I’m Sorry, Timothée Chalamet

Emma Monti

I’m sorry, Timothée Chalamet. I’m really sorry. In all honesty, I don’t really know that much about you other than your infamous everychanging haircut and that you were in Call Me by Your Name, which was arguably a pretty good movie.

Allow me to elaborate on my apology: on that Friday afternoon when my new university friends suggested we all go around and say our celebrity crushes, I didn’t know what to do. The warm glow of my Zoom screen, the cloudy Winnipeg January skies, the melting iced coffee on my desk, all of it, suddenly disappeared as I found myself in the seat of a cold interrogation booth, familiar to so many of us with secrets.

When you are a gay kid so deep in the closet you begin to collect dust, seemingly insignificant things like conversations about love and sex can feel like torture. From what I can gather, most straight people don’t think about these kinds of questions, they just say the person who they are attracted to with no consternation, no hesitancy, no fear. Despite this, when you are secretly queer and still slowly defrosting new parts of your identity, trying to talk casually about crushes and love and attraction can drown you; eroding your progression towards self-acceptance, and serving as a reminder of the eased heterosexual lifestyle you’ve left ;behind.

Sitting in front of my laptop as my friends talked, I had come to a mental crossroads—one where I could use this conversation as the perfect opportunity to come out, albeit before I was ready; or tell a lie to protect this part of my life I have instinctively shielded for so long. On that January day, I made the decision to hide, and you, Timothée Chalamet, were my unfortunate chosen straight-girl crush, an unsuspecting and innocent accomplice in my lies.

While we’re being honest, Timotheé Chalamet, I must admit that this is not my first time using a carefully chosen celebrity crush as a convincing-enough method of concealing my sexuality in a variety of social situations. At 14 years old, I would sit in my living room listening to the Roxy Music album Country Life for no reason other than the picture on the album sleeve (you can find the original cover artwork on Spotify, if you’re interested). Even with my unreliable adolescent foresight, I was always sure to have a copy of Purple Rain by Prince or Heroes by David Bowie on hand to make a deliberate comment about the attractiveness of the men on the covers as my parents sat nearby. In high school, I was able to fend off circulating rumors about my queerness with the help of a well-advertised attraction to Adam Driver and, as you might have guessed, you, Timotheé Chalamet. As my strong heterosexual façade was bolstered by the many unattainable men I flaunted as crushes, I silently continued to wrestle with my identity while self-confined in the comforting restraints of the closet for years. By some strange force of divine intervention or luck, I thought that hiding behind you, Timotheé Chalamet, would make the true attraction I felt towards women disappear in the shadow of the falsified heterosexuality I fought to maintain.

But despite all the secrets and self-loathing, there was a certain beauty I could feel about my queerness and the timing of my coming out. It sounds incredibly counter-intuitive, but remaining in the closet, lying to people I loved, creating fake versions of myself suspended in alternate realities, were all part of an elaborate scheme to protect myself. Though blinded by confusion and anger towards my identity at the time, temporarily eclipsing my queerness with a convincing heterosexual image gave me time to decipher my sexuality in my own time and on my own terms. Remaining closeted saved me from the well-intentioned but deeply intrusive gaze of those close to me, especially as I grew up in an immigrant family where secrets were few and almost always discovered and dissected.

In the end, I’m sorry Timothée Chalamet for dragging you into all this, for taking advantage of your attractiveness for so many years. I hope you understand why. The main point of all this rambling is to let you know that I don’t think I need to hide behind you anymore. When I first started using you to protect my identity, reaching a point in life where I could live as the truest version of myself seemed so impossibly far in the future. I remember long nights spent in bed, listening to The Smiths and fantasizing of moving away, of finally being able to tell myself that yes, it does get better. It has taken me many months to process that the future my past self used to dream of is now my present—I have the most incredible group of queer friends, proudly wear a rainbow pin on my backpack and actually say my real celebrity crush when someone asks. So thank you, Timotheé Chalamet. Please know how proud I am of my past self for choosing to use you when I needed to.

“No he’s NOT my boyfriend! We’re just seeing each other…Yeah, I’d be mad if he hooked up with someone else!... We both still have Tinder downloaded… He’s coming over tonight to make dinner together… But it is certainly NOT a date. We’re just keeping it casual!”

This explanation is often met with my best friends’ sympathetic stares, an exhausted sigh, and another thorough game of 20 Questions. It is the same rundown road I revisit a few weeks into each of my romantic relationships. A psychological maze attempts to lead me to label whatever my situation resembles: take a right and this person is my “boyfriend”; take a left and “it’s just sex”. I’ve noticed labels are meant to define the relationship, why am I scared of them?

While calculating the final destination, I’m exposed to an ecosystem of emotions: trust, frustration, and admiration. As the relationship blooms, an inevitable storm of pressure forces me to take the nearest exit. Sometimes this means leaving the morning after or rerouting to grab dinner. Other times it’s sending a “good morning!” text versus a “u up?” text.

A label becomes a convenient way for the outside to perceive an inner-world that they are not invited into. However, romantic relationships are anything but convenient. When I think about my friendships, the statement, “they’re my friend”, rolls off the tongue quickly and effortlessly. My friends are my most meaningful and uplifting relationships in my life. I don’t ever think twice about who they are or what they mean to me. On the other hand, defining my romantic relationships resembles a grueling hike. It takes an excruciatingly long time to unanimously admit that we mean something to each other. Often, the trouble expected traversing down the road of “what are we?” turns into a path I might as well steer clear of. Perhaps my stubbornness leads me to believe that if I admit that I want this person to officially become my partner, they will automatically hold power over me. They’re in the driver’s seat and I’m unsure of which way they’re going to turn.

Defining a relationship introduces expectations. Expectations associated with labels are meant to hold each other accountable so no one gets hurt, right? Once my relationship runs its course and comes to an end, I always end up thinking to myself, “I wish we put a label on it”. It feels like a label offers unspoken validation for their feelings of sadness post break up. I don’t feel like I can truly be upset because we never technically ‘dated’. Is it possible that two words - “my ex” - could incite the empathy from others I’m seeking? Truthfully, a label is not a seal of confirmation that the intimacy which transpired between us was real. It’s the hours we spent listening to each other’s secrets, exposing our vulnerabilities, and encouraging the best for each other that validate the attachment I feel.

Relationships are difficult to navigate. Peaks of happy Himalayas and valleys of sadness. Labels are a tool to check the intentions of the people in the relationships; nevertheless, the label is only a fraction of the relationship terrain.