Finneye: A long overdue coming-out

Finnish singer Jari Sillanpaa who was in the late 90's for several years the most wanted male artist touring around the country in the summertime, who a couple of years back represented Finland at the annual Eurovision Song contest ("It Takes Two to Tango"), and whose most enthusiastic fans are women ranging from 35 to eternity, has finally flung the doors of his closet wide open.

The past two weeks or so the media has been filled with rumors about a secret companion he told he had recently broken up with, a tragedy which caused him enormous heartaches. After all, this had been the very first time someone actually dumped him and not vice versa.

The peculiar thing about all the fuss was that the gender of the mysterious dumper never actually came up. This is quite easy in Finnish, as we do not separate between "him" or "her", its just the same word all along in our language.

Anyway, yesterday he finally decided to stop playing hide and seek and gave a straight (well...) answer to a straight question in a live TV talkshow: the person that dumped him was indeed a man. This hardly came as a surprise to anyone even remotely interested in Jari's personality, but some of his lady admirers might still have had some fragile hopes about him...

An interesting fact in his interview was that he had actually outed himself to Helsingin Sanomat, the leading daily newspaper in Finland, as early as 1995. But, back then the paper chose not to print the news.
Today it is all over the tabloids: "I was dumped by a MAN" Shoud you be fluent in Finnish, here is yesterday's interview from Tuomas & Juuso, TV4.