celebrity

Kendall Jenner says she knows why people think she's gay. And her response is spectacular.

Reading the latest profile of Kendall Jenner, 22-year-old fashion model and heiress to the Kardashian family empire, you are persuaded of her groundedness.

Impressed, even.

If a 3500-word Vogue profile is anything to go by (which it likely is) – 22-year-old Jenner isn’t who we, the mere mortals who don’t have our own reality TV shows, expect her to be.

And this is never more the case than when she answers Jonathan Van Meter’s question about rumours that she is gay.

“Why, I wonder, does the internet seem to think you’re gay?” the journalist asks.

He is referencing the response on Twitter when Jenner’s sister Kylie announced her daughter’s birth on February 4 after a tremendously private pregnancy… The online reaction had not much to do with the baby, and everything to do with Jenner’s apparent lesbian status.

Jenner responds: “I think it’s because I’m not like all my other sisters, who are like, ‘Here’s me and my boyfriend!’ So it was a thing for a minute because no one ever saw me with a guy.

“I would always go that extra mile to be low-key with guys, sneaking around all the time. You don’t want to, like, look crazy.

“I don’t think I have a bisexual or gay bone in my body, but I don’t know! Who knows?! I’m all down for experience — not against it whatsoever — but I’ve never been there before.”

And just like that, Jenner shames the world for putting her in a box with her sisters and thinking:

ADVERTISEMENT

If she’s not the same in parading through lovers having children in a way that’s fodder for tabloids and fuelled by speculation, there must be a reason.

Fair, certainly. But the indirect message from Jenner is more powerful.

Khloe Kardashian wants us all to look as thin as possible in selfies, and we say bollocks to that. The Mamamia Out Loud team discuss. Post continues after. 

She is calling out the world for cultivating a stereotype where there should really be none. For equating her desire for privacy with having something to ‘hide’, and then believing that ‘something to hide’ is homosexuality.

It’s a tired way of thinking that surely should have expired before same-sex marriage was made legal (which it is in the US and now, thankfully, Australia) and long, long before a 2018 profile on a woman aged 22.

“I’m not gay,” Jenner adds. “I have literally nothing to hide.”

And then the kicker: “I would never hide something like that.”

Thank you, Kendall Jenner. For proving that you can be different to your sisters, without needing an explanation.

And for showing the world, one more time, the want for privacy is not the trademark, nor the requirement, for being a lesbian.

00:00 / ???