Shawn Mendes Is Still 'Figuring Out' His Sexuality. Let's Give Him ...

We live in a world that isn’t always kind to ambiguity, especially when it comes to sexual orientation. As author Katie Heaney wrote in her 2018 coming-out memoir, Would You Rather: “People want a clear narrative arc. Especially me. We want gay adults to have gay childhoods—the elementary school crushes, the closeted adolescence, the gradual coming to terms. We want a line, no breaks, no swerving, from Point A to Point B. But I broke and I swerved plenty.”

Heaney’s statement is deeply relatable to me, a person who has broken, swerved, and come out no less than five times in my life (as bisexual! As generically queer! As a lesbian! As a she/they! As bisexual again!). I’m grateful for the people in my life who have made room for all my various identities and not interrogated or judged me as I toggled between them—but unfortunately that’s not necessarily the norm, as singer Shawn Mendes proved on Monday. At a concert in Colorado, he opened up to fans about his sexuality, saying: “Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it for so long. 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.”

Sadly, Mendes isn’t the only celebrity who’s felt pressure to define his sexuality for the public of late. When Billie Eilish came out as queer in 2023, she wasn’t thrilled with the fervor that surrounded her announcement, later telling Vogue: “I wish no one knew anything about my sexuality or anything about my dating life. Ever, ever, ever.” Really, should being honest with the world about who you are and who you love automatically entitle everyone to every single detail about who you’re dating or how you identify?

More than 7% of Americans now identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community, but there’s not a lot of reliable data out there about just how many of those people are—or have been—questioning their sexuality. Anecdotally, I can state unequivocally that just about every queer, trans, and nonbinary person I know has, at one point, experienced a lack of clarity about their sexuality and/or gender. Is it because they’re just confused, as the TERFs would have you believe, or is it because sexuality and gender are two of the most porous and multifaceted aspects of modern life? It’s hard to feel 100% secure in any part of your identity any of the time, least of all when communities are facing an uptick in homophobia and transphobia and much of the societal messaging you regularly take in still wishes you were straight and cis.

There can be immense joy in claiming a label for yourself, whether you subscribe to the born-this-way philosophy of queerness or, like me, have called yourself a variety of different things over the years, all of them correct feeling at the time yet none necessarily able to distill the essence of your sexuality to a word or two. There could be room for infinitely more joy in the LGBTQ+ community, though, if we stopped forcing each other (and, yes, highly visible pop-culture figures like Mendes and Eilish) to define ourselves in an immediate and lasting way and instead made room for the deeply relatable, inherently beautiful process of, as Mendes puts it, “figuring it out.”