Up until now, I have refrained from commenting on this story in any forum. It has taken me a while to even begin to put together my thoughts on it in a coherent manner.
After watching everything unfold, one detail above all others stood out for me: The only "losers" in all of this, the ones that stood to gain the most from him NOT coming out, was the small minority who did not WANT widespread acceptance to happen. They did not want this because acceptance means that it was no longer a moral club they could use to browbeat others into submission with. Without their Binky Bogeyman to wave in everyone's face while making scary noises, they would become irrelevant, as they had nothing constructive to actually offer in the first place.
This group is not limited to those that wish to use sexuality as a weapon; sadly, this is much more prevalent in race discussions... Look at it this way: If certain black "leaders" such as Al Sharpton didn't have their race-baiting "Whitey" bogeyman schtick to keep people riled up, would he actually have anything else worth listening to?
The fact is, the media had all of their "ostracized and maligned" sob story articles ready to go when Collins came out of the closet, finding they could only sit by and gnash their teeth, relegated to attempting to sensationalize the one or two mental midgets that DID say something negative, as the majority of society refused to take their "profiling" bait, instead running into responses ranging from acceptance to indifference... only to try to run NEW stories attempting to frame that indifference as hatred.
The only sickening ones are the people who wanted to make it a bigger issue than it ended up being, all in the name of ratings and self-aggrandizing power grabs.