Like Barry Manilow, I came out later in life
Barry Manilow recently came out, and I had a flash of empathy. He was 73 and I was 46 — and I felt older than old when I did it. I also felt a great sense of relief. When I came out in 2004, social media were in their infancy; I just telephoned a well-connected friend working at the juncture of food and journalism and let him do the rest in my professional circle. Manilow came out via a People magazine cover story, and the social media reaction was swift and enormous.
“It’s been great,” Manilow told Savannah Guthrie and Carson Daly on the “Today” last month. “I mean, it’s no news to me and no news to everybody around me, family, friends, band. I think even fans. I don’t think it was news at all.”
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook.
The news generated comments across social media that ranged from supportive to funny to really snarky — many of which, in turn, sparked more reaction. What surprised me wasn’t that Manilow is gay or took so long to come out, but that the reaction was so markedly mixed.
Coming out, to me, has always seemed an almost sacred step. And if there were one common bond, one experience, I shared with anyone who publicly identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer — or anywhere else outside what’s considered heteronormative — it was that act of coming out. I thought there’d be, I don’t know, universal cybercheers for Manilow. Instead, I was left wondering if people who were older would be discouraged from coming out by the jeers, even from some within the LGBTQ community.
Center on Halsted, Chicago’s LGBTQ center, posted on its Facebook page an April 5 story from the Huffington Post about Manilow coming out. The post had comments that mingled congratulations with a question about why Manilow had waited so long and quips about it being “old news” or “we knew” and so forth.
“Who knew BM would be such a lightning rod?” wrote Owen Keehnen, author, historian and cofounder of Chicago’s Legacy Project, on his Facebook page. “The subject of apolitical celebrity obligations to come out and public vs. private personas is sure great debate fodder.”
“Just shocked that coming out would take such a negative turn,” Keehnen told me when I asked about the post. “Lots of comments directly and indirectly about how BM should have come out or when . ... Or, flip side insults that treated his coming out as stating the obvious. He was doing something positive, and it was turned into a lose-lose situation.”
Vinnie Kinsella, the Portland, Ore.-based editor of 2016’s “Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi, and Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life,” said the varying reactions to Manilow’s coming out are “fairly typical” for anyone coming out except this has been magnified to a much bigger scale because of the performer’s celebrity.
“You never get an all-ornothing response,” he said. “There are always supportive people and people who don’t take it well.”
Some faulted the performer for not using his position and celebrity to help on various LGBTQ issues, said Rick Clemons, a Riverside, Calif.-based motivational speaker, coming out coach and author of “Frankly My Dear, I’m Gay: A Late Bloomers Guide to Coming Out.” But, Keehnen said, how do people know Manilow isn’t donating or supporting various LGBTQ causes? He might be.
“It was a different time,” Clemons said. “You get that, ‘Why don’t you be yourself?’ Society doesn’t let us be ourselves. It was a different time and place in Hollywood and the music industry.”
Manilow told People he was worried fans would be disappointed to know he is gay. But word that he is didn’t come as a bolt out of the blue courtesy of the magazine. Manilow and Garry Kief, his business manager, were married in 2014 in what People described as a “clandestine ceremony.” Word of the marriage got out about a year later.
“The (National) Enquirer, you know, kinda caught us getting married, and so we were stuck. So we let People magazine come on in,” Manilow said on “Today.” “I’m a private guy, I’m a musician. You know, yes, fame hit me, but I never really wanted to go on that ride. So I kept my — so I kept my dogs to myself, so I kept my house to myself. So, this part is uncomfortable but not, you know, the topic. No, I’m not uncomfortable about that. Garry and I have been together going on 40 years.”
Still, one might wonder: Why come out publicly at 73 (or 46, or whenever “later” in life)?
Kim Fountain, Center on Halsted’s chief operating officer, said each new generation seems to be coming out earlier than the one before it because earlier generations made it easier to do so. But there’s also a view, she added, that there’s a “right way” to come out and “unless you do it early and quick — it’s not right.”
I certainly felt there was a “right way” — and I hadn’t done it. Some wellmeaning friends once congratulated me for being “brave” to come out when I did, married to a woman and with a tween daughter. I thanked them but noted the really brave people were those who came out as teens or as young adults.
And, really, I came out because I had to. The question was finally asked, I answered it truthfully. The answer had been there all along, of course, buried under fear and denial and way too many glasses of scotch to be considered healthful. But it had stubbornly pushed its way to the surface and erupted.
I liken the experience of coming out to walking through a great door (perhaps a closet door), leaving a great cacophony of nerves, frustration and lies behind. In the sudden silence, I felt my mind clear and my stomach quiet. Life was different now.
Coming out as a gay man wasn’t all grand. My family broke up. My drinking worsened now that there wasn’t a vigilant spouse to curb it. I picked up smoking again and acquired a dangerous taste for some rather dangerous men. But living my truth in public outweighed all that. I was free to be me at last.
So, I understood completely when Kinsella made this case for coming out whenever: “For me, living authentically and openly is so much freer than the way I was living before.”
Clemons echoed that, saying, “You’re tired of living a lie, tired of not being who you want to be.”
“Every person has to come out in their own way,” Fountain said. “There is no one way to do it and no one safe way to do it.”
“We come out of the closet at the same time,” Clemons added. “When we’re ready.”