Many years ago, when I was a significantly more chaotic person who made vastly worse choices in her dating life, I had a brief fling with a total mess of a man. He was a restaurant worker and aspiring gossip blogger with a vicious streak running through him; he was given to brash and violent behavior that was often as poorly thought out as it was well-intentioned. I eventually cut him out of my life because it was clear he wasn’t good for me; the last time we spoke, he was on the run from cops who wanted to throw him in prison over an ill-advised Facebook page*.
Anyway. I bring this man up for one reason and one reason only, and it’s this: one time, about a year before we’d met, he walked up to a table where DJ Diplo was performing in a Philadelphia nightclub and casually overturned it, spilling all of Diplo’s expensive equipment to the floor. His justification for doing this was that Diplo was homophobic. The legitimacy of that claim was never actually clear to me.
Up until today, that story was the only thing I knew about DJ Diplo.
But today? Today I know another thing about Diplo, and that’s that some dudes have sucked his cock.
In a story that exemplifies the general emptiness of mainstream bi discourse, Emily “Green Couch” Ratajkowski had Diplo on her podcast and asked him about his sex life and queer experiences and, yeah, it turns out that while Diplo is not gay, he’s gotten sucked off by dudes, which, I mean, good for him. I think it’s up for debate as to whether getting a blowjob from a dude makes you not straight — certainly, there are many straight men who abide by the “all mouths feel the same if you close your eyes” principle — but Diplo, himself, apparently ultimately landed on the stance of “it’s not not gay,” as is his prerogative.
So on my end this is all interesting because it certainly makes it seem like Diplo is, ahem, probably not homophobic, and certainly not homophobic enough to have deserved to have his DJ equipment tossed to the floor twelve years ago. I find that personally interesting just because it puts a nice little button on a weird period in my life when I was making bad choices about who to spend my time with. But I don’t really understand why anyone else cares, and once again I find myself wondering why, exactly, this counts as a news story that Out needs to cover (aside from “because the content mill is a gaping maw that will never ever be satisfied and requires more and more content daily”).
The most generous answer I can come up with is that the more we talk openly about the fluidity of sexuality, the more we point out that this guy and that dude and even that girl over there have all engaged in sexual explorations that bend and stretch and even break the boundaries of strict monosexuality then the more comfortable you or I or someone else might feel with our own sexuality. It’s entirely possible that there’s someone out there reading these headlines about Diplo and thinking “Well if Diplo is not not gay then maybe it’s okay for me to be not not gay too!”
And if that is the case, well, I’m happy for that person.
But to be honest most of the coverage just feels kinda prurient, the same way tweets suggesting that Bill Hader gave Rachel Bilson her first orgasm do. Like, I dunno guys, do we really need to think deeply about where Diplo’s dick has been? And more to the point: are discussions of Diplo’s dick moving the conversation about bi rights forward?
It’s just the question I come back to again and again: what is visibility, what is it good for, why do we make this macro level fight about the most micro level questions of which celebrities are and are not queer? As celebrity gossip, you know, it’s all fine and good. But celebrity gossip shouldn’t be the best we can do when it comes to making progress on the bi rights front.
And most importantly: don’t hang out with dudes who flip over DJ tables at parties! Nothing good can come of it, I promise you. Even if they offer a dubious “it’s for gay rights” justification. It probably isn’t.
Calmly flipping Diplo’s dj setup over an (imagined?) slight is very Philly. Thank you.