You don't actually care about Shawn Mendes.

Shawn Mendes discusses his sexuality

Shawn Mendes

Monday night at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado (my favorite music venue, for the record!), Shawn Mendes performed “The Mountain,” a song from his new album Shawn, which reflects on the decade-long media conversation about his sexuality. The song features the lyrics:

“You can say I’m too young

You can say I’m too old

You can say I like girls or boys

Whatever fits your mold.”

He then went on to address the audience: “Since I was really young, there's been this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it for so long. I think it's kind of silly, because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes. It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me, something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover, and still have yet to discover. The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. I don't really know sometimes, and I know other times. And it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that. I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things. And that’s all I really want to say about that for now.”

I discovered the speech by waking up this morning and seeing that it had already been made into ready-to-share Instagram posts by some of your favorite accounts and posted in the stories of many friends who are “so happy” that Mendes is finally speaking his truth. I don’t know, it all seemed kind of fake to me. I can’t think of many gay men who actually care about Mendes’ music, outside of maybe recalling “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” or “Stitches” when they were radio hits. But the idea that Mendes might be gay has been an obsession of so many people online. It’s beyond the typical parasocial relationship that people have with celebrities. It devolves into fan fiction, imagining that if Mendes were to come out, somehow he’d run into you one one of his Washington Square Park strolls and ask you on a date. It’s the same kind of thing that implores people to act as if celebrities are their friends, to look up their personal information, contact their families. You know, the shit Chappell Roan spoke about. A lot of people told Roan to shut up and she wasn’t “made out for fame” when she asked for privacy. Some of those same people’s responses to Mendes are finally as if he owed them a coming-out story; just because they feel like his voice resembles theirs, his gestures remind them of their own. Whether it’s resentment that he gets to be famous and closeted or a desire to know everything about his life because he’s famous, it has very little to do with empathy and being a fan of Mendes. Every person I know who has posted about Mendes today or posted his recent Interview magazine spread has never posted about a single song of his. They probably can’t name any! The obsession with Mendes is purely based on an attraction to a young white man and has nothing to do with an interest in his talent, which is why most of the media posts from gay outlets or individuals today ring mostly hollow.

This isn’t to infantilize Mendes, however, because I think he knows this. There is less speculation about his sexuality than there was years ago, when he was barely 20 years old. Much of that caused him to retreat from public life. He canceled his tour in 2022 to focus on his mental health. But now he’s returned with a new album on the way and a seemingly shrewd way to market it. If people are going to speculate about his sexuality, then he might as well feed into it. I don’t mean it in a completely cynical way, but the almost Terry Richardson-esque Interview magazine segments seem designed to appeal exactly to a base that might not listen to Mendes’ music but is obsessed with his body.

Mendes also knew the lyrics to “The Mountain” would go viral. And discussing his sexuality on stage would go viral. For the first time, it seems like he’s using everyone’s obsession with him to his advantage. Though his albums have always debuted at #1, the sales themselves have dwindled since his debut Handwritten, which has sold almost 500k in the United States. His last album Wonder, has sold about 54k. If he’s able to top that with the forthcoming album Shawn, then maybe he’s finally winning the game.