THE STARS ARE COMING OUT
Celebs breaking down the closet door
When Tom Daley announced on YouTube what any of us with a pair of eyes already suspected, it provoked a fascinating spectrum of opinions. Some gay people angrily took to the forums declaring that “coming out should no longer be news”, while those of a more UKIP persuasion asked (with no sense of irony), “Why do they keep insisting on rubbing it in our faces?”
I was interviewed by BBC Radio Devon, which covers Tom’s home city of Plymouth and asked what my reaction was. I enthused that I thought that Tom’s “coming out” clip was not only honest, eloquent and touching, it was also incredibly important.
Almost 11 million people have viewed Daley’s “Something I Want to Say” video on YouTube, with the clip getting around 200,000 thumbs up compared to just 10,000 thumbs down. A significant number of those viewers will be young gay people coming to terms with their own sexuality, so the value of such of a positive role model admitting his own sexuality cannot be underestimated.
Using social media has definitely become a new way of coming out for a generation bought up on blogging and diary room confessions and it also leaves a permanent online library of positive stories to be accessed by people about to take the same important step themselves.
The journey towards “coming out” is, of course, different for every gay person and whether it is a positive experience is greatly impacted by a huge number of environmental factors beyond your control, from the society you are born into to the attitudes of family, friends and colleagues surrounding you. Celebrities have other factors to consider, needing to weigh up the perceived impact on their career against the positive statement they are making as a role model.
Famous sports people have additional pressures, especially as being gay is sadly still seen as a sign of weakness in many sports, still ridiculed from the locker room to chants on the terraces. While the list of LGBT sportspeople on Wikipedia looks quite impressive, very few of them are A-list sports stars and there are still many sports that have never had a professional player come out.
This is a great shame as it has now been almost four decades since American Football player David Kopay became the first athlete to come out in 1975, and almost 30 years since tennis player Martina Navratilova became the first professional athlete to come out while still playing. That said, recent campaigns to kick homophobia out of sport, here and across the Atlantic as well as the huge international