But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (“We belong together”) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: “It’s best you know what you don’t/ The aperture lets the light in.”

It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn’t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one. 

And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There’s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. “One of them had my ear and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can’t have that, it’s mine.” Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss. 

One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” Not long after Payne’s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. “You are a commodity, and not a human,” Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. “People crack, but I’m surprised more people don’t crack.”

Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of “car crash” status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don’t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently — desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you — must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up. 

One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he’s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne’s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. “Full transparency, it’s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,” he said. “I really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.” Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.

It’s something that Styles went through, albeit in a smaller way, back in 2014 when his breakup from Taylor Swift was widely understood to be the inspiration for her album 1989, though some of the references were relatively subtle. Styles gave his own musical account of the Swift break-up on his self-titled debut album, in the song “Two Ghosts”. But that’s an exception in his discography. Styles’s songs are, in general, intimate but impersonal: they very rarely map onto the tabloid version of his life in the way Swift’s songs do. What they often share, though, is a powerful sense of loneliness — a kind of loneliness that chimes, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fortuitously, with his listeners’ lives.

His second album, Fine Line, was released in 2019, but the wistful longing for contact that underpins it felt authored for the lockdown years. “I don’t want to be alone,” he sighs on the opener, “Golden”. When “Watermelon Sugar” was released as a single in 2020, it made perfect sense that the video opened with the message: “This video is dedicated to touching.” It was already a song about skin hunger, which many of us were experiencing that year. The 2022 follow-up, Harry’s House, was directly shaped by those weird years: Styles has said in interviews that “As It Was” in particular was written about the seeming impossibility of returning to normal after the pandemic. 

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Even in his acting roles, Styles seems drawn towards characters with a deeply melancholy failure to connect. His two leading movie roles (in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling) attracted little praise for his dramatic skills, and it’s true that Styles has never yet managed to be truly convincing when delivering dialog, but both films should be recognized as brave, interesting choices which cut against the heartthrob expectations he carried with him: in the former he played a closeted policeman in Fifties Britain, and in the latter he played a red-pilled nightmare who turns out to have kidnapped his wife and forced her consciousness into a simulation of midcentury American white-picket bliss. 

But what makes Styles such a great artist of loneliness isn’t just that he understands its pangs. It’s also that he finds something seductive in that idea of being alone. The pain is a good pain — the sharpening, purifying kind. It’s notable that the hobby he has to unwind from being a popstar is long-distance running, which is one of the most solitary things you can do. In a conversation with the author Haruki Murakami (also a runner) for the magazine Runner’s World, Styles describes the joy of running like this: “you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.”

There’s something else quite telling in that dialogue. Styles tells Murakami: “I think my favorite thing about you is that I know nothing really about you, other than the work you’ve given to people. So I’m as deeply grateful for the amount that you’ve chosen to keep to yourself as for what you’ve chosen to share with us.” It’s a comment that echoes Styles’s own apparent strategy for surviving fame: extreme, meticulous reserve. It’s a method that echoes the careful distance David Bowie kept between himself and his audience, often using characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) as a screen. Styles’s fashion icon status and arty performances are clearly indebted to Bowie, but this unapologetic self-protection might be the most significant influence that Styles has taken.

One way to describe fame is that it’s the condition of being loved too much — loved more than any one person can bear. For someone like Styles, who has had to survive an entire adulthood of that love, solitude must be the most fascinating thing. For most people, isolation is one of the painful conditions of our age: too much time hunkered down in solitary laptop labor, too many friendships that exist only on screens, too little touch. Styles’s extreme celebrity enforces isolation (when a trip to the shops provokes a riot, all you can do is stay at home), but it also turns being left alone into a luxury. That means that he can find beauty in a condition that, for so many people, is an ugly inevitability. Styles is our perfect pop star because he has found the romance in loneliness.

Today, he’d be left with nothing to write about: everybody wants a slice of the gay pie. You can’t get an invite to the rom com prom  without a sexual quirk or kink. LGBTQ is now recognised as a mainstream genre, something that caused Netflix considerable online grief when they put their Jeffrey Dahmer drama into it.

Along with this ubiquity arrives the accusation of “queerbaiting”. This weird little expression means either luring in the gays with the promise of something gay, and then not delivering, or using a “queer aesthetic” without being “queer” enough, or — horrors! — even at all. Dr Justin Bengry, lecturer in “Queer History” at Goldsmiths, recently told Euronews in fluent boilerplate: “We, as queer people, are right to demand ever more representation and celebration of our existence and the incredible variety and diversity within our communities.” He went on: “When we critique someone’s behaviour as ‘queer baiting’… we are accusing that they are wilfully misusing their privilege and even deceiving us about their own understanding of themself to attract attention and even benefit socially and financially.”

A confession. I think Channel 4’s Cucumber was a masterpiece. I enjoy the books of John Rechy. I think Frasier writer Joe Keenan’s novel trilogy beginning with Blue Heaven is sublime. But I find most gay culture, and nearly all “queer” culture, excruciatingly bad and frequently embarrassing. I have a theory that more gay teen wretchedness is caused by “empowering” gay culture, supposedly uplifting but horribly depressing, than anything else. I bought a book called How To Be A Happy Homosexual when I was 16 and it drove me to the outer edge of despair. The mere thought of The Communards, even now, makes me look hungrily towards the medicine cabinet.

The current craze for “representation” is nothing more than hollow fetishism, with all the vacuous, rictus-grinning “celebration” of an office party. It has not widened or improved gay culture, but simply bloated it. In fact, I often prefer it when straight people do the job: Bowie and early Suede, Marty Feldman and Barry Took writing for “Julian and Sandy” on Round The Horne, Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina in Prick Up Your Ears. Mary Renault and Barbara Pym wrote great books about gay men.

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It is very strange to think that only homosexual artists can produce art that includes homosexuality, that only gay actors can act gay parts. When it happens the other way round, nobody even notices. Legions of lesbians and gaggles of gays have written hetero stories. Noel Coward wrote plays where young male characters have non-gay secrets — heterosexual affairs — and they function perfectly. James Baldwin wrote about white heterosexual people in a world where his gayness and his race were considerably more of an issue than they would be today, and he did it brilliantly.

I’d suggest not that there is no difference, but that good writers and good actors can traverse these boundaries in their stride. It is a strange criterion to be asked to judge art on its author’s characteristics, particularly as it has followed on from the same strain of cracked academia that gifted us “the death of the author”. As for queerbaiting? I’d suggest that like most things, sometimes it’s bad, and sometimes it’s good, depending on whether the artist is an astute observer and a natural empath — by which I don’t mean the modern version of empath, the loopy “be kind” TikTokker with mad staring eyes. A smart outsider can see things insiders miss and make great art from it.

Surely the right question to ask remains not “is this authentic?”, but “is this any good?”. I don’t care if I’ve been “baited” if what I’ve been baited with was worth it. Harry Styles is, of course, the baiter supreme, being coy about his incredibly obvious heterosexuality and sporting accessories from someone’s nan who passed away in 1973. In My Policeman, out couple of weeks ago, he plays a gay character who marries a woman to conceal his secret. But his work is offensive not because of this but because it is so bad.

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A little example of my own. I wrote a TV script about lads playing football and a heterosexual romance, and people were surprised. I found this very odd, as I had written about distant planets without having visited them and alien beings without having met any, and nobody had expressed the slightest surprise. It’s ironic that “queer” — something supposedly all about breaking categories, we are told — is so tight-arsed about people staying in their lane. But then, of course, queer isn’t actually about breaking down categories at all, but about inventing tons of new ones for status, goading people, and having big squabbles on the socials.

Gay men have certainly always been pretty good at self-baiting. Until fairly recently, gay magazine Attitude nearly always had a front cover of a semi-undraped young straight male starlet, often from Hollyoaks, with a teaser quote — something along the lines of “I’ve often wondered what it might be like to be taken suddenly from behind by a big old leather bear” — and a hint that this dreamboat might possibly flash their scrotum on page 53. This was supposed to act as gay catnip, and presumably did.

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So what’s wrong with the gays acting as catnip for straights? Consider Heartstopper, a TV series about a gay male romance written by Alice Oseman, a woman who styles herself as “aromantic”, but who feels confident enough to churn out complicated tales of other people’s romantic lives. Good for her. It is notable that she is not lambasted for inauthenticity, but then she is fully signed up to the prevailing ideology, so she’s safe. But here is where fetishism comes in.

Writing about gays isn’t the same as seeking them as an audience. There is a small area of publishing — often self-publishing — full of erotic novels about gay men written by and, crucially, for straight women. (And of course a much larger, less delicately-presented, slab of it dedicated to straight men writing about lesbians.) This, and Heartstopper, is not a million miles away from Jackie magazine stories of yore. When something is an elevated masturbation fantasy, it is probably best to keep that in mind and not raise it above its lowly cultural rung. But where is the harm in it?

We often hear that the age of deference is gone. But this is not so. We just defer to different people. At the moment, for reasons unclear, we defer to American teenagers with peculiar ideas. When we emerge from this cultural tunnel we will hopefully be able to flit freely again around stories and people, whatever their sexual preferences. Yes, there might well be some terrible clangers and some unpleasant wanks out there. But these are the price we pay for approaching art with generous hearts and open minds.

Generous and open are two things that American teenagers trumpeting accusations of queerbaiting are not. And even the most progressive corners of the “LGBTQ” cultural establishment are starting to realise it. After Heartstopper star Kit Connor claimed, earlier this week, that queerbaiting allegations had “forced” him to come out as bisexual, even PinkNews took his side. This is a U-turn for a site that ran an explainer in 2018 about why queerbaiting was a “problem” — and hints that better days are to come. Days in which audience and cast alike don’t have to worry about who the other likes fucking.