This month the second season of Heated Rivalry has started filming in Toronto and the actors playing our favourite gay hockeys are out and about each looking like they swallowed other, smaller actors over the summer.

And because the frenzy around these two shows no signs of dying down, any pic is seized upon and pored over and clipped and dissected by fans. And once again it’s thrown up a debate in fan spaces about both pap photos and photos taken by bystanders when the stars didn’t know they were on camera.

I’m not going to get into the ethics of paparazzi photos. If we haven’t learned anything from the death of Diana, or from watching what happened to Britney Spears, then I don’t think we’re going to.

I talk all the time about celebrity conspiracy thinking, and the need that some fans have to constantly find out more. When it comes to candid photos, all of this sort of exists on a spectrum, from the “guilty pleasure” of seeing that Connor Storrie has cut his hair, to something much more horrifying that I encountered this week.

Historically, the whole model with paps was that they were trying to get a money shot they could sell to a tabloid publication, first in print and then online. But we live in a creator economy now. Sean O’Neill is a pap photographer in Toronto who has set up a Patreon, and is now selling his photos directly to fans.

In the past, the way this debate unfolded was sort of abstract. Or at least, I think most of us would try and maintain some sort of plausible deniability. Like “yes, these photos are bad and invasive. but they’re already out there so I might as well look at them”. I’m routinely trying to deny that I’m creating the “market” for these things, because I don’t read TMZ or whatever. But obviously I am. I may not “pay” for the photos through my clicks on certain sites, but I’m absolutely part of the demand-generation or whatever.

But this feels like something different. Cutting out the middle man entirely and paying a paparazzo yourself to take invasive photos is wild. Bear in mind this is after Hudson Williams had a public confrontation in Paris with photographers/autograph hunters who followed him to a private residence.

Worse still, the motivations of some of these fans is clearly the same conspiracist nonsense. They’re paying Sean to stalk Hudson and Connor in the hopes that they’ll get a photo of the two (neither of whom have publicly said anything about their sexuality, one of whom has a long-term girlfriend) that proves they’re romantically involved.

Much to their disappointment, Sean isn’t playing ball:

Lisa doesn’t want Sean’s clear denial. That’s not what she’s paying him for. She wants him to deliver unauthorised creep shots of two men she’s never met that imply something that isn’t true so that she can continue to tinhat about them.

I know that we live in an era where there’s no fourth wall anymore and that I’m beginning to be old man shaking his fist at the clouds meme about all this. But I’m still horrified. Fans have spent years arguing that all pap shots are paid for by celebs and management and mysterious “powers that be” to justify their thinking that relationships are fake or PR.

It’s true, some pap photos look superfake. But this is really just an excuse to link to the best celebrity profile of all time — Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s GQ piece about Tom Hiddleston. And the reality is that these photos are being taken by photographers who are, in some cases, a kilometre away. As this Sydney Morning Herald photog demonstrated:

So having decided that the photos they’re seeing are in service of some sort of “official” narrative they don’t believe — conspiracists are now trying to fund paps to catch their “truth” in the act.

Everything old is new again. In the early days of the 1D fandom, fans managed to get access to security camera footage at an airport, and a hotel, hoping to see proof that Harry and Louis were definitely actually secretly a couple. Instead, they just got proof that 1D were teenage boys.

Is paying a photographer any worse than stalking the stars yourself? I feel like the answer is yes, even if I can’t articulate why very well. Mostly I think because a paid photographer seems to have no boundaries, and most fans are still people who love the objects of their affection, even if they’re showing it in some truly messed up ways.

We’re living in a moment where female stars still have to defend their pregnancies against fan theories that they’re wearing a fake bump (Kayleigh Donaldson wrote a great piece about that here).

The 1D fans who pulled airport CCTV at least had to go looking for footage that already existed. This is something else: deciding on the truth first, then paying someone with a telephoto lens to go and produce it. And when Sean won't play ball, that won't be interpreted as a denial — it'll be evidence he's been gotten to by somebody. There is no photo he can take, and no photo he can refuse to take, that ends this. Hudson and Connor are two actors who took a risk on a queer love story and made something people adore, and the reward for that is apparently being followed by photographers funded by the people who claim to love them most. I don't know how you film a second season under those conditions. I hope it's still worth it to them.

more good stuff

• last week I was an idiot and talked about Betsy’s great newsy and didn’t include a link, so please go check it out now.

  

• saw this in Casey Lewis’ After School, and I realised I’d noticed this over the summer break with the godtwins (12 yrs old). For so long google was the best example of a brand becoming a verb, but no more. We’ve talked about the death of search before, but the death of the brand is really powerful:

• this is an amazing long read on what it took to dismantle the East India Company and what lessons that might teach us about decreasing the influence of Big Tech.

• on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I feel like we’ll probably get a bit exhausted with it so I want to share this beautiful long read in advance. The 17 Minutes that Changed America isn’t a maudlin retrospective, it’s an attempt to genuinely remember what it was like that day (and what it’s meant since).

finally, in my LEGO city

Forward this to someone without humming Gaga’s Paparazzi.