SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 57,736
Because, in the case of anyone that does not conform to heteronormative roles, society more or less demands it. This is doubly true for famous or noteworthy people.
Either you announce on your own terms or someone else—often a malicious actor—will announce it for you.
Because society largely holds being “straight”, all of your life (rejecting the fluidity of sexuality), as the default sexuality (and still in much of the world and the brains of those living in it, the “normal” sexuality), anyone outside of the default is under a special level of scrutiny and subject to constant threat of denigration, harassment, or worse, from people they have never met, who do not actually know anything about them, except that they are not the default sexuality.
If you are “straight” you don’t get up in the morning worrying about being publicly “outed” bombastically for your sexuality, or called some slur by some **** on the street, or having your coworkers speculate about your sexual preferences or exploits, or getting jumped on the way back from the club by some religious or neonazi fanatics that “fucking hate trans” or some self-hating closeted prick that didn’t like the way you looked at him at the bar, or having fabricated stories printed in tabloids simply because it gives sexually suppressed UKIP-tattooed knuckle draggers a semi, or whether your marriage will be voided or your right to have children taken away if a truly far-right government comes to power and captures the courts.
You don’t worry about that because it doesn’t happen for “straight” people because they’re “straight”. It’s not even a thing you consider as a possibility.
People that possess sexualities outside of the “default” still have to think about those possibilities every day. And those things still happen every day—far less than they once did, but they’re still happening. Not everyone is “enlightened”. In fact, far fewer than many of us would like at this point in history.
And often a way to have one less thing to worry about is to publicly “out” yourself, at the time and in the manner of your choosing, to the people you wish to know or everyone, in some cases. That allows you to attain or retain at least a little bit of power and control, especially in cases where not everyone is going to be happy or accepting, which is still all to frequent these days.
Again, it wouldn’t be necessary if being “straight”, all your life, wasn’t still seen as the default. People would just have the sexuality they have at that moment; as long as they aren’t harming themselves or others, no one cares.