This study seeks to shed light on discursive shifts in sexuality-related normativity that areassociated with coming out. Subscribing to a queer linguistically informed type of criticaldiscourse studies, it investigates the usage patterns of two labels that are commonly used todenote same-sex sexualities: gay and homosexual. The meanings and usages of these formsare first discussed more generally, based on evidence from an earlier study on a majorEnglish reference corpus. The analytical part studies the usage patterns of the two terms ina corpus of news reports on Ricky Martin more specifically, through a systematicinspection of concordance lines. For this purpose, the usages of the two forms are analysedin and compared across two sub-corpora, one with texts dating from before and one withtexts dating from after the artist’s public coming out as a gay man. Besides a quantificationof the terms in the two corpora, the main focus is on the qualitative analysis of the usagepatterns that the terms exhibit in the data. The patterns thus identified are discussed inrelation to the discursive construction of coming out as a central experience of nonheterosexualpeople and as discursive evidence for normative shifts associated with comingout.