Whenever a celebrity comes out, amidst the inevitable headlines come the comments that cry things like, “Who cares?!” or “Sexuality isn’t news!” or “That’s their business!” It happened with Ian Thorpe, it happened with Cate Blanchett earlier this year (who then claimed she’d been misquoted) and now, on a smaller scale, it’s happened with Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos.

The thing is, though, it is news. Like it or not, we’ve gotten to a point where the private lives of celebrities make headlines across even the most ‘sensible’ of news outlets. And despite all our proclamations of gay inclusivity, the fact remains that homosexuality is still ‘different’. We might be ‘OK’ with it, but we still live in a world where people are straight until proven gay, where heterosexuality is assumed, and homosexuality stands out as a result.

When Caitlyn Jenner came out earlier this year, it made huge headlines across the world. Media Watch’s Paul Barry at the time proclaimed that it wasn’t news, thus demonstrating he probably doesn’t watch much media.

Celebrity has become more and more a part of our news cycle, and we generally have ourselves to blame for that. Since Rupert Murdoch made news more of a commodity than a fact of public interest – turning news into something saleable, with topless women on page three of his red top tabloids – audiences have been driving news content. Where prior to this, we might have considered news what the public ‘needs to know’, now it’s more about what the public ‘wants to know’ (which might also explain the recent disparate Paris/Beirut coverage, as outlets like The Conversation have suggested). Because whoever sells the most newspapers makes the most money, and continues to stay afloat in this dire contemporary media climate.

And the public wants to know about people. Human interest stories have boomed in the tabloid age, and with that comes celebrity. We care about individual people, because it’s easier to empathise with a single face than an entire crowd. We care about celebrities because they personify both our everyday lives and what we’d like our everyday lives to be like. We crave their private lives, so we can measure our worth against theirs, and feel good about ourselves when they fuck up (we all love some schadenfreude).

And this is where celebrity coming out stories, ah, come in. They’re perfect headline fodder, because they demonstrate when a celebrity has done something ‘different’. And this in itself is pretty shit – that labelling of homosexuality as ‘different’ and therefore worthy of discussing – but it’s still the state of affairs. Until everyone stops calling them ‘gay weddings’ and starts calling them ‘weddings’, we’ll always be marked as other. (And then there are some of us, like me, who like being other, but that’s another story.)

There is also plenty of good in celebrity coming out stories. When I first came out myself, I wrote about why I wished more celebrities were upfront with their sexualities. Denying your homosexuality, particularly in our current world where it’s supposed to be ‘no big deal’ and ‘not news’, is responsible for making it so: it turns it into something to shame.

On top of that, the more out and proud celebrities there are, the more out and proud role models closeted kids have, which helps reduce the stigma of being gay and decreases the risks of bullying – because if some hugely masculine, hugely popular sports star that’s revered by school bullies were gay, being gay would become less of a bad thing. This is particularly important for kids growing up outside of Sydney, like me, who don’t have any gay teachers, or gay dentists (because they all live in Newtown).

While in an ideal world, celebrities coming out are not necessarily something the public needs to know as it stands, it’s certainly something we want to know. You can proclaim “Who cares?” all you like, but actually, I care, and 15-year-old me desperately cared, as I searched the news for someone like me: someone who was gay, but also successful, smart, and admirable – someone who showed me that I could be more than what the stigma of homosexuality told me I could.

This Week…

The Perv Queerotica Film Festival is on this Thursday November 26 – Sunday November 29 at the Red Rattler. Expect plenty of queer erotics, including films like Neurosex Pornoia: Episode 2, parties, and a panel on sex work and working in pornography on the closing night.

On Friday November 27 and Saturday November 28, SassLife is taking over Tokyo Sing Song. It’ll feature performances from Betty Grumble, Jord Vato, Kieran Bryant and Daisy as well as music from Vibe Positive, Perfect Calamity, Amateur Humans and more.

Also on Saturday November 28 is Loose Ends’ ninth birthday party. Moving from its old home Phoenix just up the road to Oxford Art Factory, the night features regular Matt Vaughan who will be joined by Michael Magnan, Stereogamous, L’Oasis and a few others.

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