When British pop star Will Young came out in the UK press on March 10, 2002, it was an exciting moment for the gay community. Just over a month earlier, Young had won the first ever Pop Idol TV contest (on which American Idol is based), with 4.6 million viewers voting for him against rival Gareth Gates. His first single had gone straight to the top of the UK charts, breaking records for fastest-selling debut, and he was arguably the most buzzed-about person in the country. Both the matter-of-fact way in which Young spoke about his sexuality (“It's totally no big deal, just part of who I am”), and the remarkably calm and supportive press reaction, seemed to herald a new era for gay people in British pop music.

Of course, there had been other openly gay pop stars (George Michael, Elton John, Stephen Gately of boyband Boyzone), but none of them had been out from the start of their careers; and, since their outings, only Elton had really remained squarely in the spotlight. Will Young felt like a test model for a new kind of pop star--the question being, would his groundbreaking openness about his sexuality affect his fan base and commercial appeal?

The answer proved to be a very emphatic ‘no.' Between 2002 and 2005, to quote his official website, Young “won two Brits [i.e. British Music Awards], had four Number One singles, two Number One albums, and sold out his last tour in 30 minutes.” Straight women continued to adore him in droves; he popped up as a regular in categories like "Favourite Male" in UK celebrity magazines. Even better, gay teenagers finally had someone they could look to as an example of how you could be young, openly gay, and still be massively popular.

While Young was open about his sexuality in real life, the persona he presented in his music videos and in live appearances was a different story. Several of the tracks in his debut album, From Now On, were covers of songs originally sung by heterosexual men
(Light My Fire by The Doors being an example), and to some extent it could be said that he had a reason for singing about his love object as “she.”

But the original songs on the album were sung the same way with “girl” being mentioned repeatedly in the single Over You. Meanwhile, his music videos showed him either entirely on his own, or in a safe crowd, with no specific love interest. The one exception was the video for Light My Fire, which took its cue from the French film Jules et Jim, showing an ambiguous relationship between two men and a woman. In it, Young was seen with his arm around a young blond man, who appeared several times in the video.

Even then the main romantic focus was a glamorous dark-haired girl--and Young continued to sing “she,” prompting one journalist in UK gay mag ‘Attitude' to write waspishly: “If you're going to come out to the entire nation, at least remember afterwards that you've done it. Write it on your hand, or something.”

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