megyn kelly called timothée chalamet "obviously gay" on air, then took it back seven seconds later. we'd like those seven seconds back.

Photo: Timothée Chalamet in London, 2025. Amy Martin Photography, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Megyn Kelly Show, OK! Magazine and TheBlast

At 3:47 into Monday's episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, Timothée Chalamet was "her obviously gay boyfriend." By 3:54 he had been downgraded. "You know, I don't know that he's gay," Kelly said, "but he's effete. He is so effete."

Seven seconds. That is how long it took Megyn Kelly to out a man, think better of it, and land on the word "effete," which is what you say when you want to keep calling someone gay without the legal exposure.

what megyn kelly said

The occasion was the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show on Sunday, where Kylie Jenner wore the Fantasy Bra and Chalamet watched from the front row, per OK!. (Yes, the same show where Alex Consani walked in gold wings.) Kelly was not a fan of the casting. "None of that is real," she said of Jenner, in a segment posted to her YouTube channel that went on to review Jenner's lips, breasts and bottom one by one.

Then she got to the boyfriend. After the "effete" correction, she kept going: "I cannot imagine allowing that thing on top of you. I just feel like he wouldn't know what to do." She also threw in Kris Jenner, "the momager," for going along with "the whole farce that this daughter too is somehow like a supermodel," before declaring that only Kendall qualifies.

a note on "that thing"

We have no inside information on what Timothée Chalamet does or does not know what to do with, and neither does Megyn Kelly. What we do know is the move. You call a slight, pretty, well-dressed man gay, you hear it as an insult the moment it leaves your mouth, and you swap in "effete" so the insult survives. Gay is the punchline even after she has officially taken it back.

It is a very specific kind of straight-media brain that sees a movie star cheering his girlfriend on and files it under suspicious. Being supportive at a fashion show is, we would gently point out, not a sexuality. It is just manners.

Later in the segment she credited Jenner's success to "her mother's nonstop pimping out of them," as TheBlast noted. Neither Chalamet nor Jenner has responded. Honestly, the most effete thing anyone could do here is ignore her, and we hope they do.