So, Kelly McGillis, the teenage pin-up of the 1980s, who memorably starred as Charlie, the blue-jeaned blonde training instructor in the hit movie Top Gun, has a new call sign: lesbian.

Last week, to the consternation of all of us who stuck that poster of McGillis astride a motorbike with her red-blooded co-star and love interest Tom Cruise on our bedroom walls, she gave a frank interview to a vlogger from SheWired (allow me to translate: SheWired is, and I quote, “the go-to site for women: lesbian, gay, bi, queer, trans, straight but curious and otherwise identified”, and a vlogger is someone who has a video blog). In the interview, McGillis was asked whether she was looking for a man or a woman and it all came out.

“Definitely a woman,” said McGillis, 51. “I’m done with the man thing.” There was a certain amount of whooping from the lesbian vlogger (another girl on the team) but then Kelly said some more surprising stuff that kind of resonated and made me stop and think about whether being out and proud was really the super picnic we all suppose it must be, now it’s 2009. And when I say “we”, I mean those of us who are under no pressure either to conceal or reveal our sexuality, because we are plain vanilla heterosexuals or because no one gives a hoot or, as is the case for most of us, both.

Anyway, McGillis went on to say that she’d been aware of her sexuality since she was 12, that identifying her orientation had been a “hard process” and that she thought God was punishing her (crikey!) because she was gay. “Life is a freaking journey,” she observed, “and it’s about growing and changing and coming to terms with you and what you are.”

The news that a fiftysomething actress who has been married twice and has two teenage daughters — ie, was so deep in the closet that she was practically in Narnia — has outed herself received a mixed reception. “Who?” said my 15-year-old daughter, and, “Who cares?” said most of the people who posted comments online.

I found McGillis’s raw revelation after so many years of denial (she denied she was a lesbian even after playing one in the US drama The L Word in 2007) both touching and important. And it definitely made me pay closer attention to the other gay news of the week, which was, in case you missed it, the publication of Stephen Fry’s long, moving and, it has to be said, unutterably pretentious open letter to his own 16-year-old self.

Let’s be clear about one thing before we draw any conclusions. Fry, who has made something of a — pun intended — cottage industry out of his own struggle with his sexuality, is a brilliant wordsmith, even if he is a little in love with his own unstoppable prolixity. His letter is addressed to “Dearest Absurd Child” and by the second paragraph Fry has already lost it: “My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on my keyboard now.” Indeed, there are moments in his missive mailed to the Republic of Pubescence when I wished Fry had condensed his thoughts to 140 characters and put it out on Twitter instead.

By contrast, McGillis is an actress who was talking on camera in fluent therapy-speak to a vlogger in Key West, Florida. But the fact remains: both Fry and McGillis were essentially saying the same thing, in very different ways, and it was this.

Despite the internet, gay chatlines, gay parades, the ubiquity of men-seeking-men personal ads, even though being gay has gone from a matter of deep personal shame to pride over many years via Stonewall rioters and Harvey Milk, it’s still tough out there.

“Don’t kid yourself,” Fry writes to himself. “For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds.”

Despite all the positive lesbian role models in the United States — Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, Lindsay Lohan (okay, strike LiLo) — McGillis kept it under wraps because she wanted to get parts, just as boys keep it on the down-low because Hollywood is still one big closet. Teenage girls won’t pay cash to watch a leading man who’s actually come out (rather than done the usual thing, which is to allow his studio to equip him with a series of willing beards) snog Miley Cyrus or Anne Hathaway.

Which makes me think that maybe Fry is right and not all that much has changed, after all; which in turn means that we should greet those who bravely admit they are done with the man thing, or the girl thing, with genuine applause, not yawns.

For the taboo remains. And the more who refuse to treat their homosexuality as a taboo — wherever they are on the weird and wonderful spectrum that is human sexuality — the better. I agree wholeheartedly with one woman who wrote in from Connecticut: “Thank you for coming out, Ms McGillis. Everyone who stands up for their truth makes it easier for the next one. Written on behalf of myself and my 14-year-old gay daughter.”

Thinking about it, I now understand why Fry wrote of tears on his keyboard.

- To State of Play and the symbolic relationship at the heart of the movie between pesky new media blogger Rachel McAdams and Russell Crowe, our dirt-digging dinosaur of a newspaperman on dead-tree press.

Obviously, the big affair is between the movie producers and print: the film is a love letter to newspapers, as poetic scenes of presses rolling over the credits testify. However, the main onscreen relationship is unconvincing — and as a former reporter who married an older man several pay grades higher than me on the same national newspaper, I do know a little of what I speak.

There is just no sexual tension between Crowe and McAdams: any middle-aged hack worth his salt would have at least tried to bed the slippery little minx within hours of co-working. Then, whether he mentored her or not, he would have proceeded to make her do all the donkey work, ie getting people on the telephone, transcribing interview tapes, snapping orders for coffee and cigarettes, while she wondered dreamily where they were going as a couple.

Above all, Crowe would never, ever have put her name on the front page story, let alone ahead of his, if she hadn’t actually written a word of it. McAdams just sat around fiddling with her hair while Crowe bashed out the splash and then gave her the lead byline. Otherwise, yeah, spot-on.

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