By Stephanie Hu, Communications Intern
On February 14th, 2024, Kristen Stewart gifted the people the greatest (and gayest) Valentine’s Day gift: Rolling Stone’s March cover story, courtesy of author Alex Morris, photographer Collier Schorr, and producer Rhianna Rule. The cover sees Stewart in a jockstrap and mullet, posing with gym weights and an “Eat Me” t-shirt. Accompanied by an interview feature by Alex Morris, Stewart openly discusses her sexuality, gender presentation, most recent project, Love Lies Bleeding, and anticipated project, Chronology.
Backlash
Not long after publishing, Stewart and Rolling Stone received backlash from right-wing conservatives. The reason? They can’t stop thinking about Stewart’s jockstrap.
Not surprisingly, conservative political commentator Candance Owens emerged as one of the most prominent critical voices. She’s not “outraged,” though, or so she claims on the Candace Owens Podcast on The Daily Wire. She’s “just fundamentally disgusted with this obvious ploy to rinse women of femininity.” On the show, Owens goes through several images from the cover shoot and, line-by-line, criticizes the accompanying cover story. Owens is particularly disturbed by the imagery of Stewart “swigging beer, with [her] legs open and… hand in [her] crotch, like a dude.” This behavior, Owens claims, is “cultural enslavement”; it propagandizes women to believe that “every natural proclivity that they have is wrong… that everything that shouts at them biologically (wanting to aspire to be beautiful, wanting to meet a prince in your life, wanting to get married and to have children) is wrong.”
The cover also incited a meltdown among conservative social media. Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing influencer in Malaysia, comments on X, “What did Hollywood do to Kristen Stewart?”
What these fear-mongering takes failed to mention is that LGBTQ representation is vital to the protection of LGBTQ people, especially with anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and rhetoric on the rise. On June 22nd, 2023, GLAAD and ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) released a report that “recorded a total of 356 anti-LBGTQ incidents between June 2022 and April 2023,” including “305 acts of harassment, 40 acts of vandalism and 11 incidents of assault.”
Kristen’s Response:
On February 18th, Stewart defended her cover shoot at the Berlin Film Festival during a ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ press conference.
“The existence of a female body thrusting any type of sexuality at you that’s not designed for… exclusively cis straight males is something people are not super comfy with. And so I’m really happy with it,” she says.
The cover is an opportunity for Stewart to showcase her fluidity. Morris writes that Stewart “wants the cover image to send a clear message: hyper-sexualized, left of andro, and flipping the gender script.” Stewart expresses admiration for the young people who are able to “have [gender] be like an accessory” and “actually play with the novelty of that — have [femininity] one day, not have it the next.”
Stewart came into this cover shoot wanting to do “the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life.” And she succeeded.
Kristen’s Projects Today:
Today, Stewart spends her creative energy on projects that feature or discuss gender and sexuality in meaningful ways. Love Lies Bleeding, directed by Rose Glass, stars Stewart as Lou, a butch gym manager who falls in love with Jackie, a bodybuilder played by Katy O’Brien. Her next project, Chronology, an adaption of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, is a story about “female shame and female rage and female art and female-on-female BDSM.” Stewart has already completed the screenplay; she awaits funding now.
Moving forward, Stewart wants to see a new type of queer media that does not solely revolve around “coming out” narratives or other tropes. “The era of queer films, being so pointedly only that, is over. It’s done,” she says. She wants queer media to represent people’s “actual experiences, what they love, what their desires are, where they come from, where they want to go and, yeah, not feeling like you always have to stand on a fucking soapbox and be everyone’s spokesperson.”
Love Lies Bleeding will be released in theaters across the United States on March 8th, 2024.