Love Island: Why speculating about Will’s sexuality harms all men – gay and straight
Speculating on Will Young’s sexuality is as harmful as it is irrelevant (ITV)
Will’s sexuality is none of the internet’s business – and the wave of claims that the Love Island star is gay is the last vestige of “acceptable” casual homophobia. Here’s why the assumptions are as bad as the speculation.
Love Island and the phrase “nice guy” don’t exactly go hand-in-hand. In the seasons of yesteryear, Dr Alex, Curtis Pritchard and Hugo Hammond have taken the role of being the man who wants to make everyone coffee in the morning and pummelled it into the ground so that only the deceivingly toxic remains are left.
Will Young – or Farmer Will, as his TikTok handle brands him – is one of this season’s standouts for all of the right reasons. He’s funny and handsome. He makes the entire cast laugh with jokes that are often at his own expense. He didn’t look like King Julian during the dance challenge (Curtis Pritchard survivors, I validate you), he looked like an unexpectedly sexy pirate. His role as tension-diffuser-in-chief is not only endearing but also shows a level of emotional maturity that various Love Island contestants could not hope to achieve in their wildest spray-tanned dreams.
He refuses to engage in the Lynx Africa-scented p**sing contest that most of the show’s male cast members do, instead playing dinosaurs or – in a particular highlight during a trip to the Hideaway (Love Island’s answer to Geordie Shore‘s “Shag Pad”) with Australian Jessie Wynter – doing some dress-up, leaving the two unable to stand because of how much they were laughing.
The internet’s response to this has been to brand him gay. Searching “Love Island Will” on Twitter leads you directly into a haunted house of comments such as: “Will from Love Island is gay, I don’t even want to hear it,” or “Will is the gay best friend and doesn’t even know it bless him”.
Twitter has provided a safety net for people wanting to express this homophobia elsewhere and Will has drawn the short straw by being – at the risk of sounding like a middle-aged mother – a really nice boy.
People care for a variety of reasons: Straight men often feel threatened by other straight men who have figured out to have fun with girls without it being overly sexual, simply because they haven’t cracked that particularly hard bit of code. Posting videos of Will skipping down a hallway with the caption “Will is never escaping those gay rumours” doesn’t make him gay, it makes you insecure.
None of the boys in the villa have a problem with Will, even joining him for a trip to Jurassic Park instead of the usual mind-numbing conversations we’re often served with. Playfulness, emotional intelligence and tenderness are all deemed “feminine” traits, and any man exhibiting them is suddenly the love child of Elton John and RuPaul.
Not only are these “jokes” homophobic, they’re the epitome of why masculinity so often reaches a toxicity level that rivals whatever vat the Joker fell into. Other young men see these assertions and that’s how their brains become wired: “Being friendly to girl equals gay – must only be mean to them in future.”
Speculation aside, even just assuming that Will is gay is harmful in the first place. It plays into every preconceived notion of what masculinity should look like, of what a straight man should act like, in the eyes of the wider public. But just as queer men can be hyper-masculine, a straight man acting “feminine” does not – shock, here – change their sexuality. Straight men are simply not allowed to have fun or literally just be silly. They’re not allowed to be emotional.
Why? That’s gay, and the internet will tell you so.
There’s an entirely separate discussion to be had about Twitter’s understanding of sexuality being limited to someone either straight or gay, and nothing in between. Will might be queer, but it’s really, truly, from the bottom of his board shorts, only his business. And putting assertions that he is gay on the internet, is just harmful.
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