He may not have been recognised as one — he didn’t march, shout or padlock himself to the Archbishop of Canterbury — but Stephen Gately was a gay rights hero.

He came out in 1999, the first famous member of a boyband to do so. The Sun headline was “Stephen: ‘I’m gay and I’m in love’”.

The story was positive, but its genesis revealed why Gately was the first of his heart-throb fraternity to come out.

The newspaper had been approached by a former member of the Boyzone tour crew revealing all about Gately’s sexuality. The Sun took the information to Gately. He was smoked out of the closet. The coverage was positive, but the outing was not voluntary.

It was a similar story with Will Young’s outing after he won Pop Idol in 2002. Spiking the guns of an imminent tabloid onslaught guaranteed some kind of control.

Gately and Young’s coming outs were significant — both retained their female fan base — but did not mark a sea change. There are few out teen-idol pop stars. The thinking remains that if a cute, boy-next-door comes out as gay, it will affect how their female fans see them. The fabricated bond of “he-could-be-mine” desire will be broken.

This depressing closeting dynamic persists across popular entertainment, from movies to music to primetime television. The visibly out gay men (Graham Norton, Alan Carr, Gok Wan) serve as handy lightning conductors away from the less obvious and make us all think “Fiddle-dee-dee, we’re so tolerant now”.

Gately showed that an unflamboyant guy could be a pop star and gay. As well as marrying his partner, his most resonant legacy may well be the video to Boyzone’s 2008 single, Better, in which each band member has a love interest. Gately’s is another guy.

Boyzone’s manager Louis Walsh once said that he might not have included Gately in Boyzone had he known that he was gay, because “it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band”.

The real shame should be reserved for those managers and showbusiness power-brokers who practise that kind of discrimination, and also maintain the closet, to line their pockets.

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