I was in bed with a stranger when I first saw a tweet about Frank Ocean's now infamous 2012 Tumblr post—the one in which the singer revealed that his debut album, Channel Orange, was, in part, about a boy. It was the middle of the night, and I turned over to check my phone. The boy I was with, who I'd picked up at a terrible gay club on the west side of Manhattan and who I never saw again, didn't know who Frank Ocean was and wasn't terribly excited by this information. So I smiled privately. This is often how life happens now: on your phone, in bed, at 2AM, excitingly alone with the glow of the screen as the world around you changes.

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Most celebrities collaborate with old media for their big reveals. Ellen Degeneres, America's most famous gay person, came out on her network television show, acting out a scripted screenplay in which she told Oprah her truth. Caitlyn Jenner, America's most famous trans person, spoke with Diane Sawyer and Vanity Fair to explain her identity. Not Ocean. He uploaded a shitty-looking screengrab of a TextEdit file—which, judging by the freeform cadence of the writing, hadn't been edited by anyone else. He owned his story in one fell swoop, telling us exactly what he wanted and absolutely nothing more.

My own coming-out experience as a gay man unfurled in a string of sloppy conversations, tears, and stunted truths—a mess that I still have not, more than ten years later, fully cleaned up. So I suppose I envy Ocean. I'm sure that his own coming out was way more complicated than any single Tumblr post could suggest, but at least on that day in July, he ripped his fears off like a Band-Aid. "I've never had more respect for life and living than I have right now," he wrote confidently. "I feel like a free man."