Kit Connor opens up about being pressured by fans to come out

Kit Connor, the star of Netflix’s beloved gay romance Heartstopper, has opened up about the drama surrounding his forced outing last year.

“I just felt like it wasn’t something I was ready to talk about,” he told British Vogue. “I wasn’t angry. I was just slightly disappointed by this reaction.”

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“I am not going to entertain anybody’s disgust over my body,” they emphasized.

In Heartstopper, Connor plays a bisexual high school student coming to terms with his sexuality as he falls in love with a classmate. When asked about his sexual identity in interviews about the series, Connor stated that he wasn’t ready to label himself.

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After being photographed holding hands with a woman, fans began accusing him of “queerbaiting.” The accusations on Twitter seemingly drove Connor from the social media app.

“This is a silly silly app,” he wrote in a September 12 post, adding, “bit bored of it now, deleting twitter :)”

Connor then returned to Twitter to announce he is bisexual. “Back for a minute,” Connor wrote in an October 31 tweet. “I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18 year old to out himself. i think some of you missed the point of the show. bye.”

And despite the fact that it didn’t go the way he wanted it to, Connor said he’s happy he’s out and doesn’t feel he was forced, per se.

“I think ‘forced’ isn’t the right word I would use, but I would say that I would have preferred to do it another way. I also don’t know if I would have ever done it. But at the end of the day I don’t regret it. In many ways it was really empowering.”

Asked why he thought fans believed it was ok to pressure him to label himself, he replied, “I think there’s almost a feeling that because I’d been in the industry for a little while, there was almost this understanding that it’s like, ‘Oh, well, he can take it.’”

Connor also opened up about slowly coming to terms with who he is.

“It was just a very natural process for me; I didn’t really have an ‘oh, shit’ moment. It just became more and more evident.” While he grew up attending an all-boys school that he said “wasn’t hugely inclusive,” his family has always been accepting.

Regardless, he is confident in his identity today.

“It’s the experience of maybe you’re too straight to be gay and you’re too gay to be straight. So it’s like, ‘Where do I sit?’ But I feel much more secure in myself now,” he said.

Before Connor reached his breaking point, he had publicly criticized those asking questions about his sexuality.

“We’re still all so young,” he said of himself and co-star Joe Locke on the podcast Reign With Josh Smith. “To start sort of speculating about our sexualities and maybe pressuring us to come out when maybe we’re not ready… For me, I just feel perfectly confident and comfortable with my sexuality. But I don’t feel the need to really, you know – I’m not too big on labels and things like that. I’m not massive about that. I don’t feel like I need to label myself, especially not publicly.”

“I honestly found it a little bit funny how they just make assumptions about [our sexualities],” Connor said of Heartstopper fans. “It’s 2022. It feels strange to make assumptions about someone’s sexuality just based on hearing their voice or seeing their appearance. I feel like that’s a very interesting, slightly problematic assumption to make.”

The number of fans accusing celebrities of queerbaiting seems on an upward trend as of late, but as LGBTQ Nation writer Catherine Caruso pointed out, the term was originally used to refer to media that markets itself to LGBTQ+ people by implying characters are queer without ever explicitly making them queer.

Queerbaiting was never meant to apply to people, Caruso continued, and now it is being used to force people out of the closet.