When Rebel Wilson went Instagram official last week with her new bae, Ramona Agruma, it looked to all the world like a happy moment shared freely during Pride Month. ‘I thought I was searching for a Disney prince… but maybe what I really needed all this time was a Disney Princess,’ the Aussie film star, 42, wrote alongside a photo of herself and Ramona, both beaming.
Yet it turns out the timing of her coming out wasn’t exactly Rebel’s decision. The following day, the Sydney Morning Herald, one of Australia’s biggest newspapers, wrote that they'd known about the relationship before it was public.
Andrew Hornery, a gossip columnist, complained in Saturday’s Private Sydney column about being ‘gazumped’ when Rebel revealed on Friday that Ramona was her new partner. He had emailed Rebel’s agent saying that several sources had told him of the relationship, and had given her 1.5 days to provide comment for a story. Rebel, he said, had then gone public.
Really, Andrew, what were you thinking? His newspaper at first defended their columnist ‘[who] simply asked questions and as standard practice included a deadline for a response’.
But by Monday the column had been pulled and an apology had replaced it. ‘My email was never intended to be a threat but to make it clear I was sufficiently confident with my information and to open a conversation,’ wrote Andrew.
‘It is not the Herald’s business to “out” people and that is not what we set out to do. But I understand why my email has been seen as a threat. The framing of it was a mistake.’
Elsewhere, he wrote: ‘As a gay man I’m well aware of how deeply discrimination hurts. The last thing I would ever want to do is inflict that pain on someone else.’
What a sorry mess. Coming out, as LGBT+ Health Australia’s chief executive officer, Nicky Bath, told The Guardian, is an intensely personal and vulnerable act.
On Sunday, Rebel said on Twitter it was a ‘very hard situation’ that she was trying to handle with grace. To put pressure on anyone to spill that story on your terms, pronto, is to fail to read the room utterly. To suggest that you’ve been ‘gazumped’ beggars belief.
Both the public’s and the media’s demand for ‘gotcha’ LGBT+ stories has, happily, diminished in recent years. We are all too familiar with the hurt that they cause. Last year, the pop star Ricky Martin told People he felt ‘violated’ by journalist Barbara ’s line of questioning when they sat down together in 2000.
During the chat, she told Martin he could ‘stop these rumours’ about his sexuality by coming out. He politely declined, telling her, ‘Barbara, for some reason, I just don’t feel like it.’
‘When she dropped the question, I felt violated because I was just not ready to come out,’ Ricky told People. ‘I was very afraid.’
‘You can’t force someone to come out.’
In 2020, the actor Neil Patrick Harris alleged that he had fallen victim to an outing campaign led by Perez Hilton in 2006. ‘[He] started posting about me and asking people to come forward with truths or stories,’ Harris recalled. ‘Then it became apparent that I needed to make some sort of decisive respectable move.’
The actor added that his biggest concern was coming out in a way that was respectful to his husband. ‘It wasn’t simple for me,’ he said, ‘but I tried to represent myself well.’
It is, we hope, of great comfort to Rebel that her Instagram post prompted a wave of jubilation and celebration. This is the first time Wilson has confirmed her relationship with Agruma, founder of the sustainable loungewear brand Lemon Ve Limon, but she hasn’t quite been hiding it either. In March, Wilson and Agruma appeared at the Vanity Fair Oscars party together. And in the past few months, Agruma has appeared frequently on Wilson’s Instagram, starting in January. Per Wilson’s posts, it appears that the duo celebrated Valentine’s Day together, Wilson’s birthday in March, and the success of her Netflix movie Senior Year in May. They even met Dionne Warwick together at an event in April.
‘#LoveIsLove,’ as she wrote — and the world is wishing plenty of it to the happy couple. If only it had been on their terms.