Has the British diver Tom Daley, bronze medalist at last year’s London Olympics, just introduced us to the future of coming out? In a remarkable five-minute clip the 19-year-old posted on YouTube this morning (and linked to on Twitter, where he has over two million followers), Daley comes out as bisexual* and explains why he chose to do so in a homemade video and not the more traditional print interview or TV sitdown: “I didn’t want my words twisted.”
Actress Maria Bello, she of a zillion TV shows and movies more people should see (The Cooler, A History of Violence) has written a piece in this weekend’s New York Times about telling her son and the rest of the family that her friendship with a woman has turned romantic. But keep it in your pants, squealing Law &Order: Special Acronyms Unit fangirls, because that woman is not Bello’s BFF Mariska Hargitay. Bello’s article, part of the Modern Love series, is a pleasant, low-key read and in line with the growing trend of casual celebrity outings.
* Because there exist on the Internet a gazillion photos of Bello and Hargitay gazing at each other more adoringly than some couples who have been married for forty years, I will direct you to basic Google image search results rather than select a photo to accompany this post.
12/1/2013 Update: Bello’s announcement is starting to get picked up on gossip blogs and mentioned by bastions of journalistic integrity like the Daily Mail. As of this writing one of the Mail‘s top headlines is “Prisoners actress Maria Bello comes out as gay and reveals she has a long-term girlfriend.” This is not quite true.
Well, it’s true that her name is Maria Bello and that she appears in Prisoners, but anyone who bothered reading her piece in the Times (which the Mail article quotes at length, so presumably someone there at least tried to read it while copying and pasting the details) would know that she does not call herself gay in it and that her current relationship is still relatively new. That’s sort of the whole point of what she wrote, you see.
Duncan James of the British band Blue has come out as bisexual (warning: the link will take you to a trashy UK tabloid website that will hurt your eyes and possibly your intellect). The best part of any pop idol coming out is always reading the comments his borderline-illiterate fans make online afterward (witness the reactions of Claymates to Clay Aiken coming out here), so let’s sample some of the reaction to his announcement:
“this news is brill!!!!”
“NO, NOT DUNCAN!!! I loved him, OMG! I was a huge fan! What i can say? It shouldn’t be this way. What is happening? I don’t think being Bi is a good thing….”
“no such thing as bisexual. you smoke a pipe – youre gay. end of!”*
“It was SO obvious!!!”
“Well as Duncan is always walking up and down Compton Street in London’s gay village, there was no shock to this news.”
“absolute filth. You should be locked up for putting women at risk from your dirty sordid antics. mind you, you would probably enjoy dropping the soap in the showers!!! disgusting human being”
“you seem like a top bloke mate that’s all that matters well done for being brave and talking about it good luck”
Overall, there were lots of “Duh!” responses, which makes a modicum of sense if you’re familiar with the hair and posture (more pictures here) of this particular boy bander. Honestly, I found the reactions to be disappointing, perhaps because Blue hasn’t been relevant for years. What I’d really like to happen in the near future, just to see if the Internet can withstand it, is for a current heartthrob with mass tween and teen appeal—a Daniel Radcliffe or Robert Pattinson—to come screaming out of the closet. If that could be timed for December, it would make for the greatest holiday season ever.
This time it’s former Amish widow-turned-civilian astrophysics instructor Kelly McGillis who has shocked absolutely no one by swinging open the closet door. My brother, who had a crush on her when he was a child who watched Top Gun incessantly (I still haven’t forgiven him for that), will be devastated.
Alas, that’s really no one’s fault but his own — I’ve spent the last 20 years telling him that McGillis, who hosts a yearly flag football tournament in Key West, Florida, is a gigantic lesbian and he never wanted to listen, not even when my parents added, “No, for sure, son, she’s super gay.” Now if someone could please reach her Accused costar and rumored ex-girlfriend Jodie Foster for comment on all of this, that would be fantastic.
It’s been a while since we last flipped through the pages of British tabloids (one can only stomach so many stories about little boys who might be fathers; and previously reviled cancer-stricken reality TV stars who are contemplating dying on camera), but today I saw a headline I couldn’t resist: “Gay City Roller.”
If you think you know where this is headed — that a member of the Bay City Rollers, a group I’m more familiar with as a punch line than as musicians (my middle-aged mom was more of a Carole King and Carly Simon girl in her youth) — has come out of the closet, you’re right. Sort of.
Singer Les McKeown, who fronted the band for most of the ’70s, admitted during an appearance on the British TV show Rehab (which is apparently similar to VH1’s Celebrity Rehab, a program I hope that none of you watch — there are much better things you could be doing with your time, and it wouldn’t kill you to read a book or take your dog for a walk or something) that he’s been shtupping guys throughout his lengthy marriage to a woman.
The revelation struck the Daily Mail as scandalous, but in reviewing the old photos of McKeown that accompany the article, I’m finding their shock a wee bit disingenuous. For a less tabloidy take on McKeown and his struggles with substance abuse, Scotland on Sunday has an interview with him that doesn’t feature any sidebar links to stories about Posh Spice or Kylie Minogue.
For anyone too lazy or disinterested to click the links, McKeown would like to stay married to his wife despite his interest in men, which is the only thing that prevented me from calling this post “Pop Star Everyone Thought Was Gay Shocks World By Revealing He’s Gay (And It’s Not Ricky Martin).” I mean, I may not be familiar with their music, but who hasn’t heard the “Gay City Rollers” jokes a million times by now?
As a parting bonus, here’s a 30-year-old picture of Les doing a somewhat drunken and dim-witted looking version of jazz hands.
In this good Advocate interview by Ari Karpel, Wanda Sykes is mostly serious, like when she talks about her seven-year marriage to a man:
“I actually made the choice to be straight as a kid,” she says. “Early on I knew [being gay] wasn’t gonna fly. No way. And from the teachers and church and all it was, This is wrong! What’s wrong with me? And you pray and ask God to take it away, and you bury it and bury it, and you shut that part of yourself off. Then you try to live the life that you’re supposed to live.”
But she also gets in a few good jokes, the best about the media coverage devoted to her coming out at a marriage equality rally in Las Vegas last year after the passage of Proposition 8 in California: “I was like, Damn, whatever happened to ‘What happens in Vegas…?'”
Who would have guessed there are still people who think Tintin is straight? British journalist Matthew Parris devoted a column to the character’s sexuality earlier this month, making such a strong case for Tintin being a ‘mo that more than a week later, people around the world are still talking about it. One paper, the Times of India, asked Tintin fans in Chennai to weigh in on the subject. Hilarity, inevitably, ensued. Sample response:
Kicking off the debate on Tintin’s orientation, actor Shaam confesses to be quite astounded on hearing this news. “Never in my dreams would I have thought Tintin would be gay. Just because his best friend is a male sailor, it does not mean that he shares any romantic feelings for Haddock. I simply cannot digest this theory,” he says.
The male fans arguing in defense of Tintin’s alleged heterosexuality are the comic geek versions of Claymates. What will they say when Tintin announces that he’s expecting an in-vitro baby with Bianca Castafiore?
Rock Hudson and his lesbian wife, Phyllis, laugh at the stupidity of the public.
On the heels of last week’s New York Times article about gay actors finding work in Hollywood comes this piece by MSNBC contributor Michael Ventre, who declares the “days of Rock Hudson-style facades over” while acknowledging that discrimination remains an issue for entertainers seeking an audience of millions. The latter part we’re in agreement about; when it comes to the former, I don’t know what the heck he’s talking about.
Unquestionably, there has been a shift over the last few years in how closeted Hollywood celebrities conduct themselves in the media. Rather than going through the elaborate charade of cooking up fake heterosexual relationships for public consumption (not that those things don’t still happen as well), more celebrities seem to be adopting the “my private life is off-limits” approach their British counterparts have long taken, an efficient way of avoiding both coming out and being actively closeted.
However, the American way of doing it sometimes seems to miss the point. You’re not preserving your personal integrity when you tell reporters your private life is off-limits and then proceed to spend 20 minutes yakking about your children, all the while failing to mention the fact that you had them with a partner — the same partner who was probably making sure they did their homework while you were off on a press junket pretending to be a single parent. What that ultimately exposes is an astonishing lack of integrity, made only slightly more palatable by the fact that a phony heterosexual love interest wasn’t dragged into the mix.
That more gay celebrities seem resistant to the idea of entering into sham relationships is certainly encouraging, but I question how much of it can be directly attributed to that optimistic, familiar standby that society is evolving. When it comes to the public embracing openly gay entertainers, that evolution can only happen as quickly as famous gay people allow it to. They have to keep coming out if we’re ever going to get anywhere, and when you compare the number of gay Hollywood types to the number of out Hollywood types, it’s clear there is still a great deal of progress to be made. And it’s only natural to wonder how many recent comings-out have been completely organic and how many have been the function of an increasingly invasive, ‘open 24/7 on the Internet’ tabloid media.
Are celebrities rejecting the Rock Hudson facade on their own, or is Perez Hilton rejecting it for them? I think the two are inextricably linked, but I’m also cynical enough to believe that the significant challenge of being a public figure and remaining closeted in the year 2008 has led to more recent outings than any newly unearthed altruistic impulses on the part of gay celebrities. Which leads us to another point of Ventre’s that I have to disagree with:
When gays and lesbians in the entertainment industry come out these days, they’d probably be advised to throw lavish coming-out parties to ensure that attention will be paid. In the year 2008, when tolerance levels appear to be at an all-time high — not ideal by any means, and with lots of room for improvement — such an announcement is often quickly consumed by the 24-hour news cycle, and digested by a more enlightened populace.
How many lavish coming-out parties has Hollywood ever held? More often than not, at least in recent memory, a short statement is released, or a matter-of-fact acknowledgment is made in an interview, and the blogosphere takes it from there. Heather Matarazzo, Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, T.R. Knight, David Hyde Pierce, Neil Patrick Harris — none of them were looking for a media circus when they came out, and few had the stature to warrant one, though the “Same Sex and the City” headline opportunities presented by the Nixon story were too great for most newspapers to resist.
Clay Aiken bucked the trend last week with his double whammy People cover and Good Morning America appearance, but most celebrity outings remain relatively low-key affairs — and are likely to stay that way when the majority of those electing to come out are faded pop stars or actors who work primarily on stage or in television.
Now that Clay Aiken has officially come out of the closet, calling the move “the first decision I made as a father,” his most outspoken fans, the oft-mocked Claymates, are slowly inching from bargaining to acceptance. I’ve been observing their reactions from afar since lastnight, when the ban on the People cover story discussion was lifted at The Clayboard and members commenced consoling each other and weighing in on the announcement.
From “The Clayboard,” a fan forum dedicated to Clay Aiken of American Idol:
“Clay fans are brave and loyal and loving, and sometimes they are truly tested. Hugs to everyone who has weathered the storm.”
Honestly, I’m surprised. I was expecting all kinds of crying and carrying on, but apparently the subject of Aiken’s appearance on the cover of People magazine — he is shown cradling his newborn son alongside the headline “Yes, I’m Gay” and the words “The Idol star opens up about his emotional decision to come out: ‘I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things'”—is verboten until the authenticity of the story has been established.
For the record, a USA Today entertainment blogger has already posted that while People doesn’t have the cover on their website yet, “they confirm it’s real.” And there is currently a red breaking news style banner running across the top of the magazine’s website that advises readers to “Come back Wednesday for the full scoop on Clay Aiken at 7 A.M. EDT.”
