Chappell Roan Says She's Voting for Harris After Online Furor
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Update 9/25/2024: In a series of TikToks posted to her account, Chappell Roan weighed in on the viral discourse around her refusal to endorse a presidential candidate, saying her quotes were taken out of context. Roan said she would be voting for VP Kamala Harris but added that she's “not settling for what we've been offered,” detailing subjects she feels the Democrats have been inadequate on, including trans rights and Palestine. In the latter of the two TikToks, Roan mispronounced Harris's first name (which, in Harris's own words, is pronounced “comma-la”).
As summer turns into fall, the internet continues to mercilessly go after Chappell Roan, despite her repeated requests to respect her boundaries, not kiss her on the mouth when she’s out in public, and not stalk her and her family. Roan has also been public about her mental health struggles, most recently disclosing a “severe depression” diagnosis in a new interview with the Guardian last week. The singer is now being subject to a fresh wave of scrutiny after that interview, in which Roan stated:
“I have so many issues with our government in every way. There are so many things that I would want to change. So I don’t feel pressured to endorse someone. There’s problems on both sides. I encourage people to use your critical thinking skills, use your vote — vote small, vote for what’s going on in your city.”
A post on X from Pop Flop pulling this quote out of the article — as Pop Crave-style news aggregation accounts are wont to do, to bait engagement — led to yet another online skewering of Roan.
“How are you queer, an ardent defender of the drag community and somehow a ‘both sides are bad’ person?” asked one post, with over 90,000 likes at time of writing. “The same people giving Chappell the benefit of the doubt and not attacking her character for her ‘neutral’ stance in this very crucial US election were crucifying Taylor for greeting [Brittany Mahomes] at an event and not providing an endorsement on their chosen timeline. got it,” wrote another user.
Except that’s not at all what’s happening. First, she’s talking specifically about the act of endorsing a candidate — a pressure we put on celebrities in the U.S. for some reason — and why she might not want to go full throttle stumping for any politician; she’s not discouraging voting, or even specifically discouraging voting for Kamala Harris.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Roan is far from neutral. In that same paragraph of the Guardian piece, she follows up that she’s especially concerned about trans rights, saying, “They cannot have cis people making decisions for trans people, period.” (Tell ‘em, bestie.) She isn’t saying both sides are identical, she’s identifying issues with the policies of the Biden-Harris administration — policies that Vice President Kamala Harris has insisted she doesn’t want to change on the campaign trail.
Like many people in her age group, Roan has specifically taken issue with U.S. involvement in Israel’s assault on Palestine, a subject she discussed in the Guardian interview as well as others (Roan’s politics don’t exist in a single-interview vacuum). In a late August interview with CNN, VP Harris stated, “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” then reiterated her support for Biden’s existing proposal for a ceasefire and two-state solution, declining to differentiate herself. In her Rolling Stone cover story, Roan described debating whether to take an invite from the White House to perform at a Pride celebration. While she considered doing so specifically to protest the administration’s conduct in Gaza, she ultimately passed after saying she’d been warned by her management that the move might impact her safety.
“I think chappell being told by her team her safety would be at risk if she read a poem for palestine at the white house under a democratic term is a valid reason for her to feel like there's problems on both sides, no? [sic]” tweeted TikToker Blizzy McGuire in response to the viral Pop Flop tweet.
And without getting too deep into the Taylor Swift of it all, it’s patently ridiculous to act like a billionaire artist who stayed silent about politics for years into her much longer successful career is at all comparable to a queer person straight-up telling people to vote locally and stating her actual values within six months of becoming an international household name. But anyway!
Much of this discourse has surrounded Roan being a publicly proud queer artist, the implication being that this election is a choice between voting for protections for LBGTQ+ rights or opting out of voting over Palestine. Not only is this a false dichotomy, it also misses Chappell’s correct point, which is that these struggles will continue to be just that — struggles — under Trump or Harris. It is certainly true that Republicans have championed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation; it is also true that, as organizer and journalist Raquel Willis recently told Teen Vogue at the Gender Liberation March: “We [LGBTQ+ people] are being failed across the political spectrum. We just saw at the Democratic National Convention very minimal mention of transgender people, and definitely no direct mentions of the attacks happening across the country.”
Roan is very aware of this. In that Rolling Stone interview, she mentioned the Biden administration’s June statement against youth gender-affirming care, a statement they walked back the next month after massive blowback. Part of what Chappell, Willis, and others are criticizing is the expectation that, as Judith Butler put it to me earlier this year, the Democrats “think we're in [their] pocket” — the “we” being LGBTQ+ people.
What Roan is seemingly trying to say, looking at the context of the interviews she’s given and the ways she has conducted herself over the past couple years of burgeoning fame, is that she is not a single-issue voter, unless that issue is, as she said on stage at Governor’s Ball as her ascent really took off, “liberty, justice, and freedom for all.” For all — not just LGBTQ+ people, or just Palestinians, or on and on. Everyone’s freedom intersects and intertwines, and Roan is unwilling to use her platform to sell out any one marginalized identity just to throw her name in for a presidential candidate.
The reaction to Roan’s commitment to protecting herself, learned after getting dropped from her label during the pandemic, says more about fandom culture than it does her, as Vox’s Aja Romano argued. This conversation keeps the fixation on celebrity political endorsements instead of the progressive policy commitments many young people would like to see from the Harris campaign. On climate change, Harris has doubled down on her support for fracking; on immigration, Harris proposed harsher border policy; on, again, LGBTQ+ rights, Harris has largely dodged the subject on the national stage — instead proffering TikToks, “brat” memes, and a ripoff of Chappell’s merch.
Cyberbullying Chappell Roan for genuinely caring about the issues is not the political activism you think it is, especially when you’re doing so in defense of a candidate who is still actively in the process of fighting for your vote. You all sound absurd. Wake up and pay attention to the actual political process; you might learn something.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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