If you have an emotional response, let alone feelings of animus, toward any adult’s choice of sexual predilections, that’s a you thing. Learning that somebody famous is gay may be titillating, amusing, or simply an interesting factoid. If you feel your blood boiling and you’re penning anthrax-laden hate mail to their last known address, you ought be checked out by an institution of some kind with large locked gates.
The manner in which famous men, in particular, mask their homosexuality, remains an area worth investigation under the heading of the social sciences. There, you finally know what social sciences means, after all of those middle school classes spent napping.
Hollywood and Pro Sports share the same social stage when it comes to male stars openly living as gay men. If you paid attention in high school, you likely noted that some large percentage of the guys in drama class were likely gay; perhaps a smaller number in general in the big sports, but still, you knew the number couldn’t be zero. Some years later as adult professional males, there is nary a man who has openly come out as gay. There are two openly gay male college football players and zero active players in the NFL. A few have served notice after their careers were over. Similarly, in television and especially film, there are no openly gay male stars. A few lesser level actors, but nobody blockbuster. Would anybody care if they were? Perhaps. Are these closeted men almost certainly self-described progressives? They are.
Which leads to the curious case of Russell Wilson. There have been rumors about Russell Wilson being gay going well back. The gist was largely formed by Wilson’s careful attention to grooming, style, and the soft manner in which he carries himself, when combined with his public notice that he was not going to have sex with any woman before marriage. And by the way, he was in no rush to be married. I’ve spoken to numerous old-timers from an era when no sex before marriage was the generally followed rule, and they couldn’t wait to get married at 18 or soon thereafter. When a star NFL QB who has women throwing themselves at him at 25 is still refusing to bed any of them, people are going to talk. When his belts match his shoes and he’s in on a Saturday evening watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, it’s a clamor.
The generally agreed upon kicker in cases of gents such as Russell Wilson is the manly reputation overcompensation provided for by the ladies in their life. When Wilson finally married at 27, the alluring singer, Ciara, his new bride couldn’t stop talking in public about how her new husband was a sex fiend. Wilson would chime in on occasion with a schoolboy giggle talking about how much he loved sex. Ciara herself had recently given birth to the rapper Future’s baby, so she was clearly no newcomer to the game of bones.
Wilson and his wife Ciara’s latest public relations campaign involves a series of torrid bikini and boudoir photos of Ciara that the singer claims were taken by her husband. You see, he’s so incredibly into that lady sex, he can’t not take seductive pictures of her in open gowns. What do we know of Russell Wilson’s passion for portrait and erotic photography? Not much. But consider his male longings for lady flesh and how they know no bounds. Assume this was a natural follow-on.
Russell Wilson may be that one guy who proves the exception to the rule. Perhaps he’s wildly hetero and some ruffian butch lineman on his same team revels in the homoerotic arts and everybody will say, you really never know. They’ll be wrong of course. You do know. Not that it matters, but — in 2018, doesn’t it kind of matter if you’re still in hiding? Ellen Page married a girl who looks like her weirder looking sister to help advance the cause. There’s something to be said for sticking your neck out for a higher purpose, even if only craning your neck to catch the men’s cycling team you hired to bike the velodrome you constructed outside your bedroom window.
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