How ubiquitous are crypto-homos among pop culture stars these days?

I've had a major change of view regarding how prevalent homosexuals have been in the pop culture of the past 20 years. Before, I thought, "Gee, there used to be quite a few gay singers in the '80s, yet you don't really see too many at the top of the charts these days." My interpretation was that after the Great Big Coming Out of the '90s, gays felt less motivation to earn the public's attention, now that they were getting it lavished on them for free (since being stingy with attention for faggots = bigotry).

But just to be sure, I figured it was finally worth checking up on any gay rumors. Before I was looking at lists of "out" gay singers, actors, etc. -- letting others do the work for me, since I don't really know who more than a handful of today's mopey singers and mumbling actors are.

So after some trial-and-error, I found "the #1 blind item site in the world" -- blindgossip.com. "Blind item" meaning a piece of gossip with the names removed. As far as I could tell, they had a good track record. Then, whoever their users agreed were gay, I'd investigate on Google Images. And holy shit, those "lists of LGBT actors," singers, etc., are way under-counting them. They only include the person on the list if they are confirmed "out."

It's bizarre how the Wikipedia nerds set such a high bar of evidence for claims about, say, Enrique Iglesias being gay. They don't hesitate to mention that he is male, that he is of part Andalusian ancestry, and so on, without sending a blood sample off to the lab to confirm that he actually has one X and one Y chromosome, that his genetic profile fits best with a Spanish origin, etc. But to mention that Enrique Iglesias is gay, there must be a public gay sex tape, or a self-issued declaration of his bent for getting boffed by boys -- something irrefutable.

Discussing his facial expressions, mannerisms, speech, and other behavior is considered beyond the pale -- dealing in stereotypes. Yet homosexuality is a full-blown syndrome with myriad symptoms, only one of which is wanting to commit unnatural acts with other men. Hence the gays' own open use of the concept "gaydar." It's only when normal people apply their experience-derived intuition toward detecting whether some dude is gay, straight, or in the closet, that the informed hunch becomes homophobic.

Even the gossip hounds seem to restrict their vision to sightings of X and Y caught kissing, with only a few venturing to explain what easily observable features ping their gaydar about the pair. But just as you don't have to see a person walk into a gynecologist's office to conclude she's female, you don't need to catch two men in bed to tell they're queers.

Perhaps sometime soon I'll go over some specific cases of how you can tell that some celebrity is gay just by using Google Images to check the consensus of a gay-related thread at Blind Gossip. Real quick, though, I was able to easily confirm the hunches about the gayness of Enrique Iglesias, Ryan Seacrest, Bradley Cooper, Chace Crawford, and Kevin Jonas (among many others); to strongly suspect George Clooney and Will Smith; and to reject claims about Hugh Jackman and Tom Cruise (as in, no way, no day).

But consider one final example that I would not have thought of before reading Blind Gossip -- Gavin Rossdale, current husband of Gwen Stefani and former MTV staple with Bush during the alterna heyday of the mid-1990s. Before stardom, in his late teens he was a cross-dresser and in a relationship with another high-profile cross-dresser: see pictures here, here, and here. You can tell by the sincere look on his face that he wasn't just doing it as a joke.

When that news broke, he waved it away as confused youthful experimentation. However, a blind item from June 2013 reads:

This music veteran is pregnant and ecstatic. On the other hand, her husband is wondering if he is the father. You see, lately he has preferred the company of other men to her.

There were many guesses that it was Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, although she was not known to be pregnant at the time. Well, just this week she announced her pregnancy by showing a baby bump for cameras, and you can tell that it's been growing for some months. This implicates her in the blind item, and means that Rossdale hasn't given up on guys after all.

Why do any of these examples matter? Cumulatively, they show how widespread the crypto-homo influence has been in the pop culture of the past 20 years. No wonder it's been so damn lame, emo, campy, and spazzy. There were a handful of queers active in '80s pop culture, but nowhere near this many. The even more disturbing conclusion is that mainstream audiences have grown gayer and gayer in their tastes over that time. It's not as though preferences stayed the same, only now with more gays supplying the demand. Rather gays, whose defining trait is Peter Pan-ishness, have thrived as audience tastes have grown more and more infantilized.