Yep, I’m Gay

Out and about: Actor Neil Patrick Harris recently went public about his sexuality. (Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images)

Creak! Thud! Bang! Did you hear that? It’s the sound of the tightly barricaded closet doors being wrenched open in Hollywood. Following ex-boy-bander Lance Bass’s revelation in July that he has a boyfriend, Grey’s Anatomy cast member T.R. Knight announced that he, too, is gay in an October issue of People magazine. Two weeks later, it was Neil Patrick Harris’s turn to share the happy news.

If there have been mass burnings of Doogie Howser, MD DVDs or 'N Sync CDs, no one’s reporting it. In fact, the response has been refreshingly ho-hum. Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out almost a decade ago made the cover of Time and Rosie O’Donnell’s long-awaited admission merited a Prime Time interview with Diane Sawyer. How times have changed. As Knight said in his statement to People, “I hope the fact I’m gay isn’t the most interesting part of me.” And so far the public doesn’t seem to think it is, either. Sure, the low-key response to the news about Bass, Harris and Knight is in part due to their (sorry, guys!) B-list profiles. Bass might have been in one of the biggest pop acts of the last decade and Knight and Harris are cast members of hit shows, but they aren’t marquee stars like George Clooney or Justin Timberlake. 

Still, this non-reaction reflects a decided shift in social acceptance of gay and lesbian celebrities. DeGeneres and O’Donnell are two of daytime TV’s most popular personalities, and their audiences prove that they have as many fans in the heartland as they do in the Sodom and Gomorrah of New York and Los Angeles. (DeGeneres will even host the Oscars this year, beaming her tomboy, easy-listening comic shtick to millions of viewers around the globe.) The same-sex weddings of Melissa Etheridge and Elton John have been cheerfully reported in the entertainment press, alongside notices of straight unions. And a growing number of out actors find steady work with little concern about their sexuality: there’s character actress Jane Lynch, who’s played everything from a hetero horndog in The 40-Year- Old Virgin to a lady-loving canine trainer in Best in Show. Cynthia Nixon and Nathan Lane have respected careers in television, film and on Broadway. And in a nice – perhaps intentional? – casting twist, lesbian actress Sarah Paulson currently plays a born-again Christian comedian conflicted about gay marriage on the Aaron Sorkin series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Doris Day and Rock Hudson in the 1961 film Lover Come Back. (Evening Standard/Getty Images)

This casual openness makes the celebrities still huddled in the closet look like throwbacks to the curdled-with-self-loathing era of Paul Lynde and Rock Hudson. Now, it’s almost quaint to think of a star like Hudson set up in a sham marriage to hide his interest in men from the gossip rags – and unbearably sad to remember that it was the scourge of AIDS that finally brought him out of the closet. And yet, ironically, it’s the traditional entertainment media that have done the most to keep the closet door so firmly shut. Even with the growing tabloidization of our times, closeted celebrities have been mostly spared paparazzi scrutiny. In the last week, for instance, I have read the details of Reese Witherspoon’s divorce papers, learned about Keith Urban’s struggle with alcoholism, and been subjected to the scour-your-retinas-with-Clorox idea of a Britney/K-Fed sex tape. Divorce, addiction, sex – all are private matters, and yet the mainstream entertainment media have no misgivings about reporting them, or speculating on any other personal matter, like the now ubiquitous bump watch that begins every time a female star shows the slightest sign of bloat. But, aside from pure tabloids like the National Enquirer, the traditional media remain hesitant to out an entertainer, or press the question in an interview. This double standard was evident when Diane Sawyer brought up the long-standing gay rumours during an interview earlier this year with American Idol star Clay Aiken. The singer dismissed the question as “rude” and Sawyer dropped the issue. Would a straight celebrity have gotten off so easily when it came to discussing his or her personal life?

A decade or more earlier, when being gay was considered a sure-fire career killer, the press’s reticence might have been spun as a gallant, protective instinct. Certainly when Tom Junod wrote a wink-wink-nudge-nudge story about Kevin Spacey for Esquire in 1997, he was slammed by straights and gays alike for his almost-outing of the actor. These days, though, not raising the question about a closeted star’s sexuality seems more like homophobic collusion than kindly obfuscation. While outing is a controversial, complicated issue, the reluctance of the mainstream press to even ask the question of a closeted star perpetuates the erroneous and hurtful belief that homosexuality is something singularly shameful and best kept a secret.

Singer Lance Bass (left) with boyfriend Reichen Lehmkuhl. (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

But in the age of YouTube, MySpace and reality television, that old-time notion of secrecy seems almost laughable. The line between private and public is speedily being erased by video diaries, the swapping of personal information with thousands of on-line “friends” and the inexplicable desire of average people to make asses of themselves on TV. In this new look-at-me! culture, any celebrities who don’t live their lives fully in the public eye seem suspicious. So much so that when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes first declined to release pictures of their newborn, it didn’t sound like the reasonable wish of protective parents (and not just because Cruise’s recent behaviour is so many shades of crazy), but instead led to speculations that the child was ugly, an alien or non-existent. Not surprisingly, in this context, living in the closet is nearly impossible.

And unlike the traditional media, the round-the-clock, camera-phone-fuelled blogosphere has almost no qualms about outing famous people. Harris went public after his publicist denied the actor was gay, following a report about Harris’s boyfriend on the site Canada.com. Knight came out after it was widely reported that his Grey’s Anatomy co-star Isaiah Washington uttered an anti-gay slur. And most famously, it was a campaign by Perez Hilton, a popular gossip blogger, that drove Bass out of the closet; Bass’s fame-sucking boyfriend Reichen Lehmkuhl, himself a former reality TV star, is even attempting to extend the pair’s 15 minutes of notoriety by coining the phrase “lanced” to describe this online outing. Now, Perez has vowed to go after other alleged closet cases.

Whether these don’t-ask-don’t-tell celebrities will ultimately blame Perez, or thank him, doesn’t really matter anymore. In this new media climate, the closet’s days are numbered. The only question now is whether stars will bravely step out on their own, or wait to be pushed.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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