Watching Hollywood awards shows is something of a habit for me, and I always hope to find some nugget of meaning in them. When I was a kid, my family used to gather around the old Admiral TV and root for our favorites. It was a moment of precious togetherness when secrets and hurt feelings were suspended and we could tap in to that strain of love we knew existed but all too often hid, for one reason or another. For me that reason was fear of rejection, which in fact happened after I came out officially in 1988. I’d been clean and sober for eight years, and integrity yanked at my soul: I couldn’t let my friends be outed as gay and dying of AIDS without acknowledging that I, too, was gay. My mother couldn’t handle the truth, and the family split was official.

After that I started watching awards shows differently, focusing on who was wearing a red AIDS ribbon and who might be gay, especially after director Debra Chasnoff won an Oscar for It’s Elementary and thanked her partner from the stage. Every moment of courage and visibility mattered: Our people were dying every day, and mainstream America didn’t seem to care. Pissed-off activists and gay journalists started calling out celebrities and power players on the immorality of hiding in the closet out week became a must-read publication.

Actress Jodie Foster was one of the celebrities most often mentioned, especially after Queer Nation and others pointed out the homophobia (or, by today’s more precise terminology, the transphobia) of the 1991 hit The Silence of the Lambs, about which she said nothing (see out).

I tended to cut her some slack because of the incredible fear she must have experienced in 1984, when her stalker, John Hinckley, Jr., tried to kill President Reagan to get her attention. Celebrity stalkers in Hollywood are no joke, and to have the added publicity of being out when anti-gay religious leaders like Lou Sheldon and politicians like Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) were calling gay people “perverts” and “abominations” was enough reason to stay in the closet.

Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, Foster helped her best friend