#both here

Anon 2: You mean that career-wise coming out might be a smart choice for Louis?

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So I’m not going to be nearly as direct as anon 2 is, but I am going to explain my thoughts. There are two aspects of Louis image and fandom that I’ve talked about quite a bit that I think are relevant.

The first is the lack of thirst among Louis fans. This is an interesting and complicated phenomena (and I think there’s some subliminated thirst out there), but basically I don’t think Louis’ female fans are invested in imagining that he’s their boyfriend.  He doesn’t have a significant ‘het’ fanbase.

Second - Louis closet has some very particular characteristics.  Years of closeting him in the face of the fact that he’s so easily read as gay has created a sort of binary - he is boxed in all sorts of ways.  He has an active fan base that should be an asset, but it is often very unhappy, because they don’t believe the story he is telling.  It’s very difficult for him to stay in the closet and also keep the fan base happy.   I’ve answered a few asks (and I’ve got some more in my to answer pile) on the question of why he isn’t doing things that make fans happier - and often it’s really difficult to see what he could do.

If you put these two things together - what you get is that Louis isn’t gaining that much from a fan perspective by being closeted and there’s a real opportunity cost to him.  I think there are some other obstacles he faces that might look very different if he wasn’t closeted - most notably differentiating himself in a 1D solo career heavy market (the fact that Louis faces more of a problem of this than the others I think again comes back to that lost year - I think a lot of the obstacles Louis faces are related and compound on each other).

Now those two points I make may look very different to Louis or his team.  They have very different sources of information than I do. On top of that there may be all sorts of factors that I’m ignoring.  But I think the combination of lack of ‘het’ fans and the ways that his particular closet makes things harder means that the economics of Louis’ career are not a big factor in why he’s closeted.

I think we need to briefly take a divergence into my world view here. - because if people said that my JGG post was saying that Louis choose ‘this’ (whatever that meant and despite the fact that my philosophy of agency is in my bloody header) - I shudder to think how people might read what I’ve just said. I think it’s really important to have a materialist analysis of society, if I want to know why something is happening, or not happening, it’s really important to look at whose economic interests are being served.  But you can’t only look at that - the world is complicated and messy and there are often other explanations as well.

In terms of the entertainment industry, economics is a huge part of closeting.  I don’t think that means that if there’s no economic reason to closet someone that they’ll come out.  But I do think if there is an economic reason to closet someone then it’s almost impossible for them to come out. 

Now there is a custom suited elephant in the room in this discussion - because while I don’t think there’s an economic reason relating to Louis’ career that prevents him coming out, until very recently there was a very good economic reason for him not to come out.  Until Harry released Medicine my thoughts were mostly about how difficult the situation it was for Louis to navigate all this closeted, but now my most optimistic thoughts (which as I said in the tags aren’t very likely) are that maybe he wouldn’t have to.

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