I initially thought about this, but I kind of shied away from saying anything because, well, I don't want to speculate too much about Andy and what or whom he finds attractive, and he may very well be into older women, etc, we really have more way of knowing.
I will say that I agree with this post, even if he is being completely honest and these really are his top celebrity crushes I think that him going out of his way to post this publicly is extremely performative.
Andy is neck-deep in social justice Twitter. Knowing that Twitter is a snakepit that awakens and unfurls and ruins your life when you phrase something incorrectly, it's pretty safe to assume that anyone who is posting anything even vaguely social justice-y (or runs in those circles) is going to double and triple check their wording to ensure that it's appropriately phrased and won't be misconstrued before they hit the "post" button. The contextless nature of retweets - where your post may be shared around without all the other posts that came before and after it - also means that people have to be careful about each tweet potentially standing alone and representing them to a huge collective that is hungry to jump on imperfections.
So, while I don't think Andy is arranging and orchestrating his tweets any more meticulously than the typical social justice Twitter person, and that "performativity" is pretty much the defining word of social media, I do think that our collective knowledge of Andy's motives makes this post suspicious for reasons beyond the obvious lie about Ian McKellen. Most of Andy's tweets are of the "I'm just a STRAIGHT WHITE MAN but [proceeds to angrily scold no one in particular], sincerely, your friendly neighborhood STRAIGHT WHITE MAN" variety or the "how dare you say that [inflammatory thing] when even I, a straight white man, knows that [social justice supernova]" ilk. I think that this tweet, though, in its apparent lightheartedness, conforms to that "hypnotic" writerly style that TB and KQ have pointed out numerous times: he top-loads the tweet hard, so that the lie comes off as a humble afterthought, and what emerges is an ideal portrait of Andy. It's not really about who Andy is sexually attracted TO, but about how sexually attractive Andy IS. He opens with a sensitive variant on "no homo", lulls his reader into complacency with his politically perfect rainbow of bangable female celebrities, and only then drops his idiotic lie. And he even covers over that with a "and I considered it!" conclusion, which again drives home the fact that he is the ideal straight dude: appealing in a queer kind of way, cool and self-aware enough to flirt with an impish old gay man, and resolutely super heterosexual. He's a class act. Ladies, he'll even still want to have sex with you when you're old!
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Re: That time that Ian McKellen hit on Andy
(Anonymous) 2021-07-07 08:56 am (UTC)(link)I will say that I agree with this post, even if he is being completely honest and these really are his top celebrity crushes I think that him going out of his way to post this publicly is extremely performative.
Re: That time that Ian McKellen hit on Andy
(Anonymous) 2021-07-07 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)So, while I don't think Andy is arranging and orchestrating his tweets any more meticulously than the typical social justice Twitter person, and that "performativity" is pretty much the defining word of social media, I do think that our collective knowledge of Andy's motives makes this post suspicious for reasons beyond the obvious lie about Ian McKellen. Most of Andy's tweets are of the "I'm just a STRAIGHT WHITE MAN but [proceeds to angrily scold no one in particular], sincerely, your friendly neighborhood STRAIGHT WHITE MAN" variety or the "how dare you say that [inflammatory thing] when even I, a straight white man, knows that [social justice supernova]" ilk. I think that this tweet, though, in its apparent lightheartedness, conforms to that "hypnotic" writerly style that TB and KQ have pointed out numerous times: he top-loads the tweet hard, so that the lie comes off as a humble afterthought, and what emerges is an ideal portrait of Andy. It's not really about who Andy is sexually attracted TO, but about how sexually attractive Andy IS. He opens with a sensitive variant on "no homo", lulls his reader into complacency with his politically perfect rainbow of bangable female celebrities, and only then drops his idiotic lie. And he even covers over that with a "and I considered it!" conclusion, which again drives home the fact that he is the ideal straight dude: appealing in a queer kind of way, cool and self-aware enough to flirt with an impish old gay man, and resolutely super heterosexual. He's a class act. Ladies, he'll even still want to have sex with you when you're old!