Chappell Roan’s fame is a drag Stars need to cultivate closeness

She was discovered on YouTube at 17, signed to the label Atlantic, and then dropped in 2020 when lockdown stifled was should have been her big breakthrough. She spent two years rebuilding herself to where she is now: tickets for her British tour started at £20 when they were released in March; if you want to go to her London concert this weekend, it will now cost more than £600 on the resale market.

Those prices tell you something about the determination of Roan fans to get close to their icon. It’s a passion that, when it turns sour, tips into disturbing intrusion and harassment. This becomes even more disturbing when you realise that what she’s undergone is pretty normal for famous people. In April this year, for example, a woman was sentenced to prison and placed under a 10-year restraining order for stalking the singer Harry Styles, after sending him 8,000 cards in a one-month period.

More often, though, it’s a woman being harassed by a male obsessive. The “public woman” is, historically, a euphemism for prostitute: by making herself visible, the crude logic goes, she precludes herself from refusing any attention at all. That is witnessed by the list of female artists who have offered support to Roan, including Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX. The singer Mitski sent an email: “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them and they find and harass your family members.”

As well as finding private support, Roan has made a public effort to set boundaries. In August, she issued a statement on Instagram urging fans to leave her alone when she was “not in work mode”: “I don’t agree with the notion that I owe a mutual exchange of energy, time, or attention to people I do not know, do not trust, or who creep me out — just because they’re expressing admiration.” She reiterated on TikTok.

One notable thing is that Roan’s pushback has, so far, been near-universally well-received. Yes, some individual fans have called her entitled or selfish for refusing to cater to them, but in the press, the reaction has been largely celebratory and supportive. That’s a shift from a generation ago, when fan intrusion was largely treated as a fair tax on the pursuit of public attention.

In 1999, a psychiatrist writing in the Guardian claimed that having a stalker was “the ultimate fashion accessory”. Three years earlier, the New York Times had chided Madonna for seeking special treatment after she asked to be excused from testifying in the presence of the man charged with stalking her: the headline read “Even You, Madonna”. (He was ultimately convicted, despite the defence’s efforts to claim Madonna was acting in the courtroom as she acted on screen.)

In the 2000s, that attitude was enthusiastically embraced by a voracious celebrity gossip culture. Gawker — the now-defunct New York gossip blog — was even shameless enough to have a feature called “Gawker Stalker”, reporting live sightings of celebrities around the city. After the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel attacked the website over this, Gawker went on the offensive in a luridly self-righteous post.

“Stalker-style treatment is a description of public people’s lives in public, and is also treatment that anyone with any kind of media or online presence […] is now subject to,” it read. “The only difference is that celebrities are protected somewhat from these verbal attacks by ‘piles of money.’” In other words, celebrities are only being treated the same as everyone else, and even if they aren’t, their celebrity status itself precludes them from sympathy.

Any journalist suggesting in the same way today that Roan is somehow asking for it or too privileged to be affected by the behaviour would have a hard time, largely because social media has given artists a direct line to their own fandoms — and those fandoms a direct line to anyone who criticises their heroes. And Roan’s connection to her fans is unusually tight, even in these intensely parasocial times. When she returned to Missouri to rebuild herself, it wasn’t her songs she put the most effort into: it was building her presence on TikTok.

With no label to push her, she had to build her own following; and because her songs and her act focus on ideas of sexuality, self-discovery and release from repression, that following has bonded to her tightly. For many fans, her work has helped them to uncover and express the most intimate truths about themselves. She told the Face: “I can’t read my DMs anymore, because I cry so much. But when people are like, ​‘Whatever you’re doing, it helped me’ — I don’t think any award or any money or whatever can be exchanged for that compliment.”

This is emotionally powerful. But it’s also the intractable paradox of fame in a social media era. You become successful by cultivating closeness with your audience; from that closeness, some people are going to extrapolate a relationship that extends further than is healthy. Roan’s fans believe that, through her work, they have found the truest version of themselves.

From there, it is only a short step to imagining that they also know the truest version of her, and that if they could only attract her attention, she’d recognise the bond they share.

It’s telling that one of the fan behaviours she’s announced she will no longer tolerate is people trying to attract her attention by shouting her birth name (Chappell Roan is a stage name): another manifestation of the fantasy that they know her secret self. The irony is that her act draws heavily on drag, an art form that is all about concealment in plain sight. For Roan, her elaborate costumes and mask-like makeup act as a division between her public and private selves. For the extreme and obsessive fans, this simply represents a challenge to be overcome: an act of coquetry inspiring them to up their pursuit.

Clearly, it is untenable for anyone to live with the demands placed on Roan by her most obsessive fans. But it is also impossible to see how her reasonable need for privacy can be balanced with being the kind of celebrity to whom fans send highly personal messages about their own coming out story. At the moment, Roan’s best defence against the cadre of over-proprietorial fans is a cadre of slightly less proprietorial fans who are at least responsive to her requests about boundaries. It is a choice between two different ways of being treated as a possession, one slightly less destructive than the other.

Fame is not power — or at least, it is not only power. Fame is the experience of being owned by millions of different people, each of whom is certain that their small, splintered version of you is more true than the version of you anyone else could have; each of whom believes that their love entitles them to be loved in return. The only way to survive is to bury the “real you” out of reach and let people pour their devotion into a person who doesn’t really exist. Otherwise, everyone ends up like Orpheus: annihilated by those who claim to care the most.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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