But among celebrities announcing their queerness, whether ostentatiously in Big Media or through chiller routes like tweets or ’grams, there are plenty who eschew official admissions altogether. On the Death, Sex & Money podcast last December, actor Holland Taylor told host Anna Sale: “I haven’t come out because I am out. I live out.” The concurrent news that she’s dating fellow actor Sarah Paulson boggled the minds of many, even though both women had been publicly affectionate IRL and on social media for months. Taylor’s not-coming-out recalled Jodi Foster’s famously confusing speech at the 2013 Golden Globes, as well as Kristen Stewart’s August cover story in Nylon, throughout which the interviewer was clearly fishing for some sort of sexuality pronouncement. “I don’t feel like it would be true for me to be like, ‘I’m coming out!’” Stewart said, as well as: “Google me. I’m not hiding.”

And she wasn’t. At least by then. All summer, Stewart was constantly photographed by the paparazzi holding hands with her live-in girlfriend at the time, Alicia Cargile. But, as my very smart colleague Kate Aurthur wrote in an essay last June, “when [Stewart] started dating a woman, it was as if she had suddenly become invisible.” All photographic evidence of intimacy to the contrary, Stewart and Cargile were labeled “gal pals” and “BFFs” by the same tabloids that had put the minutiae of her dating life with men on blast. Stewart was, as always, incredibly visible in the media — much more so than she would like — but her rather overt queerness went unnoticed.

Queer women, in particular, are constantly assumed to be straight, with their romantic relationships belittled as friendships or phases or performances for horny heterosexual men. While Stewart’s queer cred has been glaringly obvious to lesbians everywhere for years, there are still plenty of clueless straight people out there who — not knowing where to look or even to look — still think of Stewart as the ex-girlfriend of Robert Pattinson and that English film director. Which is not Stewart’s fault, or her responsibility. The onus shouldn’t be on queer people to declare their otherness over and over.

Still, in her Nylon interview, Stewart went further than just refusing to come out on someone else’s terms. “If you feel like you really want to define yourself, and you have the ability to articulate those parameters and that in itself defines you, then do it,” she said, adding: “Until I decide that I’m starting a foundation or that I have some perspective or opinion that other people should be receiving…I don’t. I’m just a kid making movies.”

It was a rather strange implication — that, for her, to come out would mean she was taking up the mantle of queer activism, potentially lumped in with the likes of Ellen Page, whose own coming-out speech in 2014 at an HRC event was undeniably inspired by a social consciousness. Stewart also seemed to think that, were she to give herself a label, it would supersede the one label she does care about (“I am an actress, man”). It’s a fair worry: The further anyone is from being a straight white cisgender man, the more they face pigeonholing in their careers. But those who can avoid self-identifying with a marginalized label by blending in with the majority do hold a particular privilege over those who can’t — particularly trans women of color, who, in their hyper-visibility, are targets for epidemic levels of violence.

Stewart’s comments share a certain kind of derision with Cate Blanchett’s at the Cannes Film Festival last May. A Variety cover story quoted Blanchett as having been in past relationships with women “many times,” but Blanchett later claimed the reporter had taken her words out of context. “Sexuality is a private affair,” she told Cannes reporters. “What happens these days is if you are homosexual, you have to talk about it constantly; it has to be the only thing; you have to put it before your work, before any other aspect of your personality.” (Stephanie Fairyington shut down this rather ridiculous presumption in Slate: “What Blanchett experiences as homosexuality's loud self-assertion is a faint whisper next to the roar of heterosexuality.”) And then there was Matt Damon giving some acting advice in The Guardian last September. “Whether you’re straight or gay, people shouldn’t know anything about your sexuality because that’s one of the mysteries that you should be able to play,” he said — a curious instruction, since he personally makes no effort to deny the fact that he’s married to a woman. Damon, Blanchett, and Stewart can’t seem to conceive of a world wherein someone can own up to being gay without their gayness taking over every aspect of their personhood and professionalism — or at least, without the media assuming as much.