“He’s got pretty persuasion

She’s got pretty persuasion

Goddamn your confusion.

He’s got pretty persuasion!”

It’s been 20 years since I announced to the world that I was queer – and that I had found the strength and the voice to say that, and to move forward with my life as a completely out, publicly queer individual.

It was September 1994, and my band REM had released the two biggest records of our career. With Out of Time and Automatic for the People, we had sold more than 25m records worldwide, and we were ramping up to tour for the first time in five years. I was more famous than I could have ever imagined. For the promotion of our next album, Monster, and its world tour, I decided to publicly announce my sexuality. I said simply that I had enjoyed sex with men and women my entire adult life. It was a simple fact, and I’m happy I announced it.

Not many public figures had stepped forward at this point to speak their truth. I was happy to stand beside those who had. What I had thought was fairly obvious the entire time I had been a public figure was now on record. It was a great relief. My band, my family, and my friends had my back, as they always had – and I had their full support. I had also grown accustomed to the spotlight, to speaking my mind, and I felt confident about myself, in a way I had never felt before.

Stipe in September 1994, around the time he came out. Photograph: Dave Lewis/Rex

A lot of people had grown up with REM’s music, and my public persona as a quiet, difficult, enigmatic, paralysingly shy artist. On hearing my announcement, it did appear that some fans – and the general public – wanted their idea of who I was as a public figure to be unchallenged, familiar, poetic maybe – or stuck in time, perhaps. Some people were thrown by my announcement, or ignored it altogether.

In 1994, most people had a largely binary perception of sexuality – the message was complicated for them. I am thrilled to see how much this has changed in those 20 years. The 21st century has provided all of us, recent generations particularly, with a clearer idea of the breadth of fluidity with which sexuality and identity presents itself in each individual. Gender identification, and the panoply of sexuality and identity are now topics that are more easily and more widely discussed, debated and talked about openly. It’s thrilling to see progressive change shift perceptions so quickly.

What I feel we have arrived at with all this, is that queerness – as I am happy to call an all-embracing, foundational tenet – is really a state of mind brought about by an understanding: it is understanding difference, accepting your own truth, desire and identity, and lovely, lovely choice. It is the final, completely obvious contemporary acceptance and understanding that this enormous world of beauty, sexuality, identity, lust, feeling, excitement, and love isn’t just black and white, or simple, at all – it is literally every shade and gradation of the rainbow. It doesn’t just lie in one of two camps. It includes accepting and supporting positions that you may not even completely understand; and to arrive at that conviction is so, so beautiful, and to quote my great friend Casey Legler: “Fierce!”

These 20 years of publicly speaking my truth have made me a better and easier person to be around. It helped develop the clarity of my voice and establish who I would be as an adult. I am proud to be who I am, and I am happy to have shared that with the world.