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CONTENTS

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MASTHEAD

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

THE IMPORTANT TRUTHS ABOUT LABELING SEXUALITY Adrenne Sigeti

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HARRY STYLES Harry Styles is Over “Outdated Pressure to Label His Sexuality

WHY I WON’T LABEL MY SEXUALITY Lane Moore

CARA DELEVINGNE Cara Delevingne Sets the Record Straight on Her Sexual Fluidity

WHY I CAN’T LABEL MY SEXUAL ORIENTATION Anonymous

Fluidity Fluidity Executive Director Johanne Daoust Assistant Director Patricia Lobo Design Director Lillian Carter Writers Oliver Haug Tom Lamont Lynsey Eidell Rob Haskell Ramin Setoodeh Adrienne Sigeti Anonymous Lane Moore Photographer Kevin Mazur Patrick Demarchelier Contributors Patricia Lobo

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Editor’s Letter

A Warm Hello To Everyone

My name is Lillian Carter, and I am the editor of Fluidity, a magazine dedicated to setting aside limiting labels to explore with curiosity and flexibility who we are and how we love. As humans, we tend to define and organize everything into contained, seperate boxes, often which prevent new possibilities and growth. But therein lies the paradox: while we try to define, label, and shelve ourselves, we also need to grow, to change, to explore, throughout our entire lives. We have many layers and are constantly in flux. Do you wear the same clothes you wore when you were 12? I sure don’t. Yet, with our sexuality, we try to define who we love with a singular word and for all time. This shapes our thoughts: “Oh, I like this girl: I must be a lesbian!” But last week, maybe I felt attracted toward a male. Labels limit us, causing cognitive dissonance. Fluidity is not here to demand a removal of labels—they give us a foundation to understand and analyze ourselves and our preferences—but we are here to explore how labels overtly and subtly limit us and have the potential to cause us pain and confusion. We are here to help those who fight against, or contradict, the labels they’ve been given or have given to themselves. Labels work in many surprisingly small ways to change behaviours. For years, I labeled myself as straight, although this label was completely inadequate. In high school, I was surrounded by friends who were active members of the LGBTQ+ community, and I often felt at odds, as if, to fit in, to be accepted fully, I felt I needed to share the same label as them. At a Pride festival in my hometown the summer we were 16, we visited an event where we could chat about sexuality with a supportive LGBTQ+ adult. At this time, I still considered myself straight. During our session, we were asked if we identified with the LGBTQ+ community. When I stated that I was straight, the session leader frowned, said, “Oh, an ally then,” and immediately moved on to supportive

conversation with my friends only, effectively dismissing me due to my given label. We were all 16, all young people, all inexperienced humans, all trying to explore our sexuality, and all feeling insecure—including me. Of course, some labels are accepted by society and other labels are not—causing enormous systemic injustices. But, in our everyday lives, we all want to be seen, to be respected. Yes, I was an ally, but no, that didn’t mean I was not present, hurt, and still at that table, wanting to be part of the conversation. I understand the goal of the event was specifically to support LGBTQ+ youths, but labels continued to divide inadvertently. A few years later, I found myself conforming to the LGBTQ+ group: I liked females and I liked males. But I didn’t just like those genders. “What label now?” I thought. “Pansexual?” Still, that label didn’t sit right. In fact, I realized I never felt I belonged in the LGBTQ+ and I was lying to myself about my sexuality. I was straining against the stiff, too-small walls of my box, dying for a place to breathe easily. My perception shifted dramatically when I met my partner. He helped me realize I didn’t need to label myself. I didn’t need to be constantly grasping for an answer that would never come. He allowed me to love who I wanted, to simply enjoy and explore love, without the pressure to place that love into a category. By providing me with a space to grow, to love, to change without restricting myself, he inspired the creation of this magazine. I want it to be a space for everyone to feel safe to explore—to observe ourselves with a spirit of fun, not with pressure to categorize. I know you have your own stories. I want to hear them. Your unique voice is valuable. Labels are tools: they should help us, not restrict us. People will demand: “Stop floating around! Make up your mind!” Don’t stop. Be open minded! Allow yourself the time and comfort of just being and loving who you are now. This is the meaning of Fluidity.

Lillian Carter Design Director

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The Important Truths About Labeling Sexuality

W ADRIENNE SIGETI

When it comes to identity formation, labels might be something that you normally take for granted. Before you could even walk or talk, you were probably assigned several labels like “boy,” “girl,” “brother,” “sister” or even just “heterosexual.” These labels were assigned to you whether you agreed with them or not; you probably weren’t old enough to know what you were even agreeing to. If you accept the labels assigned to at birth, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the significance of sexuality terms like queer or pansexual. Many people don’t have that privilege, however. In fact, although the population statistics for LGBTQ members are largely uncertain, some researchers estimate there are around 9 million LGBT Americans today – and that’s not counting those who identify as queer. For these people, labels are not only a means of selfexpression but also an instrument for self-advocacy and empowerment. Yet, labels can also become boxes to limit their sexuality. To find out the benefits and drawbacks of sexual labels, ENTITY reached out to LGBTQ advocate Rebecca Vipond-Brink and Dr. Ritch Savin-Wlliams, retired Cornell director of the Sex and Gender Lab and author of books like “Becoming Who I Am: Young Men on Being Gay.”

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01 02 LABELS COULD ENDANGER THOSE WHO WEAR THEM… BUT ALSO BUILD SAFE PLACES.

Even though we’re in 2017, violence against “out” members of the LBGTQ community “is a reality that’s still very present for more queer Americans than I think people – especially white, urban, young queer people – realize,” says Vipond-Brink. In fact, data from the National Coalition of AntiViolence Programs suggests that 20-25 percent of lesbians or gay people will experience a hate crime in their lifetime. Queer people of color are even more common targets of violence: in 2014, 43 and 23 percent of hate attack survivors were respectively Latinos/Latinas and Blacks. While labels can be dangerous at times, they can also help create safe spaces for marginalized groups to gather and talk about the pressing issues in their communities. Dr. Savin-Williams points out that labels might be especially helpful for youth, who can sometimes be “linked to similar kinds of other [people]” through shared identifications. Beyond talking about everyday experiences or challenges, these safe places can spark conversations about (systematic or shared individual forms of) oppression. According to some activists – like Sian Ferguson – labels even play an important role in giving people “the vocabulary to discuss oppression.” Without the vocabulary to discuss privilege, power and oppression, silenced minority groups will continue to go unheard. In a way, labels are double-edged swords: while they can hurt those who use them, they can also be used to create a safer, more accepting environment for people who identify as LGBTQ.

“Sexuality is only attractive when it’s natural and spontaneous”

LABELS CAN BOOST AWARENESS.

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of sexual labels is how they can help raise awareness about who LGBTQ members really are and what problems they are facing. True, the LGBTQ community still has a long way to go. In fact, 92 percent of LGBT youths report that they regularly hear negative messages – from their peers, Internet and schools, especially – about being LGBT. However, a 2013 Pew Research survey shows how far America has come: since 2003, Americans’ social acceptance for gay men and lesbians has increased by around 19 percent. For Vipond-Brink, one cause of this increased acceptance could be the increase in visible LGBT representatives. “The gay rights movement only started gaining serious mainstream traction when celebrities started coming out in the 80s and 90s,” she explains. “Straight people who held homophobic views were forced to reckon with the possibility that someone who was homosexual could also be someone they liked and whose work they admired.” You don’t have to be a celebrity to make a difference, either. “Being out and proud forces people to reconcile the best of who you are with the fact that you’re queer,” says Vipond-Brink. Labels also allow the formation of non-profit groups and governmental organizations that focus on meeting LGBTQ needs. After all, it’s pretty hard to advocate for a group of people if those people don’t have an umbrella term or name that united them! One could even argue that labels are more important now than ever because of the role social media often plays in political or social campaigns. For instance, last week, two trending Twitter hashtags were #BlackGaySlay and, in Saudia Arabia, a hashtag that translates to “I love gays and I’m not one of them.” Could gay men and women – along with allies – advocate for LGBT rights without using the word “gay”? Probably. But it would be a lot more complicated to explain…and a lot harder to fit inside Twitter’s character limit!

- Marilyn Monroe

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04 03 LABELS CAN CREATE EXCLUSIONS AND PRESSURE TO “PROVE” YOU BELONG.

LABELS AND SEXUALITY CAN CHANGE.

In the same way that labels can give a voice to the voiceless, they can also help raise public awareness on previously overlooked LGBTQ members and issues. One of the hardest part about labels is that language, by its very nature, is slippery. What do I mean? Well, first of all, sexual labels “are always changing both in words and meaning,” says Dr. SavinWilliams. For instance, the term “gay” originally meant “joyful” or “bright and showy.” By the 19th century, it (ironically enough) described men who slept with a lot of women (often prostitutes). It wasn’t until 1955 that “gay” finally acquired the homosexual meaning we often know it by today. It’s not just the terms that are changing, either. Several studies have found that sexuality is also more fluid than people often think. For instance, a 2010 study examined over 2,500 adults’ sexual orientation identity during a 10-year-period. When researchers interviewed the same people in 1995 and 2006, they found that 2.15 percent of the participants reported a different sexual orientation, with bisexual and homosexual women being the most likely to report a change. A more recent study of New Zealand adults similarly reported that 16.1, 16.3 and 11.8 percent of women in the respective age groups of 21-26, 26-32, 32-38 reported a change in sexual orientation. Changes also occurred in surveyed men, though only around 3 percent of them per age group. Because sexualities can change over time, VipondBrink says, “[Some] people don’t want to put a label on themselves, come out to their loved ones, learn as time goes on that maybe a different word would be more useful for their personal experience and then have to come out all over again to their friends and family.” Coming out once? Scary. Coming out twice and probably being judged for “getting it wrong” the first time? Terrifying.

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Tied in to the “fixed” nature of labels – in terms of them not being able to properly categorize sexually fluid individuals – is another major problem with labeling: the creation of exclusions. After all, you’re either gay – or you’re not. You’re a lesbian – or you’re not. The often black and white world of sexuality can cause people “who are not heterosexual [to feel] pressured into a choosing a label that describes their sexuality,” according to activist Sian Ferguson. Sometimes, though, adopting a label isn’t enough – you have to “prove” your sexuality, too. “Our community isn’t like race communities, who – for the most part – wear their identities on their skin; nor are we like religious communities, who have symbols and buildings and communities that make them visible,” explains Vipond-Brink. “Probably the most common experience queer people have is that we are told that we aren’t really gay, we aren’t really lesbians, we aren’t really bisexual, we aren’t really queer – it’s just a phase, or a disordered way of thinking, or a perversion.” People can even be told they’re not “gay enough,” as former NFL player Michael Sam reported last year. The truth is, labels can help unite people. However, they can also act as measuring sticks of “correct” gay/lesbian/bi/trans behavior used to exclude some people and pressure others.

“Some people don’t want to put a label on themselves, come out to their loved ones, learn as time goes on that maybe a different word would be more useful for their personal experience and then have to come out all over again to their friends and family.”

05 THE POSITIVITY OF LABELS OFTEN DEPENDS ON WHO’S DOING THE LABELING.

Perhaps the most important determinant of whether a sexual label is helpful or harmful is who’s doing the labeling. According to Dr. Savin Williams, “The reality is that youth are quite inventive, creating words and concepts that are meaningful to them. I’d like us to be open to these possibilities.” In fact, a 2016 study found that generation Z (those age 13-20) are much more likely than Millennials to self-identify as something other than heterosexual. However, a 2014 study also found that, besides having to hide their sexuality, fear of being labeled by others was the most negative factor associated with the well-being of LGBTQ youths. These findings support the idea that sexual labels are only as empowering as they are self-determined. A man who is called “gay” because of his stereotypically feminine appearance – regardless of his actual sexual orientation – is obviously not being benefited by that label. However, teenagers walking in a gay pride parade with a sign reading, “Gay and Proud!” could feel empowered by embracing this aspect of their identities. For Vipond-Brink, the power of labels is tied to the power of truth. “No one should hide their light under a bushel,” she says. “You deserve better than to hide the facts of who you are in your own, full, glorious truth.” And, in many cases, people’s “true” selves can only be revealed through a sexual label of their choosing – not anyone else’s. Perhaps that is, in fact, the takeaway of all of these “truths” about sexual labels: the sexual labels are individualized and every person may react to them differently. Some may look to labels for belonging or increased public awareness; others may shun labels altogether because of the physical – and emotional – violence that can sometimes accompany them. One fact that is certain? As long as you follow your heart and stay true to yourself when choosing a sexual label (or choosing to not adopt one), you can never label yourself a liar.

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arry The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.

Styles

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Harry Styles Is Over “Outdated” Pressure to Label His Sexuality

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op star Harry Styles, whose sexuality has long been the subject of public conjecture, revealed in a recent interview that he’s frankly a little sick of the “outdated” speculation. In an exclusive conversation with the magazine Better Homes and Gardens ahead of his third album Harry’s House, Styles said that his refusal to clarify his sexuality — even as his queer following continues to speculate about the meaning behind his elaborate dresses and his affinity for waving Pride flags at shows — is actually quite intentional. “I’ve been really open with it with my friends, but that’s my personal experience; it’s mine,” Styles said. Styles has faced criticism in the past from some LGBTQ+ fans for declining to label his sexuality, with some accusing him of implying queerness in aesthetics and lyrics merely for marketing purposes. In a 2019 interview with the Guardian, Styles pushed back against this argument, stating that he was not “sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting,” and expressing a “who cares” attitude when it came to speculations about his sexuality. Harris Reed spent lockdown completing their graduate collection. But the speculations have continued nonetheless, most recently with the pop star’s performance at this year’s Coachella music festival, in which he sang while hoisting a Pride flag offered up to him by the audience. At the festival, Styles also debuted a new song called “Boyfriends” with lyrics about bad boyfriends who “take you for granted” and know “just how to get under your skin.” In the Better Homes interview, the former One Direction star added that he once felt “ashamed” of his sex life. “For a long time, it felt like the only thing that was mine was my sex life,” he said. “But I think I got to a place where I was like, why do I feel ashamed? I’m a 26-year-old man who’s single; it’s like, yes, I have sex.”

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The new album, which debuted its jaunty first single “As It Was” earlier this month ahead of its May 20 release, is about “metamorphosis,” according to Styles. He added in the interview that he finally feels free to make the kind of music he actually wants to make: “I just want to make stuff that is right, that is fun, in terms of the process, that I can be proud of for a long time, that my friends can be proud of, that my family can be proud of, that my kids will be proud of one day.” Here he comes, one of the planet’s most conspicuous young men, stepping out of the London drizzle and into a dusty suburban pub. If there was an old vinyl record player in the place it would scratch quiet. Instead, the two-dozen punters turn hushed and intent, as if a unicorn has just trotted in off the street, and nobody wants to scare it off. “That’s frickin’ Harry frickin’ Styles,” whispers a young man at the bar, “in this pub.” The pop star is asked what he wants to drink and in a voice already inclined to undertones, quietly orders a cup of tea. A former teen star who is now 25, a happier and rockier solo artist since his boyband One Direction split a few years ago, Styles has hidden himself inside a large, swamp-green parka. He’s tall, around the 6ft mark, and carries himself with a slight stoop. If Styles could only do something about his appearance from the neck up (elfin brow, wide Joker smile, a face that’s recognisable across multiple continents) you sense he could drink in pubs like this anonymously enough. As it is, cover blown, he removes the parka. A woolly jumper beneath has a picture of the planet Saturn on it. Maybe they’ve heard of Styles there, too. We take a seat in the corner. On nearby tables, conversations start to sputter as people try to keep their own talk ticking along on autopilot while straining to hear what Styles says. I ask him about the sheer strangeness of this and other aspects of fame. Full stadiums, swooning

The whole point of where we should be heading, which is toward accepting everybody and being more open, is that it doesn’t matter, and it’s about not having to label everything, not having to clarify what boxes you’re checking.

He says: “What women wear. What men wear. For me it’s not a question of that. If I see a nice shirt and get told, ‘But it’s for ladies.’ I think: ‘Okaaaay? Doesn’t make me want to wear it less though.’ I think the moment you feel more comfortable with yourself, it all becomes a lot easier.”

admirers, an excess of opportunity and cash. Why isn’t Styles an absolute ordeal of a human being by now? Keith Richards, at a comparable stage, imagined himself the pirate leader of a travelling nation-state, unbound by international law. Elton John was on vast amounts of cocaine. Meanwhile, here’s Harry, known in the music industry as a bit of a freak, medically, having maintained abnormally high levels of civility in his system. Boots, waistcoat and trousers, Gucci. Pearls, National Theatre costume hire. Necklace and rings, Styles’s own. Main image: top, waistcoat and trousers, Harris Reed. Styles tilts his head, flattered. There are others, he promises. “People who are successful, and still nice. It’s when you meet the people who are successful and aren’t nice, you think: What’s yer excuse? Cos I’ve met the other sort.” Styles read Keith Richards’ autobiography a while back, and he recently finished Elton’s, too. (“Soooo much cocaine,” he marvels.) We talk for a bit about whether extreme dissolute behaviour and artistic greatness go hand in hand. Styles, who has just released his second solo album, Fine Line, the penultimate track of which is called Treat People With Kindness, has to hope not. “I just don’t think you need to be a dick to be a good artist. But, then, there are also a lot of good artists who are dicks. So. Hmm. Maybe I need to start scaring babies in supermarkets?” A couple of lads hustle over to offer drinks. A photo is requested; they say they’ll wait. I’m weirdly anxious about Styles’s phone, which is slung on the table in front of him. What must be the black-market value of that thing? If fans were to get hold of it, would they want to open Styles’s music app first, to listen to tracks from the new album, or rush to see his messages and calls, to find out who

Styles has been flirting with late at night? The interest in his music has always run at a ratio of about 50/50 with the interest in who he is dating. It’s a ratio Styles tries to adjust in favour of the music by being vague about his ex-partners, real and rumoured (Taylor Swift, Kendall Jenner, Parisian model Camille Rowe), diverting to discuss his songs about failed relationships. A year ago, when Styles was floating around near this pub in north London, where he lives, and California, where he tends to record, looking for inspiration for the new album, his close friend Tom Hull told him: “Just date amazing women, or men, or whatever, who are going to fuck you up… Let it affect you and write songs about it.” Styles, who writes in collaboration with Hull and producer Tyler Johnson, sounds as if he took the advice. The new album, Fine Line, is at its best when capturing late-hours moments, drunk calls, “wandering hands”, and kitchen songs. A golden-haired lover recurs. There are up tracks, down tracks, some with the trippy delirium of harpsichord-era Stones, others with the angsty Britpop swell of strings. While I listened, I couldn’t help scribbling down names, possible subjects. On the lyric “There’s a piece of you in how I dress” I wrote: maybe Kendall? In a song about a lover “way too bright for me”: surely Taylor. Styles says he keeps to a general rule: write what comes and don’t think about it too much afterwards. The only time he worries about an individual lyric is if it risks putting an ex in a difficult position. “If a song’s about someone, is that fine? Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it?” Has he ever got that judgement call wrong and taken a bollocking from an angry ex? Styles raises an eyebrow. “Maybe ask me in a month.” I quiz him on something I’ve often wondered about. Why are the very famous so inclined to hook up with the very famous? From the outside it looks twice the hassle, with twice the odds of ending badly. “Don’t we all do that, though?” Styles asks. “Go into things that feel relatively doomed from the start?” I ask him why he doesn’t date normals. He seems tickled: “Um. I mean, I do. I have a private life. You just don’t know about it.”

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tyles doesn’t particularly like being asked about his love life, but is amused all the same, as he is about most things. When I ask about the logistics of someone as well known as him dating someone anonymous (“Do you need to give them, like, some sort of primer?”), Styles snorts with laughter. Styles holds out his hands: no, ta. “I don’t wanna have that conversation, man. It would be fucking weird.” And not very sexy, I say. “Not sexy,” Styles says, “no.” A quick aside about his accent, which is hard to capture in print. (“Nat sexy, no.”) After a workout in a hotel gym recently, Styles says he was taken aback (“taken aback”) to be asked by a stranger whether he was speaking in a fake voice. He was appalled. But after so long crossing borders and time zones, living and working between England and the US, the accent has undergone a jazzy remix, and tends to get farthest from its Cheshire roots when he’s around strangers. Once Styles begins to get comfortable in the pub, the flatter, no-nonsense sounds of his youth return. Nope he says, for nope. Fook, for fuck. “What the fook are they?” This was the response of his childhood pals, he remembers, back in the village of Holmes Chapel, when little Harry had the gumption to show up in the playground wearing Chelsea boots instead of the approved chunky trainers. Styles’s parents had separated when he was very young, but there is no origin-story trauma: he

has always stayed close to both. His mother, Anne, would praise his singing voice in the car, and when Styles was 16 it was agreed he could audition for a singing contest on TV. For a long time I didn’t try therapy – I wanted to be the guy who didn’t need it. But I was only getting in my own way “The craziest part about the whole X Factor thing,” says Styles, who auditioned for the ITV reality show in 2010, “is that it’s so instant. The day before, you’ve never been on telly. Then suddenly…” Suddenly you’re a piece of national property. “You don’t think at the time, ‘Oh, maybe I should keep some of my personal stuff back for myself.’ Partly because, if you’re a 16-year-old who does that, you look like a jumped-up little shit. Can you imagine? ‘Sorry, actually, I’d rather not comment…’ You don’t know what to be protective of.” In February 2012, One Direction were feted at the Brit Awards, hours before they were due to fly to the US for the first time. On TV that night they looked young, silly, chuffed – on the precipice of something huge, and with no clue at all. Their subsequent wonderrun (five platinum albums, four world tours) had its foundations in their ridiculous popularity in the States. Right away, Styles remembers, “We were fuelling a machine. Keeping the fire going.” He remembers it as a stimulating time; maybe overstimulating. “Coming out of it, when the band stopped, I realised that the thing I’d been missing, because it was all so fast paced, was human connection.” I first met Styles in 2014, around the time the lack of human connection was starting to bite. One Direction were promoting their penultimate album and I’d been commissioned to write about them the Guardian. Management felt the boys were so exhausted that my minutes in their presence had to be strictly counted. Inside a circle of cripplingly hot lights, while someone ran the stopwatch, we interacted as humanly as we could. I remember how jaded the best singer in the group, Zayn Malik, seemed. (Malik was weeks away from quitting.) I also remember how flattered and bewildered the others were to be asked a few grownup questions

“To be honest, I’m still searching for that one thing, y’know. Something I can really stand up for, and get behind, and be like: This Is My Life Fight. There’s a power to doing one thing. You want your whole weight behind it.” 18

Uh-h-h. Like any conversation, I guess, it’s easier if you’re honest. But I try to let it come up when it comes up. Cos that’s a weird thing to talk about, y’know? If you’ve just started seeing someone, and you’re, like: [he adopts a throaty, mission-briefing voice] So! This is what’s gonna happen!”

– and not what Louis Tomlinson would later describe to me as “who’s-your-favourite-superhero… all that shit”. Styles was watchful and quiet that day. By total chance, a week later, we were in the same London cafe and he tapped my shoulder. He was having lunch with friends. “Will ya join us?” It struck me as a quietly classy move. I was fascinated to see him interact with mates he’d chosen for himself. Styles was dry and funny, older than his years. After lunch we said the usual things about keeping in touch, and followed each other on Twitter. I kept an eye on his updates, about leaving One Direction, releasing an impressive, self-titled debut album in 2017, playing for 36,000 people in Madison Square Garden in New York, acting in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated war movie Dunkirk. Meanwhile, I did my best to manage the mess that had been made of my own account after Styles’s Twitter follow ignited a small explosion of teenage longing in my mentions. For at least a year I received weekly, sometimes daily, pleas from people who wanted messages conveyed to “H”. Still now, every few days, fans in America, Asia and Europe follow me to “see what H sees” in their timeline. It’s a very freeing time. He has around 50 million social media followers, and with that comes the ability to ripple the internet like somebody airing a bed sheet. I’ve noticed, though, how rarely Styles directs people to support specific causes, last doing so in 2018, when he encouraged people to join a march against gun violence. Why don’t you use your influence more, I ask? “Because of dilution. Because I’d prefer, when I say something, for people to think I mean it.” He runs his fingertips across the table.

It’s one of the things that sets Styles apart, the way he puts his whole weight behind the different aspects of this strange job. If you watch footage of him as a guest host on Saturday Night Live last month, Styles plunges in, fully inhabiting the silliness of every sketch. He has good songs in his repertoire (2017’s ballad Sign Of The Times stands out), and would probably admit to some middling songs that attest to his relative inexperience as a writer. But whichever of his songs Styles performs, he goes all-in, trusting that his zest and energy will hold an audience’s attention. He approaches this interview in roughly the same spirit, not enjoying every question, fidgeting, pleading for clemency once or twice, but giving everything due consideration. I bring up something Styles joked about earlier: the possibility of waking up in his 40s with deferred mental health problems. “Mm,” he says. Have you thought about therapy, I ask, to get ahead of that? “I go,” he says. “Not every week. But whenever I feel I need it. For a really long time I didn’t try therapy, because I wanted to be the guy who could say: ‘I don’t need it.’ Now I realise I was only getting in my own way.” He shrugs. “It helps.” Lately he’s been reading a lot (Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women stood out). He’s watched a lot of Netflix (crime thrillers and music docs). He recently cried through Slave Play on Broadway. I sense in Styles, at 25, a pent-up undergraduate hunger, maybe a desire to make up for lost time. “I’ve definitely been wanting to learn stuff, try stuff,” he says. “Things I didn’t grow up around. Things I’d always been a little bit sceptical about. Like therapy, like meditation. All I need to hear is someone saying, ‘Apparently, it’s amazing’, and I’ll try it. When I was in Los Angeles once, I heard about juice cleanses. I thought, yeah, I’ll do a juice cleanse.” How messy were the results? “You mean…?” Styles raises an eyebrow, recalling the poos. “They were all right. I was just hungry. And bored.” One notable feature of Styles’s solo career has been his headlong embrace of unconventional clothing. A 2017-18 tour could have been sponsored by the Dulux colour wheel: mustard tones in Sydney, shocking pink in Dallas. In a more serious sense, some of Styles’s choices have fed into an important political discussion about gendered fashion. In May, as a co-host at the Met Gala in New York, he stepped out in a sheer blouse and a pearl earring. One evening’s work challenged a lot of stubborn preconceptions about who gets to wear what.

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e says: “What women wear. What men wear. For me it’s not a question of that. If I see a nice shirt and get told, ‘But it’s for ladies.’ I think: ‘Okaaaay? Doesn’t make me want to wear it less though.’ I think the moment you feel more comfortable with yourself, it all becomes a lot easier.” What do you mean, I ask? Styles is leaning forward, hands folded around his cup of tea. “A part of it was having, like, a big moment of self-reflection. And self-acceptance.” He has a habit, when he’s made a definitive statement, of raising his chin and nodding a little, as if to decide whether he still agrees with himself. “I think it’s a very free, and freeing, time. I think people are asking, ‘Why not?’ a lot more. Which excites me. It’s not just clothes where lines have been blurred, it’s going across so many things. I think you can relate it to music, and how genres are blurring…” Sexuality, too, I say. “Yep,” says Styles. “Yep.” There’s a popular perception, I say, that you don’t define as straight. The lyrics to your songs, the clothes you choose to wear, even the sleeve of your new record – all of these things get picked apart for clues that you’re bisexual. Has anyone ever asked you though? “Um. I guess I haaaaave been asked? But, I dunno. Why?” You mean, why ask the question? “Yeah, I think I do mean that. It’s not like I’m sitting on an answer, and protecting it, and holding it back. It’s not a case of: I’m not telling you cos I don’t want to tell you. It’s not: ooh this is mine and it’s not yours.” What is it then? “It’s: who cares? Does that make sense? It’s just: who cares?” I suppose my only question, then, is about the stuff that looks like clue dropping. Because if you don’t want people to care, why hint? Take the album sleeve for Fine Line. With its horizontal pink and blue stripes, a splash of magenta, the design seems to gesture at the trans and bisexual pride flags. Which is great – unless the person behind it happens to be a straight dude, sprinkling LGBTQ crumbs that lead nowhere. Does that make sense? Styles nods. “Am I sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting? No.” As for the rest, he says, “in terms of how I wanna dress, and what the album sleeves gonna be, I tend to make decisions in terms of collaborators I want to work with. I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay, or it makes me look straight, or it makes me look bisexual,

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but because I think it looks cool. And more than that, I dunno, I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun. Honestly? I can’t say I’ve given it any more thought than that.” In our musty corner of the pub we’ve somehow passed a couple of hours in intense discussion. We’ll lighten up, before Styles heads home, with some chat about clever films (Marriage Story), stupider viral videos (the little boy who’s just learned the word “apparently”), that favourite-superhero stuff that, after all, has its place. He talks about the curious double time scheme of a pop star’s life – those crammed 18-hour days and then the sudden empty off-time when Styles might find himself walking miles across London to buy a book, afterwards congratulating himself: “Well, that’s an hour filled.” Before we stand up I ask if he’s minded any of my questions. He pushes out his lips, possibly recalling them one by one, then shakes his head. “What I would say, about the whole being-asked-about-my-sexuality thing – this is a job where you might get asked. And to complain about it, to say you hate it, and still do the job, that’s just silly. You respect what someone’s gonna ask. And you hope that if they respect you, they might not get an answer.” I tell him I do. “Cool.” Styles had to find those lads who wanted a photo. He scoops his phone off the table and flicks his thumb around the screen. Lately, he says, when he messes around on his phone in an idle moment, it’s mostly to look at videos – clips that his friends have sent him, in which their kids sing along to music he’s made. “Never gets old,” Styles says, beaming.

If I get told a nice shirt is for ladies, it doesn’t make me want to wear it less. 21

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Why I Won’t Label My Sexuality

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’ve dated pretty much every configuration of gender imaginable. But when people ask, I wouldn’t call myself bisexual (which is one of the only universally recognized defining boxes we currently have if you’re not gay or straight). I wouldn’t call myself anything because I don’t think any of the boxes apply, not to mention they all come with baggage that isn’t super appealing to me. Bisexuals are still largely seen — incorrectly — as people sitting in chairs in sexual identity waiting rooms until their names are called to go into the “straight” or “gay” offices; lesbians are seen as being attracted to women and women only, and never men, not even a little bit or else you don’t count as a lesbian; and straight people are seen as people attracted to the opposite sex only, and if you’re a girl and you so much as have a crush on a girl, you are gay, the end. Who the fuck is this system working for? That said, as a non-straight person and LGBTQ advocate, I fully know the importance of LGBTQ visibility and the power of coming out. Every time I write something for this website that has anything to do with LGBTQ issues, it is almost impossible to find photos of publicly out lesbian celebrities (outside of the, like, five we have right now — Hi, Ellen and Portia and, like, two others!). There are slightly more out bisexual actresses, but if they’re

NE “What if you fall outside all the boxes? What are you supposed to do then, other than wrestle with the feelings of otherness, the “Oh shit, my sexual identity deadline is here and I don’t have all my paperwork filled out yet?”

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currently in relationships with men (like Anna Paquin or Angelina Jolie), most people see them as straight or “not gay anymore,” which is not a thing. (Former gayness is not a thing. I just wanted to say that one more time.) So when Ellen Page said one of the reasons she wanted to come out was “to help others have an easier and more hopeful time,” I understood exactly what she meant. Coming out is so essential to LGBTQ people feeling better about themselves and knowing they’re not alone, and it especially helps to have openly gay celebrities. For an LGBTQ kid to be able to say to a disapproving parent, “But Ellen Page is gay and she’s great!” it could potentially mean the difference between them getting kicked out of their own home or not. I could not be prouder or happier for people who are out as one defining sexual orientation. But that also doesn’t mean that everyone who falls outside the preset sexuality boxes should pick one anyway so they can feel like they’re an official part of the LGBTQ community, or any community at all. Because of all this, I’ve ended up thinking about my sexuality a lot. It seems so damn urgent, like if I don’t pick a category today, gay or straight, right now, right this second, I guess

there’s the good friend of mine who identifies as straight, but will often say she’s attracted to women but she’s “not gay” and is “definitely straight.” I hear her say this and want to hug her and tell her it’s OK to not pick a word and to be attracted to whoever she’s attracted to, but I also know why she feels that’s impossible. What if you fall outside all the boxes? What are you supposed to do then, other than wrestle with the feelings of otherness, the “Oh shit, my sexual identity deadline is here and I don’t have all my paperwork filled out yet?” There really is something about being able to put yourself into one concise, well-marked, tidy section of society, hands dusted off on your pants. “That’s that, now I can move on with my day.” But it’s not that simple. Carrie Brownstein, who says she has dated men and women, but doesn’t identify as bisexual, says she hates these categories and never thinks of her sexuality as an identifier. She identifies herself by the types of relationships she has (in her case, it’s

Those people who make cheap jokes about bisexuality not being a thing, have no idea how much time bisexual and queer people spend thinking.... I’m either straight by default or something is wrong with me because I can’t decide. (The other option is identifying as queer, but many people still don’t know what that means and assume it means “bisexual,” and some LGBT people think it sounds offensive since it’s a reappropriated word, so that’s a whole other issue.) If you’re not 100 percent positive that you are 100 percent straight, some part of you is constantly wrestling with this pressing need to put yourself in a box. I’ve known self-identified lesbians who worry when they get crushes on guys sometimes and self-identified straight women who worry when they’re attracted to women sometimes, and all of them feel like they need to know, once and for all, what they are. And that makes me deeply sad. Because I totally understand why they feel that way. The world desperately wants us all to pick a side and tell them what it is. Personally, no one has ever told me to pick a label, but I can feel it in my gut that I need to, and oftentimes I see it reflected in other people. If I have a friend who only knows me to date one gender and I start dating someone of a different gender, I find myself playing the pronoun-dodging game. I start saying things like “This person I have a crush on” and how “they are really great” just so I can avoid people asking me to categorize it when all I want to do is be psyched because I like someone. Or 24

that she’s “pretty horrible at relationships and [hasn’t] been in many long-term ones”) and I couldn’t agree more. I have relationships with people. I know that may sound simplified, but I think a lot of people who don’t fit into boxes feel that way. Gender is not a defining factor in the relationship. There is no “guy” and “girl” role. We are just two people who like each other. Here is what I know. It’s possible to be a self-identified straight girl who also has feelings for her best female friend. It’s possible to be a self-identified lesbian who thinks that guy over there is hot and one time she thought about him while she masturbated. It’s possible to be a self-identified gay man who would totally, literally sleep with Jennifer Lawrence. You choose your labels. You choose who you show them to. You choose when they change, if they change. None of us are just one of anything. If I’m funny right now, I might be really sad in two hours. That doesn’t change that I’m funny; it just means that at that moment, there’s been a shift. I think many of us are much more sexually fluid than we think we are, we’re just so scared of what that means and if we have to take action. And I’d just like to tell you that you don’t.

about their sexuality 25

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Cara

It is the labeling that the 24-yearold wants to avoid. “Someone is in a relationship with a girl one minute, or a boy is in a relationship with a boy, I don’t want them to be pigeonholed.

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Cara Delevingne Sets the Record Straight on Her Sexual Fluidity

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Cara Delevingne is an open book when it comes to her sexuality, having candidly spoken about her sexual orientation on multiple occasions. But despite her honesty on the topic, the model and actress recently revealed that people are still very confused by the concept of sexual fluidity. So, she’s decided to set the record straight in a new interview for Glamour, which just happened to be conducted by her close friend and fellow Brit ‘it’ girl Adwoa Aboah. Delevingne explained that the initial response to her coming out as sexually fluid was that people didn’t understand it and thought she was just “gay.” “Once I spoke about my sexual fluidity, people were like, ‘So you’re gay,'” she told Aboah. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not gay.'” Delevingne, who previously dated rock star Annie Clark (better known as St. Vincent) for a year and a half, continued: “A lot of the friends I have who are straight have such an old way of thinking. It’s, ‘So you’re just gay, right?’ [They] don’t understand it. [If] I’m like, ‘Oh, I really like this guy,’ [they’re like], ‘But you’re gay.’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re so annoying!'” For her part, Aboah notices that sexual fluidity among models isn’t all the uncommon.“During Fashion Week many young women [were] in same-sex relationships,” she told Delevingne. “They would be like, ‘I’m surrounded by the most beautiful 28

women.’ They’re not gay; they’re not straight. ” With a host of movie roles on the horizon, Cara Delevingne is living the life she always wanted and is ready to be unfiltered and unguarded as never before. "Trust me," Cara Delevingne says, once we’ve settled into a Toronto bar so dark, so thronged, that even this instantly recognizable young person dissolves into the shifting masses. “I can find fun anywhere.” I do trust her. Grinning and conspiratorial, all kinetic limbs and generous laughter, possessed of a demeanor that suggests that she has both seen it all and seen nothing at all, she slips so readily into familiarity that it’s hard to imagine we’ve never met before. She’d like to know everything about me, which is hardly the point; but it’s the point with Cara. “I love figuring out a stranger, sitting down and learning about their loves and struggles and everything,” she says. “People are my jam.” She’s here shooting DC’s secrecy-shrouded Suicide Squad, due next summer, and Rihanna and her other famous besties are nowhere to be found. But that’s OK, because the leash is tight. “I’m not allowed to drink. I’m not allowed good food,” she says. “After turning 20 and eating McDonald’s all the time and drinking too much, it started to show on my stomach and on my face. But I’m playing a homicidal witch, so I need to look ripped.” I ask her if her body has become her temple, and she laughs. “I always chuckle at that saying. I say my body is a roller coaster. Enjoy the ride.” “But can you believe that?” she goes on. “That I have to exercise restraint after I’ve succeeded in a business where for years I had no restraint, where the whole

It took me a long time to accept the idea [of being attracted to women]—until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognized that I had to accept it…. We’re all liquid. We change, we grow.

point was excess?” Cara wants to make one thing very clear tonight: Modeling was an amuse-bouche, an hors d’oeuvre, never the main dish. Acting is and always was the thing: “The thrill of acting is making a character real. Modeling is the opposite of real. It’s being fake in front of the camera.” This month she appears in her first leading role, as the brooding and beautiful enigma at the center of Paper Towns, adapted from John Green’s novel of the same name. If teenage audiences respond to it as they did the film version of Green’s_The Fault in Our Stars,_ Cara will, she tells me in her characteristic marriage of plummy and potty-mouthed, “freak the fuck out.” The food sent down from David Chang’s restaurant upstairs is so spicy that for intervals we can do little more than smile at each other and pant happily. Cara is wearing the skinniest suit imaginable, from the Kooples, and a pair of Chanel trainers. She tugs a cube of meat off a skewer with her teeth, offering the wink-and-grin-andhead-tilt that her thirteen million Instagram followers (that’s almost twice as many as Lady Gaga has) would recognize instantly—a selfie counterpoint to the iterative steely glamour of her fashion billboards. As Paper Towns’s director, Jake Schreier, tells me later, “What picture can the paparazzi get that Cara hasn’t already gotten? That’s what I call taking control of your image.” We are, Cara says, about as far as she ever gets from the bubble—a word that becomes our shared shorthand for that inexorable whirl of dinners and défilés, fittings and sittings that constitute a career in modeling. True, she has a few active-duty leaves from the Suicide Squad set in the coming weeks—New York for a Chanel fashion show, Los Angeles for a big Burberry bash—but to hear Cara talk about the bubble, you’d think she’d already left it behind. “I’m not sure I understand what fashion is anymore,” she says. “I admit I was terrified to leave. I mean, the bubble gives you a kind of dysfunctional family. When you’re in it, you get it. And the second you’re out of it, you’re like, What the hell just happened?” Acting has traditionally proved hostile terrain for models, and few cover girls have made successful crossings. But

I admit I was terrified to leave. I mean, the bubble gives you a kind of dysfunctional family. When you’re in it, you get it. And the second you’re out of it, you’re like, What the hell just happened?

Cara, according to her colleagues in both fashion and film, appears to possess gifts that her thwarted predecessors lacked. For starters, she has become the preeminent model of her era through the brazen display of personality, that thing most models are now richly paid to hide. Far from a rare orchid that wilts in the breath of more noxious air, Cara, simmering with life on the runway, boils over with life off it. She has been called the next Kate Moss, but the similarities begin and end at their shortish stature (for their profession, that is: both are five-eight), English background, and penchant for late nights. Whereas Kate has retained an essential unknowability, Cara seems always to be declaring, “This is the real me!” I feel this desire to throw away the story I’ve been telling for years. Cheers—to a new story! The designer Erdem Moralioglu calls this her “characterful-ness,” a sort of elfin energy that animates her beauty. “In 20 years,” he says, “we may look back at this era and think of Cara the same way we look back at the sixties and think of Jean Shrimpton.” Karl Lagerfeld, the designer with whom she has become most closely identified, acknowledged her leavening effect on his industry when he called her “the Charlie Chaplin of the fashion world.” (It was that most precious of Lagerfeld confections: a compliment.) Though DC wants her fit as a fiddle, Cara decides that a glass of red wine can’t hurt. Perhaps it will ease the passage of all that veritas she seems intent on spilling. “I feel this desire to throw away the story I’ve been telling for years,” she says, raising her glass. “Cheers—to a new story!” The tale begins in the Belgravia neighborhood of London, in whose rows of white stucco houses aristocratic families live in the comforting proximity of families they have known for generations. Cara’s father, Charles Delevingne, is a property developer, and though he did not grow up rich, his looks and charm got him invited everywhere. Her mother, Pandora, a London society beauty in her day, is the daughter of the late Sir Jocelyn Stevens, a publishing magnate, and Jane Sheffield, lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret and a charter member of the princess’s Mustique set in the 1960s.

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ara’s older sister Poppy, 29, is also a model, while Chloe, 30, a scientist by training, has moved to the country to raise her children. “My family was kind of about that whole parties–and–horse racing thing. I can understand it’s fun for some. I never enjoyed it.” But it was Pandora’s relapsing heroin addiction that may have been the defining fact of Cara’s childhood. “It shapes the childhood of every kid whose parent has an addiction,” she believes. “You grow up too quickly because you’re parenting your parents. My mother’s an amazingly strong person with a huge heart, and I adore her. But it’s not something you get better from, I don’t think. I know there are people who have stopped and are fine now, but not in my circumstance. She’s still struggling.” (Pandora is currently working on a memoir—about her battle with addiction and the eighties London scene that formed its backdrop—which Cara says she has mixed feelings about.) Now 22, Cara was a brooding little girl whose sisters excelled in school. She recalls spending an inordinate amount of time in the offices of mental health professionals whom, she admits, she tended to “screw with,” saying the same things again and again, trying to get them so frustrated they’d fire her as a patient. At nine, she was told she had the reading ability of a sixteen-year-old. (Later, at sixteen, she was told she had the reading ability of a nine-year-old.) She suffered from dyspraxia, a problem with coordinating her thoughts and movements. Writing was always hard, exams a nightmare. After her sixth-form year, the Delevingnes sent her to Bedales, a posh but arty boarding school. “Totally hippie-dippy,” she says. “If you had a Chanel bag there, you’d be bullied.” She immersed herself in drama and music. (Her parents had started her on drum lessons at age ten to help dissipate some of her inexhaustible energy.) But at fifteen, she fell into an emotional morass. “This is something I haven’t been open about, but it’s a huge part of who I am,” she says. “All of a sudden I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety and self-hatred, where the feelings were so painful that I would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out. I never cut, but I’d scratch myself to the

But back in New York, she continued to distract herself by partying. “I had to be doing things with people at all times,” she explains. “The life of the party is an easy part for me to play. It rots your insides, though.

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point of bleeding. I just wanted to dematerialize and have someone sweep me away.” She was placed on a cocktail of psychotropics—“stronger stuff than Prozac” is all she recalls. “I smoked a lot of pot as a teenager, but I was completely mental with or without drugs.” She saw an armada of therapists, none especially helpful. “I thought that if I wanted to act, I’d need to finish school, but I got so I couldn’t wake up in the morning. The worst thing was that I knew I was a lucky girl, and the fact that you would rather be dead . . . you just feel so guilty for those feelings, and it’s this vicious circle. Like, how dare I feel that way? So you just attack yourself some more.” She dropped out, promising her parents she would find a job. Her sister Poppy was already modeling, and Cara had been noticed by an agency executive whose daughter was a schoolmate. But modeling was a rough ride at first. She worked for a year before booking a paying job and paraded through two seasons of castings before landing her first runway show. “The first time I walked into Burberry,” she recalls, “the woman just said, ‘Turn around, go away.’ And all the test shoots with the pervy men. Never trust a straight photographer at a test shoot.” Then, finally, she met Bur­berry’s Christopher Bailey, who cast her in the company’s spring 2011 campaign. At eighteen, she was a late bloomer relative to her model friends Karlie Kloss and Jourdan Dunn, who made their runway debuts in their mid-teens. “I remember feeling so jealous when she and Jourdan first met,” Kloss remembers. “Cara can create that kind of jealousy because she can make anyone fall in love with her. But it’s misunderstanding her to think she’s just the life of the party. Yes, she’s the life of the party. But she’s extremely serious about her work. And here’s the thing: She is truly herself while being in the public eye—not easy to do.” Her career hurtled out of the station. The lush, expressive caterpillars above her eyes shook the bushy brow awake from a three-decade hibernation, and on the runway, her half-upturned mouth, which seemed to suggest a mind dancing with naughty ideas, looked delicious within a sea of glazed, blank-looking beauties. “The thing about Cara is that she’s more than just a model— she stands for something in her generation’s eyes,”

says Stella McCartney, who first met her at the Paris shows a few years ago. “She has a fearlessness about projecting what she stands for, which is so rare. In a certain sense she’s brought back some of that energy you saw in the supermodel era, with Linda and Naomi. In our industry, people can be rather forced, not genuinely themselves. Cara would never pretend to be someone she’s not, and she’s not living her life for other people’s approval.” Being in love with my girlfriend is a big part of why I’m feeling so happy with who I am these days Cara cataloged her every move on social media, but outside Instagram, the reins were in other hands. “My agents told me what to do, and I did it,” Cara says of those early days. “When I got in trouble, they told me off. It was a machine that I wasn’t controlling.” She was passing out on shoots, and she developed severe psoriasis. “It was like the disgusting way I felt inside was transposing itself on my skin. Somebody should have said stop.” In fact it was Kate Moss and _Vogue’_s Tonne Goodman who suggested that she yank the emergency brake. She spent a week in the Los Angeles sun writing poetry and music, and the psoriasis disappeared. Cara doesn’t list every powder that passed under her nose during those days, but I doubt that drugs were ever much more than the occupational hazard of a girl with access, big appetites, and an escapist streak. “Honestly, I don’t think I did anything different from other people my age,” she says. “But I definitely have that addict gene. For me it comes out in an addiction to work. I’d probably have done more drugs back then if I hadn’t been working like mad.” Depression, Cara says, runs in and out of her life, as does a tendency toward the self-destructive. “It’s like, if anything is good for too long, I prefer to ruin it.” At a low point, alone in a New York apartment, she came close to attempting suicide. She was due to leave on vacation the next day, in the grip of an unshakable insomnia. “Full-on bubble. I was packing my bags, and suddenly I just wanted to end it. I had a way, and it was right there in front of me. And I was like, I need to decide whether I love myself as much as I love the idea of death.” And then a song started playing on her laptop, Outkast’s “Spottie Ottie Dopaliscious,” which had been played at the funeral of a friend who had recently died of a heroin overdose. “It felt like a warning from him. And it made me so furious with myself.” The story goes a long way toward explaining Cara’s mixed feelings about fashion, a world that has exalted her but chewed her up a bit in the process. She thinks

acting and music, always the long-term plan, saved her. At this point her ambition to play music, she says, “is just a flower growing through concrete.” She doesn’t dream of being an overnight pop star. “Singing, writing songs, is kind of my biggest fear, but it’s the thing I feel I need to conquer.” This spring I watched as she joined Pharrell Williams onstage in New York to perform a duet he wrote for them for a short fashion film made by Lagerfeld. Cara sings with a restrained rasp, though her heroes are more unleashed: Prince and Al Green. “I first met Cara at the Met ball two years ago,” Pharrell recalls, “and I thought, Here’s a person with this unique energy. But in working with her, what amazed me was how prepared she was, how carefully she studied. Cara overshows up.” “She’s more together now, more grounded,” says Sienna Miller, who has known Cara for most of a decade. “But even as a young teenager she was this ebullient force, this magnetic presence. I’m not sure it’s ever happened before that someone could move so seamlessly through different fields and achieve in them all. I kind of always thought you had to choose. But then most people don’t have Cara’s talent.” Though she stood around looking lovely in 2012’s Anna Karenina, the next couple of years herald her undeniable cinematic arrival. Cara is due to appear in no fewer than seven films: The Face of an Angel, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the Amanda Knox story (in which she does not play Amanda Knox); Kids in Love, a coming-of-age story set in London; Tulip Fever, a period drama; London Fields, based on the Martin Amis novel; Pan, an origin story about Peter Pan and Captain Hook; Valerian, from the director Luc Besson; and the one that may turn her into a movie star, Paper Towns. The film tells the story of a pair of childhood friends living in the suburbs of Orlando, Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara) and Quentin “Q” Jacobsen (Nat Wolff, who played the lead character’s blind best friend in The Fault in Our Stars). Their paths diverged years earlier, when Margo ascended to queen of her high school’s popular crowd, but one night toward the end of their senior year, Margo climbs in through Q’s window and recruits him as her accomplice in a meticulously planned act of revenge—thrilling, dangerous, and romantic. The next day, she disappears, fueling the mystery at the film’s core. “People tell me I’m just like Margo,” Cara 31 says. “But as a seventeen-year-old I was nothing like her, so mischievous, so sure of herself. Her boyfriend cheats on her, and she screws up his little life. Maybe I’m more like her now.”

My agents told me what to do, and I did it,” Cara says of those early days. “When I got in trouble, they told me off. It was a machine that I wasn’t controlling.

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It took me a long time to accept the idea, until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognized that I had to accept it

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chreier, who previously directed the 2012 sci-fi film Robot & Frank, believes the character of Margo resonated with Cara instantly. “I had her improvise with Nat, who had already been cast, and it was gripping,” he remembers. “She won the part in the room that day.” Margo may bring to mind the sullen glamour of Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers, or the bewitched Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks; she is the reluctant goddess, a girl whose mythos drives her friends to set out in pursuit of her, only to learn at the end that the real Margo is someone quite different from the girl they’d imagined. Paper Towns is about how simultaneously oppressive and irresistible it can be to be the object of collective fantasy and projection. It’s hard to imagine anyone understanding that better than Cara Delevingne. “Somehow I was the only person on the face of the Earth who had never heard of Cara,” recalls Wolff, her costar. “Then she walked in and I said, ‘Hey, you’re on a billboard right outside my apartment.’ Cara has this rock-star quality, but there’s also a fragility to her. That’s what makes the best actors—they’re complicated.” When the camera wasn’t rolling, Cara cavorted in her generous fashion. One evening, she whisked a group of her castmates to a hotel suite at a water park. On another occasion, she recruited 30 extras to film a spontaneous response to the rapper A$AP Ferg’s viral video “Dope Walk” in between setups. “Being on set was like getting to relive school again, but happy,” Cara says. “Trying to be an adult and be mature for so long, I’d kind of forgotten how young I was.” Though she first took the stage in a preschool play, she doesn’t pretend to much in the way of technique. “I’m no Method actor. I’ve tried staying in character, and it’s just exhausting. But after playing Margo, I broke up with my boyfriend in a totally Margo way. I wrote him a letter and left. That wasn’t me, it was Margo.” Those who have been gathering the crumbs on Cara’s romantic trail may be confused about whether it’s men or women who excite her. She conveys a Millennial’s ennui at the expectation that she ought to settle upon a sexual orientation, and her 32

interests—video games, yes; manicures, no—might register as gender-defiant in the realm of dresses and heels. (“I’m a bro-ey chick,” says Cara.) As this story went to press, she was seriously involved with the singer Annie Clark, better known by her stage name, St. Vincent. “I think that being in love with my girlfriend is a big part of why I’m feeling so happy with who I am these days. And for those words to come out of my mouth is actually a miracle.” Cara says she felt confused by her sexuality as a child, and the possibility of being gay frightened her. “It took me a long time to accept the idea, until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognized that I had to accept it,” she explains. “But I have erotic dreams only about men. I had one two nights ago where I went up to a guy in the back of a VW minivan, with a bunch of his friends around him, and pretty much jumped him.” Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and they may be correct. “Women are what completely inspire me, and they have also been my downfall. I have only been hurt by women, my mother first of all. “The thing is,” she continues, “if I ever found a guy I could fall in love with, I’d want to marry him and have his children. And that scares me to death because I think I’m a whole bunch of crazy, and I always worry that a guy will walk away once he really, truly knows me.” When I suggest to Cara that to trust a man, she might have to revise an old and stubborn idea of hers—that women are perennially troubled and therefore only women will accept her—her smile says she concedes the point. It’s now past midnight. There are no photographers in sight, and indeed the only person who appears to recognize Cara in the amber light is the barmaid, who as we leave approaches to tell her she’s dropped something, then hands her a piece of crumpled paper and quickly disappears. Cara pulls it open to find a message—food? drink? party? call me—along with a phone number. And for the moment, she appears to be considering something other than beating her retreat. “You’ve got balls, babe,” Cara says at the prospect of another stranger, another puzzle. “Maybe that deserves a reward.”

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uality Why I Can’t Label My Sexual Orientation ANONYMOUS

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I am lesbian. I am Christian.

This may sound like an oxymoron, and thus you may empathize with how stressful it is to identify yourself as both. There’s this notion that because I’m one thing, I can’t be another. There’s no in between. No room to falter. When I started dating my first girlfriend, I didn’t want to label myself as “lesbian” because I was afraid. I was terrified of what being lesbian would mean in relation to my religion, worried about how my parents and friends would interpret my sexuality and scared of how drastically my life would change. So I spent years hiding in the dark, constricting closet I had shoved every important aspect of myself into – my values, my sexuality, my identity. Eventually, fear turned into frustration. It’s seven years later and I find myself resentful toward the limitations of our language, our culture and our practices. There are no words to accurately describe how I see myself because the only labels I know of are both paradoxical in nature. I’m either an “abomination” for liking women or I’m not “queer enough” because I believe in a supposedly spiteful God.

When people learn about one part of my identity, they automatically assume that the other doesn’t exist. And because of the way our society has traditionally defined those two terms, I become this anomaly that sometimes even I have trouble understanding. Language has been constructed to help people comprehend the world around them; it’s what allows us to communicate abstract ideas and concepts. Likewise, labels have been created to help people grasp who they are. But the problem is, there are a series of definitions, stereotypes and traditions that are too simple for something as complex as attraction. The understanding we’ve established around these labels – straight, lesbian, gay, bisexual–are constricting. This is shown in the very way that many people today find themselves more sexually fluid than they’re willing to admit. In a recent survey conducted by market research firm YouGov, British adults plotted themselves on the sexuality scale created by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. The data shows that while 89 percent of the participants describe themselves as heterosexual, “The results for 18-24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 35

Be strong, believe in freedom and in God, love yourself, understand your sexuality, have a sense of humor, masturbate, don’t judge people by their religion, colour or sexual habits, love life and your family

percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52 percent place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46 percent say they are completely heterosexual and 6 percent as completely homosexual.” Then, when Americans were asked to take the same test, YouGov found similar results. It turns out that 29 percent of adults under 30 put themselves in the “bisexual” category. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also conducted a similar survey, which found that 16 percent of American women and 5 percent of men under 45 didn’t want to say they were only attracted to one sex. Instead, the respondents admitted to being mostly attracted to one sex, equally attracted to both or unsure of their attraction. Essentially, people today are avoiding the extremes because they’re recognizing the limitations of traditional binaries. “I’m very upset that the English language does not allow me to accurately describe myself in some very important ways,” writes Dr. Joe Wenke, author of “The Human Agenda: Conversations about Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity,” on the Huffington Post. He then goes on to explain how he is attracted to transgender women, but doesn’t feel like “straight” or “gay” are adequate descriptions of his sexuality. “The truth is that language reflects cultural values, or perhaps I should say ‘cultural biases.’” Dr. Wenke explains. “[And] the lack of any word to describe sexual attraction to transgender people represents a refusal to grant integrity to transgender people or even to acknowledge that they exist.”

Although we have specific words to understand our identities, the definitions are restrictive. So, people like me prefer to forgo labeling themselves altogether. Because even when people do label themselves, there are still various stereotypes trying to invalidate their identity. For instance, being bisexual is often dismissed as some sort of transition phase for people who are confused or just biding their time until they make a “real choice.” Even in the queer community, Everyday Feminism explains that bisexual-identified people have to face the stigma that they “don’t exist,” “are just going through a phase,” “are sexually greedy” or “spread HIV and live for threesomes.” There is an ongoing erasure that bisexual people have to deal with and many of them are told that their sexuality “doesn’t exist” because “ultimately, you can test the waters, but you must pick a side.” So while our words like trans, lesbian, gay, intersex, genderqueer, nonbinary and pansexual can feel like salvation for some people, they’re still flawed, ever-evolving words. Our definitions of these terms need to change in order to include new discoveries along the way. I acknowledge, celebrate and stand with the generations of people that have fought for the right to claim these labels. But for me, I still can’t find the words to describe how I am both lesbian and Christian because the current definitions of the two refuse to acknowledge my existence. Right now, I’m hovering between both categories, torn by the idea that I have to choose one or the other. I shouldn’t have to legitimize my existence whenever I choose labels to identify with. Sexual orientation, sexual attraction and identity are complex and multifaceted. Our language needs to reflect that because I already do.

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