I wish we lived in a society where people weren't pressured into "publically acknowledge" their sexual orientation just because it's different than the norm. You don't see heterosexual CEOs publically acknowledging they are banging their wife, why should it be different for other sexual orientations? Just let everyone be.
I sorta agree, but I think the core paragraph explains his motivations better:
[I]f hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.
Announcing that you're straight is never going to be controversial, but we're currently in a cultural stage where announcing things like this continues to normalize the reality of diverse types of sexuality and, ironically, over time that should make it less of a big or negative deal to some people.
> I wish we lived in a society where people weren't pressured into "publically acknowledge" their sexual orientation
As someone who has come out, I'd like to note that I was never "pressured" into publicly acknowledging my sexuality. In fact, the general message from the wider culture was "please STFU and don't talk about it".
No, I looked at history, saw that coming out was an important and useful thing I could do to contribute to the movement aimed at getting equal rights for gay people and that formed part of a pretty rational decision to do so.
The lies and bigotry aimed at gay people thrived for so long precisely because nobody knew any gay people. That's exactly why coming out was (and still is) necessary. One of the reasons the gay rights movement has been so spectacularly successful over the last 40+ years is because the lives of actual gay people is a living testament to the falseness of the vicious stereotypes spread by homophobic pricks.
You don't see straight people coming out because they don't need to. Gay people came out because the alternative is persecution, mixed with a whole lot of personal misery.
This is important because gay people have not been allowed representation or public acknowledgement. Until this month there were 0 openly gay CEOs but hundreds of openly straight CEOs in the public eye.
We would all like for that to be the case. Unfortunately, as long as members of the GLBT community have to worry about being physically attacked, even in "safe" places like San Francisco and other progressive cities, it's important for people who are in a position to be able to speak out safely to do so.
It's important for mere visibility and representation of MOGAI people in general. Everyone is generally assumed to be heterosexual by default, so people who are het don't need to make public announcements about it.
