Will Young was meant to be Love Island’s token ‘nice guy’ this year. A reincarnation of the ‘nice guys’ gone by like Alex George, Curtis Pritchard, and Hugo Hammond. Except what we realised in those series is that the ‘nice guy’ has the potential to be just as toxic as the out and out f*ckboys. Thus, the existence of the Love Island ‘nice guy’ has become something of a curse in recent years, an inevitability viewers look upon with disdain, waiting for the moment they’re proven right that self-proclaimed ‘nice guys’ are never that nice.
Will Young, however? He might actually be a nice guy. The nicest guy, even. Yes, it’s only been a few weeks and we’ve still got Casa Amor to remind us that heterosexual men bring nothing but disappointment, but so far, he’s proven himself to actually be sweet, sincere and supportive. Unlike the ghosts of nice guys past, Will’s sweet nature isn’t curbed by a need to fit in with the other men – he’s managed to make genuine male and female friendships, toxic masculinity aside.
With that, we get to enjoy the very personality that had viewers dubbing him the ‘token nice guy’. He’s funny, whimsical even, unafraid of embarrassing himself in the pursuit of making others laugh. He’s unpretentious, considerate and provides the levity necessary in a villa full of otherwise boring or toxic men.
How has the public then responded to him? By questioning his sexuality. It started on Twitter, people sharing videos of him dancing around and being silly, captioning it with some variation of ‘You can’t convince me Will Young isn’t gay’. Then came the Google searches, ‘Is Will in Love Island 2023 gay?’ is a breakout search term today when looking at search data around Love Island. In fact, of the 10 search queries associated with Will Young, more than half of them are questions about whether or not he’s gay.
Now, we know for sure Will dates women – we don’t know whether he also dates other genders, he’s never explicitly stated his sexuality on social media. Plenty of Islanders have come out as bisexual or pansexual in the past, so it’s not out of the realms of possibility for one of this year’s crop to be queer too. That being said, we do know that in 2021, ITV commissioner Amanda Stavri told the Radio Times that gay people are less likely to be included in Love Island’s line up because it presents a ‘logistical difficulty’.
‘In terms of gay Islanders, I think the main challenge is regarding the format of Love Island,’ she said. ‘There’s a sort of logistical difficulty, because although Islanders don’t have to be 100 per cent straight, the format must sort of give [the] Islanders an equal choice when coupling up.’
It’s safe to assume when people are searching for ‘Is Will Young from Love Island gay?’, they’re not necessarily using it as an umbrella term – they’re most likely using it in to mean is Will only – and in turn then, secretly – attracted to men.
That’s where the problem lies with these search queries, because while it’s natural to speculate about an Islander's sexuality if they’ve openly spoken about it, the narrative here is that people think Will is gay because he doesn’t fit with their ideas about heterosexual behavioural norms. You only need scroll through the tweets for evidence…
That’s where this discourse bears discussion, because it once again perpetuates the false narrative that straight men can’t be whimsical or weird or fun. It’s toxic masculinity 101, assuming that a man with what we deem ‘feminine traits’ – gentleness, playfulness, an ability to talk about your emotions – must be gay because he doesn’t fit in the narrow definition of masculinity that heterosexual men deem appropriate. Just as queer men can be hypermasculine, straight men can be hyperfeminine – a person’s behaviour does not strictly define their sexuality.
Now, Will could very well be queer, and one can only hope he feels safe and comfortable enough to live his most authentic life both publicly and privately – but frankly, it’s no one’s business but his and to make assumptions based on the fact he can dance and enjoy himself fearlessly is ignorant at best, harmful at worst. Let’s stop perpetuating falsehoods about what it means to be a heterosexual man in 2023, let Will be whimsical!