Bad Bunny on queer-baiting accusations: ‘You don’t know the reasons why a person is wearing that’
“I get an endless number of negative comments and sexist and homophobic ones" says the star.
Bad Bunny has addressed accusations of queer-baiting in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
The ‘K-pop’ singer is known for wearing dresses and skirts on the red carpet, in photoshoots and in videos. (For instance, donning a 26-foot train to this year’s Met Gala in New York City.)
However, much like Harry Styles before him, Bad Bunny’s seeming embrace of gender-queer fashion despite his assumed identity as a cis-het man has led to criticism from some quarters.
Similarly, after he kissed a male back-up dancer at the 2022 VMAs, critics complained his projected LGBTQ ambiguity was a marketing strategy.
“Maybe the queer person suffers more” – Bad Bunny
“I get an endless number of negative comments and sexist and homophobic ones, without being homosexual, for dressing like that,” Bad Bunny told the publication.
“Maybe the queer person suffers more, but it is not like I put on a skirt and go out and they say ‘Look, how cool.’ They’re going to attack me with all their force anyway.”
The ‘Where She Goes’ singer continued: “You don’t know the reasons why a person is wearing that. You weren’t in his mind when he decided to put on a skirt or a blouse. You don’t know what’s inside him, what’s in his heart.”
When asked if dressing femme reflects a part of his identity, the 29-year-old replied: “You do it because you want to and it makes you feel good and it makes you feel happy.”
As the Vanity Fair article points out, Bad Bunny has a track record for publicly stated LGBTQ allyship, such as in 2020, when he spoke out against the murder of trans Puerto Rican woman Alexa Negrón Luciano by wearing a T-shirt saying: “They killed Alexa, not a man in a skirt”.