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I’ve written a lot recently about openly gay celebrities and the positive impacts they have on the movements for queer visibility and rights. But as we praise these brave individuals for the amazing strides they are making, we should not take this public discussion of sexual orientation by famous people for granted. Coming out publicly is not the automatic obligations of every LGBT person who happens to be well-known for some reason, and we have no right to demand that it should be.

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Last week, I wrote about Ricky Martin’s declaration of himself as “a fortunate homosexual man” on his official website, arguing that the coming out of a major figure, even one past the prime of his or her cultural relevance, is always a positive step for queer visibility and therefore queer rights. And yet, it is important not to overpraise those like Martin, who spend the peak of their career denying their homosexuality and then choose to come out once their greatest successes have already passed. Though we should not look down on or attack Martin, who is perfectly entitled to live his life as he chooses and had very good reasons for not being open about his sexuality earlier on, we must recognize that celebrities hiding their sexualities until a big reveal after their heyday is not the best way to move forward as a culture.

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If you’ve been on the internet in the past several hours, you may be aware that Ricky Martin has officially come out as gay. As with many official coming outs of the past few years, the vast majority of the reaction has been made up of “duh” and “who cares? His career is already over,” with a decent amount of support and congratulations mixed in.

But dismissing this moment as insignificant or as a desperate ploy for relevance, or even as merely a personal achievement deserving of praise is missing the point. Ricky Martin came out because he felt he needed to, but why? Why is the coming out story so important for our culture to tell?

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ABC currently has a sitcom called Cougar Town, about a recently divorced woman who finds herself dating younger men. TV Land had a reality competition called The Cougar, in which a group of 20-something men fought for the affections of a beautiful woman in her 40s. 30 Rock had a second season episode called “Cougars,” which followed Liz’s relationship with a man 17 years her junior. As these examples indicate, “cougar,” a slang term which has gained enormous popularity in recent years, is generally defined as an older woman who is attracted to younger, handsome men.  The concept of a woman being interested in a gorgeous man who is in his sexual prime is apparently so surprising to the culture at large that we needed a special name for it.

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Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first female pop star to get experimental with her fashion choices. Madonna had her cone-shaped bras, Cher her feathered headdresses, Cyndi her neon hairdos. Right now, we’re definitely at a high point in the history of female singers’ creative sartorial decisions, with Rihanna going military-bondage chic, Katy Perry aiming for 1950s pin-up girl, Ke$ha choosing to bathe with glitter instead of soap, and Beyoncé wearing whatever she pleases.

But even amongst this wide array of exciting fashion, Gaga stands out. Unlike her contemporaries, Gaga isn’t trying to be pretty.

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The Twilight series gets a lot of criticism for giving teenage girls an unrealistic idea of what teenage boys are like. As the average seventeen-year-old neither lives off of animal blood or has a century’s worth of experience holding back all sexual urges, this is a pretty fair critique. Edward Cullen is a terrible representation of young male desire.

But what so many miss in their rejection of Edward is that Bella Swan, the Twilight heroine and narrator, is actually a pretty remarkable thing in pop culture: an openly and unashamedly desirous teenage girl.

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Last night, Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for Best Director for her Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker. The Hurt Locker also won Best Picture, beating out the newly crowned highest grossing film of all time, Avatar (whose director, interestingly enough, is James Cameron, Bigelow’s ex-husband).

By winning these awards, Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for directing and the first woman to direct a Best Picture. If you look at the media write-ups of the Oscars, these achievements appear to be a very big deal.

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A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about Susan Boyle that provoked quite the response. I’m not going to complain about the series of outraged comments I received from Boyle fans, bizarrely personal as some of those comments were, because as someone who writes on a public website, I have intentionally opened myself up to the feedback of anyone with access to a computer. It would be unreasonable to expect to become a blogger without encountering some negative opinions of one’s ideas and writing style, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to become a popular singer without encountering negative opinions of one’s talents and image.

But as some of the comments were genuinely provocative, I’d like to discuss them further.

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I was really hoping that as a culture we were just going to let this one go, but as I just read a series of blogs and gossip sites attacking someone for criticizing Susan Boyle’s album, I guess we’re not yet done with this particular sob story.

For the uninitiated (and extremely lucky), Susan Boyle is a singer who shot to instant fame when a YouTube clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent went viral last April. Though she ultimately finished the competition in second place, her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November and immediately sold an obscene amount of copies, breaking all sorts of records and becoming 2009′s highest selling album in the world.

Why has this shy, middle-aged Scottish woman so captured our society’s attention? Basically, because she isn’t very pretty.

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Men’s figure skating is pretty much inherently queer. It’s a bunch of guys competing to be the absolute best at twirling around on ice, while wearing spandex and sequins.

Physically impressive? Worthy of attention and praise? Definitely. The embodiment of normative heterosexual masculinity? Not so much.

But the world of athletics is notoriously uncomfortable with homosexuality and hints of femininity in men (and often in women), so commentators and many competitors do their best to put a butcher spin on the sport. Much like for gymnastics—figure skating’s summertime cousin in spandex—the narrative of men’s Olympic skating finals focuses as much as possible on masculinized values like technical difficulty and strength, rather than feminized values like grace and beauty. The important people in figure skating are terrified of their sport being seen as too pretty, too girly, and, frankly, too gay. This is why Johnny Weir is a problem.

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