THE MANOSPHERE'S CLOSET: SNEAKO, LOUIS THEROUX, AND THE HOMOPHOBIA THAT EATS ITSELF

Louis Theroux's new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere has done what Theroux documentaries always do — pulled back the curtain on a subculture and watched the chaos unfold. But the most revealing fallout hasn't come from the film itself. It's come from one of its subjects: a 27-year-old creator called Sneako, real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, whose past is now devouring his present in the most painfully ironic way imaginable.

Sneako appears in the documentary as part of a younger wave of "red pill" influencers — men who promote hyper-masculine, often aggressively anti-LGBTQ+ views to enormous online audiences. He's a devout Trump supporter. He spends much of his screen time ranting about Sam Smith. He's built his brand on the kind of rigid, performative masculinity that the manosphere sells as gospel.

Then the old clips resurfaced.

In one, Sneako talks openly about questioning his sexuality as a teenager. He described watching gay porn at 14, going to a gay nightclub with friends, and ultimately deciding it wasn't for him. In isolation, that's a perfectly normal story of adolescent exploration. Millions of people could tell a version of it. There's nothing shameful about it.

But Sneako doesn't operate in isolation. He operates in a world where homosexuality is treated as the ultimate weakness, the deepest insult, the thing you must deny at all costs. And when Andrew Tate — his former ally — publicly alleged that Sneako is gay, claiming their falling out happened after Sneako suggested they should "try new things," the internet turned it into a feeding frenzy. Explicit images circulated. Sneako went into damage control, saying most were fake, some were sent to a girl when he was 17, others were modelling shots. The specifics almost don't matter. What matters is the machinery.

Here is a man who has made a career out of rigid, hostile masculinity and anti-queer rhetoric, now being destroyed by the very system he helped build. The homophobia he promoted is the weapon being used against him. The audience he cultivated — one that treats gayness as the worst thing a man can be — is the audience now tearing him apart. Even Nick Fuentes weighed in, arguing that Sneako trying gay content and rejecting it actually makes him less gay. That's the level of intellectual sophistication we're dealing with.

But beneath the circus is something genuinely important. The manosphere is a pipeline. It takes young men who are confused, lonely, or insecure and funnels them toward a worldview that's built on domination, suppression, and fear — particularly fear of anything that isn't rigidly, aggressively heterosexual. Sneako's story exposes the contradiction at the heart of that pipeline: the men preaching the hardest often have the most complicated relationship with the thing they're raging against.

Theroux's documentary doesn't make that point explicitly. It doesn't need to. The internet is making it for him, in real time, with all the cruelty and exposure that these creators have spent years inflicting on others.