Twenty years ago, in the autumn of 1994, R.E.M. was one of the world's biggest rock bands. Having recently dropped Automatic for the People and Out of Time on everybody, the group made another big wave when lead singer Michael Stipe came out as "queer," a term he used to classify his attraction to both men and women.
To celebrate the anniversary, Stipe just wrote a column for The Guardian that discusses his decision as well as brings more awareness to the idea and practice of complicated sexuality.
"I was more famous than I could have ever imagined," Stipe wrote. "For the promotion of our next album, Monster, and its world tour, I decided to publicly announce my sexuality. I said simply that I had enjoyed sex with men and women my entire adult life. It was a simple fact, and I'm happy I announced it.
"Not many public figures had stepped forward at this point to speak their truth. I was happy to stand beside those who had. What I had thought was fairly obvious the entire time I had been a public figure was now on record. It was a great relief. My band, my family and my friends had my back, as they always had — and I had their full support. I had also grown accustomed to the spotlight, to speaking my mind, and I felt confident about myself, in a way I had never felt before."
Stipe helped ease readers back into the majority mindset of two decades ago.
"In 1994, most people had a largely binary perception of sexuality — the message was complicated for them," he wrote. "I am thrilled to see how much this has changed in those 20 years. The 21st century has provided all of us, recent generations particularly, with a clearer idea of the breadth of fluidity with which sexuality and identity presents itself in each individual. Gender identification, and the panoply of sexuality and identity are now topics that are more easily and more widely discussed, debated and talked about openly. It's thrilling to see progressive change shift perceptions so quickly."
He put an exclamation point on the piece with a thoughtful conclusion:
"What I feel we have arrived at with all this, is that queerness — as I am happy to call an all-embracing, foundational tenet — is really a state of mind brought about by an understanding: It is understanding difference, accepting your own truth, desire and identity, and lovely, lovely choice. It is the final, completely obvious contemporary acceptance and understanding that this enormous world of beauty, sexuality, identity, lust, feeling, excitement, and love isn't just black and white, or simple, at all — it is literally every shade and gradation of the rainbow."
