No: 10 Stephen Gately Comes Out 1999 | Pocketmags.com

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No: 10 Stephen Gately Comes Out 1999

“Out popstars at the time were rare, but there were none in boybands.”

At just 10 years old in the summer of 1999, I was a youngster with a growing fascination for pop music. My sister had some of their cassettes, but Boyzone weren’t my pop act of choice (What can I say? I was a Spice Girls fan.) Still, I knew the singles and they were a huge player in the ’90s pop scene.

Even at that age I knew I was different to other kids in school. What gay actually was eluded me, but on some level I knew I was experiencing something that wasn’t always talked about. When Boyzone’s baby-faced crooner Stephen Gately officially came out in June that year, it struck a chord.

Gately chose to out himself after threats from a tabloid paper following a former employee attempting to sell the story. Out popstars at the time were few and far between, but there were none in boybands, who clung to ideas about the kind of fantasy that could be sold to a primarily straight, female audience. Gately showed that you could come out and the straight girl fans would not only accept it, they would embrace it.

When at the age of 33, Gately died from a congenital heart defect, the Daily Mail faced scorn for an opinion column by Jan Moir implying that Gately’s passing was tied to some insidious ‘gay lifestyle’. But almost 20 years ago and 10 years before his untimely death, a successful and well-known Irish gay man took it into his own hands to tell the world who he was. For many young Irish gay people it was a reminder that you could declare who you are even if people will try to mock you for it.

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