Echoing what everyone else has said about the incredible importance of celebrities coming out because of the way it inspires and supports LGBTQ youth.
A lot of celebrity gossip is pure schadenfreude, and I don't care for it. People coming out, on the other hand, is
important.* It's often personally and psychologically important to the person in question, and it's important for society in that it helps normalize being LGBTQ.
(*
ETA: I don't mean "important" in the sense that a big deal
should be made out of it, in a perfect world -- I wish we lived in a society where orientation was shrug-worthy -- but I mean it matters to society that people do it, that there are people demonstrating that it's okay not to hide if you don't want to.)
I know what it's like to have other people make a big deal of what they assume to be my sexual orientation or tell me emphatically how a person of my biological sex is supposed to be and behave. I didn't start it, they did. What, we aren't allowed to talk about it ourselves? Fine, then: tell them to STFU.
This is a really good point. Most of the time it's not the person coming out who's insisting on making a big deal about things, it's the media, to whom sexual orientation is (still, unfortunately) a newsworthy story. And celebrities
know the media is going to make a big deal out of it no matter what they do, and the more private they try to be the more newsworthy the information is (and maybe they don't want sneak around and hide when they go on dates and constantly fear that the paparazzi will spot them and pounce -- I can't imagine making a decision as to how to come out in the face of that).
In fact, it looks like the most complicated decision in the world to me, how to come out as a celebrity. One recent example -- the to-be-pro football player -- IIRC he decided to come out publicly (he was already out to his team) after the information got leaked, I think? And he wanted to control the story and do it himself first. And other celebrities have come out after the media kept pestering them about rumors and gossip. Still others have made very much the opposite of a big deal out of their orientations, but have simply dated whom they liked without hiding it -- and then the
media made a big deal about it.
And others have come out to the media because they didn't want to feel like they were living a lie, or because they wanted to stop any rumors before they started, or because they wanted to show they were proud of being with their partners, or for any number of excellent reasons, including "just because," which is in my opinion also an excellent reason.
But you know what? I don't care if celebrities make a big deal about coming out, because in the world we live in, which is still so incredibly full of prejudice, where queer teens are committing suicide and Arizona is trying to get laws passed that dehumanize gay people and homomsexuality is a capital crime in many places still (a capital crime!) and even in the United States sodomy was illegal in many states until 2003
-- until 2003 people's sex lives were
crimes -- and we still don't have equal rights for same-sex couples in most states and a lot of people still face tremendous pressure from unsupportive families, well, considering all that and more, I think people can come out however the fuck they want to.
