Here’s the difference between straight celebrities and queer celebrities:

Found on Tumblr. Reposted for truth!

While leaking pertinent and personal information on about either is skeezy and wrong, there is something supremely fucked up about outing a queer celebrity.*

Outing a person is not the same as fuzzy pictures of last night’s orgy or bad shots of lovers after a date. Outing a person is NOT the same as someone’s secret love child or affairs on set. Outing a famous celebrity is fucked up because not only is coming out a completely personal and sometimes time-sensitive subject, it has a lot to do with safety. Not just physical safety. Mental, emotional—if you can name it, coming out might have some effect on it.

It takes a special kind of jackass to out a celebrity and then try to justify that shit. Not only do you risk the chance of ruining this person’s career (unfortunately), you put them in a dangerous situation. Suddenly their bodies, minds, experiences, and decisions are no longer relevant. They do not have time to adjust to the sudden intrusion and opposition from all sides—how does their agent spin this, how does their manager work with this, how will their family react, what about the project they’re working on?

They don’t know their fans—what if one reacts badly? Are they safe? Do they need more security?

Queer celebrities don’t owe you shit. They don’t owe you their safety, health, or their career. Painting them as hypocrites or liars because they’d rather consider themselves before your time table is fucked up and wrong. I’d be fucking damned if I’d ever surrender my livelihood because some fucktwit with a fucked up sense of Justice and Right decides to tell the whole world things I am not ready to tell myself.

There is nothing wrong with being in closet, especially when it comes to safety. Queer people deserve time, context, and confidence. They deserve to pick and choose people, places, times—-all that shit.

(*It should be noted that it’s fucked up to out ANYBODY, but seeing as I’m taking this from the Ellen Page affair, I’m using celebrities.)

9 thoughts on “Here’s the difference between straight celebrities and queer celebrities:”

  3. “It takes a special kind of jackass to out a celebrity and then try to justify that shit.”

    I don’t know about the “special” part Neo (it’s too common), but I would agree with everything else. It’s incredibly invasive, dicatorial and reducing a human being to a ‘tool’ in order to aid a cause and an extension of the whole imperial mindset where people don’t get to be whole, entire human beings that have some say in shaping their own path. Nah, much better to have some moralisitic, blinkered ass-wipe determine your time table and set the agenda for you; not because they are weak-minded ninnies who can’t stand on their own two feet so need to enforce a faux ‘solidarity’ on others that is entirely on *their* specific terms – but for the “greater good” or because they “care” or whatever. (When people are happy to sacrifice other people for an alleged greater good, I’m always curious as to how the one that’s sacrificed is immediately jettisoned and discounted from the supposed “collective”.)

    The thing that gets to me in all of this is that too many people have no flexible notion of solidiarity that balances between the welfare of an individual and the good of the collective. And there are too many unscrupulous types that feel that they and they are alone ARE the collective on to themselves.

    Hmm. Sounds like the mainstream LGBQT movement shares some problems in commone with mainsteam (read, white) feminism with far too many members of these groups being unable to distinguish where they end, and where other people begin.

    • “I don’t know about the “special” part Neo (it’s too common), but I would agree with everything else. ”

      I didn’t write this. I don’t think the author meant special as in rare or unique but in the sense of immensely fucked up. But I completely agree with you that this ish is all too common.

      “Hmm. Sounds like the mainstream LGBQT movement shares some problems in commone with mainsteam (read, white) feminism with far too many members of these groups being unable to distinguish where they end, and where other people begin.”

      SO MUCH THIS!!!!

      Um yeah for the same reason: READ, WHITE!

Comments are closed.