Evicted from the closet: 8 times queer celebrities were outed by their own allies
Ricky Martin opened up about the time Barbara Walters tried outing him in an interview.Speaking to People, the 49-year-old singer said he felt “violated” by the iconic journalist’s line of questioning when they sat down together in 2000.During the awkward chat, Walters told Martin he could he could “stop these rumors” about his sexuality by, oh, you know, coming out to her right then and there.
He politely declined, telling her, “Barbara, for some reason, I just don’t feel like it.”Speaking to the Toronto Star in 2010, Walters said she regretted the way she interrogated him.“I pushed Ricky Martin very hard to admit if he was gay or not, and the way he refused to do it made everyone decide that he was,” she said. “A lot of people say that destroyed his career, and when I think back on it now, I feel it was an inappropriate question.”“When she dropped the question, I felt violated because I was just not ready to come out,“ he told People. “I was very afraid.”“You can’t force someone to come out.”But Martin isn’t the only LGBTQ celebrity to be outed by their alleged allies in the media.
Scroll down for seven other times beloved public figures were forced out of the closet…A post shared by Lance Bass (@lancebass)The *NSYNC crooner was forced to make a public statement about his sexuality in 2006 after gay gossip blogger Perez Hilton nicknamed him “Princess Frosty Locks” and wouldn’t stop posting nasty and degrading articles about him.
In 2007, Bass told Attitude, “Two years before I came out I was really bullied on the internet by bloggers. That’s when Perez Hilton just started and was just really malicious against me.” The singer finally came out in an exclusive interview with People “because of the bloggers like him.
