To Shawn Mendes, all the speculation and discussion about his sexuality “felt like such an intrusion” because he is only “just figuring it out like everyone.”
The 26-year-old singer-songwriter opened up about this before performing the unreleased track The Mountain during a concert at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Monday night.
On exploring sexuality
According to Variety, he said, “Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality and people have been talking about it for so long,” Mendes said in video captured by fans. “And I think it’s kind of silly because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing and it’s so hard to just put into boxes.”
He added, that 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.”
The Mountain
Speaking about the song, Mendes expresses, “writing this song felt really important to me because it felt like a moment where I could address it in a way that felt close to my heart.”
He adds, “The real truth about my life and about my sexuality is that, man, I’m just figuring it out like everyone and I don’t really know sometimes, and I know other times. 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.”
Mendes had earlier addressed this topic when he was 17 years old. In a video posted on Snapchat, he claimed, “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or if I wasn’t. The focus should be on the music and not my sexuality.”