It seems a natural thing to me that celebrities bear the majority of the spotlight . I mean our Civil Rights Movement is only taught as if Martin Luther King was the only leader and the only one pushing for change when it was actually a coalition of several organizations and leaders throughout the nation . MLK even acknowledge the necessary evil of pageantry to appeal to the masses . Who is to say who deserves more than the other ? It ' s not like Ellen had her show and made her movie BEFORE she was accepted . That came after she came out and after she made the decision to keep pursuing her career and after she almost lost everything . She bore a pretty significant cultural burden that she didn ' t have to . She went onto use her platform and celebrity to push forward on the causes important to her and others . Do you realize she came out in 1997 and her career success didn ' t come until 2003 with her show and her movie deal . Six years is a fairly significant gap in someone ' s life and it just seems like you don ' t understand that sequence of events . She was making a principled stance before she got to the level of success she has today . She wasn ' t fighting from a privileged position initially , she just happened to keep fighting once she found success . The way you make it sound , she was always in some ivory tower and that ' s just not true .