering listeners of a bit fruity, get 15% off their first order.

So if you would like to take advantage of that, go check it out at blueland.com slash fruity. Again, that's blu land.com slash fruity. Now back to the show. When did the backlash kind of start? Was it with the movie? Was that when things started like exploding? Yeah, for the most part.

I mean, I'm sure there's always been some. It wasn't extreme in the early days. and I think both because the book was so much smaller. People are saying that at this point in like the cultural discourse, they're like if you're going to write a book about gay people, then you have to publicly identify as gay and like clarify that to people for it to be a legitimate piece of writing. Yeah, I mean, I would say like, okay, so in the early days when it came out,

it was a lot more like, oh, that's interesting. So what made you decide to write this book about a gay teen boy? Are you gay? Are you, you know? You know, so me in 2015, you know, my allyship looked like I definitely felt like the ethical thing to do is to kind of be like I'm straight. Were people then critical, especially as it was, as Simon was growing in popularity and then with the movie, you know, it exploded, were people critical of you being straight? Yes. Basically, in the early days, it was much more of what I think of as kind of a normal critical, kind of a normal critical, kind of.

made me uncomfortable, but I don't think I would never call it harassment for somebody to be like, I don't know how I feel about a straight woman writing this or it feels like appropriation or whatever. You know, like that was more the kind of stuff. I feel like that was the tone of it in the early days. But it turned into harassment. Yeah. It was like it looked like a couple of different things at once. Definitely a lot of just heavy mockery of just in a a sexualized way. How so? You know, I think part of the narrative is that straight women writing about gay men is a fetish that would quite often sort of work its way into fairly like graphic descriptions of like Becky Al Bertali flicking the beam with one hand while typing, frantically

typing about sexy underage gay boys with the other. It's like. Jesus Christ. Oh, my, like, it is just like a million miles away from where I was coming from. Like, they were saying that you were writing this for, like, your own sexual pleasure as a straight woman? And just, like, you know, it had all kinds of flavors. Like, I co-wrote a duology with Adam Silvera. You know, somebody, it's like very memorably on, I think Reddit or something, said that what if it's us is basically me masturbating in Adam Silvera's presence.

I'm like, that is... Jesus Christ. It makes me so viscerally uncomfortable. And then, of course, the usual, like, drive-by, kill yourself. You know, like, that kind of stuff. Oh, I've gotten kill yourself many times. I get kill yourself many times a day. I get it.

To be totally clear, even though I made a flippant and regrettable remark, I never thought that you wrote any of this for your sexual pleasure. I want to be clear about that. I do feel like there are a lot of people like me who are like, oh, who's this straight woman writing a gay book for straight people? So at the time, particularly as I was sort of questioning or pre-questioning or kind of entering that conversation with myself, like internally, the way that landed for me wouldn't be like that is offensive and invasive or anything like that. at the time, it was like, queer people are reading this and they can tell from reading it that I'm straight. I know as an ally that I defer to queer people on issues of queerness. So that, I mean, that is like this real mind.

Did you internalize the criticism as like correct because it was coming from people you viewed as like an authority on your personal life or something? 100%. Yeah. Yeah. And that's so, I mean, that's so gross because you're like a grown woman who, you know, as you tell it now, it has these unresolved, inconclusive feelings about her own sexuality. And you're just being told by people like, no, you're a straight woman. Yeah. And, you know, and to be clear, I think there's a difference probably.

It's hard to know. But I would say there's probably a difference between like opening a book, reading it and being like, oh, I can tell a straight woman wrote this versus you've heard an interview. I've said that I'm straight, right? You know, you're finally getting around to reading Simon before the movie or something. And with the knowledge in the back of your mind that I'm straight, as you're reading it, you're like, ooh, that could only have been written by a straight woman. To me, that was actually the biggest, like, not that I had to untangle. Did you feel like in telling people that you were straight, that you, like, tangled the knot yourself? For sure.

Yeah. And also, too, I internalized a lot of like by just straight up biphobia from the discourse too where it just felt like what does it matter? I'm not like a real queer even if I were queer. You know, it's like. You wrote in an essay when you would later go on to describe this, you wrote, and holy shit did people discuss. To me, it felt like there was never a break in the discourse and it was often searingly personal. I was frequently mentioned by name, held up again and again as the quintessential example of aloehl syshet in authenticity. I was a straight woman writing shitty queer books for the straights, profiting off of communities I had no connection to. Because the thing is, I was straight. At least I was straight if you rounded up. All of this, you know, harassment and discourse around you and your ability to be making this book and your ability to be making money off of this book and this movie, all of this is going on. And in 2020, you write an essay. You know, when you look back at the timeline of everything. You know, 2018, the movie comes out. 2020 is when Love Victor came out, came out in June. It was just like a revival of the same

discourse. It was everything all over again. She's straight. Like, why did she get to profit off of this? This is for straight people. Yeah. And the differences is by 2020. I was pretty sure I wasn't. So I wrote an essay over the summer of 2020 and it walks through kind of my experience, A, just missing all of the neon, like the brightest neon signs throughout my entire childhood and adolescence, you know, that I was not the straight woman who I thought I was and said I was. And I talked about what it was like figuring that out and kind of putting all of these clues together. Well, in the public eye, in the midst of this discourse, at times it felt like I was at the center of the discourse. It was inextricable from my questioning period, my coming out.

I can't really tell one story without the other. Yeah, you wrote in the essay, quote, I'm pretty sure I've had crushes on boys and girls for most of my life. I just didn't realize the girl crushes were crushes. Every so often, I'd feel this sort of pull towards some girl I vaguely knew from school or camp or after school dance classes. I'd be a little preoccupied for a few weeks with how cool or cute or interesting she was and how much I wanted to be her friend.

It just never occurred to me that these feelings were attraction. And so was that all stuff that you started to realize while? you're receiving this harassment about being a straight woman who wrote a gay book? Yeah. Yeah. It was wild. It was, um, it's tricky because I really felt by the time that I was questioning, I felt like that I was a piece of shit for having written that book.

I would have in a heartbeat, gone back in time and not published it. And, um, I don't feel that way now. Yeah. You shouldn't. Thank you. No, I did for a long time. And I felt like I was, I was in the middle of it. think kind of I can be a little bit more objective about it now. Do I think that like Simon versus

is the reason why we have more queer representation now? No, I think we need diverse books and a number of other kind of community factors gave Simon a huge boost and that momentum continued in a way that has created really visible change in the industry. However, I do not think that Simon being successful cause fewer gay wa-e-a-books to be published. Is that something that people accused you of? They still do. Yeah, because it's like you're taking a spot. So you, for years at this point, had been

accused of being a straight woman profiting off of the community. You were, you know, you're a straight culture, vulture, yada, yada, yada. And then you write this essay being like, I'm bisexual. Surprise, I'm bisexual. are you happy now? And the tone of the essay, I think rightfully so, there's a little bit of bitterness there that you weren't able to do this in the privacy of your own home and your own brain, but in the public sphere of all these people accusing you of making an inauthentic piece of work and, you know, taking up an inauthentic space in a community that you weren't

a part of. And so now it's out there. Now you're like, okay, well, you wanted it, you have it. How did people react to that? Was there a seismic shift where people were just like, oh, no, well, you know, I've always supported you. And I've always, you know, did people immediately leap from one side to the other like I did? No, it was, I would say like, yes and yes and yes. It was everything. It was, I mean, it was so overwhelming.

I am not somebody who is naturally a good fit for having any kind of. public figure role. I should like start with that. Like I have a debilitating anxiety disorder and, you know, I am like a carpal mom and stuff and I am like, I do care a lot about hurting people and I care what people think of me and I care if I'm like saying the wrong thing. It was just this like wave of feedback and looking back as subjectively as possible, it was overwhelmingly supportive. You know, some of my author friends here in Atlanta, this is like, I will never forget this. So Kelly Quinlan, Julian Winters, Nick Stone, and Rachel Freakin Allen are all local here. This is like in the thick of COVID, Rachel bakes this like bi-colored

Oreo cake. They had, they had like planned all of this and plotted. it together. It had like a little cake topper with like Justin Timber Lake and the bye, bye, you know, and like, um, and like, um, and delivered it to my door staff when I like didn't even know what time of day it was, you know, it was just, um, like it was in the immediate aftermath. And I think about that all the time. A lot of people say that I was, um, forced out. I would definitely say that I was pressured out. I was in a situation where I felt like it would never stop and it was so painful that, you know, and like all of the bad discourse that happened after my essay, I knew it would happen. What kind of bad discourse? There was significant backlash. It wasn't the majority of

people, but you definitely had a lot of people speculating that I was lying or it was just. Just very convenient. People were saying that you were coming out as bisexual to make the backlash stop. Yeah, I mean, in a way, I mean, I knew it wouldn't stop. Well, you, I mean, I guess in a way you did come out to make the backlash stop, but it doesn't, but they were saying that you were faking it so that the backlash would stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, you know, here, you want it, fine, I'm bisexual, leave me alone.

But, like, you actually were bisexual, leave me alone. Oh, my God, I'm just like, all of y'all who think I'm faking it, like, if you all saw my for you page TikTok algorithm at the time. Like my God, like many women in 2020. So I'm just like,

I don't know what to tell you, but like, yeah, you know, there are definitely a lot of people who've been hurt before who have felt exploited by public figures before who did not find my description of experience to be compelling. It didn't seem like, like,

like a legitimate queer experience, kind of measuring it up against their own, maybe. This brings me back around, though, to like, that was my, I mean, that was my thing when I saw Love Simon, personally, was I was like, this is not a story. Because, okay, when I saw Love Simon, my reaction was the coming out narrative that is his in the book and in the movie is, quote unquote, easier, you know, than mine was. when I was in high school. And so I was like, well, no, this is illegitimate because it's not something that I can identify with.

And I think as queer people, we do that way too often, where we're so sensitive and rightfully so to like our own pain and the pain that we carry from our own experiences with coming out, with being rejected, with being marginalized, that we, anytime we see something, a story of a queer person that we don't immediately relate to, and especially one that is better than our own, and that's why we don't relate to it, we're like, well, no, that's not the right one. That's, that, that, that, you know,

that was written by Becky Albertalia, straight woman, you know, who doesn't get it. And I think that's wrong. And, like, what's troubling about the whole, like, this is a gay thing for straight people, or, you know, this is, this is a glossy gay story that straight people can watch without, feeling responsible for any like homophobia or you know anything that makes the material lives

of gay people difficult is like we should have enough of we should have happy gay stories frankly I think I was just immature and thought that if if a story about a gay person didn't reflect my own pain then I couldn't see myself in it because I thought that to be queer was to identify with the pain of being queer. And that's why I think sometimes I see Twitter discourse. I see people argue about whether or not asexuality is part of the LGBTQ spectrum, which I think is silly because who cares? I don't care about gatekeeping.

But something that people will say in that discourse is like, well, what bigotry do asexuals receive? You know, I've gotten gay bashed. I've gotten this. I've gotten that. What do asexuals get? And I'm like, what do we gain, or more importantly, what do we lose when we define queerness by suffering? I think I identified so closely with my suffering.

And I viewed it as the quintessential experience of being queer that when I saw Love Simon and there wasn't that suffering, or at least not the extent that I felt was in my own life, I was like, well, this is fake. Which, you know, I really, like, I understand where that comes from. And I think kind of what's behind that is we don't have enough queer media. And it's so much better now than it was. And it's still nowhere near where it should be. And so every single piece of queer media that crosses that finish line and actually, you know, makes it out there. You know, having like Love Simon was expected to carry more than the average rom-com. I can see why the personal stakes are.

are a little bit higher. And I also don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing Love Simon or just not liking it. Like that's another thing. Another piece of it too is like anybody listening, you have my permission to not like love Simon, to not vibe with it, or to find a problematic or whatever. I think for me, the line is invalidating the sexualities of the people involved in creating it. You know, when you use, when people like kind of use the phrase, and this phrase is really common, you still see it all the time. It doesn't just get applied to Love Simon,

but gay media for straight people. It's just for me, it's like a, like a red flag in the discourse kind of where I'm like, where you start to see the like gay media for straight people, I have never once ever seen like a comment section or something where that, was in it that didn't also include somebody. And it's a pretty, like it's a small specific group of people. It is usually specifically mislabeling or misgendering or both one or several queer creators. So it's usually me, Alice Osven, Casey McQuestan. I see a lot of people kind of just erasing like Keenan Lansel, people involved in gay media for straight people.

We've all been pressured out of the closet. But there's also like pretty extensive collateral damage, I feel like, to that conversation. So after I came out, I heard from, like, I want to, it was like over a hundred people in my industry, authors, but not just authors. Like people like in publishing agents and readers and bloggers, just people who I knew to varying degrees reaching out and telling me that they, you know, they had gone through that. that they came, the reason they came out is because they saw the way people talked about Simon for all those years. And so they knew that like when they got their book deal, they knew they had sealed their fate, you know, that they had to like do it. They had to come out. That they had to come out so as not to face the harassment that you did. Because they knew that people were going

to accuse them of the same thing that people accused you of. And so they were like, well, the closet is not a safe place to be anymore. Yeah. No, it was like, this is, it's time to start having these conversations with my family and, you know, like, I want to kind of have the agency to do this on my own terms to the extent that I can with this pub date in mind, you know. Yeah. So there are also a lot of people who are, yeah, people who are avoiding engaging with queerness in their work. So, um, you know, a lot of queer people who just cannot be out for whatever reason or don't want to be out, you know, are deliberately choosing not to go anywhere near that in their work, which is fine.

Which is fine, but you're saying that they're not going anywhere near it for the sake of not being accused of being queer or of being a straight person trying to be queer? Yeah, to be clear, it is fine to make that choice for yourself as an author. It is not fine that they feel like that is the choice they have to make. Broadening this more widely into the way that we see it used again, it's, you know, relentlessly on social media. People speculating around certain people's sexualities to, you know, speculating that they're decidedly heterosexual and profiting off of the community,

only for them to later come out as queer. I was going down a list of different, you know, recent examples of, you know, targets of queer baiting discourse. And I want to mention a few. So Harry Styles has been like kind of a subject in this discourse. for like, Jesus, over a decade, I feel like since he was in One Direction and the people who were on Tumblr back in the early 2010s are going to know exactly what I'm referring to, but there was an enormous conspiracy theory called Larry. People who subscribed to this conspiracy theory

were called Larry's, which was that Harry, okay, I was never a One Direction person, Harry and I think Louis Tomlinson, who was another one direction. guy that they were romantically involved and the conspiracy theory I think was that because one direction was trapped in this record deal and the record label like wouldn't let them express their love and so like fanfic writers would go wild being like Harry and Louis you know there it's real it's real it's real they would like at the time this is like queer baiting in reverse like they were insisting that he was gay but now it's sort of a little bit of the opposite in the last couple of years, Harry Stiles has started to, you know, now he's in his solo career. Obviously,

he's one of the biggest musicians in the world. And he dresses very androgynously and, you know, in outfits that frequently become memes because, you know, sometimes they're great and sometimes there's, you know, there's questionable ones too. But androgynous no less. And people have basically demanded repeatedly that he announce his sexuality. They think that he's, you know, again, another one of these like straight culture vultures because he has like a nail polish line or whatever. Demi Lovato ever since Cool for the Summer came out, which had a music. Well, I mean, the cool for the summer was a pretty queer song, right?

It was about like, you know, tell me if you want, like, you know, I think it was about like hooking up with a woman, which is interesting that she was accused of queer baiting when that song came out because to me it's just pretty transparently about being queer. Like, you know, I think speculation too much on either end is wrong, but I think you can listen to that song. Like, my first reaction to hearing a song about a woman hooking up with another woman at the time Demo Lovato identified publicly as a woman, I wouldn't be like, They're lying. You know, I would be like, wait a minute.

Is there something here? And, you know, then Demi Lovato turns out to be queer. They also, as of a couple years ago, started using they-them pronouns. And that obviously raises a ton of bigotry with, you know, right-wing assholes who are like, they-them, what's a they-them? That's referring to multiple people. Like, whatever, we don't have time. But that also raised flags within the queer community about, like,

like, well, Demi Lovato's not really non-binary or they would be this, this, or that. And that intensified when last year, Demi said that she's fine using she-her pronouns in addition to they-them pronouns. And people were like, look, you know, see, I told you, she's not really non-binary. She's just profiting off of being non-binary, which is so funny. Like, what is there to profit off of? non-binary identity is not an extremely profitable thing at the moment. That example to me, and first of all, a lot of people mistake this. Demi Lovato still goes by they or she pronouns,

which is why I use both when I talk about her. But it's also just like this idea that you have to get it right the first time or you're lying is so antithetical to what it actually, means to be queer and also to be human. I've had so many thoughts about, like, my gender over the years. I can't imagine being as famous as someone like Demi Lovato, being in your 20s, publicly navigating your identity, while everyone is telling you what you are

and what you have always been and what you'll always be. Exploration of gender and sexuality and pronouns and whatever, like that should just be part of life and it is for a lot of people and I don't care if Demi Lovato changes their pronouns six more times and identifies as a lesbian and then identifies a lesbian and then identifies a straight and then marries a man and then marries a woman I don't care like that's their journey and this impulse that we have to categorize everyone so neatly for our own understanding. It's like, it's just at odds with what it means to experience queerness and experience, you know, being alive. Kit Connor, which I'm sure you know

Kit Connor's story, because frankly, it's a lot like yours, Becky. You know, for you, the listener, in case you don't know, Kit Connor is, he starred in Heart Stopper, which was a newer Netflix, like LGBT Netflix series where I believe he played a bisexual character. And then afterwards, he was photographed by a paparazzi holding hands with a woman. Mind you, he's 18 at the time. After that photograph went public, he was like totally obliterated all over the internet by these people who are like, he's queer baiting, like, see, he's actually straight, which first of all, holding hands with a woman is included in bisexuality. So this was entirely consistent with what people might have already thought about him based on his character.

But that led to him deleting his Twitter account. And then a month later, he came back on Twitter and wrote one tweet, which is, Back for a minute, I'm by. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show, bye. And then this just happened again. Billy Eilish a couple years ago, she released a song called Lost Cause, and she made a music video for it where she was basically having a sleepover with a bunch of girls and just like

singing the song around them and like having like pillow fights and whatnot and you know being physically affectionate with these girls she posted a screenshot of the video on instagram to promote it with the caption i love girls and people were like she's queer baiting like she's she's pretending to be lesbian for the you know for the sex appeal and for the this and that that and I have admitted today to being wrong about some things. This was one that I was right about. May I just say? And I was totally crucified for it at the time.

I brought up my old tweet from 2021 when this happened. I tweeted, and I don't even agree with how I wrote this. Like, I don't think I needed to be so cunty about it. But I wrote, my only thoughts on Billy Eilish queer baiting is that more than 100 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year. And they are all infinitely more. harmful than a 19-year-old publicly exploring her sexuality without labels. I at this point am kind of against the whole what-aboutism thing, but my statement stands.

And anyway, last month, she came out and she wrote on Instagram, I like boys and girls, leave me alone. Cardi B, who's an openly bisexual woman, like being out didn't even prevent her from getting caught up in this discourse. Someone on Twitter made a collage of celebrities with her in it where they wrote, celebrities that came out as bisexual but have never dated someone of the same gender. To which Cardi B responded on Twitter, in my opinion, brilliantly, writing, quote, I ate bitches out before you was born. Sorry I don't have razor phone picks to prove it to you.

I bring all of this up because these stories are, they are all a little different, but they all resemble yours in some way. So my experience, I think, is the reason why I absolutely hyperfixate on these kinds of stories. I was familiar with literally every single thing you just mentioned. I can picture the tweets. I've seen all of this. I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. It definitely hits really close to home sometime.

I cry. Like reading Kit Conner's tweet. It's so frustrating that it happens. so many times and everything. Also, that's just a fraction of them. Like, God bless Kit freaking Connor. You know, he should never,

never have had to do that. You know, I do think, at least in the corners of the internet, that I occupy, I finally started to see a bit of a shift in the discourse, and I give him quite a bit of credit. Which is wild because he was 18. I can't

wrap my head around yelling at an 18 year old to be like, give me your proof of sexuality. Like, I can't wrap my head around them doing it to you in your 30s. And I really struggle because, like, I don't know. When I was 18, I couldn't have definitively told anyone anything about anything. And they're yelling at these people for their, you know, dating and hookup histories. It's ridiculous. It makes me want to fight.

Like, it is like, I really, like, I go into like, Mama Bear, like. Like Kit Conner, Billy, get behind me, everyone. Like, you know, it's Slade. And I do think, yeah, there is a part of me that gets real mama bear about these, like, teens. But I also think it's, it is a bad thing to do to, you know, full grown adults as well. It's really tricky and it's hard to explain to anybody who hasn't experienced it. And I also think we're really talking about two different discourses that are kind of flip sides of a coin. One is you're not queer.

Why are you, you know, doing these like queer things like in your music videos. Why are you engaging with queer art? Why are you profiting? You're not queer. And then the other side of it, and Harry has like really gotten to experience both of these. but the other side is the just very close focus on, you know, these celebrities and their personal lives. The dynamics that are created by each of these conversations are a little bit different. And I also think that, like, where it starts to get harmful is, like, for example, with, you know, the gaylers, I think it's really beautiful to kind of do, like, this literary analysis of her,

lyrics and find queer themes. Like, that's lovely and fascinating, you know? Yeah, yeah. And I give the Gaylor's credit, too, for this idea of the possibility of queerness. I think it is actually a really good thing to, when you were engaging with media, and if you choose to think about the creators who are involved with it, which is fine, to think about that and wonder, there's something to be said for making space for the possibility of queerness. Where I think it crosses the line is when you start to feel

entitled to any kind of certainty or you start to look for evidence and getting really into the weeds with these are the reasons why I know that this person is queer or these are the reasons why I know this person is not queer, it kind of all comes from this similar place of needing to categorize, kind of to go back to what you were saying before. I think there's this discomfort with the idea that we don't always know the context surrounding this media and the way it engages with queerness. We won't always know and we can't always know, and that is uncomfortable for many reasons. And it can be, you know, it can be scary.

too. Like there are legitimate reasons why kind of depending on your headspace at the time or your situation, you may choose not to engage with media created by somebody who is not openly queer, right? But I think we need to get a lot more comfortable with we will not know, we do not know, we are not entitled to know. And the possibility of queerness to me doesn't mean that we need to like start, searching for confirmation or confirmation in the opposite direction. I want to wrap up this discussion with like, this isn't just about Harry Styles or, you know, some rich and famous people. I think like the effects of it trickle down to all of us normals, really, because it's saying,

first of all, that the idea that everyone is straight until proven otherwise, to me, is it's heteronormativity with like a progressive bow on it. It backs everyone into this impossible corner where they have to, if they're going to experiment with the way that they express themselves, they have to come out and they have to be ready to come out. And they have to, I mean, they have to first of all be queer. They have to know exactly what type of queerness, you know, they embody. and they have to be ready to come out if they want to express themselves.

And like I said earlier, you know, they have to get it right the first time. I think like you said, I mean, we should leave people the possibility of queerness. But, you know, we don't have to speculate one way or another. And frankly, like, Harry Styles can keep wearing nail polish and questionable dresses until the end of time. If he's heterosexual and people think that he's profiting off of that, then like, I don't know, I would rather that than have anyone ever get outed because we decided that there are these rigid structures in place for who's allowed to be queer and who's allowed to wear what. I would rather be queer-baited. No, me too. And also, you never need to personally give any of your money

to Harry Seiles if that helps. But I will continue to give my money to Harry Seiles because I love pen. As is you're right. The broad effect, the collateral damage of this kind of, like, when the discourse crosses the line, right? It creates this environment where people internalize that this is something that they owe people, that this is the cost of entry to being clear. I know that what happened to me was traumatic.

not just for me, but it was sincerely traumatic for a lot of people, people who I don't even know, people who are not going to ever pursue anything creative because, you know, they watch me go through when they imagine kind of going through that with their particular circumstances, which in many cases are not going to be cushioned in the way that mine was in a whole bunch of different ways, right? Even if you believe that, like, you know, somebody with a certain amount of money is untouchable, at the very least you have to consider the people who are watching this play out, who are deeply not untouchable.

And that's who, like, those are the people who are always on my mind every time I ever, talk about this. Is everyone who's watching from the sidelines being like, okay, well, if I come out, I better be exactly sure about who I am and, you know, who I'm going to be and the type of work that I can make and the type of clothes that I can wear or not wear or should wear, how I'm signaling to people this or that, like I have to be confident on exactly all of those things if people are going to take me seriously as a queer person. Mind you, these are a lot of people who are watching this stuff play out with someone like

Kit Conner. These are people who have never had a sexual experience in their lives. Not that that's what queerness necessarily comes down to, but it's like, these are young people. You do not have to have it figured out to, like, paint your nails or hold hands with someone or, you know, post an Instagram picture. Like, you don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to have it figured out by the time you're 15 or 18 or 30 or 50. It doesn't matter. Like, there's no timeline for these things.

Queer baiting, the whole queer baiting discourse is an attempt to make these things neater than they ever will be. I think it comes from a place of wanting authentic representation that we've been denied for so long, and in many cases still are, and of being hurt by corporations who want our money and nothing else. And I think it comes from these natural places, but the way that it plays out materially hurts people. And I think that should take priority. That, and I guess the only thing I would add to that is like if you have been a part of this discourse in the past, it is first of all not too late to recalibrate on that, but also like kind of give yourself a little grace and go a little easy on yourself because the discourse has its own norms

and it kind of reinforces those norms within itself. And you are not a bad person. If, you know, you participated in some of this discourse in a way that like you eventually come to regret or even, you know, if you haven't unpacked it, but like you've been called out for it or something. Like, I don't think you're a bad person. I don't know. There's like five of you out there who I think are a bad person, but I doubt you listen to this podcast. Becky, where can people find you? Where can people support your work? Thank you. So I am on Instagram. The Instagram is the only one that I run myself. It's Becky Albertali.

I have a bunch of books out. If you are interested in any of the stuff we talked about, though, the one to read is Imogen, obviously, which is my latest one. And it is all of this in book form, basically. Becky, look at that. You bargained for one book and you've now written a lot more than one book. So congratulations. Thank you. I'm so happy that you were here.

I'm so happy that, you know, I'm not happy that you went through what you went through, but I'm happy that you can speak about it with some clarity now. And I know a lot of people are going to really benefit from it. Thank you, the listener, for being here today. I hope that, you know, maybe you learn something. Maybe you have been forced to challenge yourself as I was in that moment a bunch of years ago where I was called out for being an idiot on Instagram, basically. I love you.

Again, if you want more a bit fruity, the Patreon link will be in the description. And until next time, stay fruity.