Why Kristen Stewart's Coming Out Is Still So Important

Kristen Stewart is helping save lives.

I mean that literally.

The 26-year-old actress just took a bold step in revealing in the new issue of Elle U.K. that she’s in love with a woman.

In opening up about her girlfriend Alicia Cargile, Stewart helps assure her young fans struggling with their sexuality that being gay or bisexual is, quite simply, okay.

Sure, we live in a time when the LGBT community is accepted like no other time in history, but more needs to be done.

According to LGBT youth suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project, lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers, and nearly half of all transgender individuals report attempting suicide at some point in their lives.

I know what many of you are thinking. You’re not surprised and knew Stewart and Cargile were in a relationship for quite some time now. You’ve seen the photos of the couple holding hands. You’ve read the tabloid reports about their ups and downs.

But the big difference now is that Stewart herself has gone on record and confirmed the romance.

Until now, the actress remained cagey about the relationship.

In May, she told Variety, “When I was dating a guy, I would never talk about my relationships. I feel the same way now.”

In her most recent movie Equals, Stewart plays a young woman who falls in love with a man in a future world where having emotions is considered a disease.

While promoting the movie, I asked Stewart to imagine living in a world in which she’s forbidden from loving who she loves.

“It’s the most terrible notion,” she said. “It’s so unbelievably hurtful.”

She went on to say, “Having to hide yourself in any way doesn’t feel good to humans. We want to be seen for who we are.”

And now for who she loves.

Stewart says in Elle U.K. that when she was dating a guy (she doesn’t mention Robert Pattinson by name), she refused to talk about it because she felt like the media had trivialized the relationship by turning them into characters in a “ridiculous comic book.”

But things changed when she found herself in a same-sex romance because she realized that hiding the relationship implied that there was something wrong with it. “I had to alter how I approached being in public,” Stewart says in the magazine. “It opened my life up and I’m so much happier.”

In his landmark 1978 “Hope” speech, late gay activist and politician Harvey Milk said by coming out, gay adults help give gay youth “hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right.”

We need more celebrities like Kristen Stewart because, not matter how good things seem to be, LGBT youth still need hope.