Barry Manilow has come out as gay. If you reacted to the news with an online post detailing sarcastic astonishment then pat yourself firmly on the back. You are the greatest wit of the age. Split sides are being sewn up across the nations.

Aside from anything else, Barry himself admitted that the information was more or less an open secret. The singer married Garry Kief, his partner for some 40 years, at a quiet ceremony in 2014. There was no official confirmation, but news sources frequently identified them as being hitched.

Just two days before last week's non-revelation, the Daily Express reported that "Barry Manilow [had] been spotted with his husband Garry Kief" leaving a party at the home of music mogul Clive Davis.

There was other circumstantial evidence. The great man began his career accompanying Bette Midler at a gay bathhouse in New York. Despite an early, brief marriage to Susan Deixler, he was rarely described as the least likely entertainer to emerge from the closet.

Still, nobody knows anything. It’s none of our business how he goes about his lovemaking. I should shut up and mind my own dreary business. But I won’t, just yet.

There is something worth unpicking here. Should we be surprised that Manilow felt pressure not to speak about his sexuality? Can that still be an issue?

In the interview with People magazine, Barry, now 73, explained that he worried Manilowsters would have trouble accepting the truth. "I thought I would be disappointing them if they knew I was gay. So I never did anything," says Manilow.

“When they found out that Garry and I were together, they were so happy. The reaction was so beautiful – strangers commenting: ‘Great for you!’ I’m just so grateful for it.”

Sarcastic jerks

I was reminded of a trip a friend and I made to the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas some 20 years ago. As we were nauseating urban snoots in black jeans – Europeans at that – we naturally assumed the building would be swollen with equally sarcastic jerks eager for ironic chortles. Ha, ha! Look at the Rolls Royce covered in diamanté. Ha, ha! I don’t think that younger chap in the photograph was just his chauffeur; do you?

The more we swaggered, the sourer the atmosphere became. Everybody else in the building was taking the exhibits at face value. Towards the close of our visit, we overheard an elderly couple furiously muttering about the scurrilous rumours concerning his sexuality.

Barry Manilow, a songwriter of genius, is a very different sort of performer to the late piano hammerer. No carnival huckster, he has shown a gift for incorporating old-school Tin-Pan Alley values with a variety of later styles. (Though I shan’t forgive him that unfortunate collaboration with Kid Creole and the Coconuts.)

But the Liberace story is worth mentioning because it demonstrates that there was once a conservative demographic capable of shutting its ears to the most persuasive evidence.

Perhaps there were Manilow fans who dismissed the stories about his relationship with Kief as urban slurs. You know, the sort of lies those European nincompoops in the Liberace Museum might spout.

Stubbornly hostile

Such attitudes are surely vanishing. Same-sex marriage is the norm in many western democracies. Even backwaters like Ireland have elected prominent gay politicians. Full confirmation that we’ve turned a corner came with news that Doctor Who’s next companion would be a gay woman. “Just to be clear, we are not expecting any kind of round of applause or pat on the back for that,” Steven Moffat, the show’s executive producer, said last week. “That is the minimal level of representation we should have on television and the correct response would be: ‘What took you so long?’ not ‘We’re so great.’”

Maybe Manilow is a Whovian. Perhaps that’s what triggered the announcement.

If only this were so. The strange and depressing fact is that there are certain areas of show business that remain stubbornly hostile to openness on sexuality. Bits of Hollywood have advanced little further in this area than professional sport has managed.

Many character actors are proudly open about their gayness. A few older actors, now viewed as beyond the teen-heartthrob demographic, are also prepared to admit the truth. But the dictum that a male romantic lead should be potentially “available” to heterosexual female fans has barely relaxed since the days of Rock Hudson.

We don’t even need to consider rumours about That Star everyone “knows” to be homosexual. The implausibly tiny percentage of leading actors who identify as gay confirms that wariness of homophobia still abounds. Managers and publicists fear the world has not changed as much as we’d like to pretend.

Then again, maybe gay people just aren’t drawn to the theatrical professions. Can I have that right?