On the heels of outing his Body Dysmorphic Disorder in an expose by the Huffington Post, Reid Ewing also kind of outed himself as gay on Twitter by commenting that a fellow sufferer of Body Dysmorphic Disorder looked “hot af”.
When asked by a fan “did you also just out yourself?” Ewing responded, “I was never in.”
Which raises some questions.
In 2015, with marriage now legal across the board in the US and Neil Patrick Harris and Ellen Degeneres as America’s (separate) Sweethearts, do we still need to come out?
Unfortunately, the question posed by the fan means that we do. “Coming out” in the limelight is very different than coming out in our private circles. When you’re a celebrity of any persuasion, going grocery shopping is political. So why on earth wouldn’t announcing your sexual orientation be?
While we can salute Ewing for his cavalier attitude, the bottom line is that we’re just not politically in a place where being LGBT is normalized. We still need to “come out” as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or another faction of the PRIDE umbrella where the straight world just doesn’t.
Coming out publicly doesn’t cause the same stir it would have even a year ago, but it’s still newsworthy because being gay is different. Being gay, by and large, is no longer bad, but it’s still different.