By Joel Meares
Last week two young gay Australians made headlines.
On Sunday night, 21-year-old pop singer and YouTube sensation Troye Sivan won two ARIA awards, and dedicated one to "every LGBT kid in Australia". And late last week, the news broke that 13-year-old Brisbane schoolboy Tyrone Unsworth committed suicide after years of bullying.
Unsworth's tormenters called him a faggot and a fairy, put him in hospital, and drove him to end his life because he was one of those LGBT kids Sivan was reaching out to.
The schoolboy's death has reignited debate around Safe Schools, that inexplicably controversial program whose critics, in the light of Tyrone's suicide, should feel crushed with shame.
Troye Sivan accepts an ARIA for Best Video during the 30th Annual ARIA Awards last week.Credit: Brendon Thorne
These two young Australians who've shared the news cycle: the singer and the victim whose triumph and tragedy will always be linked in my memory.
It feels like now, more than ever – with our leaders and institutions failing so fully to do so – we need people like Sivan reaching out to kids like Tyrone.
There can be great pressure on LGBTQI celebrities to "come out" and work for the cause – to call in 60 Minutes and announce to the world that all the speculation and insinuation had, in fact, been true. Often, that pressure can materialise as a kind of bullying; a demand that someone reveal and display an intimate part of themselves, often to help the cause, but more often to merely satisfy public curiosity.
I've always pushed back against this pressure. As someone for whom the coming out process was complicated and confusing, I've stationed myself firmly in the "none of your business" camp. To go through that same thing with paparazzi lenses trained on your home and commenters snickering about your love life must be a special kind of horror. If a celebrity wants to remain closeted for fear that emerging might put a ding in their box office receipts – or for any other reason – fine. Who are we to huff and puff and try to blow that safe space down?
Tyrone Unsworth, 13, who took his own life after being bullied. Credit: Facebook
But safe spaces are often for the privileged, and it is becoming increasingly hard to understand those who choose the sidelines. Not when a kid like Tyrone Unsworth looks down at his laptop and sees what's happening in the world. Politicians talking about his incapacity to have a family, or labelling a program that aims to keep him safe as "indoctrination". Not when rainbow flags are being burned in America and gay couples abused by bigots emboldened by the Donald Trump. The forward flow of LGBTQI history I'd always taken for granted feels less and less a certainty. Bigotry is threatening to be normalised again, and part of the fight back must be to normalise diversity.
I cannot honestly say what an "out" celebrity or sportsperson actually does for a vulnerable young Aussie. But I have some experience of looking out into the world as a kid struggling with his sexuality and seeing no one I resembled. When I was Tyrone's age, there was nobody I could point to on my TV and say, with pride, "They're just like me."
Pioneer: Ellen DeGeneres, comedian and television personality, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President Barack Obama. Credit: Andrew Harrer
I knew of Elton John and Ian Roberts, and knew them to be "poofs", as playground parlance would have it; they may have been doing great work for the cause at the time, but to a 13-year-old boy they were just flamboyant punchlines to the dirty jokes told by the same kids who called me a fag. There was no one standing at a podium letting me know that I was OK and that, indeed, it gets better.
This past week, as Sivan accepted his ARIA, US President Barack Obama was speaking eloquently about the power of gay celebrity as he awarded a teary Ellen Degeneres the Presidential Medal of Honour. She has been a pioneer.
"It's easy to forget now, when we've come so far, where now marriage is equal under the law, just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago," Obama said. "Just how important it was not just for the LGBT community, but for all of us to see somebody so full of kindness and light. Remind us that we have more in common than we realise, push our country in the direction of justice."
We've made a lot of progress, but it can be hard to know that when facing taunts, or worse, after school. And it can be hard to believe it in the face of a tragedy like Tyrone's.
The Ellens of our world have brought us together and shown our similarities; the Troyes show us our beautiful differences.
I do not know if Tyrone Unsworth knew of Troye Sivan. And I don't know exactly what I would have felt were I 13 and watching the latter accept an award for all the LGBT kids. But part of me, I know, would have felt less alone.
Joel Meares is a Fairfax Media columnist.