We Just Had a Gay Media Earthquake — Did You Feel It?

The ground just shifted. Did you feel it?

No, I’m not talking about that earthquake in California a couple of days ago. I’m talking about a subtle, but seismic shift that happened in the way the traditional media cover gay celebrities who are not officially “out.”

Back in September, AfterElton.com announced a shift in our editorial policy: a celebrity didn’t necessarily have to declare “I am gay” in order for us to refer to him as such. If there was compelling evidence that a celebrity is gay – if, for example, they’re repeatedly seen kissing and holding hands in public with a same-sex partner and didn’t make public statements saying they weren’t gay – we weren’t going to censor that information from our readers just because he hadn’t yet made a formal announcement of homosexuality.

If it talked and walked like a gay duck, we were going to call it a gay duck.

At the time, it was really just something of a thought-exercise. Granted, there was a clear illustration of a female celebrity doing this: Lindsay Lohan and her then-girlfriend Samantha Ronson. They were acting unambiguously like a couple in public, but had not yet formally confirmed that they were. After a similar change in editorial policy, our sister site, AfterEllen.com, began referring to them as such anyway.

Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan

But AfterElton.com concerns itself primarily with gay and bisexual men, and at the time, there weren’t any celebrities that fit our definition of “out but not out.”

Then came Adam.

American Idol comes to its grand conclusion Wednesday night, but at the time of this writing, Adam Lambert has still not publicly confirmed that he’s gay. But by now the whole world has seen the photos of him kissing guys and the video clips of him alluding to himself as gay (and – for the record – not bisexual). And when contacted by various media, Adam didn't deny the photos and videos are of him.

It was an easy call: here at AfterElton.com, he was “gay.” To say otherwise seemed to be literally denying reality, and to be buying into cultural assumptions that to be labeled “gay” was somehow a derogatory thing.

What’s interesting is that much of the traditional media has made something close to the same decision.