Earlier this month, Shawn Mendes appeared to address speculation surrounding his sexuality.
For years, Shawn, 26, has spoken out about how speculation that he’s gay has upset him. He told Rolling Stone in 2018, “I’d like to say I don’t care about it, but that’s not true. In the back of my heart, I feel like I need to go be seen with someone — like a girl — in public to prove to people that I’m not gay.”
Over the years, Shawn has been romantically linked to famous women like Camila Cabello and Sabrina Carpenter.
On Oct. 19, TikTok user @theliyahrich captured a video of Shawn on stage at a show in New York, debuting a new song (titled “The Mountain”) in which he appears to address the rumors about his sexuality.
“I have a change of heart / you can say what you need to say,” he sings in the clip. “You can say I’m too young / you can say I’m too old / you can say I like girls or boys / whatever fits your mold / But I've never been better / so call it what you want.”
Now, Shawn has opened up a little further about his sexuality during his concert on Oct. 28 at Morrison’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
As he introduced “The Mountain” on stage, Shawn began by admitting he’d thought about whether or not he was “gonna say something tonight at this point.”
“The truth is that I didn’t get to do a lot of 15-year-old things and discover parts of myself that you do at 15,” he said, per the Independent.
“There’s this thing about my sexuality, and people have been talking about it so long,” he said.
Noting that the speculation is “kind of silly,” Shawn said, “I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing, and it’s so hard to just put into boxes.”
“It always felt like such an intrusion on something very personal to me. Something that I was figuring out in myself, something that I had yet to discover and still have yet to discover it,” he shared.
“The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone. And it feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that. And I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things. And that’s all I really want to say about that for now,” he added.