Are we really still describing people as ‘openly’ gay?

I’m going to start referring to heterosexuals in the public eye as “openly straight”, in the hope that it draws attention to how clunky and outdated the phrase is when used to describe gay people. By now, you’ll have seen the headlines: Grace Richardson, 20, crowned the first “openly gay” Miss England in what is being celebrated as a triumph for representation.

The entire circus around this announcement gave me the ick. I don’t mean to diminish the personal journey of a young gay woman who has spoken candidly about the homophobic bullying she experienced as a teenager, and how isolating it was to grow up “feeling different”. Well done to you for winning a strangely anachronistic beauty contest – take that, haters!

What troubles me is more the giddy insistence on her being the “first openly lesbian Miss England”, and the implication that this, finally, is what progress looks like. Because in 2025, shouldn’t we be past this by now?

Let’s start with the pageant itself. Miss England still trades, however modernised it pretends to be, on narrow ideas of femininity, palatability and traditional womanhood.

It exists in a bubble entirely detached from the material realities of women’s lives in this country, let alone queer women’s lives. To crown a lesbian within that system and declare it a radical win feels to me like assimilation with a sash.

I am all for representation obviously. But is this citadel of heteronormativity really where queer political energy should be funnelled? Is this really the battleground we want to win? Or is it simply the easiest arena for mainstream culture to congratulate itself for “letting one in”?

We’re seeing this pattern elsewhere. Just weeks ago, Jonathan Bailey was crowned People’s Sexiest Man Alive – and instantly labelled “the first openly gay man” to be given the accolade. The implication, humming beneath the headline, was that previous winners may well have been gay too, they just weren’t allowed to say it. Again, we were invited to celebrate not just Bailey’s win, but the institution’s magnanimity in finally letting queerness be visible on its terms. To trumpet “the first” really just advertises how long the exclusion lasted.

There is something deeply vanilla about the way queer success is celebrated when it happens inside straight institutions. We clap when someone gay makes it into the room. We rarely ask who built the room in the first place or why so many of us still live outside it.

And then there’s the language. That grinding, awkward prefix that refuses to die: openly.

Because what are we really saying when we insist on “openly lesbian”? That being gay is still a disclosure. A confession? Something that must be clarified for the comfort of a presumed straight audience.

Andrew Scott called for the phrase “openly gay” to be “parked” altogether, pointing out how strange it is that we only ever hear it in the media. “You are never at a party and you say, ‘This is my openly gay friend,’” he said. “You don’t say you’re openly Irish. You don’t say you’re openly left-handed. Why do we put ‘openly’ in front of that adjective?”

There is something in it, he added, that sits uncomfortably close to the idea of being shameless. As if visibility itself still needs justification.

A more generous reading of all this is that “openly” acknowledges a past in which people couldn’t be visible without risk. One doesn’t want to presume there were no gay Miss Worlds or no gay “Sexiest Men” (c’mon!) before this moment. That’s true. But it also reinforces the idea that straight remains the unmarked default, while queerness must always be caveated.

Which brings me to the increasingly stale performance of “coming out” as a cultural climax. There was a time when doing so was radical. And of course for many people today, it still carries real risk. But if queerness were presumed to be part of the ordinary human spectrum rather than an exception to it, then nobody would need to “come out” at all. We would simply live, and move through the world without constantly being asked to announce and explain ourselves in a way straight people never have to.

This is why the celebration around Richardson’s win feels so hollow to me. Her identity as a lesbian is being used to modernise an institution that remains fundamentally out of step with the world.

An “openly gay” person being embraced by the mainstream is queerness made safe. Meanwhile, the queer communities doing the most urgent, radical and life-changing work in healthcare access, housing justice, trans safety and youth support rarely receive anything like this fanfare.