Charlie Puth Is the Latest Male Celeb to Queerbait for Likes

In February, just a couple of weeks after the release of his first single in two years, “Light Switch,” Charlie Puth posted a rare TikTok of himself wearing clothes. “Alright, this filter is supposed to tell me if I’m headed for the top or if I’m going to hit rock bottom,” he says to the camera. The filter over his head scrolls past an emoji that says TOP and another with a B for “BOTTOM,” alternating between both, before landing on “TOP.” “Aaaand I’m going to go to the top,” he says with a smirk.

He then posted it to his Instagram story and his Twitter feed so as not to miss out on any opportunities to reach all the self-professed tops, bottoms, or vers people in the queer community—the people that the joke filter was actually designed for. Replies and quote tweets of the video were not so favorable.

“Please get a job,” read one. “I know queerbaiting when I see it,” read another. But one particular quote tweet summarized this particular kind of straight boy gag more succinctly than any of the others: “Charlie Puth has been baiting and terrorizing the gay community for MONTHS.”

Indeed, Charlie Puth seems to have found a completely cost-free marketing tactic that works for him, a time-honored classic employed by many male musicians since the dawn of time: straight-up queerbaiting.

In the weeks surrounding the release of his two most recent singles—allegedly from an album that has no confirmed title, release date, or tracklist—Charlie Puth has ramped up the amount of nudity across his social media, seemingly in an attempt to drum up attention from a demographic that he has not yet fully tapped: the queer community and all of our horniest members.

Whether he’s putting his phone on the floor to go live on TikTok wearing a pair of short shorts, posting pictures of himself doing a face mask in his underwear, or showing a demure hint of crack to promote his new music video, Puth has had no problem putting nearly every part of himself out there. But the steady stream of near-nudity and references to queer slang and vernacular have ignited an age-old debate: Is queerbaiting a fun and acceptable promotional tool or an obnoxious way for straight men to pander to the pink dollar?

It’s actually both. Until it becomes neither.

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See, this kind of gay-adjacent gambit is nothing new, it’s just the most aggressive that we’ve seen in a while. The last time things got this bad was eons ago, in the distant summer of 2016 during The Great Nick Jonas Calamity. Many marked the election of Donald Trump as the visible beginning of America’s downfall, but it actually started about five months prior. For a couple of years in the mid-2010s, Nick Jonas had been riding the queerbait wave in a mostly successful fashion, lifting up his shirt on stage in gay clubs and playing coy about if he had ever experimented with men.

Sure, there had been a few stumbles here and there—like when he fired back at the detractors who had called him out for using queer people to market himself by labeling them “ignorant”—but it was nothing that playing a gay character on Ryan Murphy’s camptastic Scream Queens and taking his shirt off or grabbing his bulge through a pair of Calvin Kleins a couple more times couldn’t fix!

I mean, come on, surely one tweet that just simply reads “I love my gay fans” is enough to make us forget any small, myopic transgressions. Here is our allied warrior, laying his head down for us in the most dignified fashion: in a tweet sent out by his manager. Nick Jonas threw the first purity ring at Stonewall.

And go to Stonewall he did, unfortunately.

On June 13, 2016, Jonas got up on stage at a vigil held at the Stonewall Inn in New York to honor those lost in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, which happened just the day before. Jonas, whose sophomore solo album had dropped a week prior, was the most famous person to get on the stage that day, delivering a grossly shortsighted speech that included useless platitudes like “love is love and we are all equal.” Suddenly, the haze of pheromones was lifted and it was far easier to see Jonas for exactly what he was and had been the whole time: an “ally” whose allyship went no further than his label’s PR budget.

With a Nick Jonas-six-pack-shaped hole in the market for musicians to actively queerbait using their sexuality, Charlie Puth has so kindly stepped in.

Every other day is a new shot of him shirtless or in a tight tank top. Some days he’ll be posting Instagram stories of him sweating it out on the treadmill, pecs gleefully bouncing around and smacking together, clapping as if they’re thanking me for watching. Every so often I start to think, “Maybe he just likes being naked,” and then he’ll tweet something like, “All I want is one of those cream pies” before making a separate tweet later to clarify he conveniently meant the Little Debbie snack cake variety. It’s then I remember that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

And maybe this time around, it’s even worse than someone like Nick Jonas. He’s not just a willful participant in a label’s skeevy promotional plan, he’s the mastermind behind all of the tweets, shirtless shots, and insta-thotting. But with the endless cycle of social media news in 2022, he can get away with making it seem unassuming, maybe even a little charming. And then it’s forgotten. Accusations of queerbaiting are disregarded until a couple of days later when Puth’s nipples poke through the screen once more, now in eye-popping 3-D.

Puth isn’t alone on the current roster of coy, baiting musicians, he’s just the star player, the MVP (Most Virulent Puth, if you will). Other artists like Harry Styles, Shawn Mendes, and Bad Bunny have come under fire for baiting the queer community not just with their raw sexuality, but with their fashion choices and personal style as well.

Harry Styles, in particular, has received significant blowback from some of those in the queer community for his continued experimentation with genderfluid dressing while remaining reluctant to discuss the intimate details of his sexuality publicly. “The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn't matter, Styles told Better Homes & Gardens last month. “It's about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you're checking."

Styles is correct and completely entitled to say whatever he does or does not want to say about his personal life. Frankly, male musicians shouldn’t always need to clarify their sexuality just because they agree to wear a dress on the cover of Vogue or a pair of fishnet stockings in a photoshoot. It only becomes a question of baiting when a male-identifying artist will adamantly cling to their heterosexuality while co-opting queer styles, clothing, and aesthetics. That kind of performative allyship serves no one but the straight artist doing the pandering and their cisgender heterosexual fans who also want to feel good about supporting an artist that they feel is implementing visible allyship, just like they are.

So where do we draw the line for artists who are profiting from the expressive genderfluidity of fashion and commodifying themselves for the queer gaze but never having to own up to any queer question mark that may come along with the benefits of wearing sheer tops and sequins in 2022? And at what point does protecting your “personal life” cross the line into adopting queer style, sensibility, and vernacular slang for monetary gain?

Well, that line often moves. It’s rare that a straight celebrity queerbaiting is going to be genuinely offensive unless you’re Nick Jonas reducing the bodies of queer people to a last-ditch promotional effort. A lot of the time, it’s even refreshing to see men willingly thirst trap on Instagram while knowing exactly who the main audience really is. There’s no level of hiding or disgust when it comes to posting things that might be enjoyed by queer people. In fact, they’re willfully providing!

And who’s to say that playing with different types of style choices that are less rigidly confined to the rudimentary ideas of gender norms can’t serve as a way to open the door for younger gay and queer fans to feel accepted and validated by their straight counterparts? Even if that door may only be slightly ajar, ready to be kicked open and off its hinges completely by a bright and shining queer star like Lil Nas X, who will play with fashion and show his body without tiptoeing around what that might mean for his career.

Some straight artists will bait more disingenuously than others, and it depends on who you ask. To be fair, Harry Styles had the title of Gender Norm Destroyer thrust upon him by the media and his rabid fanbase. But any longtime fan of Styles since his earliest days as a member of One Direction can track the progression of his style journey, and, to his credit, it did reflect the sense of the natural experimentation and relentless curiosity that charmed millions of people around the world from the start.

Though Harry Styles may be opposed to disclosing the details of his sexuality plainly, his actions seem to visibly come from a place of inclusivity and allyship, as opposed to his peers—like Shawn Mendes, who will wear a sheer shirt to Camila Cabello’s Cinderella premiere but be afraid of being labeled as gay, or Charlie Puth, who will post shirtless videos so often you’d think he was making up for lost time in high school when he didn’t get to be the jock walking around naked in the locker room taunting the gays.

And all that is to say, I like those things too, most of the time. I buy into it just as much as the next weak-willed queer person that lives on the internet. Consider me baited. Hook, line, and sinker! I am simply powerless to my own wiles when it comes to male celebrities showing skin on main, even when it’s so abundantly clear they need the attention to sell something. Their desperation to promote their silly little songs is their own business. Why can’t I be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor while also acknowledging that it’s not, say, the most kosher promotional strategy possible.

Maybe we are being terrorized by these men. But much like watching a horror movie or listening to a Bebe Rexha song, allowing yourself to be terrorized can be fun.

There’s some shred of autonomy in letting yourself be baited every now and again. Owning up to it takes the power back! Charlie Puth’s armpits, Nick Jonas’ abs, Harry Styles’ four nipples, and Shawn Mendes’ chest hair may intrigue me, but the only real power they hold over me is the amount of storage space that photos of them take up on my phone.

If they really want my dollar, they’ll have to earn it the hard way: by actually making good music. And judging by the amount of skin he’s shown so far this era, Charlie Puth’s next album looks like it’s in trouble.