As most empowered divas of the music world know, the best kinds of fans to have are the gay fans. No demographic has more excitement, loyalty, and downright passion than the gays. It’s what has allowed the careers of otherwise forgettable pop stars to live on in eternal infamy, endlessly reinvigorating careers with blind faith. But the relationship between pop star and gay fan is a two-way street; the significantly darker side of this exchange exists when a musician caters to a queer fan base, using their love and support for purely personal gain. This proves especially hurtful when said musician gives little to nothing back to the queer community. Which brings us to Nick Jonas.

Last year marked the beginning of a sort of a firestorm for the young heartthrob. In an attempt to distance himself from his boy band past with the Jonas Brothers, little Nick began to make simultaneous moves into a solo music career and an acting career. The former saw him support his debut record in a tour circuit heavily filled with appearances at gay clubs and even pride parades. The latter saw him appear in a similar role in two TV shows: as a barely closeted frat boy in Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens and as a bareley closeted, rarely clothed wrestler in The Kingdom.

Now there is nothing remarkable about a non-homosexual musician performing at a strictly queer event, nor is there anything particularly shocking about a queer character being portrayed by a decidedly heterosexual actor. But there remains something uncomfortably calculated about Jonas’s decisions in each field.

For instance, this past September he admitted that during his tenure in the Jonas Brothers he should have paid more attention of the group’s gay fans. “When my brothers and I started touring and had some success, naturally [gay men] became a pretty big part of our following. I don’t know that we ever did enough to really own that,” he told Logo’s NewNowNext.

In the immediate months after, Jonas made up for lost time. While doing press for his TV shows, he was asked whether he had any real life experience in experimenting with members of the same sex. “I can’t say if I have or haven’t,” he said, flatly refusing to give an answer in any subsequent interview that addressed the question.

But the hype train only continued to barrel on for his album circuit, wherein he began to appear in gay clubs around America. And despite performing strip tease after strip tease for queer audiences, he immediately began to deny any mention of his persona as a gay icon. In an interview with Vogue Italia, he explicitly stated “It’s an honor, but I don’t think of myself as an icon… There should be a lot more straight artists who don’t have a problem with having gay fans.”

His actions and his subsequent explanations are contradictory to say the least, but Jonas only continues to double down. In this month’s issue of Complex Mag, he spoke at length about the accusations of “gay-baiting” with an answer as vague as it gets: “The goal is acceptance on all levels – that should be the focus… There’s always going to be negativity toward anything that is a positive effort toward change.”

Not only has Jonas evaded an affirmative answer to his sexuality, he is now insinuating that any critic of his courtship of the gay community is against the idea of progress and acceptance. The comments would be laughable were it not so disconcerting; Jonas is not so subtly taking advantage of a minority in which he holds no stake to further his own career.

In his defense, he is far from the first celebrity to act with such impulses. One could argue that Madonna did something to a similar effect in culling talent from the underground vogue halls to advance her mammoth single of the same name. But where Madonna used her platform to call attention to the issues affecting gay community, what Nick Jonas is doing with his platform remains to be seen. Celebrating a gay fan-base is one thing, but playing on the controversies of a community in which you have no part is a different matter altogether.