Last Word: advice to the stars.

I'M LOSING MY PATIENCE WITH CLOSETED GAY CELEBRITIES. For years I've subscribed to the rationale behind why they should not be outed. It takes away their freedom of choice. It creates a climate of fear in which no one feels comfortable coming forward. And it can damage careers. Of these explanations I still believe in the first, and I understand the second. In light of last month's George Michael escapade, however, I've had it with the third. Although the glib message of Michael's arrest in a Beverly Hills park rest room on a charge of lewdness is that outing is sometimes superfluous (if we wait long enough, all people will, literally or figuratively, expose themselves), the more resonant lesson is one most people have known all along: The closet is more dangerous--to one's self and thus to one's career--than coming out.

It has long been an open secret that Michael liked guys; I remember watching him make advances toward a friend of mine a decade ago in a New York nightclub and thinking, I guess that's more than just a rumor. Less known is the constancy with which some of his friends advised him to speak publicly about his gay side. For myriad reasons Michael resisted. He said that if he talked too explicitly about his relationships (even about his close friend Anselmo Feleppa, who died in 1993) that he might alienate his mostly female fan base. Meanwhile, the "Bleak House"-length legal fight he waged against his former record label left him bitter and disinclined to talk about anything too openly.

Lost on Michael were the obvious counterarguments: that many of his young female fans had already moved on to fresher, teen-throbbier singers; that coming out would win him new admirers who might even be potential record buyers; and, most glaring, that as his friend Elton John and others have shown, he was in the one branch of the entertainment industry that is relatively welcoming to gay superstars.

I grant that the singer's resistance to logic takes place in a media climate so overheated that celebrities can hardly be blamed for making decisions driven by fear. Gay celebrities take one look at the Enquirer's and Star's front-page stories about Rosie O'Donnell's gal pals and Jodie Foster's prepregnancy babes and go running for cover. And, unfortunately for the celebrities, the days when even the thinking public laughed off such exposes as complete sensationalism have, since the Enquirer's big scoops in the O.J. case, given way to the perception that tabloid stories often contain a solid nugget of truth. (Of course, the tabloids have been publishing truth-tinged information for years, but now that their shrill packaging has been adopted by all the media, loud cover lines are no longer a sure tip-off to disbelieve everything that's inside.)

So why should celebrities like Michael succumb to tabloid tactics and confirm the accurate part of what has been written about them? I used to think they shouldn't. Speaking too directly, I thought, would force them to surrender the very quality--mystery--that gave them their power over the public. Mystery is crucially allied with sexuality, so exposing too much of their love lives would force stars to compromise the enigmatic sexual aura with which many of them are blessed. But while such blurred boundaries may still have justification on-screen or on-stage, they rarely make much sense now for any other reason.

Coyly managed sexuality has a way of backfiring these days because it tends to increase media interest in ferreting out the truth of orientation. When Michael in a recent interview asked, "Who really cares if I'm gay or straight?" he was very naively issuing a challenge to the tabloids to provide an answer. As it turned out, they didn't have to. He outed himself in a manner that provided him with no control over the revelation. By staying silent he thought he was maintaining his power, but all he was doing was giving it away.

I suppose Michael's behavior should be no surprise in a country where even the biggest celebrity, Bill Clinton, dissembles blatantly about his private life and then expresses surprise when interest in it doesn't go away. Neither the president nor the POP star has learned one of the decade's toughest but most essential celebrity lessons: The best way to safeguard your privacy (and reclaim some of your dignity) is to tell the truth.