This story is adapted from Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet As We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany.
Gabrielle Foster had been a fan of One Direction since she was 11 years old.
“We all come from different backgrounds. We all bond over Harry, but we don’t personally know what’s going on in each other’s lives,” she told me. “I just want there to be more representation for everybody.” Now in her early twenties, Foster is one of the better-known “Black Harries” on Twitter, as she was one of the first Black Harry Styles fans to organize efforts to win his public alliance with the Black Lives Matter movement.
This took a longer time than many people seem to remember. In the fall of 2017, a fan threw a Black Lives Matter flag onto the stage at a Styles concert in London, and Styles ignored it. His fan base was used to him accepting pride flags and dancing with them onstage, as well as giving an opening monologue about how much he valued the support of women. It didn’t seem like an accident that he’d left the flag on the floor, untouched, even as sections of the crowd were holding up Black Lives Matter signs. He was known for noticing things like that—he would often read off the signs in the audience and banter a bit with the people who had written odd ones. Many fans responded with anger. “Use your fucking platform,” one tweeted afterward. “You’re enabling hypocrisy.” Others were deeply hurt. “I love Harry, he’s my safest place, but I feel so disconnected, so unsupported,” another wrote. Some taunted him with a play on his own song lyrics, from the (horrible) song “Woman”: “You flower, you feast” became “You flower, you white feministe.”
Young people who were raised to understand network effects speak reflexively about the power that comes with having a lot of followers and a central cultural position, or a platform, which is not so much a stable object or trait but a privilege granted by interconnected groups of real people and should therefore be used judiciously. Black fans of Harry Styles were not arguing that he should support Black Lives Matter only because it would be personally affirming; they saw it as his moral responsibility as a person with a high public profile. But many white fans joined in the conversation only to suggest that Black fans were asking for too much, that Harry couldn’t support every political cause, and that a concert was not a protest. After the initial uproar, Styles posted a black-and-white photograph of some of the signs on his Instagram, captioned “Love.” To white fans, that gesture was supposed to be enough. In June 2018, when Gabrielle organized a huge showing of mass-printed paper signs at a show in Hershey, Pennsylvania, white fans tweeted at her about it in rude confusion. This was resolved already, wasn’t it?
“The projects we put on all through the tour, it started to feel hopeless at some point,” she told me. “It was a constant attack toward Black fans; we’re getting attacked and we can’t get the recognition from Harry.” Gabrielle went to a second concert, in Washington, DC, and splurged for a ticket in the standing-room pit at the edge of the stage. She brought a Black Lives Matter flag with her and planned to toss it up to Styles, to see if he would pick it up. “I was very hopeful,” she told me. “He was directly in front of me and he was talking to someone near me. I threw it at his feet, and he looked down at it, accidentally stepped on it, and walked away. So that kind of crushed me.” Her mood got worse when some of the girls in the crowd around her insisted that she had only herself to blame for the disappointment. She’d kept the flag crumpled up so he couldn’t see it the whole show, they told her, and then she got mad at him for not noticing it that one instant? She shot back that she’d held the flag open over the edge of the barricade for hours. The night was ruined, and she went home in a rage. “I was really upset in the moment,” she said. “I had a picture of him standing on the flag and I was so mad. I had even considered just unstanning completely because it was so awful. I went off the rails.”
After a long drive back to Virginia, she cooled down a bit and checked her Twitter messages. Many of her friends in Styles fandom had sent her clips of another Black Lives Matter flag on the Jumbotron at a different show, or of Styles holding the flag up in Boston, and one of him yelling, “I love every single one of you. If you are Black, if you are white . . . Whoever you are . . . I support you.” Eventually, she decided that Styles did care. But she never quite forgot that moment of despair. “I wish he had done something sooner,” she told me. “It still gets thrown in Black fans’ faces to this day by other fandoms. Well, your fave wouldn’t even hold the flag, or something like that.”
There is a term for the type of fan who will never criticize their fave, never hold them accountable for anything, and coddle them forever as if each day is freshly the day they were born. It’s “cupcake,” and the Harry Styles fandom has many of them. It also has what Black fans refer to as “KKK Harries”—white fans who refuse to cede any ground in the fandom and prefer to pretend they’re the only people there.
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When Harry Styles agreed to perform at a Super Bowl preshow in the midst of conversations about the NFL’s legacy of racism, Black fans were startled and tried to put pressure on him to change his plans with the hashtag #HarryBackOut. Supporting Black Lives Matter with a sticker was not enough, they argued, if it didn’t reflect a principled dedication to living those politics. Some white fans were annoyed too, but it seemed that most of their annoyance was directed at the fans who wanted to prevent them from enjoying a rare television performance by their favorite star. They offered “friendly” reminders that Styles is a singer, not a political activist. Black fans were asked to qualify and defend their desires over and over—they do love him, they don’t think he’s racist, they just want him to do better, maybe he’s not a political activist, but he is an adult man who is capable of processing information and altering his behavior, if he cares to. (The show was canceled due to inclement weather.) Many of them also wrote about how tiring it was to be a Black Harrie or a Black stan in general. “When you’re a fan of somebody and the fan base is mostly white, you might feel a little ostracized,” Ezz Mbamalu, a 23-year-old fan from North Carolina told me. “People try to get on you about Why do you listen to them? That’s not what Black people listen to. You get pushed down even more.”
Black Harries had a big moment when Styles released the single “Adore You” in 2019—it was an upbeat, charming love song with a lyric about “brown skin and lemon over ice.” These few words turned Twitter into a party, as Black fans were elated by what they viewed as much-delayed representation in Styles’ work. “THE BLACKS HAVE FINALLY WON!” Ezz tweeted, “ADORE YOU WAS WRITTEN ABOUT A BLACK WOMAN.” The celebration lasted all night, and for self-described “Harries of colour,” this event was “going in the history books.” But almost as soon as Black women started tweeting about the lyric, white fans were replying and subtweeting, suggesting that Styles could have just been talking about a woman with a tan. Or, after the release of the “Adore You” music video, which followed Styles as he cared for a large pet fish, that it could have referred to scales. “It’s like, let us enjoy one thing,” a Black Harrie named Elul Agoda told me. “He writes two words about us and that gets taken away from us too.”
Black fans sometimes abandon the main Twitter timeline when these types of dismissals happen and move to group chats for Black Harries only. There, they can organize to make themselves visible in the broader fandom in careful and coordinated ways, such as with the hashtag #BlackHarriesMatter. For several years, on the first of every month—in honor of Styles’ February 1 birthday—Black fans tweeted selfies in Harry Styles merch, or styled in a Harry Styles aesthetic, or just smiling, paired with the hashtag, so that their faces would take up space in the broader fandom’s timelines. The idea, Ezz told me, was to say, We’re here, we’re visible, we care about Harry, we’re not going to be pushed aside. “I think it’s cool to go into the hashtag and see other people who look like me, that have the same interest as me, which is Harry Styles,” she added. But even that effort has received pushback from white fans, some of whom will go so far as to comment things like “White Harries Matter Too,” while others mask their questions in politeness, saying they love the hashtag, the photos are gorgeous, but why is it important to say this?
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“It’s tiring,” Gabrielle Foster told me. “But it’s also like, we got to let it be known. Black Harries Matter.”
In August 2019, in his second Rolling Stone cover story, Styles told the journalist Rob Sheffield that he had struggled with Black Lives Matter because he hadn’t wanted people to feel like he was virtue signaling. He inched into participation by putting a BLM sticker on his guitar. “When I did it, I realized people got it,” he said. “Everyone in that room is on the same page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to say, ‘I see you.’”
Eventually he would be stirred to do more; he tweeted links to bail funds when demonstrators were arrested during the George Floyd protests, and participated in a Black Lives Matter march himself in Los Angeles. The Styles fandom organized itself to support the protests as well, in an assiduous way that reveals how fans have started to think about the relationship between their pop culture loyalties and their politics. Many removed his face from their avatars and replaced it with a Black Lives Matter fist. They canceled the #BlackHarriesMatter tag that June, and all other usual fandom activities, preferring to stay focused on helping protestors. When I spoke to Black fans during that time, they sounded energized—they were excited that K-pop fans were popping out in such numbers to support them, even though typically the two fandoms couldn’t possibly have less to do with each other. They were also relieved to see Styles participating, and glad that he had attended the protest without deliberately calling attention to himself over Black protestors themselves.
Activism in a fandom context has often been concerned with visibility. The causes tend to be identity-based, and the aim is often to win from the stars in question some explicit recognition that these identities exist within their audience, that they are important, and that both star and fan are aligned with a broader political movement related to this identity. But the choices that Styles fans made during the protests of 2020 reveal a shift or logical progression in this thinking. Fandom activism has been mostly visibility-based so far, but it could still be a precursor to something bigger: Visibility is a starting point for activism, and not its end goal. “Pop culture doesn’t really change the world,” the labor organizer Teo Bugbee wrote for SSENSE that summer. “It’s a product to be consumed, an indulgence. But the gift of pop is that it actualizes a fantasy: visions of a world that doesn’t yet and maybe won’t ever exist.” Harry Styles fans didn’t imagine that they would erase the structural problems of the societies they lived in by calling attention to themselves, or that being seen by people who like the same music as they did was overtly political. They just wanted to be respected for their dedication and to be seen for all the things they are other than fans of Harry Styles.
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Just as stereotypes can hurt all kinds of fans, elucidating the diversity of fandom can help all kinds of fans too. Jessica Pruett, a gender and sexuality studies scholar who completed a PhD in culture and theory at the University of California, Irvine, in 2021, wrote her master’s thesis on lesbian fans of One Direction. “Thinking about lesbian fandom of One Direction helps reframe how people think about One Direction fandom in general,” she told me. “It’s a lot more complicated and weird than people think it is. It’s not a straightforward thing of Oh, of course girls have crushes on the boys and that’s why they’re fans. It’s not just lesbian fandom that’s more complicated than that—it’s all fandom.” (She recommended a Tumblr account called 1Dgaymagines, which is short-form self-insert fanfiction for queer women fans of One Direction. Among the most recent stories on the blog: The boys of One Direction are your best friends and help you woo a sexy vampire who lives in a castle on a hill; Harry Styles asks you to decide who to let into the Met Gala; you start a community garden.)
When the goal is visibility within a fandom, the external result is clarification: If Black women love One Direction too, then this is not just a white cultural artifact; if queer fans love them, then this is not just a cheap ploy to exploit heterosexual teenage hormones; if adults love them, then this is not just a phase that a person eventually grows out of. When the goal is to use a fandom’s numbers and organizational capabilities to lift a political cause, the external result is also a clarification, one more like an adjustment of a lens that brings something into clearer view: Selecting a pop star to love was never a political tactic, but an expression of optimism that anyone can be changed. To hope that Niall Horan deeply cares about my rights is to hope that the other men I love do. To expect that Liam Payne understands why there are so many rainbow flags in the crowd is to believe that anyone should. To want Harry Styles to wave a Black Lives Matter flag onstage is to believe that the world is shifting, and to ask him to do it is to insist on it. We don’t need to be told that these men are more a reflection of us than we are of them.
Excerpted from Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany. Published by MCD × FSG Originals. Copyright © 2022 by Kaitlyn Tiffany. All rights reserved.