Is Harry Styles ashamed of being straight?

Celebrities used to dread being outed as gay. Now they seem to dread being outed as straight. Consider Harry Styles. The poor fellow seems to live in constant fear of being exposed as a boring old heterosexual.

Mr Styles, the current king of pop, dances around questions about his sexuality. It’s ‘outdated’ to define your sexuality, he says. We shouldn’t have to ‘label everything’, he insists. Why should you have to go around clarifying ‘what boxes you’re checking’, he said to an interviewer.

All right, mate – they only asked about your sexuality.

There’s a palpable defensiveness in young Harry’s comments on sexuality. Only it’s the polar opposite of the defensiveness expressed by gay pop and film icons in the past, from Rock Hudson in the 1950s to the pre-out George Michael of the 1980s.

Where those guys ducked and dived queries about their sexuality because society was still pretty homophobic back then, and therefore honesty was not an option for many homosexuals, Styles seems to erm and ahh on the sexuality question because he cannot bring himself to say: ‘I’m straight.