Larrie is a Conspiracy Theory
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you... prove she wasn’t pregnant?
What do you get when you drop a lesbian going to uni for media studies who used to be obsessed with One Direction and Larry into a global pandemic? You get someone falling down a rabbit hole about Larrie conspiracy theories and somehow writing a 5,000+ words opinion piece on it. Well. Here we are, then.
A huge thanks goes out to @shit-larries-say, @cantquitu and @back-to-louis for pointing me towards resources and blogs to find examples; particularly the blogs @lrambling and @thelarrative were a huge help to me. And also an honorable mention to @portraitofalarryonfire whose blog I have been reading A LOT during the past couple weeks and who was one of the reasons why I decided to make this side-blog and start writing this essay in the first place.
Before I begin, I want to let you know that English is not my native language, and while I am fairly confident in my English abilities, that means I might make mistakes or not pick up on/misinterpret some things. If that is the case, please let me know.
I also want to preface this by saying that I was only an active larrie from early 2015 until mid-2016. After that, I still mostly believed what I had internalized, but didn’t take part in active shipping anymore; it was only in late 2020 after I had re-entered the fandom a couple months ago that I really examined my beliefs and came to the conclusions I believe in now. I was involved in some “drama” back in 2015/16, especially surrounding babygate (by which I mean I made a couple of really stupid posts trying to prove that Briana was carrying an empty baby carrier around and got called out for it lol), and I believe I still have quite a good grasp on how this fandom operates based on that and what I see on people’s blogs and in the tags now. However, this obviously means that my take on in-fandom things will not be 100% correct and I don’t claim to be objectively correct on anything; but I believe you don’t need an in-depth understanding of the fandom and all its intricacies to be able to see the problems with it.
Because using a direct source is always easier/more comprehensible in my opinion than simply rattling on about stuff I’ve read, I’ve decided to go off of statements that were put together by people who are way smarter than me and who literally do this for a living. The main information I’ll be using comes directly from the site Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories in Europe, an EU-backed project investigating conspiracy theories. This is a quote from their page, explaining what they do:
COMPACT [Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories] is a network of academic researchers investigating conspiracy theories from a variety of perspectives. Funded by COST (EU Cooperation in Science and Technology), it has brought together 150 scholars from 35 countries across Europe to share ideas and collaborate on research projects.
Now, people are always quick to cry foul on any and all comparisons that are made between Larrie and other, more insidious conspiracy theories like QAnon, and I don’t intend to compare them directly. However, I do believe that there is merit in explaining why these movements and pretty much all conspiracy theories in general operate on a similar groundwork, and perhaps show why simply describing larries as “some fans who believe two boyband members are secretly dating” is at best downplaying the issue and at worst deliberately misleading and actively harmful to the larger discussion that needs to be had.
COMPACT has released a comprehensive guide to conspiracy theories that’s free to download here. I will be putting up quotes taken directly from the document, but I encourage you to take a look at it yourself and make sure I’m not misrepresenting anything.
1. Understanding conspiracy theories
[...]
1.1 What is a conspiracy theory?
Conspiracy theories assume that nothing happens by accident, that nothing is as it seems, and that everything is connected. In other words, they claim that a group of evil agents, the conspirators, is secretly orchestrating everything that happens. [...] They claim that you need to look beneath the surface to detect the actions and intentions of the conspirators, who make great efforts to hide their wicked purposes.
Now, of course Larrie is on a much smaller scale than, say, QAnon or 9/11, so the belief that everything is connected is obviously limited to things that happen regarding Louis and Harry, sometimes regarding the music industry in general, instead of politics or the entire world. Reading this paragraph, it’s pretty obvious that larries’ line of thinking is exactly what is being presented here: nothing that Harry and Louis ever do or say is by accident or coincidental, everything has a purpose and everything they do is connected to each other and to the Larrie conspiracy, be that wearing a shirt or pants, reacting a certain way to something, wording things a certain way in person or in tweets. The “group of evil agents”, depending on where you look that can be Modest, Sony, Simon Cowell or Jeff Azoff and their respective cohorts, the music industry in general, or generally the mysterious, all-encompassing “powers that be” that have conspired to keep these boys in the closet.
Conspiracy theories also usually see themselves as subverting received opinion. The assumption is that if you dig deep enough, you will find hidden connections between people, institutions and events that explain what is really going on. These assumptions put conspiracy theories at odds with the modern social sciences which stress the importance of coincidence, contingency and unintended consequences. [...]
This one is pretty obvious as well: the general public, other 1D fans who don’t ship Larry or believe in the conspiracy theory, all these people don’t know “the truth”, because they take what is being said and shown to them by the actors involved at face value and don’t dig deeper. The only people who are “in the know”, the only people who know what’s really going on are the ones who do dig deeper, who do their research to see that everything is actually connected. I don’t have any data or reliable information about this, but I feel like Larrie has also, in a way, lowered the bar for other conspiracy theories within the fandom to take hold. There are people who genuinely believe that Liam’s baby isn’t real, that Zayn’s baby isn’t real, that Louis is gay and closeted independently of Larrie, all these things that are or have the potential to be just as harmful as Larrie, the only difference being that they are on a much smaller scale. Again, I don’t actually know if this is true, but I personally don’t believe that people would even have taken a second look at Zayn and Gigi’s pregnancy announcement if larries hadn’t set a precedent for this kind of invasive speculation to be acceptable.
But back to the conspiracy theory at hand. The last sentence of the quote above is of particular interest to me: “coincidence, contingency and unintended consequences” are generally more important in academic discourse than the idea of an all-powerful entity controlling everything. What this means is basically Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation. It is far more likely that things line up coincidentally or that people don’t put that many thoughts into how they say things or don’t think twice about wearing specific clothes, than everything being part of this huge conspiracy.
For example, what sounds like the easier explanation: that the rainbow bears were a complex ploy created by two incredibly busy boyband members to secretly communicate with their fans that would have taken a lot of time and planning out of their day for research and putting things together, sometimes not even being in the same place as the bears, apparently without anyone of the almighty “powers that be” noticing and putting a stop to it? Or that a crew member just decided to have a bit of fun and mess with the fans, without intending it to be taken so seriously? The only explanations larries accept as the truth include the people involved jumping through a bunch of hoops and rely on ridiculous, unprecedented oppressive contracts and a huge number of people being kept quiet about these contracts. Does that sound very likely, just objectively?
However, conspiracy theories usually do not spring from nowhere. Often they are responses – albeit simplified and distorted – to genuine problems and anxieties in society.
This is a point I particularly want to emphasize: while accusations of straight women fetishizing gay men and relying on outdated stereotypes definitely ring true in certain parts of the fandom, I know that a lot of people, especially younger ones, genuinely believe they are helping two closeted individuals trapped in an oppressive, homophobic system. Homophobia and closeting in the music and entertainment industry are real issues, and it’s important to talk about them and listen to affected people’s stories. Unfortunately, although social media might paint a different picture, the world is still pretty homophobic overall.
Things become questionable when people take these genuine problems and use them as groundwork to spin a narrative the way larries are doing. In using the fact that these issues exist as evidence or excuses for their behavior, larries, intentionally or unintentionally, ignore and obscure the realities that surround them, showing that they’re not really interested in talking about and supporting these people in their struggles, but instead co-opting their stories as nothing more but “proof” that their own beliefs are correct. It doesn’t matter that generally, celebrities who speak about their sexuality-related struggles (Lance Bass, George Shelley, Matt Bomer, Olly Alexander, Raven-Symone, Parson James, Ezra Miller and so many others) talk about being pressured or encouraged, not contractually forced, to stay in the closet. It doesn’t matter that “closeting contracts” are virtually unheard of. It doesn’t matter that if One Direction’s management had tried to closet them via something like that, they could have taken it to a tribunal under the UK Equality Act for employer discrimination due to sexual orientation, even if they had shrouded it in evasive language and morality clauses. It doesn’t matter that while things like movie studios closeting actors might have happened in the past, we do live in different times now and in a lot of cases, celebrities coming out of the closet doesn’t affect their careers as negatively as it would have a couple of decades ago, so much so that there are a lot of artists who explicitly build their image around being queer and appealing to a queer audience. It doesn’t matter that a case where a gay celebrity was forced to pretend to have a child to hide their sexuality has literally never happened.
Even larries’ concept of beards as “women being hired by a company to play pretend-girlfriends to a client” isn’t really perpetuated in any space outside of the fandom. Larries ignore that, historically, people who were beards either didn’t know that their partner was gay or agreed to do it voluntarily as a friendly favor or as a mutually beneficial closeting situation. They ignore that something like babygate and vigorous closeting would never hold any ground in a court setting, they ignore that both Harry and Louis are literally multi-millionaires who would most definitely have the means to get out of such an oppressive contract, just like other bands have done in the past. They ignore these things or try to explain them away, because Larrie is a story to them, it’s fiction about fordbidden love, and to a degree it’s almost tragedy porn. They need the fictional people they’re fighting for to suffer in order to feel like the heroes of the story, and they can only suffer if larries ignore reality.
[...]
1.4. How do conspiracy theories work?
Since they assume that nothing happens by accident, conspiracy theorists usually ask, “Who benefits?” from a particular event, such as 9/11, or development, such as the refugee crisis. A conspiracy theory often makes the leap from the idea that a particular group might have benefited from an action to claiming that group must have secretly planned to bring it about.
It is not wrong to assume (in fact, it’s been proven) that 1D’s management deliberately fabricated a certain image for all the boys in the band to market them to the broadest possible audience. It is also correct that part of that image was that all of them were portrayed as strictly heterosexual, in order to market them specifically to young, presumably heterosexual teenage girls. A very interesting paper I would recommend on the subject is One Direction and the Marketing Machine (be warned: it’s very long), especially if you want to know more about Emotional Marketing and such. There is also nothing wrong per se with looking at how Harry and Louis behaved around each other back in the day and think “Hey, they seem pretty close, I wonder if they might be secretly dating.” However, combining all of these things into “Harry and Louis might be secretly dating and their management wants to market them to heterosexual girls, so therefore they are oppressing them into staying hidden and doing everything in their power to keep it that way” without real, concrete evidence is.... a jump at best.
Taking that already unsupported claim and extrapolating from it “Harry and Louis are being oppressed by their homophobic management against their will and because of that they need me to uncover the truth and connect all the clues that they’re leaving me so that one day, they can finally be free” is even more out of left field. Because of this belief, Larrie is often turned into an almost moral issue, shipping Larrie being the “good” and “morally right” thing to do, because after all, they’re fighting against homophobia and closeting. No trace of It’s just a ship, it’s just thinking two boys are in love, it’s a moral issue and if you’re not a Larrie, you’re behaving immorally. This basically leads to the conclusion that any and all behavior, no matter how invasive, creepy or obsessive, is justified, as long as it helps “the cause”, which can become incredibly dangerous, as we will see further down. This also means that people are less likely to call out fan theories that veer into morbid territory, like the incredibly insensitive theory that babygate will “end” with a miscarriage announcement, like saying Briana forcing herself on him would be the only possible explanation for why the child is actually Louis’, or that it will “end” by saying Louis’ child died, because he wore an Eric Clapton shirt whose child died young, which is just... so messed up on so many levels.
Conspiracy theorists then resort to one or both of two rhetorical strategies. Some of them articulate their theory by explicitly trying to provide evidence that confirms their position, while ignoring all counterevidence. Others proceed more indirectly by trying to poke holes into the official version of events. [...] The rhetoric of “just asking questions” allows conspiracy theorists to deny that they are actually spreading conspiracy theories. However, their questions are usually designed to leave the conclusion that there must have been a conspiracy.
From what I’ve seen, larries more often than not use the second rhetorical strategy, that is, they try to prove the official version of events is not true, rather than proving their theory independently. This is understandable: when your entire conspiracy theory is based on the assumption that something is being hidden, it’s a lot easier to try to prove that what you’re being told is not true than trying to come up with evidence on your own. Once in a while, something like Louis being in Chile with Harry pops up, something with very little evidence beyond hearsay and interpreting blurry pictures or videos the way you want them to and that, even if true, wouldn’t even necessarily prove Larrie in any way. These little tidbits are then being held up religiously as insurmountable evidence by the entire fandom, often even if they have been disproved, like in the case of Louis supposedly saying “I’m gay, it’s pretty unfortunate” on video, or the “The rose has already been taken care of” regarding the rose and dagger tattoos. If you ignore things that have been disproved and things with next to no evidence or mostly based on speculation, pretty much the only thing you are left with are gifs of loving looks between the two of them (something that larries always insist are Larrie moments, not Larrie proof), and maybe, like... the bears. That’s it.
Most of the time though, it goes something like this: larries assume a position that a specific thing must be true, something they present as a fact that goes against the “official version” of events, for example: we are told that Louis has a son, when he actually doesn’t. This is the starting point. From there, they try to disprove every little bit of information we get about Louis' child, to show that the “official narrative” doesn’t add up, therefore he must be faking having a child at all, therefore Larrie must be real because otherwise there would be no reason for him to do that. Every picture that is posted of this child is either “proven” to be photoshopped (spread like gospel by people who have no idea how photoshop works or how you prove an image was photoshopped) or actually proves that it’s a different child that’s not related to Louis in the slightest. Briana can’t have been actually pregnant because there’s a photo of her where her baby bump seems to disappear, and also because she was wearing tight leggins a few days after giving birth, which according to all the experts in natal care that seemed to suddenly come out of the woodwork, is something no woman ever does after giving birth. Alternative explanations, like pregnant bellies shifting around and being less noticeable while sitting, like the fact that many women do wear leggins after giving birth (so much so that postpartum leggins are an entire subsection of maternity wear with lots of versions that are just as tight as Brianas, sometimes even in the same pleather look) are dismissed, “debunked” or simply ignored. Every bit of evidence that comes out that’s not in their favor (which is pretty much all of it) is twisted into something that at first glance looks like it actually proves their beliefs, but only if you don’t think about it too hard.
The “just asking questions” excuse that’s mentioned in the quote is also very apparent. Larries ask, If Briana really was pregnant, why did she post pictures of other pregnant women on social media? If Louis’ son is actually his, why haven’t they been seen together in years? Trying to answer these questions from a perspective that’s not their own is pointless though, because they’re not questions they want or need an actual answer to. They already have their minds made up about the answers, in a way that supports their own narrative of course and “their questions are usually designed to leave the conclusion that there must have been a conspiracy”, in the hopes to either pull people over to their side or to strengthen the belief of anyone who might be starting to doubt their theory.
Something I see quite often, especially regarding babygate is the notion of “This has nothing to do with Larrie, any sane person looking at this mess and connecting the dots themselves would come to the same conclusion”, which is... laughably untrue. If it didn’t have anything to do with Larrie, no one would have even set out to prove that Louis’ child was fake in the first place, because normally people believe things other people tell them about their own lives, even celebrities. I mean, wherever you look, the majority of non-Larrie One Direction fans, the general public, people he works with, people interviewing him, everyone seems to believe him having a child is very much true. The only reason you wouldn’t take people at their word regarding something like this is if you have an agenda that already rests on everyone involved lying their asses off with every single thing they say, and this child threatens the world view that you have developed because of this. Other people or the media don’t even seem to think Louis is a bad person for accidentally knocking someone up, or a bad father for not spending every waking moment with his son. The only people who think of him that way are larries, it actually doesn’t seem as if they’d like him very much if it wasn’t for Larrie.
1.5 What’s the difference between conspiracy theories and real conspiracies?
[...]
Successful real conspiracies are usually event conspiracies. Compared to the typical scenarios of conspiracy theories, they have a clear and rather modest goal such as a coup d’état or an assassination. Some conspiracy theories also revolve around specific events, but many others are “system” or superconspiracy theories. [...]
Real conspiracies usually involve a limited number of people who participate knowingly or unwittingly in the plot. Conspiracy theories, by contrast, often claim (sometimes by implication) that hundreds or thousands of people have been involved in the alleged plot and cover up. [...] Faking the moon landing or an inside job to pull off the 9/11 attacks would have required thousands of helpers who worked perfectly together and kept silent until today. Such scenarios are highly unlikely, if not impossible.
Finally, real conspiracies usually have unintended consequences. They lead to outcomes not foreseen by the conspirators. Conspiracy theories, by contrast, usually claim that everything goes according to the conspirators’ plan. They hardly ever leave room for unintended consequences. [...]
This is quite a long quote which I don’t really have anything to add to in regards to Larrie, but I thought it might be insightful to take a look at what has historically constituted conspiracy theories and maybe realize that a conspiracy that supposedly has been going on for over ten years, involves unprecedented levels of regulation and oppression of two artists and requires the silence and complicity of perhaps hundreds of people may not actually be a thing.
1.6 Who believes in conspiracy theories?
In the past, belief in conspiracy theories was often associated with paranoia and other psychological problems. [...] Psychological research, however, has found that people who feel powerless or have trouble accepting uncertainty are particularly prone to believing in conspiracy theories. [...]
I wanted to include this quote as well, because as I’ve already mentioned, while there are legitimate concerns to be brought up regarding fetishization etc., I know a lot of people who are very invested in the Larrie fandom probably have problems in their own lives that they’re not dealing with properly. I know when I became a larrie in 2015, I was a teenager in the midst of going through puberty with probably more than a few mental health issues I was not dealing with. I was struggling with an eating disorder, I was self-harming, I didn’t have many friends. Add to that the typical puberty issues everyone has to go through and the fact that I generally latched onto fandom things and became invested in them very quickly and very intensely, and the prerequisite for me becoming a larrie was set.
Who knows, if I hadn’t moved on from my intense 1D phase fairly quickly or if I had had stronger ties and more popularity within the fandom, or if I had started to evolve from just lurking and reading other people’s theories to writing up my own, maybe I would still be a larrie today. I can acknowledge that, and it’s scary to me, because it’s something I disagree with so wholeheartedly on a moral level, and to think that if things had gone differently, maybe I would be on the exact opposite end of the spectrum is... definitely weird. I’m saying all this, because I want to reiterate that I don’t want to hate on or shame anyone. I don’t agree with what larries are doing, but that doesn’t make most of them categorically bad people in my book, and I want you to know that I understand why people get invested in this stuff and why it’s so hard for so many of them to let go of it.
1.7 Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?
Conspiracy theories are attractive because they fulfil important functions for the personal, social and political identity of those who believe in them.
Conspiracy theories make the world meaningful because they exclude chaos and coincidence. [...] They are a strategy for dealing with uncertainty and resolving ambiguity. It is easier for some people to accept that a group of evildoers is secretly pulling the strings than to face the possibility that there is nobody pulling the strings and that sometimes things just happen. [...]
I think this is especially true for many people who have believed in and been vocal about Larrie for years, who have oftentimes believed it since they were very young. It’s so much easier to believe that everything that’s happening does have a point, and you’re the only one who can see behind the curtain and figure everything out, than to realize that maybe something you’ve dedicated such a huge amount of your time and energy to might be false after all, that everything might just be a coincidence. Of course no one wants to subject themselves to that, so they just keep clinging to the straws that they do have as if they were irrefutable evidence.
[...] They [conspiracy theories] are an important tool for what the social sciences call “othering”: they allow their believers to identity scapegoats and draw a firm line between “us” – the victims of the conspiracy” – and “them” – the conspirators. In this way, conspiracy theories can forge strong communal feelings. [...]
There are two very important correlations to Larrie in here. First is obviously the “othering” -- in larries’ case both directed at the “conspirators” and at anyone outside of their in-group, anyone they deem an “anti” (or a “houie” or a “rad” or whatever other word they’ve come up with next week). Anyone who is seen as complicit in the whole conspiracy is immediately and indiscriminately demonized, be that Simon, Jeff, Olivia, Eleanor... the list goes on. A lot of times, this demonization also veers into very gross theory that wouldn’t be acceptable in any other social situation (misogyny, antisemitism, slutshaming, buying up domain’s with people’s names to fill them with unspeakable abuse, actively wishing for people to die... the list goes on), but because these people are apparently partaking in closeting two gay men, everything about them is fair game. Especially the women in Harry’s and Louis’ lives are demonized to no end, no matter if they are/have been romantically involved with them (Olivia, Eleanor, Briana, Danielle, Taylor, Camille ...), are just accquainted with them in some way (Lou Teasdale, Lizzo), even their family members (especially Lottie and the Tomlinson twins, despite the twins still being children).
"Antis” are the other ostracized group, all painted as a monolith. It doesn’t matter if you’re against the idea of Larrie because you don’t believe it’s real or because you believe another made up bandmate ship is real or because you don’t like one of them or because, like me, you just want people to see why the behavior associated with Larrie is so beyond messed up... immediately, the anti label is slapped on, which makes it much easier to ignore what people are saying and not have to think about potentially valid points they bring up. You don’t have to listen to what someone is saying or re-think your own actions if that person can be immediately dismissed as an “anti” -- nothing they have to say matters anyways. This often leads to shunning, gatekeeping, bullying and even explicitly encouraging transphobia or antisemitism while refusing to take responsibility for it.
The second point that’s important here is the “strong communal feelings”. As I’ve already mentioned, many people have very strong ties to the larrie community on Tumblr or elsewhere. Sometimes, it might be the only place where you can find online friends, sometimes even the only place where you can find real friends at all. I can also acknowledge that for a lot of young queer people, Larrie might have been their first exposure to other queer people, perhaps even the reason they figured out they’re queer in the first place. Because as much casual homo- and biphobia is evident in larries’ ramblings and their theories, there is no denying that for many LGBT+ people, it might be their only safe space to feel comfortable talking about their own experiences. I don’t want to attribute ill intent to anyone, but it definitely feels like some older, well-liked larries weaponize that in a way.
For many, Larrie is also their only connection they have to the One Direction fandom in general, since everything is so divided. During your entire time in this fandom, everyone you’ve been talking to has been telling you that everyone who’s not a larrie is an anti, a houie, a rad, and of course they’re all evil. So if you start to question Larrie and don’t want to be a part of it anymore, where do you turn? Certainly not to these other communities that you know are evil, so what, are you just supposed to leave the 1D fandom entirely, even if you still care about the boys and want to support them? All of this makes it incredibly hard to let go of the idea of Larrie, especially, again, if you’ve held onto this belief for a long time. All I want to say to that: there are other communities, better communities. Other safe spaces for queer youth and other queer people where they can feel seen and heard without all of the baggage that taking away the sexual agency of two grown men entails, without people insensitively photoshopping white men over pictures of the activism that queer POC partake in for their own little headcanons, without ignoring actual queer people’s voices who talk about how they’re uncomfortable with fetishization and ascribing them a sexuality, without calling everyone who doesn’t accept your gay conspiracy theories homophobic. Other fandom spaces, even within the 1D fandom, where people just have fun and enjoy the content they’re given, without splitting hairs over every single piece of it because it has to be “proof” somehow.
1.10 Are conspiracy theories dangerous?
[...] Conspiracy theories can be a catalyst for polarisation and violence. Since they identify a group, the conspirators, that is seen as responsible for all evil, those who believe in them may feel justified or even obliged to act against this group, its institutions or representatives. [...]
I’m not going to show my ass by acting like the Larrie conspiracy theory has the same political, economic or social consequences as QAnon and other theories, which is why this is again meant to be seen on a much smaller scale than that. However, I would absolutely subscribe to the notion that Larrie and larries are dangerous towards the people they see as the evil “conspirators”. Although from what I’ve seen this might not be true of a lot of Tumblr larries and happens more on other platforms (Instagram, Twitter), although it’s most definitely encouraged on Tumblr, flooding the comment sections of Harry’s and Louis’ families, work accquaintances, significant others and everyone who so much as touches the boys with a ten-foot-pole, even if the connection exists entirely in larries’ imagination, might be annoying at best, but is targeted harassment at worst, especially when it devolves into behavior like sending actual pornographic images to a woman just because she dares to speak about her grandchild on Twitter or spamming the comment section of a literal small child to say the word “Larry” just because he is Niall’s nephew. Anyone who claims these things are not harassment obviously hasn’t had to deal with hundreds of strangers spamming you every time you post, claiming to know more than you about a person you know as a colleague or as a family member, claiming that your relationship isn’t real and calling you homophobic for taking part in covering up someone’s sexuality. It gets quite frustrating I believe, and I don’t blame a single person for lashing out sometimes.
Something that’s not mentioned here, but that has been scientifically proven is that believing in just one conspiracy theory, even one as seemingly innocuous as Larrie, can alter your perception of reality. It changes the way you think, the way you interact with the world, and it makes you much more susceptible to believe in other conspiracies. Larries love to draw comparisons between antis and Trump voters or QAnon believers, when in reality, their thinking is based on the exact same thought processes. It’s also why I’m so worried about so many new, mostly very young larries coming in from Twitter and Tiktok. Shipping people and maybe even believing two celebrities are secretly dating are a very normal part of puberty, and can be a healthy way to explore complex feelings regarding your own and other people’s sexuality, so I don’t have an issue with that. But it’s so easy, especially with this particular “ship”, to slip into tinhat territory, to maybe read a couple masterposts about it and in no time you find yourself deep down the rabbit hole believing in a fake child and gigantic, industry-wide coverup of two gay boybanders. That is not healthy or normal, and can be a stepping stone to becoming a part of much more insidious conspiracy theories.
Another thing that is absolutely dangerous about Larrie is the normalization of gay stereotyping, biphobia, misogyny, racism, ableism, antisemitism and other pernicious and discriminatory beliefs and behaviors. The women H and L are dating or associating with are bodyshamed, slutshamed, made fun of, called slags, swines, leeches, golddiggers, shamed for “not working”, shamed for their career choices when they do work, shamed for having plastic surgery, shamed for the clothes they wear, for the things they post on social media. Things like racism and other social justice causes are propped up as false fronts as to why they’re apparently the scum of the earth (aka “We don’t hate her because she’s a beard, we hate her because she’s done racist things!”) when it’s crystal clear that, if the accusations should prove to be false, another reason to hate them will be found in record time. But all of that is done under the veil of progressivism, so it’s all okay, because they’re supporting two closeted men (by trying to pry their closets wide open, apparently).
This not only creates a culture where it’s not called out to behave that way, but also encourages people, as I briefly touched on before, not to think of Harry, Louis and the people around them as real people, but rather as fictional characters playing their part in larries’ personal narrative, going so far as to actively sabotage their careers when they don’t behave the way larries want them to. After all, it’s telling that larries believe they’re doing their part in mending a great injustice and making sure that this unprecedented case of employee suppression in the entertainment industry comes to light, but they also... write explicit sexual fanfiction about these people and make porn edits with their faces. Would you do that if you honestly saw them as actual victims to industry homophobia? I know a lot of larries identify as queer and are closeted themselves, and to a degree I understand that the notion that these celebrities are going through similar struggles to them can be comforting. However, I absolutely can’t understand behaving the way larries do, trying to basically drag these people out of the closet they believe they’re in, while knowing how being closeted actually feels. Personally, I only spent a few of my teenage years actively in the closet, and when I did decide to come out to friends and family, I had a comparatively easy time with it. I know a lot of people don’t have that luxury and are faced with extreme adversity for their sexualities. But even I shudder at the concept of someone coming up to me when I wasn’t out yet and trying to assign me a sexuality, trying to prove that I was in a secret relationship in my best friend. I would probably have broken down in tears if even one person did that to me, never mind thousands of strangers on the internet prying into my personal life and trying to drag me out of the closet. If you honestly do believe that Harry and Louis are closeted (which neither of them have given any indication for), why do you think it’s your place to make them come out? When people with a bigger platform try to exploit the massive reach and obsessive nature of the 1D fandom and imply they’re going to “out” them, you turn around and cry about how that’s wrong and messed up, with zero self-awareness that you are doing the same thing every single day. I honestly can’t wrap my head around it.
(Unconsciously) seeing them as fictional characters instead of real people that are actually affected by these things is the only way to reconcile those opposing behaviors. When the HBO show Euphoria referenced Larrie and pictured Harry and Louis in a sexual scene together, larries were outraged, when in reality, it’s the exact same thing they do every day. They act as if their blogs are this obscure little safe space that no one ever sees, when they have created a culture that consists of thousands of people prying into strangers’ private lives because they feel entitled to every single aspect of them. Spreading a fake sextape as some kind of revenge porn against a woman they don’t like, meticulously analyzing a child’s face to prove that they belong to different parents, accusing the child’s family of incest, trying to cause actual repercussions for people’s careers by e-mailing their universities, theorizing that a song is a “tribute” to a deceased man so they don’t have to deal with it actually being written for a girlfriend, comparing their “struggles” to those of a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Larries have created a culture where these things are okay, encouraged even. When these examples of their despicable behavior are brought up, they scream “Not all larries!”, but that’s a lie; each and every single larrie that participates in this conspiracy theory has aligned themselves with people who do these things, these were born out of your culture, and you don’t get to distance yourselves from it so you don’t have to feel guilty about it.
Admittedly, when I started writing this, it was going to be from a very charitable position, because I once was a larrie as well and I didn’t want to call anyone out or cause drama. And to a degree, I still feel for young people who were roped into this and haven’t been able to let it go. But the things I found doing research for this are honestly unexcusable. I have a Google Document with links upon links of larries doing invasive, creepy and simply fucked up shit, so much that I was only able to fit a fraction of it in here, and I know that’s just the tip of the iceberg, just what I was able to find doing research in my free time for a few weeks, as someone who hasn’t even been active in the fandom in years . In my eyes, there are no excuses anymore for actively and genuinely believing in the cesspool of harassment, outright lies and complete lack of self-awareness and accountability that is Larrie in the year 2021, and for some people, there’s no redemption either.
So, where do we go from here? I’m aware that this is just me screaming into the void, I don’t even know if anyone will read this. Certainly not the people who need to read it. To be honest, I can’t even explain why, over the last few weeks, I have developed such a morbid fascination with this entire Larrie phenomenon. Maybe it’s a mixture of just being completely baffled by the levels of delusion among people who believe in it and almost feeling guilty for ever buying into the whole thing myself, almost like trying to “make amends” in a way. Because even though I was only a small blog and mostly a passive consumer of Larrie content, I was still actively a part of propagating and upholding this culture. I feel like I almost have a responsibility to “make it right again”, to take a stand and renounce what I used to believe in. If someone had told the old larrie-me in 2015 that in 2021 Louis would have a 5-year-old son and larries would still be convinced that everything was a coverup for their big, gay conspiracy, I... honestly don’t know what I would have said. Maybe I would have still bought into it, maybe it would have woken me up and I would have left the Larrie fandom sooner than I actually did, because I couldn’t imagine it going on that long.
I sincerely hope that over time, when Louis and Harry continue to date people who are not each other, when babygate doesn’t “end”, when Freddie grows into a teenager and Louis still calls him his son, when eventually one or both of them get married and have other kids, belief in Larrie will die down and become extinct. I hope that this influx of new larries that has been happening consists of mostly teenagers and children who are home bored because of the pandemic and who will move on from it when they’re not interested anymore. I hope that @portraitofalarryonfire has started a trend of people realizing how very much not okay the belief system is they’ve held up for years, and maybe people will start to re-examine their actions and leave Larrie behind.
There are still some people who are probably too far gone at this point, who will read a wedding announcement for either of them in a couple of years and say “I can’t believe they would go this far for a stunt, evil Simon Cowbell :(”. And I feel sorry for them, I really do. Because fandom is supposed to be fun, fan theories and fanart and fanfic are supposed to be fun, something that you share with your friends because you enjoy it and because you want to talk about it. I have been in so many different fandoms over the past 8 or so years I have been on the internet, I have been in fandoms for fictional stories and for celebrities, I have created and consumed so much fan art and fanfic, I have been in toxic, drama-filled fandoms and in chill fandoms, I have made friends and I have made enemies. Fandom and being a fangirl is my life, it’s something that played a huge role in my own journey of getting to know myself, and I still consider it a big part of my identity. But above all, it was always a hobby for me, something that I loved participating in in my free time, and if it stopped being that and started to be a source of stress and anger in my life, I left the fandom and moved on. But these people, these conspiracy theorists, are stuck in a pathetic, endless loop of regurgitating the same talking points over and over again about two people they don’t even like outside of what they imagine them to be in their heads, and it doesn’t seem to be fun for them. And it’s really, truly sad to watch.
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Thank you so much for reading, if you made it this far! Even though it can be a really serious issue sometimes, I had a lot of fun writing and researching this and it has firmly cemented my new *special interest* in conspiracy theories. It’s truly a scary but fascinating topic and I gained a lot of new perspectives from putting this together. Again, a huge thanks to the people I mentioned in the beginning who were a big help to me!
Articles and other additional information that I would recommend:
The Shit Larries Say Podcast, hosted by @shit-larries-say (particularly the episodes on fandom antisemitism and fandom racism were very eye-opening for me)
One Direction and the Marketing Machine by Megan Katherine Haney-Claus (via Scholar Works)
‘The great untold scandal’: the sordid tale of boyband mogul Lou Pearlman by Eamonn Forde (via The Guardian)
One Direction, Fake Babies And the Problem With Celebrity Conspiracy Theories by Tabitha Carvan (via Junkee.)
A Journey Into The Dark Heart Of Celebrity Relationship Conspiracy Theories by Zan Romanoff (via BuzzFeed News)
Are we entering a golden age of the conspiracy theory? by Daniel & Jason Freeman (via The Guardian)
Why conspiracy theories aren’t harmless fun by Patrick Stokes (via The Conversation)
Why Are We So Obsessed With Celebrity Conspiracy Theories? by Lily Peschardt (via Grazia)
The Surprising Power of Conspiracy Theories by Sander van der Linden Ph.D. (via Psychology Today)
