Beyond a talent for appearing in front of the television cameras and a photogenic appeal that has earned them both legions of devoted fans, Jameela Jamil and Phillip Schofield may not have thought they had much in common. But last week they both made the same big decision: to come out.

For the 57-year-old presenter of ITV’s This Morning it was a matter of issuing a statement on Instagram before sitting down, for once the interviewee, on the sofa with his co-host Holly Willoughby. “I have been coming to terms with the fact I am gay,” he wrote. “Every day on This Morning, I sit in awe of those we meet who have been brave and open in confronting their truth – so now it’s my turn to share mine.”

For Jamil, a 33-year-old actor and activist whose boyfriend is musician James Blake, social media was also the platform for her announcement that she identified as queer. Previously, she wrote, she had “kept it low because I was scared of the pain of being accused of performative bandwagon jumping, over something that caused me a lot of confusion, fear and turmoil when I was a kid”.

Two tales of coming out; two very different assertions of sexuality; both – so far as anyone outside their close circle can tell – equally honest and emotionally raw. Yet one, Schofield, was met with an outpouring of support and approval, and the other a rather more ambivalent response, ranging from cynical doubt to scathing criticism. Why, in 2020, can coming out still be so fraught with difficulty?

Jeff Ingold, head of press at Stonewall, which campaigns for the equality of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, believes the language used by different generations and how that is understood is one key factor. While Schofield was coming out with a sexual orientation that will have been understood by the vast majority of people in modern Britain, Jamil’s choice of queer – especially while she is in a relationship with a man – may have confused some.

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“People know what being gay is,” he says. “There is generally a much lower level of understanding in what it means to be queer, especially for people from a different generation. It it still seen as the original derogatory slur used against gay men. It’s only in the last 20 years or so that queer has been reclaimed by a movement of mostly younger people to describe not just their sexuality but their gender.”

Prior to her coming out, Jamil had faced days of criticism online after it was announced that she would be a lead judge on a new HBO ballroom voguing competition show in the United States, while ostensibly having no experience or connection to a culture founded by black and Latinx LGBTQ people in New York in the 1980s. While she made clear in her statement that “being queer doesn’t qualify me as ballroom”, she did have “privilege and power and a large following to bring to this show”.

Play Video 1:10 'I had to be honest with myself': Phillip Schofield announces he is gay – video

Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture, believes context and timing have been another factor in the way each coming out has been treated. “We talk about Schofield living his ‘authentic self’, and much of the social media response has focused on that as a good thing,” she says.

“I think the reason Jameela Jamil has faced backlash is that her coming out feels inauthentic to people. It feels she was on the back foot, or reactionary, or the timing was off because it came just after she was criticised for being a judge on a voguing show, and because she’s made some ‘off’ or ignorant comments in the past.”

The former T4 presenter-turned-Radio 1 DJ who decamped to Los Angeles five years ago and became an actor on the show The Good Place, and, more vocally, an activist, has a habit of often riling the very base she tries to champion: young women, marginalised women, big women, women of colour.

Jamil went viral after claiming Beyoncé was “deluded” into thinking she was a feminist if she was on stage “emulating a stripper”, and called out the Kardashians as “double agents of the patriarchy” for selling detox teas to impressionable young women.

In 2018, she set up a body positive initiative, I Weigh, to encourage her followers to measure themselves by what makes them unique and valuable rather than by stones and kilos. Jamil went further when she put herself at the centre of the body positivity movement, calling for an end to fat shaming, demanding more representation of bodies that don’t look like hers.

She also waged a war with airbrushing, refusing touch-ups on her magazine shoots, and called for face-editing apps to be binned. That she managed to do all this so vociferously, railing against impossible beauty and body standards while conforming to them herself, was an irony that wasn’t entirely lost on her, but one she would explain away as being “a feminist in progress”.

Yet this backstory only goes so far when it comes to explaining some of the flak she has received, says Ingold. “Queer can still be derogatory but it can also be hugely empowering; the more people like Jameela Jamil are proud and visible, the more people can understand the words people use to fit how they feel and connect with who they are.”

Racial minorities within the LGBTQ communities have, notes Ingold, been quicker to adopt “queer” to create their own space under the rainbow. “Racism does, of course, exist even within LGBTQ communities and, in that way, being Q-POC (a queer person of colour) speaks to an important specific community,” he says.

“We still need these role models, and we need diverse representation in the public sphere. Society needs to see that LGBTQ people exist in every space, community and workplace. That’s how we get to a place how LGBTQ people can just be.”

Abraham agrees that visibility across the spectrum is crucial. “If you look at the most prominent gay male presenters on mainstream British TV, many of them are camp or effeminate – such as Paul O’Grady, Alan Carr and Graham Norton. That Phillip has known he is gay for some time, and none of us knew, works to trump the stereotype and show that there’s more than one way to be gay – being camp or effeminate is not a bad thing at all, but a wider breadth of representation is a positive thing.”

“The fact that it took him so long to do so, and even the fact that it necessitates a TV announcement, demonstrates how far we still have to go in terms of acceptance and normalisation. I wish it wasn’t such a big deal, but this week shows it still is.”