No, Tyler Posey Did Not Just Come Out As Gay On Snapchat, And That’s A Problem
As much as I don’t want to call out Tyler Posey for his fake “coming out” moment on Snapchat early Friday night, I realize that I have to. Not just because of that particular moment, mind you, but due to multiple problematic, queer-baiting actions that he and several other cast members of his soon-to-cease MTV series, Teen Wolf, have performed in the past (yes, dedicated Teen Wolf viewers — we’re going to touch on “Sterek” here. You’ve been warned. To everyone else, read on for a proper definition and a longer explanation).
Before we get to all of that, however, we need to start with this latest incident. Posey, who portrays the titular Teen Wolf on the series, Scott McCall, recently shared the following moment with his Snapchat audience.
To most who viewed that, the thought of Posey playing for the “other team” was an ultimate grand slam. Not only would such an admission pretty much make him a major face for the young Hollywood LGBT community (sorry, Noah Galvin of The Real O’Neals, but you’re not there yet), but it would’ve been the third player from the Teen Wolf cast — the other two being Colton Haynes, who departed the series in 2012, and came out as gay in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in May 2016, and Charlie Carver, who preceded him in January via Instagram — to publicly address and own his queerness with the world.
Alas, as you have probably guessed now, it was not meant to be. Immediately after that Snap, Posey posted another video where he likened himself to a light fixture and proved that his “coming out” was simply done for laughs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr6HyGuVvrM
To back his play and this truth, fellow Teen Wolf star Cody Christian shared the following post on his Instagram (forgive the Tumblr post, folks; it seems as if he’s already deleted his response to Tyler’s tomfoolery).
Luckily for Christian, nobody has time for him right now (seriously, who is he?), but when it comes to Tyler, I’ve definitely got more than enough of it — time, that is — to let him know just how tiring it is that he and his Teen Wolf buddies continue to play with all thing gay in a repeatedly crass way (I didn’t mean for that to rhyme, but I like it, so I’ll leave it be).
Allow me, if you will, to take it back to that mention of the term “Sterek” that I brought up at the beginning of this piece. For those who aren’t familiar with that amalgamated phrase, “Sterek” is the romanticized shortening of two characters from Teen Wolf: the manic Stiles Stilinski, played by Dylan O’Brien, and werewolf-with-a-heart-of-gold Derek Hale, who was portrayed by Tyler Hoechlin, until his departure in Season 4. The thing is, unlike certain celebrity couples whose monikers were combined for easier tabloid reader digestion — “Bennifer,” “Kimye,” “Brangelina,” “Bennifer 2.0,” etc. — Stiles and Derek were never actually together, because neither character is gay (the show did toy with the idea of a bisexual Stiles for a time, but they never followed through).
For example, to get fans to vote for the show at the 2012 Teen Choice Awards, Dylan and Tyler participated in a promo video that saw them sweetly and literally sleeping with each other, while on a ship (there’s a double entendre attached here, as “Sterek” is something that fans “ship,” meaning that they want to see the two in a relationship).
It was an obvious gay pandering push. but one of many that most LGBT fans of Teen Wolf had allowed to slide since the show’s debut in 2011. That is, until Posey condemned the idea of “Sterek” in an on-air interview with Hollywood Life in 2014.
“I think Sterek is a bizarre, weird, twisted thing,” Posey stated, “and I think that anyone who pays more attention to Sterek than the show isn’t watching [Teen Wolf] for the right reasons.”
To this day, Posey has never even started to open his mouth to apologize for that crude comment (especially to all of the “Sterek” lovers who were harmless in their actions) but at the very least, we can somewhat understand that his opinion was meant tied to the narrative of a fictional television show. This Snapchat joke, however, totally falls in the realm of real life and never should’ve even been thought about, much less carried out, for the sake of a laugh. It’s just another, “ha, ha, gay people are so funny, y’all!” moment that shouldn’t fly in 2016, or any other year under any circumstance, especially when you tack on the fact that Tyler Posey’s boss is a gay man, and two of his former co-stars/current close friends are gay, too. He should know better, simple as that.
Of course, the half-apology will come at that point in the near future, and everyone will forget about this long enough to let the final season of Teen Wolf, which was noted by the Inquisitr, go on without a hitch. However, it just sucks to think that Tyler Posey, an actor that plays a hero of sorts, has reaffirmed that there is no perfect scope of a supposed LGBT ally. Yes, it’s a harsh connotation; one that some will surely say that Posey is undeserving of, but tell that to the still-closeted kid who just saw his favorite actor making a mockery of coming out. It just got a little harder for him, thanks to Tyler.
[Photo by Dave Mangels/Getty Images]
