Ellen Page was the latest celebrity to openly come out of the closet. It happened at a conference for LGBT in Las Vegas over the weekend. Not to much surprise, this revelation dominated the news for more than 24 hours. This being said, you have to ask yourself, is being gay really seen to be normal these days?
I believe that a celebrity coming out being widely acclaimed and talked about in the news, internet and social media is a contradiction of the view that being a homosexual is normal; a view that our society is rightly trying very hard to encourage lately.
Our society is subtly guilty of putting labels on groups of people thus creating divisions between them. If people were to stop and realise that putting labels on people is not helping the issue and that your sexuality doesn’t define you as a human, I believe it would be easier for everyone to express their sexuality without feeling any constraints.
There’s no denying that homosexuality receives stigma from time to time but the whole idea of calling someone a hero and saying that they are brave because they announce their sexual preference just seems a bit bizarre. I don’t think it makes sense to make it such a big deal when this is the very thing we are trying to avoid. We should want people to feel normal and like everyone else regardless of their sexuality so why should such commotion follow someone announcing they are gay, straight, bisexual or lesbian?
It would be wrong for me to say that we live in a perfect society where every single person is one hundred percent okay with homosexuality but more or less, it’s widely accepted and should be seen as a normal part of everyday life; for someone to be called a hero because they announced that they’re gay is contradictory of that.
In simpler forms, it’s like giving someone a gold sticker when they come out of the closet. I don’t know about you but it all just comes across as inadvertently patronising. It’s 2014 and if we keep making a big deal out of these things than how will it ever be considered normal?
