On May 25, 2018, Niall Horan—the sole Irish member of One Direction, who is two months older than me, and who has spent roughly the same portion of his life dyeing his hair blond as I have—tweeted, “Cmon Ireland! This is your day to make another great decision. Please do right by the great women of our nation.”1
There was also an Irish flag emoji, and yes, Niall Horan sometimes puts an extra space between the last word of a sentence and its punctuation, and sometimes he doesn’t. There was something moving about it to me, even though there was hardly anything to it. I know that this is not good: activists and citizens make historic social change over the course of generations and decades. That Niall Horan tweeted in support of reproductive rights is one result of that work, and not really a meaningful contribution to it. Still, from where I was sitting, in a country where nearly 80 percent of the population agrees that women have the right to abortion yet it is functionally illegal to get one in many states, it was a fun surprise to see Horan treat the statement as natural. If the right to abortion is popular, why wouldn’t a pop star tweet about it? Why don’t more?
At one level, this feeling is a result of our very modern obsession with reconciling our politics and our consumer choices, which we regularly remind ourselves is impossible, usually when tacitly giving ourselves permission to continue shopping on Amazon. At another level, it’s parasocial relationships 101: I want a famous boy, who I grew up with, to understand and support me, because that is what I feel like I have done for him. It’s about coherence. When Elon Musk started dating Grimes, the New Yorker writer Naomi Fry described an odd kind of disappointment, expressed mainly on Twitter by people who had loved the indie weirdo’s garish and otherworldly experimental pop music, and who had set themselves in principle against technocrats and libertarians and ego men like Musk. The pair had met via Twitter exchange, the context of their personas and politics flattened into some viral quips about something nerdy. “What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a levelling torrent of information and capital?” Fry asked. “What if anything still meant something?”2
The experience of being on Twitter, the site of all these emotions and contradictions, is an experience of futility. My fellow scrollers and I spend our time in an endlessly refreshing feed alerting us to injustices big and small, most of which we can’t do anything about. People with large follower counts are said to have a “platform,” which feels like the thing most proximate to power. We know that our political system is horribly broken, and so maybe we develop a sense that our true representatives are not those elevated to power at the ballot box, but the ones we have elected far more democratically. With our millions of patient streams and endless tweets, we’re laboring out of love, but we also expect something in return: we come to see it as crucial that our values be reflected, to the letter, by those we have chosen and feel we can influence.
There has never been a time when pop music was truly apolitical, but today we are literally asking Cardi B to talk about the dispersal of economic gains through a population. Harry Styles was pushed to give his personal feelings on Britain’s exit from the European Union, and every few months there is another Twitter thread about his failing to be sufficiently critical of Israel. (When his Muslim former bandmate Zayn Malik tweeted #FreePalestine in 2014, he was met with death threats.) Rihanna’s politics have been consistently unimpeachable, while Lana Del Rey squandered the goodwill around her 2019 opus Norman Fucking Rockwell! by subsequently dating a cop. Even as we say these things don’t really matter, we stew over them constantly. When we talk about celebrities having politics, we’re writing fanfiction all the time. For example, One Direction—the first internet boy band—was aligned fairly early on with Barack Obama—the first internet president. There is literal fanfiction about Harry Styles and Barack Obama falling in love, of course (search term “Hobama”), but there were also real-life scenes that were blown up beyond their significance. After Horan became famous, he was asked often about a statue of Obama he kept in his backyard. “I like him out there because you can see people doing a double take then looking confused,” he said in a 2011 interview. “He’s beginning to feel the effects of the weather though. I don’t think he’s supposed to be left in the open.”3 Styles quipped that he would buy some special “varnish” for Niall’s next birthday, to refurbish the president. The following summer, Horan jumped on the statue, ripping its arm off.
None of these boys are American, yet their allegiance to liberal politics in the States became part of a pop culture narrative that continued after the end of Obama’s presidency. Horan, in particular, made a habit of offering commentary on President Trump that delighted his fans. He told an anecdote about One Direction leaving one of Trump’s New York hotels, years prior, after Trump got angry with the band for refusing to take promotional photos with a friend’s daughter. This was picked up as a #Resistance narrative, even though the boys had refused simply because they’d been very tired.4 “Wish you would use common sense before you open your mouth,” he later replied to one of the president’s incomprehensible and illogical tweets about the coronavirus pandemic.5 It was a silly jab, making Horan just another of the thousands of Twitter users who hovered in Trump’s mentions, waiting for an opportunity for a viral clapback. Yet it was a charming image—sweet Irish golf jock standing up for his tragic American fan base, doomed to live here all of the time. “Nothing but respect for MY president,” many of his fans wrote in reply. I pressed the little heart underneath it as well, even though I knew we were all at the mercy of Trump’s mouth, regardless, and that Niall Horan legally can’t be president, never mind that he shouldn’t be.
Then summer came, and Trump referred to Black Lives Matter activists who were protesting the murder of George Floyd as “thugs.” “THUGS??” Horan wrote, “these people are protesting against the fact that one of YOUR animalistic white policemen kneeled on George’s windpipe and forced him to stop breathing and killed him?? THUGS???? Are you listening to yourself?”6 This was different from the insignificant anecdotes so many fans, myself included, had sketched a narrative of Horan’s political ideals around previously. Here he was putting real emotion into sloppily typed phrases, expressing what had to be sincere solidarity with a country of which he is not a citizen. On the mechanisms of what was happening, it was not going to have much of an impact. But for some of the young Americans who had been swarming the streets for days, had this cute Irish boy ever been someone they’d cared about, perhaps it felt like something, for one second, to know that he’d been affected.
Styles and Horan both enjoy participating in a kind of American political cosplay: in 2020, Horan also tweeted that he wished he could vote in the presidential election, and Styles wrote that if he could vote in America, he would “vote with kindness.”7 (Become citizens, cowards!) While this could reflect an independently arrived at sense of personal responsibility to speak on matters of import in a country where you own property and reside for much of the year, fostering friends and business relationships, it seems more likely that Horan and Styles were pulled this way by the internet’s highly attuned networks of desire.
Fans are aware of this power. When Harry Styles’s fans lobbied him to publicly align himself with the Black Lives Matter movement, the fandom researcher Allyson Gross wrote that they were “seeking explicit representation of their own political will, and mobilizing his image for their own political use.” She identified this as a form of populist politics and observed that the fans wanted to play “a direct role in developing his political meaning.”8 After years of work elevating the members of One Direction to their positions of relative cultural influence, fans have started to realize the significance of what they’ve done. They selected these boys to represent them, and now they want to be represented.
Gabrielle Foster had been a fan of One Direction since she was eleven years old.
“We all come from different backgrounds. We all bond over Harry, but we don’t personally know what’s going on in each other’s lives,” she told me. “I just want there to be more representation for everybody.”9 Now in her early twenties, Foster is one of the better-known “Black Harries” on Twitter, as she was one of the first Black Harry Styles fans to organize efforts to win his public alliance with the Black Lives Matter movement.
This took a longer time than many people seem to remember. In the fall of 2017, a fan threw a Black Lives Matter flag onto the stage at a Styles concert in London, and Styles ignored it. His fan base was used to him accepting pride flags and dancing with them onstage, as well as giving an opening monologue about how much he valued the support of women. It didn’t seem like an accident that he’d left the flag on the floor, untouched, even as sections of the crowd were holding up Black Lives Matter signs. He was known for noticing things like that—he would often read off the signs in the audience and banter a bit with the people who had written odd ones. Many fans responded with anger. “Use your fucking platform,” one tweeted afterward. “You’re enabling hypocrisy.”10 Others were deeply hurt. “I love Harry, he’s my safest place, but I feel so disconnected, so unsupported,” another wrote.11 Some taunted him with a play on his own song lyrics, from the (horrible) song “Woman”: “You flower, you feast” became “You flower, you white feministe.”12
Young people who were raised to understand network effects speak reflexively about the power that comes with having a lot of followers and a central cultural position, or a platform, which is not so much a stable object or trait but a privilege granted by interconnected groups of real people and should therefore be used judiciously. Black fans of Harry Styles were not arguing that he should support Black Lives Matter only because it would be personally affirming; they saw it as his moral responsibility as a person with a high public profile. But many white fans joined in the conversation only to suggest that Black fans were asking for too much, that Harry couldn’t support every political cause, and that a concert was not a protest. After the initial uproar, Styles posted a black-and-white photograph of some of the signs on his Instagram, captioned “Love.”13 To white fans, that gesture was supposed to be enough. In June 2018, when Gabrielle organized a huge showing of mass-printed paper signs at a show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, white fans tweeted at her about it in rude confusion. This was resolved already, wasn’t it?
“The projects we put on all through the tour, it started to feel hopeless at some point,” she told me. “It was a constant attack toward Black fans, we’re getting attacked and we can’t get the recognition from Harry.” Gabrielle went to a second concert, in Washington, D.C., and splurged for a ticket in the standing-room pit at the edge of the stage. She brought a Black Lives Matter flag with her, and planned to toss it up to Styles, to see if he would pick it up. “I was very hopeful,” she told me. “He was directly in front of me and he was talking to someone near me. I threw it at his feet, and he looked down at it, accidentally stepped on it, and walked away. So that kind of crushed me.” Her mood got worse when some of the girls in the crowd around her insisted that she had only herself to blame for the disappointment. She’d kept the flag crumpled up so he couldn’t see it the whole show, they told her, and then she got mad at him for not noticing it that one instant? She shot back that she’d held the flag open over the edge of the barricade for hours. The night was ruined, and she went home in a rage. “I was really upset in the moment,” she said. “I had a picture of him standing on the flag and I was so mad. I had even considered just unstanning completely because it was so awful. I went off the rails.”
After a long drive back to Virginia, she cooled down a bit and checked her Twitter messages. Many of her friends in Styles fandom had sent her clips of another Black Lives Matter flag on the Jumbotron at a different show, or of Styles holding the flag up in Boston, and one of him yelling, “I love every single one of you. If you are Black, if you are white … Whoever you are … I support you.”14 Eventually, she decided that Styles did care. But she never quite forgot that moment of despair. “I wish he had done something sooner,” she told me. “It still gets thrown in Black fans’ faces to this day by other fandoms. Well, your fave wouldn’t even hold the flag, or something like that.”
For Black fans, a part of what made it so important for Styles to pick up the Black Lives Matter flag was the fact that Black women had never been part of the popular idea of who One Direction fans were.
Similarly, for years, queer fandom of One Direction was overlooked and poorly understood by other fans, the media, and sometimes, it seemed, the band members themselves. In 2015, Payne introduced the song “Girl Almighty” on a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, saying, “It is about trying to find that number one woman of your life, which none of you can relate to, because most of you are girls.” The backlash against the comment was quick, and Payne was apologetic but defensive, tweeting several times about the unfairness of calling him homophobic, and saying it was “annoying” to be criticized after trying his best to make people happy. “Lol this is so insane the more I read I’m like wtf have u ever said something in the wrong way I’m sure every person here has lol,” he wrote in one of the messages.15
The stereotype of the screaming, hysterical teen fangirl is harmful to fans who may indeed be teens and screaming and girls. It’s also harmful to the many fans who feel they don’t fit into even the basic contours of that caricature and may not be welcome at all. “As a cisgender male and a queer person, it just felt like One Direction fandom was a club I wasn’t in,” Tyler Scruggs, a fan from Georgia, told me. “It was something that was more for girls, and at the time I was still in the closet, so being an unabashed One Direction fan came with a lot of social hurdles.”16
The visibility of LGBTQ+ fans became a priority for Kat Lewis, a fan from Europe who is now in her midforties. “Boybands are marketed with a majority teenage female public in mind, and the assumption is that these female teens are all heterosexual and therefore the band should be sold to them as ‘romantic interests,’” she told me. “That assumption can make LGBTQ+ fans feel like they are not seen, like they don’t matter. It can make other fans and the press forget they are there.”17 In 2013, she set up the Tumblr account Take Me Home from Narnia as a “safe and enjoyable space” for LGBTQ+ fans who felt overlooked. Later that year, she started talking to two friends, who go by Ellis and Li, about how to take this idea and move it offline so that these fans would be visible in the real-life spaces of fandom as well. These conversations led to the launch of Rainbow Direction in 2014—an organization with the explicit goal of bringing rainbows “to every single show on the Where We Are Tour.” They started by posting it to Tumblr as a fandom “challenge.” “We figured we’d get the most people involved in the campaign if we’d make the options to join in as diverse as possible,” Lewis said. “If you wanted to knit a rainbow hat you’d do that, if you wanted to draw a poster, you’d do that. Craft wristbands or dye your hair or do rainbow makeup.” The first person to sign up was in Sweden, she remembered. The first person to bring a rainbow sign to a show was in Colombia. The group hosted meetups where they decorated banners, signs, and T-shirts, doled out rainbow flags, and worked on other handmade crafts to distribute at shows. “Physical shows are at the core of what it means to be a fan of music,” she told me. “This is where you experience your fandom to the fullest, this is where fandom is celebrated, so that’s where you want to fully be yourself and feel fully accepted.”
The effort was praised by Teen Vogue, The Advocate, Pitchfork, and other outlets, and seemed to be warmly received by One Direction members themselves—during the 2015 On the Road Again tour, Harry Styles frequently accepted rainbow flags from audience members. “Rainbow Direction was not easy to ignore,” the researcher Bri Mattia wrote in 2018. “Not only did its ideology become dominant, but the band itself, in response to Rainbow Direction’s efforts, began attaching the same meaning to their concerts”—at six sold-out shows at the London O2 arena in 2015, the lighting design was modified so that the stage was bathed in rainbow colors during the performance of “Girl Almighty.”18 Soon, fandoms for other pop groups, like Little Mix and BTS, were making similar efforts. In 2016, groups of Rainbow Direction members attended vigils for the Orlando Pulse victims, as well as pride events in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and Helsinki, among others. Even years after One Direction stopped performing together, Rainbow Direction planned actions at shows on the solo tours. Before the pandemic hit, there were supposed to be four individual tours in 2020—Tomlinson, Payne, Horan, and Styles—and Rainbow Direction were going to bring rainbows to all of them.
But it wasn’t always so simple. The dark element in the Rainbow Direction story is its unavoidable politicization in the ongoing Larry wars. Among many fans, there was a general perception that the Larry drama was too entwined with Rainbow Direction for the two to be considered separately. The founders always maintained that the effort was not associated with the Larry Stylinson theory—or later with Babygate—and Lewis said they were asked about it “frequently enough to be annoyed by having to explain ourselves again and again.” She declined to tell me if she had any personal interest in Larry, though I’d noted that she had sometimes reblogged Larry content. Rainbow Direction’s policy was that everyone be neutral while “on the job,” she said, in order to keep the movement inclusive. Volunteers were supposed to be accepting of all ships; shippers were supposed to keep their ships off of their signs. “That was not always easy to enforce,” she admitted. “When you participate at a concert, and you bring rainbows, [we said] don’t put your ships on your T-shirt or poster. Of course, people would wear what they wanted, some did not stick to that rule, and we’d get criticized for that.”
The way that some Antis reacted to Larry theories, and to even the smallest affiliation between Larry and Rainbow Direction, sounded homophobic to Lewis at times. “There was a small subsection who were adamant that they needed, in their own words, to ‘defend’ the boys against these accusations,” she told me. “Some called the rumors ‘vicious.’ Those words, that attitude of gay rumors being seen as possibly the worst thing that could happen to someone, did have a very negative impact on the LGBTQ+ people in the fandom.” The confusion and conflict around Larry undermined Rainbow Direction’s effort by making the two appear inextricable to those who weren’t paying careful attention, and the toll was significant.
Near the end of One Direction’s final tour, Liam Payne told Attitude magazine that there had been “loads of rainbow flags” at the band’s shows that summer, in celebration of marriage equality in the United States. “But I think that was mainly because people think of the Louis and Harry thing,” he added, “which is absolutely nuts and drives me insane.”19
There is a term for the type of fan who will never criticize their fave, never hold them accountable for anything, and coddle them forever as if each day is freshly the day they were born. It’s “cupcake,” and the Harry Styles fandom has many of them. It also has what Black fans refer to as “KKK Harries”—white fans who refuse to cede any ground in the fandom and prefer to pretend they’re the only people there.
When Harry Styles agreed to perform at a Super Bowl preshow in the midst of conversations about the NFL’s legacy of racism, Black fans were startled and tried to put pressure on him to change his plans with the hashtag #HarryBackOut. Supporting Black Lives Matter with a sticker was not enough, they argued, if it didn’t reflect a principled dedication to living those politics. Some white fans were annoyed too, but it seemed that most of their annoyance was directed at the fans who wanted to prevent them from enjoying a rare television performance by their favorite star. They offered “friendly” reminders that Styles is a singer, not a political activist. Black fans were asked to qualify and defend their desires over and over—they do love him, they don’t think he’s racist, they just want him to do better, maybe he’s not a political activist but he is an adult man who is capable of processing information and altering his behavior, if he cares to. (The show was canceled due to inclement weather.) Many of them also wrote about how tiring it was to be a Black Harrie or a Black stan in general. “When you’re a fan of somebody and the fan base is mostly white, you might feel a little ostracized,” Ezz Mbamalu, a twenty-three-year-old fan from North Carolina told me. “People try to get on you about Why do you listen to them? That’s not what Black people listen to. You get pushed down even more.”20
Black Harries had a big moment when Styles released the single “Adore You” in 2019—it was an upbeat, charming love song with a lyric about “brown skin and lemon over ice.” These few words turned Twitter into a party, as Black fans were elated by what they viewed as much-delayed representation in Styles’s work. “THE BLACKS HAVE FINALLY WON!” Ezz tweeted, “ADORE YOU WAS WRITTEN ABOUT A BLACK WOMAN.”21 The celebration lasted all night, and for self-described “Harries of colour,” this event was “going in the history books.”22 But almost as soon as Black women started tweeting about the lyric, white fans were replying and subtweeting, suggesting that Styles could have just been talking about a woman with a tan. Or, after the release of the “Adore You” music video, which followed Styles as he cared for a large pet fish, that it could have referred to scales. “It’s like, let us enjoy one thing,” a Black Harrie named Elul Agoda told me. “He writes two words about us and that gets taken away from us too.”23
Black fans sometimes abandon the main Twitter timeline when these types of dismissals happen and move to group chats for Black Harries only. There, they can organize to make themselves visible in the broader fandom in careful and coordinated ways, such as with the hashtag #BlackHarriesMatter. For several years, on the first of every month—in honor of Styles’s February 1 birthday—Black fans tweeted selfies in Harry Styles merch, or styled in a Harry Styles aesthetic, or just smiling, paired with the hashtag, so that their faces would take up space in the broader fandom’s timelines. The idea, Ezz told me, was to say, We’re here, we’re visible, we care about Harry, we’re not going to be pushed aside. “I think it’s cool to go into the hashtag and see other people who look like me, that have the same interest as me, which is Harry Styles,” she added. But even that effort has received pushback from white fans, some of whom will go so far as to comment things like “White Harries Matter Too,” while others mask their questions in politeness, saying they love the hashtag, the photos are gorgeous, but why is it important to say this?
“It’s tiring,” Gabrielle Foster told me. “But it’s also like, we got to let it be known. Black Harries Matter.”24
In August 2019, in his second Rolling Stone cover story, Styles told the journalist Rob Sheffield that he had struggled with Black Lives Matter because he hadn’t wanted people to feel like he was virtue signaling. He inched into participation by putting a BLM sticker on his guitar. “When I did it, I realized people got it,” he said. “Everyone in that room is on the same page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to say, ‘I see you.’”25
Eventually he would be stirred to do more; he tweeted links to bail funds when demonstrators were arrested during the George Floyd protests, and participated in a Black Lives Matter march himself in Los Angeles. The Styles fandom organized itself to support the protests as well, in an assiduous way that reveals how fans have started to think about the relationship between their pop culture loyalties and their politics. Many removed his face from their avatars and replaced it with a Black Lives Matter fist. They canceled the #BlackHarriesMatter tag that June, and all other usual fandom activities, preferring to stay focused on helping protestors. When I spoke to Black fans during that time, they sounded energized—they were excited that K-pop fans were popping out in such numbers to support them, even though typically the two fandoms couldn’t possibly have less to do with each other.26 They were also relieved to see Styles participating, and glad that he had attended the protest without deliberately calling attention to himself over Black protestors themselves.
Activism in a fandom context has often been concerned with visibility. The causes tend to be identity based, and the aim is often to win from the stars in question some explicit recognition that these identities exist within their audience, that they are important, and that both star and fan are aligned with a broader political movement related to this identity. But the choices that Styles fans made during the protests of 2020 reveal a shift or logical progression in this thinking. Fandom activism has been mostly visibility based so far, but it could still be a precursor to something bigger: visibility is a starting point for activism, and not its end goal. “Pop culture doesn’t really change the world,” the labor organizer Teo Bugbee wrote for SSENSE that summer. “It’s a product to be consumed, an indulgence. But the gift of pop is that it actualizes a fantasy: visions of a world that doesn’t yet and maybe won’t ever exist.”27 Harry Styles fans didn’t imagine that they would erase the structural problems of the societies they lived in by calling attention to themselves, or that being seen by people who like the same music as they did was overtly political. They just wanted to be respected for their dedication and to be seen for all the things they are other than fans of Harry Styles.
Just as stereotypes can hurt all kinds of fans, elucidating the diversity of fandom can help all kinds of fans, too. Jessica Pruett, a gender and sexuality studies scholar who completed a Ph.D. in culture and theory at the University of California, Irvine, in 2021, wrote her master’s thesis on lesbian fans of One Direction. “Thinking about lesbian fandom of One Direction helps reframe how people think about One Direction fandom in general,” she told me. “It’s a lot more complicated and weird than people think it is. It’s not a straightforward thing of Oh, of course girls have crushes on the boys and that’s why they’re fans. It’s not just lesbian fandom that’s more complicated than that—it’s all fandom.”28 (She recommended a Tumblr account called 1Dgaymagines, which is short-form self-insert fanfiction for queer women fans of One Direction.29 Among the most recent stories on the blog: the boys of One Direction are your best friends and help you woo a sexy vampire who lives in a castle on a hill; Harry Styles asks you to decide who to let into the Met Gala; you start a community garden.)
When the goal is visibility within a fandom, the external result is clarification: if Black women love One Direction too, then this is not just a white cultural artifact; if queer fans love them, then this is not just a cheap ploy to exploit heterosexual teenage hormones; if adults love them, then this is not just a phase that a person eventually grows out of. When the goal is to use a fandom’s numbers and organizational capabilities to lift a political cause, the external result is also a clarification, one more like an adjustment of a lens that brings something into clearer view: selecting a pop star to love was never a political tactic, but an expression of optimism that anyone can be changed. To hope that Niall Horan deeply cares about my rights is to hope that the other men I love do. To expect that Liam Payne understands why there are so many rainbow flags in the crowd is to believe that anyone should. To want Harry Styles to wave a Black Lives Matter flag onstage is to believe that the world is shifting, and to ask him to do it is to insist on it. We don’t need to be told that these men are more a reflection of us than we are of them.