Is Pete Wentz The New Straight?

A recent issue of OUT Magazine features a sultry Pete Wentz on the cover with bright red letters and quotes “Yeah, I am a fag.” Setting the record straight from the outset…Pete Wentz is not gay.

The full quote from which the issue-selling clip was snipped is this:
“There is a sense of self-empowerment or recapturing who you are by people calling you ‘fag’ and being like ‘Yeah, I am a fag.’ Even though you’re not.”

The article, subtitled on the cover “Pete Wentz’s Gay Circus Act” and a similar article in the Advocate about a year ago heroically try to out Pete Wentz - the lyricist and bassist for the immensely popular band Fall Out Boy. Those articles are joined by about a thousand blogs and a few hundred YouTube artists conjecturing that Wentz is gay and in a relationship with either Fall Out Boy lead singer Patrick Stump or Panic At The Disco (a band Wentz signed to his own label) lead singer Ryan Ross.

The authors ramble on about Wentz’s gay stylist, his hero Andy Warhol and the photos circulating on the web of Wentz posing naked in front of a life-size poster of Morrissey.

But here’s the deal. Pete Wentz is straight. He’s married to Ashlee Simpson and reportedly expecting a child. In both interviews (given to gay magazines,) Wentz claims that he just doesn’t like penises. Finds them ugly, in fact.

So, let’s drop the circus act and figure out what Pete Wentz really is to us in the gay community.

Pete Wentz is an advocate for us. He is famous for interjecting a speech between songs at Fall Out Boy concerts in which he seriously admonishes the use of the word “gay” as a synonym for “shitty.” Big advocacy, you say sarcastically? Considering that Fall Out Boy concerts are mostly attended by “teenage girls and dudes who like mosh pits and teenage girls” (think high school or college age male perpetually in gym shorts and a white cap backwards on his head,) it is kinda big.

Wentz told OUT Magazine “whenever you say homophobia is stupid, you just get called gay. Homophobia is the last accepted hatred.” Wentz writes about this on his blog to the point of weariness. Perhaps to our occasional dismay, Wentz counters the homophobia and the reaction to the fact that he (gasp) opposes it by “fucking with people’s minds” about his own sexual identity. He rarely misses the opportunity to let slip a bomb of a quote, including joking that he likes to parade around the house in wife Ashlee’s line of three-inch high heels.

Is this helping the gay community? Pete Wentz is, by his own admission, a fierce warrior against homophobia. He is the undisputed leader of a band that is exceedinlgy popular among young straight people - a battleground demographic in the fight against homophobia. His strategy is to, well basically, act gay to prove the point that we should celebrate what makes us different, not make fun of it. If someone calls you a fag or any other derogatory name and you respond with “yeah, I am” it completely diffuses the insult in such a way to make a fool of the insult’s originator.

If you happen to also be famous, what this means, of course, is that you might have to sort of clear the record about your true sexual identity from time to time. Pete Wentz does that in interviews with gay magazines (Advocate 2007 and OUT 2008.) Even then, he admits to a “big stupid crush on John Mayer” who is famous for dating his sister in law. Is that just to throw us off or is it, as he puts it, because “we’re, like, all gay. Kind of?”

Is this a circus act? No. Pete Wentz is the new straight. Although undoubtedly a pioneer, Wentz is the result of years of hard work to point our culture toward acceptance of sexual minorities. He is the result of the achievements, especially in the music industry, of thousands of talented gay artists - who Wentz regularly claims as inspiration.

He is the new straight. The one who just laughs and says homophobia is “fuckin’ stupid.” The one who acts the way he wants to act and won’t take any shit for it. The one who got his Baptist minister father in law to suggest that they release a photo of the two of them holding hands in front of the Christmas tree. That was a response to tabloid rumours that his father in law opposed the marriage to his daughter on the grounds that Wentz might be bisexual.

The one who is so straight, yet so flamboyantly ambiguous at the same time, that homophobia just kinda seems like a joke told by a fourth-grader.

Pete Wentz is the new straight and that’s a good thing. Maybe the very magazine where he explains all of this could come up with something a little better than calling it a “circus act.”

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