There are some people, gay and straight, who argue that a person’s sexuality should be a private matter. There are also some who would argue that it doesn’t matter how a celebrity happens to “come out”, as long as it happens. I’m not one of them.
While having sympathy with public figures faced with the real commercial risks and personal pressures of revealing their sexuality – as Frank Ocean certainly faced, discussed in part 1 of this blog – there’s a right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it. One is to come out voluntarily and the other is to be forced into it.
Handled well, a famous person coming out of his own free will can help gay or bisexual teenagers- who commit suicide at vastly disproportionate rates to their heterosexual brothers and sisters – hope that they can live a life without shame and fear. That’s what Dan Savage’s inspired and inspiring “It Gets Better” campaign in the states has tried to demonstrate. But if a celebrity tries to conceal their sexuality until the dread day they are finally outed, then their actions suggest the opposite, that not being heterosexual is indeed an awful thing, a dirty secret.
That’s not to say that outing celebrities is a noble activity at all. The late Stephen Gately was famously blackmailed into revealing that he was gay by despicable tabloid journalists, and made a rather graceful, brave job of it given the strained circumstances. Far more embarrassing – and sadly well known- was the case of George Michael.
Despite the fact that his sexuality had been an open secret for years – his closet was definitely of the glass variety – he stubbornly refused to speak on the subject until his humiliating arrest for “lewd public behaviour”. While Michael managed to milk (sorry) some humour out of the incident in his “Outside” video, and those same despicable journalists struck gold with the “Zip Me Up Before You Go Go” headline, the circumstances resoundingly re-inforced the message that gayness was something shameful that should only be confessed when you were forced to.
That’s what makes Ocean’s coming out so bold, beautiful and inspiring: he voluntarily admitted his love for a man at a time when his whole career hung in the balance. Ocean’s masculine image and demeanour would have allowed him to “pass” for straight, as some people still say. To the best of my knowledge – speaking to friends who might know – there were no gay rumours swirling around Ocean before he went public (the same cannot be said of 50 Cent, the recently reformed homophobe, amusingly enough). Continue reading
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