Sexuality, and the power of a celebrity crush.

Oh, celebrity crushes! Whether it is someone you’re willing to brag to your friends about or a guilty pleasure that you keep private, they’re great for the odd day-dream whereby you can pretend to be married to them, living the life of luxury.

As an example of one I was not afraid to brag about, I spent many years when I was younger imagining life as Emma Bunton (Baby Spice’s) husband. Not sure what I would’ve expected as a 9-10-year-old boy, but I remember very vividly having a huge crush on her. Being a very talkative child, it wasn’t a mystery to anyone that I really liked her.

Celebrity crushes are also great for understanding your sexuality, with some people finding out how they feel about certain people through the crushes they make. Whether this is at a young age or older, it takes just that special celebrity to awaken something inside you that helps you come to terms with who you are as a person. That is where my more prolific early celebrity crush comes into play. However, this wasn’t a celebrity crush that I was aware of at the time, instead it is one that I’m able to look back on now as a 26-year-old man, knowing more about how I felt as a young guy than I did in my teens.

Going back a whole decade to 2010; life is good, there is no virus keeping the world trapped in their homes, and I am a 16-year-old trying to navigate my way through high-school. Like many people in my year, I was obsessed with the latest young adult novels (I mean nothing has really changed there). One of these books was Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, along with all my friends, we binged the books and were very excited for the upcoming live-action adaption coming to the cinemas that year. As more information came out and my friends and I talked excitedly about the movie, I found myself becoming noticeably drawn to the person destined to play our eponymous hero, Percy, Logan Lerman. It was to be his breakout role that would propel him into the same stardom as the likes of the Harry Potter cast (we’ll ignore the actual movie itself for the sake of sanity and not wanting to get annoyed). However, I will continue to talk about how much I was infatuated with Mr. Logan.

At that age, obviously, with hormone going awry, things got overly complicated when it came to knowing what I was actually feeling for this person. Young me simply watched the movie with excitement and taking in one particular scene where Percy spends time under-water. Now, this is where I wish my young self knew what was actually going on, but I do remember having lustful feelings for him (that was a cringey way of explaining that), but then I was young, inexperienced, and uneducated on what was happening so I wasn’t aware that what was happening was a sexual awakening. If anything, I explained it away by thinking that every other guy my age who watched that movie simply had the same feelings for Logan as I did.

For me at the time, I would never admit that he was my celebrity crush in a serious way. If brought up, I’d laugh it off and say something along the lines of “if I was gay it would I’d fancy him” (oh how naive of young me).

As a much older and openly gay man, I’m able to look back, with some feelings of cringiness to how I was in the past, but entirely understand how I felt towards Logan Lerman. Even now as I write this, I can remember how flustered and weirdly happy I’d get when he was on screen or doing interviews, or even just bringing him up in conversation when we talked about the movie. I’d very gladly do that now, even though I’ve not seen him in a movie since The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Although, the recent pics of his silver and black hair, lord have mercy, he’s still super attractive to me.

With more emotional experience, I’m able to see that I was crushing hard, and the only real confusion came from not knowing that it was ok to have feelings towards a male celebrity as a man as much as it is for woman to have female celeb crushes.

Unfortunately for younger me, this was not a big profound moment in my teenage life where I came to terms with my blossoming sexuality. Instead my feelings towards Logan Lerman were suppressed and hidden away, only coming about when I was on my own to dwell in the confusion that it brought internally. That didn’t come about for another couple years (oh the drama of life as a young member of the LGBTQ+ community.

That being said, a couple years later once I’d come to terms with who I was and who I liked. I became a bit of an advocate for telling my friends to embrace their celeb crushes, both the known and the hidden. I would help to encourage them, especially the guys, to understand that a celeb crush isn’t a bad thing, even if there is nothing much to it. Just being able to say that you think someone of the same sex is aesthetically pleasing, is perfectly fine – nor does it define who you are, its just another person in the world who you’ve gone some sort of positive opinion towards.