The Chappell Roan Hate Train Runs on Bigotry

In April, singer Chappel Roan was the target of a harassment campaign. After the soccer star Jorginho claimed on social media that Roan ignored her security guard confronting his wife and stepdaughter, Roan was harassed en masse.

It’s hardly the first time Roan has received backlash, either. In March, a tweet that called Roan “painfully annoying” for filming the paparazzi in response to their harassment incited other users to call her a bitch and claim she suffers from “ALS[:] Angry Lesbian Syndrome.”

I am not an extraordinarily big fan of Roan, and can acknowledge she makes mistakes, such as ignorantly praising prolific bigot Bridget Bardot (she later apologized for this) and making tone-deaf remarks on the intersection of politics and fame during her Call Her Daddy podcast appearance last year.

​In response to such mistakes, Roan seems held to standards so many other pop stars are not. While the stan Twitter machine thrives on misogyny and nasty quips, and no one escapes unscathed, Roan seems an exception to the rule in just how often these widespread hate trains flow. Why is she consistently met with such a nasty public outcry?

Perhaps it’s because the singer is still a novelty in that she is not only a woman expressing her boundaries, but a mainstream lesbian pop star. And not a pop star performing lesbianism to shock the masses, à la Madonna at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, but an actual lesbian beyond gimmick who entrenches her music and imagery in queer culture. There never seems to be room for nuance or grace, as if society wants to shame her, over and over again, lest she forget we’ve done her some sort of favor in allowing her fame with her eccentric lesbian self.

​But what Roan represents is important. How cool is it that we have a lesbian pop star headlining festivals, winning Grammys, and topping the charts, all while centering her queerness? So why do we resist embracing her? Much of the critique Roan receives could be valid, but it is delivered with such pure contempt that it begs the question of what the messengers really intend; are they mad at Roan for allegedly being rude to paparazzi or fans, or are we mad at Roan for being a young queer woman with wants and boundaries she is not ashamed of enforcing?

​No one is going to get it all right, and no female pop star is ever going to be met with total love and compassion. I don’t think everyone needs to be Chappell Roan super-fans, but we need to truly consider where the hatred of her is coming from. Roan should not be The Lesbian Pop Star, like a museum spectacle shrouded in protective glass with signs saying “no flash photography”; she does not need preferential treatment. But she does deserve to be treated the same as any other celebrity. And, to be sure, that treatment could be better for everyone — sadly, this ridicule of female celebrities is fairly normalized, and it is nearly always disproportionate to what they have or have not done. But for Roan, there is an especially wide discrepancy.

​I’m reminded of another young girl, eccentric and talented, who the world wanted to punish years ago: Fiona Apple. Apple once said: “I don’t want to give any advice to a 19-year-old, because I want a 19-year-old to make mistakes and learn from them. Make mistakes, make mistakes, make mistakes. Just make sure they’re your mistakes.”

Roan will make mistakes, but they are her mistakes. I ask that we consider if the lectures and insults from Twitter accounts all over the world in response to those mistakes are things we actually believe, or if we’re just looking for any reason to make the lesbian pop star pay.