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rmSo Lindsay Lohan is dating a woman and Clay Aiken acknowledges he's gay and most people just seem to be making snarky comments about how obvious all that was before the announcements. And how boring.
And I wish I could agree. Because while neither are celebrities I care about and both pieces of news are things I find unremarkable, it matters tremendously that in the face of long-term and very loud speculation (especially in Aiken's case) the people involved felt they couldn't or shouldn't say anything.
That sucks. It sucks whether it's self-hatred or career preservation, advice from friends or concern over issues of family. And so while no one is surprised that Aiken's gay, it does matter a lot that he's come out. Just as it matters a lot that Lohan has acknowledged her relationship.
Because these are desperately normal celebrities that desperately normal people, who might be the sorts of people who believe they don't even know any gay people, adore. And I don't care who you are or how much the world's been talking about it -- coming out is always scary, especially if you have to do it in People or on CNN.
So dial down the snark a bit, folks. You may not like their creative work or think much of their public personas, but they're doing the work of living life under circumstances more fucked up than any of us can imagine. I was older than both of them when I came out to my parents. So aside from being richer and thinner, today I've got to acknowledge, obvious or no, a couple of celebs being just a bit braver than me too.
Give the kids a break for a day. They deserve it.
And I wish I could agree. Because while neither are celebrities I care about and both pieces of news are things I find unremarkable, it matters tremendously that in the face of long-term and very loud speculation (especially in Aiken's case) the people involved felt they couldn't or shouldn't say anything.
That sucks. It sucks whether it's self-hatred or career preservation, advice from friends or concern over issues of family. And so while no one is surprised that Aiken's gay, it does matter a lot that he's come out. Just as it matters a lot that Lohan has acknowledged her relationship.
Because these are desperately normal celebrities that desperately normal people, who might be the sorts of people who believe they don't even know any gay people, adore. And I don't care who you are or how much the world's been talking about it -- coming out is always scary, especially if you have to do it in People or on CNN.
So dial down the snark a bit, folks. You may not like their creative work or think much of their public personas, but they're doing the work of living life under circumstances more fucked up than any of us can imagine. I was older than both of them when I came out to my parents. So aside from being richer and thinner, today I've got to acknowledge, obvious or no, a couple of celebs being just a bit braver than me too.
Give the kids a break for a day. They deserve it.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 05:21 pm (UTC)So I was sitting there trying to decide if I wanted to disprove his assertion that he didn't know any gay people by holding out my hand and saying, "hi, I'm queer" but since it was around two in the morning, he was drunk, and his argument for not liking gay people besides "sex is for reproduction" and "it's just wrong" was "anal sex is nasty", I figured my odds of finding out that lesbians were hot or didn't exist or otherwise don't count were fairly high and it would piss me off more than I wanted to deal with at the time.
That and his saying that he'd want to kill his (non-exisitent) son if his son was gay doesn't really make for warm fuzzy safe feelings even when everyone else was as horrified as I was. On the up side, his non-existent kids now have standing offers to come live with pretty much everyone else who was there.