Everybody’s Gay

Walking down Mass. Ave, I pause unknowingly, watching a man glide over the brick sidewalk. My friends pause, too. “Is he gay?” they muse. “It’d be lucky for you, Chris,” one says. “Unlucky for us.”

I feign a weak “I don’t know.” I like to believe I absolve myself from deciding who or what is gay. In the Square, the thought never crossed my mind — and frankly, I can’t tell. Gay or straight, he’s just a man. Yet, the thought takes root, unfurling as I move toward the Yard. I, too, am wondering about this mystery man’s queerness.

Conveniently, The New York Times had just reported on findings from Gallup. As of this past month, 9.3 percent of Americans describe themselves as LGBTQ. There are now more self-identified queer individuals in this country than ever before — up by two-thirds since 2020. Statistically speaking, mystery man has 1 in 10 odds.

Lizzo confronts those odds in her song “Everybody’s Gay,” which stormed the charts on her 2022 acclaimed album “Special.” I remember the first time I heard the track — or rather, my brother did. How ironic it was for my younger brother to discover a song about being gay and parade around his closeted older sibling, yelling “everybody’s gay!” How funny that he came across this message before I did.

Urging listeners to “take [their] mask off” offered me little comfort. But it did make me think: Lizzo offers a universally- applicable sense of queerness centered on the individual. Obviously, 9.3 percent of people is far from everybody. But in Gallup’s examination of Gen-Zers (those aged 18 to 27) nearly one-quarter identify as LGBTQ.

This remains true at Harvard: there are so many queer people that speculation often feels unnecessary. It’s a numbers game. So long as I continue meeting people at Harvard, some inevitably will be gay. Yet on campus and beyond, we are especially attuned to queer flagging — the symbolic traits and features by which queer people, intentionally and unintentionally, encode themselves. We fixate on the mere possibility that certain someone might be gay. In doing so, we also indulge in the fantasy of certain people’s heterosexuality. From Annenberg to Instagram, queerness becomes an object of close-reading, our eyes trained on the “if” of inner identity.

In Lizzo, we seek queerness — its multiplicity — in her queer bar’s “happy place,” where we “express” ourselves in a “costume” of realness. Identifying with this expression remains tethered to the same social expectations that shape the broader cultural conscience. On campus, we look for similar clues. From hand gestures and elaborate clothing to pursuing socially- gendered extracurricular pursuits, we like to see a prescriptive set of transgressive symbols as indicative of queerness.

But searching these clues naturally falls short of encompassing queerness in its entirety. It’s a tension I witness in encountering straight women with short haircuts and gay men with bass-like timbre. I, too, feel this tension between traditionally queer modes of expression and personal identity. As a gay man, I am often perceived through the lens of my “straight dress code.” Peers seem to assess my mannerisms and affectations — hand gestures, for example — via the gaydar before they consider my appearance. Until they know me intimately, my sexuality remains a distant anomaly, suspended in ambiguity. Across campus, self-expression actualizes identity — one that may, but does not necessarily, align with queerness or sexuality.

When Lil Nas X came out as gay in 2019, fans celebrated his sense of queer authenticity. They retroactively queered their understanding of his image — the rainbow on his album cover, the fluidity of his style — by aligning it with his revelation. “Deadass thought i made it obvious,” he famously tweeted. In cultural memory, Lil Nas X’s transition into public queerness appears logical. From his loose garments and transcendent dress code to his unapologetic embrace of gay sexuality, his once-uncertain identity now eludes societal recollection. To many, he was always queer. He embodies the kind of queerness that demands visible substantiation. Our culture allows us to flag traits that feminize men and masculinize women, absolving ourselves of the deeper scrutiny needed to understand queerness in all its forms.

But when someone’s public identity does not reinforce their private one, our criteria for recognizing queerness unravels. No one suspected football star Carl Nassib’s queerness when he became the first active NFL player to publicly come out as gay. Social expectations of queerness fumble under their own shortcomings, revealing their failure to actually signify gay identity. In other words, we have no issue with suspecting an expressive singer of being gay, but we struggle to reconcile queerness with the image of a macho athlete. We rob queerness of its ability to exist in a permutation that appears heteronormative.

Carving space for authentic queerness requires careful consideration. In seeking out queerness, we fall into a trap — we look for what disrupts normalcy, what unsettles our assumptions about heterosexuality. Nassib, while gay, presents a visual image that reads as heterosexual. Does that make him any less gay, any less queer? Obviously not.

The risk of the queer qualifier, furthermore, limits our own ability to realize true queerness — to see its inflection in our institutions. Queerness, as a social construct, requires personal definitional power. Harry Styles has earned praise for his ability to transcend conventions of gendered dressing. His dress code — the selection of bright color palettes and elongated suit tails — positions him beyond the traditional wardrobe of masculinity. For his progressive fashion, he’s also speculated to be gay.

Harry Styles opts out of labels — and has been regularly featured in heterosexual relationships. He may not be gay despite his visual substantiation of the gaydar. But perhaps his fashion statements do more than resist gender norms. Perhaps they also queer him — his figure, his presence, his very performance. Styles, regardless of his sexuality, queers the act, — or performance — of dress. His sexuality does not matter. For all I care, he’'s a straight man. But he, himself, inhabits a domain of queerness independent of his sexuality. He separates his explicit sexuality from the possibility of entering queerness, of being queered.

Understanding this relationship as liminal — potentially queered, potentially straight — expands our horizon of queerness altogether. Queering position and space extends beyond fashion. Young, straight men’s obsession with affirming their heterosexuality — their “no homos” and “homies,” their “sock rules” and “five feet” buffers “’cause they’re not gay” — betrays an underlying discomfort. They move in and out of queerness. Their relationships may be heterosexual, but their actions reveal otherwise: if queerness signifies anything outside heteronormativity, then a slap on the ass in the men’s locker room reads as queer. So does the physical intimacy of a long-established bromance or a kiss-cladden sisterhood.

Acknowledging the “homo” and “gay” of activities between otherwise straight individuals does not infringe upon heterosexuality. Gay marriage, after all, remains gay despite the historically heterosexual confines of wedlock. But our obsession with labels — of what is queer and what isn’t — stands at the crossroads of our own anxieties about sexuality. We want the certainty of knowing whether people are queer because we believe in a prescribed taxonomy. Yet this overlooks the fluidity of identity.

In many ways, Lizzo articulates our own quasi-transgressions: we can all be queered and unqueered. Her rally rejects the boundaries around queerness, challenging the arbitrary lines we draw around what qualifies as gay.

Heteronormativity, by nature, seeks to reject what is strange, forcing queerness into restrictive compartments. But by interrogating the so-called normalcy of heteronormativity, we liberate our definitive interpretation of queerness as mere otherness. It is not just an opposition — it is a state of being, existing everywhere, in everyone.

Maybe it’s time we, like Lizzo, stop seeing queerness and heteronormativity as distinct, separate fields — only bridged at their point of divergence. Perhaps we ought to recognize their interpolation, the way queerness can osmose into the very structures it critiques. Everything and everyone has the propensity to be gay, or queered. Lizzo radically suggests this in her assertion that “everybody’s gay.”

Perhaps she goes too far; it’s one thing to characterize fluidity, another to live it. Not everyone is gay. But her coincidental point — that everything holds the potential to be queered or unqueered — crystallizes a truer, more liberated understanding of queerness. Queerness may exist where it pleases.

And maybe once we accept that, we’ll finally confront our impulse to categorize — to wield the gaydar. Instead, we’ll be able to realize that queerness is common, even everywhere, even ordinary. Or, if we do continue seeking labels — as I catch myself doing halfway between Tercentenary Theater and Memorial Hall — we’ll know how to do so on equitable terms. When we stop requiring queerness to explain itself, we can appreciate its beauty in all its multitudinous forms. We won’t expect answers. We’ll simply take note — broadly and connotatively, rather than authoritatively. Anywhere, everywhere.

— Magazine writer Christopher Schwarting can be reached at christopher.schwarting@thecrimson.com. His column “Queer Coded” interrogates queerness within and beyond Harvard.