A Note on 'Love Island' and Homophobia

We need to talk about Curtis

Love Island, ITV 2's colossal real-time hit wherein a range of conventionally attractive 20-somethings battle it out to find 'love' in Majorca, is one of televisions only youth-backed juggernauts. This is significant - the Netflix oriented age of streaming has seen young people's TV engagement drop by almost 33% (according to a 2017 Ofcom study). With a young audience, naturally, comes social media, and many fans of the reality show will openly admit that half of the fun of keeping up with the programme is in engaging in each day's Twitter reactions.

Love Island is, arguably, half of its own show, with the remaining 50% of the fun found not on your telly but on your phone. Obviously this means that there are daily viral tweets referencing the show - some of which reach hundreds of thousands of interactions - and while most of these jokes are harmless fun some occasionally feel unkind. On Twitter, Love Island 2019 has led to the rise of the 'Yewande support group', the 'anti-Arabella bad spellers' and a general liking of Maura, but the ongoing narrative around one Islander has left me incredibly uneasy - the suggestions that Curtis is gay.

For those of you outside of the twitter-sphere, allow me to provide some context. Curtis, one of the shows arguable front-runners, is a 23 year old professional ballroom dancer and brother to Strictly's AJ. He is kind, openly emotional and dabbles in performative camp - often when trying to make people laugh. Currently coupled up with fellow housemate Amy, he's in a secure 'relationship' which, providing all goes well, will see him sail through to the show's finale.

There has been a fair amount of speculation, though, that the contestant may be gay. Tweets have gone viral, with tens of thousands of likes, suggesting that the contestant is a "closeted gay", that he "fancies Tommy [a fellow contestant]", that he's "defo a poof", that Amy will be shocked when he ends up "finding a boyfriend" and so on. Sure, maybe it doesn't seem that serious, surely people don't mean any harm. The thing is, though, I'm not sure if people actually are coming from a good place - and I need to talk about why. 

I don't really know what upsets me most about these viral comments. Perhaps it's their mocking tone. People aren't genuinely wondering whether the lad is gay, they're declaring it, and declaring it with such a sense of superiority that they seem to feel all the more powerful for it. It's a very specific kind of queer discourse which primarily ricochets around school corridors and locker rooms; "That one's a poof", "yeah, bet you like that, don't you." This kind of mockery, because that's what it is, takes high school bullying to another level, one made far more uncomfortable given the humongous amount of retweets. 

Ironically, this kind of witch-hunting leads to the development of genuinely grim mental health issues in all men during their formative years. Both queer and straight, young boys everywhere are constantly monitoring their behaviour in homophobic school environments. It is this form of self monitoring which Matthew Todd explains in his book Straight Jacket leads to LGBT youth experiencing suicidal thoughts at over 3 times the rate of their heterosexual peers. There has also been a recorded increase in cases of 'Homosexual OCD', wherein straight men develop crippling anxiety disorders in which they're terrified at the prospect of being [perceived as] gay.

Perhaps what upsets me most about the viral tweets is the bi-erasure. The idea that, because Curtis' behaviour somewhat conforms to an outdated gay stereotype, his interest in women must therefore be falsified. Sure, maybe Curtis does find men attractive, the lad has never claimed otherwise, but he may very well be bisexual, or simply identify as queer.

Maybe what upsets me most is that, during pride month, and in the wake of the viral news story regarding the same-sex female couple who were bloodily assaulted on a London bus, hundreds of thousands of people are finding it funny to mock someone's potential queer-ness. Hundreds and thousands of people are finding it interesting to analyse this man's behaviour (mainly because it doesn't subscribe to the norms of modern masculinity) and proudly declare to their followers that a man they've never met is gay, as if sexuality is something to be outed, as is 'decoding' someone's sexuality lends them cultural cache, as if it's any of their business. 

This kind of social analysis that queer people are subjected to is a violent one. Millions of teenage girls across the globe are subjected to "corrective rape" because an older figure in their family has come to a similar conclusion; my child acts in a way which could indicate sexual non-conformity, she must be gay, she must be fixed. Millions of teenage boys who display effeminacy in their youth are sent to Evangelical "correction camps" (which remain legal in the UK and US) wherein boys are electrocuted and forced to watch 'straight' porn so as to 'cure' their 'illness'. Some 'perceived' queer people end up murdered by their own parents or peers, and even in the west it is estimated that around 40% of homeless youth are LGBT.

Still think I'm taking this too far? Curtis literally made headlines earlier this year because he was violently beaten in the street by seven men (nearly losing his knee) in a homophobic attack (see image below). What will it take for people to back off?

In actuality, though, I guess what truly upsets me most (and I would imagine that minority readers will be able to understand this to a tee) is that this specific form of speculatory homophobia is almost too subtle for it to be aptly called out. It's similar to the way in which someone racist may sneer at a person of colour across the train - the recipient knows exactly why they received the ugly glance, but if they were to say anything they'd have no grounds to prove racism was afoot. It's a trap. Sure, tweets claiming Curtis is a "poof" are out-rightly homophobic in nature, but tweets that say "I've said it once and I'll say it again, Curtis is gay," exist in murkier waters.

The moral of the story here, I suppose, is that if you too have felt uncomfortable over the online narrative surrounding Curtis (and I know people have), you're not alone. Your feelings are valid. It's okay. And for my heterosexual readers, allow me to offer a gentle reminder: someone else's sexuality is no one's business but their own. Straight men have the capacity to be effeminate. Gay men have the capacity to be masculine. Sexuality is a spectrum, not a binary. Queer people aren't puzzles for you to decode, and feeling morally superior for possibly doing as such is definitely homophobic.

I'd like to end this article with a link to another written by the aforementioned Matthew Todd - it discusses the impact of this kind of homophobia with far more grandeur than I ever could, and if you've made it this far through the article then I implore you to at least bookmark it for later.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/05/matthew-todd-growing-up-gay-trapped-inside-cultural-straitjacket

Written by James Green