Is Shawn Mendes gay? Discourse on singer's sexuality may stop as he's seemingly dating Jocelyn Miranda
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Months after his breakup with Canadian singer Camila Cabello, singer Shawn Mendes has the gossip mills running rumors about him dating Dr Jocelyn Miranda, his 51-year-old chiropractor after the two were spotted together on several occasions in the past few weeks. Mendes, 24, has reportedly known Jocelyn for quite a few years now.
Mendes and Cabello began dating in 2019 and were soon one of pop music's most talked about couples. The two had reportedly met at an Austin Mahone tour in 2014 where they performed as the opening acts. Rumors about the two dating started in 2015 after they released the song 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'. The couple broke up in 2021. However, even while they were dating, several rumors about the possibility of Mendes being gay had become a sensation online, so much so that it started affecting Mendes' mental health.
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Is Shawn Mendes gay?
Mendes identifies himself as straight, however, his sexuality has been a hot topic of discussion within the queer community for several years. His breakup with Camila in 2021 led to an online meme fest with Google searches for “Shawn Mendes gay” hitting a three-year peak in November 2021. Rumors about Mendes' sexuality had started around 2014 with netizens taking to his YouTube channel to express how they felt he had a 'gay vibe'. For a while, the singer left the comments unaddressed, but as they started flooding in with more people discussing his sexuality, he posted a Snapchat story saying, “It shouldn’t make a difference if I was or I wasn’t (gay). The focus should be on my music, not on my sexuality...I’m frustrated because, in this day and age, people have the audacity to write online that I’m gay as if it were a bad thing."
Later, in an interview with Dax Shepard on his podcast 'Armchair Expert,' Mendes revealed that people have been calling him gay since he was 15. "It was so, so frustrating for me because there were some people in my life that I was very, very close to... who were gay and in the closet," Mendes told Shepard in the December 2020 podcast. He was still dating Camila at the time. In the same podcast, he used the platform to clarify that he is not gay, and it is difficult for him to understand how he could react to people making such comments. "You want to say, 'I'm not gay but it'd be fine if I was gay. But also, there's nothing wrong with being gay but I'm not.' You don't really know how to respond to the situation," he said.
However, after his 2021 breakup, the rumor mills churned again and Mendes' sexuality became a topic of discussion across queer communities. Now that he is seemingly in a straight relationship, one can expect the rumors to subside; however, given what Mendes faced in the past, he might have to make a special assertion to stop people from assuming him to be gay.