I have no interest in the sexual orientations of the people whom I find entertaining. What matters most to me is that they are entertaining–if their comedy makes me laugh, for example, or they make me feel moved by a piece of music they are performing, then I don’t care who their partners during private times are.
And I’d agree with this also.
I would want to know because I’m nosy. I like finding out the details of anyone’s personal life.
It wouldn’t change my opinion of their work.
Other: Sure! I find it interesting to know about such things. On the other hand, I don’t feel that I have any particular entitlement to know. I don’t think it makes much of a difference to the believability of their acting. In general it doesn’t matter at all, it’s just interesting. The only time it makes a difference is if they are hypocritically promoting some kind of agenda that is betrayed by their own personal behavior.
That’s pretty much the way I look at it. My appreciation of their talent is seperate from my enjoyment of celebrity gossip.
A part of me says, “who gives a damn”, but the other part of me says, “hey, I have to hear about hetero couple’s drama on the evening news, why not hear about Gay couples as well?!”
Growing up Gay, at least in the “older days”, it was a lonely experience. I realize it is not like that today, but it seems that having famous people come out as Gay or Lesbian at least gives other kids some kind of encouragement to ignore their (perhaps) bigoted family/neighborhood/school and realize there are successful Gay and Lesbian people out there who went through what they are going through.
Yes, I understand why people like Tom Cruise will hide in the closet until he is 92 years old and finally write that tell-all book; maybe some of his career really is based off a fan base of women who fantasize about him and might not be so inclined to see him as a credible lead love-interest in films if they know he is Gay, severely affecting his career and income . Rock Hudson played that game quite well until the very end.
Still, I hope someday it will be a non-issue, but I doubt it. Let’s be honest - people know far too much about celebrities and if they know so-and-so is Gay, and up their kissing Nicole Kidman on screen, well - they might be thinking more about what they saw on Entertainment Tonight than what is going on on-screen.
You left out “Don’t care, but don’t mind when I do find out” which is somewhere between your 1 & 6.
I don’t care but let’s face it people want to know. And it just isn’t about gay / straight. People from the beginning have always gossipped.
Who’s dating who, who had a baby, who was cheating on whom with so and so and the list goes on.
Whether a person is gay or straight means nothing to me. Whether a person cheats on his/her spouse means nothing to me. Whether so and so get’s drunk each night, I don’t care.
But let’s face it we all like to read about it (to various degrees), whether we admit it or not
I loved the use of the Walt Whitman quote. I went with that one, because it’s a sort of complicated issue for me.
I don’t generally care, but I like it when LGBT public figures are out. In some cases it might change how I view things, such as with learning about Hans Christian Andersen’s unrequited love for another man and description of himself as having a fundamentally feminine nature. The fact that The Little Mermaid was written around the same time as the object of his love was getting married suddenly adds layers to that story.
So I suppose I don’t really want to know as if I’m hoping tabloids will expose someone, but when someone comes out it makes me happy and it may add new depth to their work for me, in the same way that learning about any artist can change my perspective.
I don’t want to know about that crap. It distresses me to no end to know the latest…news…about Morgan Freeman, for instance. All I want to know about actors I like is what project they’re working on.
I honestly don’t care whether I know or not. In some cases I’m interested in learning a little bit about my favorite artists personal lives, but it’s really only interesting when it has an effect on my appreciation for a song. As such, orientation will only really have an effect on music in which the theme is relationships, which will generally be either explicitly “her” or “him”, and thus indicating that the artist is heterosexual, or an ambiguous “you”, in which case I think it’s something that is then independent of orientation all together.
As an example, of the couple artists I like and am aware that they are homosexual, I can only recall a couple songs where it could have come up, and I remember them being on the ambiguous side.