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.
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.
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?
Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wonders why there are no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. (For my part, I wondered why Mark Caro was asking such a silly question until I saw the accompanying promotional still from Milk.) There aren’t any openly gay leading ladies in Hollywood, either, but never mind that; the answer to Caro’s question is simple — the entertainment industry is full of cowards, the media is full of cowards, and the public is full of idiots.
In Las Vegas, the comedian Wanda Sykes surprised a crowd of more than 1,000 rallying outside a gay community center by announcing that she is gay and had wed her wife in California on Oct. 25. Ms. Sykes, who divorced her husband of seven years in 1998, had never publicly discussed her sexual orientation but said the passage of Proposition 8 had propelled her to be open about it.
You can read more of Wanda’s Las Vegas statements here. She’s one of my favorite comedians and I applaud her for finally coming out. It can only help her stand-up routine; now she can let loose in her bit about gay marriage in a way she couldn’t before.
This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate where we get a glimpse into Don Vito Corleone’s childhood in Sicily, his voyage to America, his adventures in rug-stealing with Clemenza, and the totally awesome way in which he disposed of Don Fanucci. (And that’s not even getting into Michael Corleone’s trip to Havana and his dealings with Hyman Roth, or Fredo’s fatal Johnny Ola slip-up.).
Sorry, I got confused there for a minute. This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate in which an actual lesbian — Jane Czyzselska, editor of Diva magazine, which is Europe’s answer to Curve — weighs in, managing to do so in a non-sucky way. You know, unlike the Australian article that I complained about so bitterly earlier this week. Czyzselska was responding to Jodie Marsh’s recent declaration that she’s giving lesbianism a whirl.
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.
“I thought you were good, Clay. But you’re not good. You’re just another lying old dirty birdy.”
“Clay has such a power over me that I couldn’t turn away from him if I wanted to.”
So says avowed Clay Aiken fan ClaysCutiePie14 over at the Clayboard, and I know how she feels because that’s how I feel … about the Clayboard. I can’t stop visiting that website.
I’ve already compiled a companion piece to my previous post about the Claymate reaction to Aiken’s coming out, but I won’t have everything ready until tomorrow. Still, I couldn’t wait to post this, the campiest Claymate post of all time. It starts off slow, but stick with it and I promise you won’t be disappointed:
