Harry Styles Says His LGBTQ+ Policeman Movie Isn’t A Gay Story – Giant Freakin Robot
A lot is going on for Harry Styles in 2022. After the pandemic began to subside in 2021, the world was aching for a star. It longed for someone to make us forget about everything the country went through the year prior. The pop icon saw his opportunity to shine and launched his “Love on Tour.” The tour was meant to celebrate and promote his album, Fine Line, which was released before the pandemic in 2019. He performed 41 shows in 34 cities across America from September 4 to November 28 before taking the show across the pond. Styles isn’t finished with his tour as he just added 22 more shows in the UK, and his star keeps rising. If that wasn’t enough, the former member of One Direction has shifted to movies, appearing in Marvel’s Eternals and having two more films upcoming in the near future. Speaking of the film My Policeman, he opened up about regarding sexuality.
In My Policeman, Styles plays Tom, a man engaged in forbidden love with another man, Patrick (David Dawson), when homosexuality wasn’t just frowned upon but illegal. The film jumps back and forth between the present day when the pair, along with Tom’s wife, Marion (Emma Corrin), under dire circumstances, and the 1950s. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Harry Styles says the film is more than just about two gay men in an illicit affair that could ruin both of their lives. He says it is about love and wasted time. The actor says it is about the journey that everyone, including him, goes on to discover their own sexuality in the world around them.
Harry Styles has been open about his sexuality since leaving the boy band. He has addressed his fluidity in the past only to come face to face with accusations of “queerbaiting.” This is a phenomenon of benefitting from appearing to be queer while not living the lifestyle. Those accusations only increased when his relationship with Olivia Wilde was made public during the filming of their movie together, Don’t Worry Darling. He addressed comments people have made asserting that he has only ever publically dated women by saying he hasn’t publically dated anyone. He says that other people taking pictures of him with women and publishing them isn’t him coming out as dating. In a Better Homes & Gardens interview earlier this year, Harry Styles called the need to label his sexuality outdated and that his philosophy is about not being forced to check boxes.
At the end of the day, Harry Styles will be whomever he wants to be, with whomever he wants it to be with. We live in a world obsessed with dividing everyone into divided groups to classify who is oppressed and who is the oppressor. Styles seems to be fighting against that trend as he refuses to check boxes and label himself a member of a particular group. This appears to be the exact opposite of what the “queerbaiting” accusations suggest. Whether he eventually labels himself something or not, his star doesn’t seem to be dimming as he continues to be one of the movie and music industry’s most sought-after performers.