The Closet Door Is Open: Coming Out (Or Something Like It) in Contemporary Celebrity Culture

Contemporary celebrity culture embodies a dissonant tension between a want to end the concept of “the closet” and the social demand to “come out” and a hypervigilant culture of digital surveillance via social media that looks for traces of out-ness. Such that during a recent red carpet interview Billie Eilish describes how she did come out, need not come out, does not believe in coming out, and, later, was outed. This article utilizes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Michel Foucault’s “will to knowledge” to explain how the closet works in contemporary celebrity culture. It outlines a successive chronology of celebrity coming out genres beginning with Ellen DeGeneres’ influential TIME magazine cover and continuing through deviations from this modern standard that trend toward more obscure and indirect expressions over time. It concludes that the contemporary closet door is best understood as “open,” meaning that nonchalant transparency is coveted, and yet personal interiority remains vulnerably put on display for scrutiny. This results in modern celebrity coming outs taking the form of puzzling incoherence, to the extent that whether a coming out has occurred is unclear, and viscerally direct statements seemingly designed to quell inquiry and accusations of queer baiting.