He also hosts two new popular podcasts - “ The Rundown” with Noah Beck and “ BFFs” with Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports - and is the first recording artist signed to TalentX Records, a label formed by Warner Records and TalentX Entertainment, a social media agency. “These boys feel like a sign of the times,” said Mel Ottenberg, the creative director of Interview magazine, which featured some of the Sway Boys in their underwear for its September issue. “There doesn’t seem to be any fear about, ‘If I’m too close to my friend in this picture, are people going to think I am gay?’ They’re too hot and young to be bothered with any of that.” Fun to Be ‘Gay’Īs recently as a decade ago, an intimate touch between two young men might have spelled social suicide. But for Gen Z, who grew up in a time when same-sex marriage was never illegal, being called “gay” is not the insult it once was.
Young men on TikTok feel free to push the envelope of homosocial behavior “because they’ve emerged in an era of declining cultural homophobia, even if they don’t recognize it as such,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of masculinity studies at the University of Winchester in England.
