Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Musto

Musto’s line lands because it flatters progress and then yanks the rug out from under the people most eager to congratulate themselves for it. The first sentence nods to a real cultural shift: by the time Musto is writing as a nightlife chronicler and gossip-savvy critic, “homosexuality” has moved, at least in mainstream media, from unspeakable to talk-show material. Columnists can gesture at tolerance without risking much; the taboo becomes a safe object to tap for moral authority.

Then comes the twist: “I wish the columnists themselves would come out too.” That “too” is the blade. He’s not asking for more enlightened takes; he’s calling out the professional incentives behind them. Media can treat queerness as a topic while keeping queer people as a managed abstraction - a rhetorical prop that signals sophistication, bravery, modernity. Musto’s subtext is that the closet doesn’t vanish when a subject becomes discussable; it just relocates into bylines, newsroom politics, and the quiet calculation of who gets to be a “universal” voice.

It’s also a jab at the performance of allyship before it had that name: the columnist who condemns homophobia from the safety of presumed heterosexuality, enjoying the sheen of dissent without paying the social cost. Musto, coming out of a gay cultural world where identity is both lived and policed, demands specificity. He’s arguing that the real taboo isn’t homosexuality on the page - it’s ownership, disclosure, and the redistribution of credibility that follows when the narrator stops pretending to be neutral.