Two celebrities skipped out of the closet in one week: Sheryl Swoopes, star forward for the WNBA’s Houston Comets, and George Takei, the inimitable Mr. Sulu on “Star Trek,” both did the deed.

I could get used to weeks like this.

When the news about Swoopes hit, WNBA-loving lesbians like yours truly burned up the phone lines. We essentially re-created the scene in Bye, Bye, Birdie where every teenager in town is on the phone, only instead of singing, “Did they really get pinned?” we asked, “Did she really come out?”

Swoopes spilled the beans in an “as told to” in ESPN The Magazine. This gal is a three-time league MVP, a four-time league champion with the Comets and a three-time Olympic gold medalist. I know from painful experience that she can take over a game and make my beloved Seattle Storm look like a Brownie troop. But Swoopes says she was “miserable.”

She says she’s coming out now because, “I’m tired of having to hide my feelings about the person I care about. About the person I love.” (Bang go the hopes of those dykes who lusted after her. But I digress.)

Swoopes tells of coming out to her mother, who responded with the time-honored, “What did I do wrong?” Swoopes is a Christian, so she endures the Religious Hotfoot. She also says she expects “a lot of flak” from fellow African-Americans. “My biggest concern is that people are going to look at my homosexuality and say to little girls – whether they’re white, black, Hispanic – that I can’t be their role model anymore.”

I’m sympathetic to all those concerns. But I’m also irritated with her for saying, “Do I think I was born this way? No. And that’s probably confusing to some, because I know a lot of people believe that you are.” She goes on to say that her partner, Alisa Scott, was there for her during the breakup of her marriage. “Maybe it was just the fact that I needed that comfort.” Oh Lord. A tale made to order for the religious right: the noble hetero woman was emotionally vulnerable and the big bad lesbian swooped Swoopes away.

My ex, a straight, male sportswriter, had a different complaint. He e-mailed me, “Just once I’d like to see a gay woman athlete come out WITHOUT an Olivia endorsement deal on the table.”

He added he’d also like to “see a gay MALE athlete come out before his playing days are over,” and ultimately that’s the point. Quibblers like me may nitpick over the particulars, but Sheryl Swoopes has had the guts to come clean about being in a gay relationship while an active player fresh off an MVP season. Theoretically, she has a lot to lose. OK, this is the one and only time I will say this: Go Comets!

George Takei, twice the age of Swoopes, came out in Frontiers, a magazine covering gay L.A. The news that the Enterprise’s helmsman has never steered a straight course didn’t, I suspect, shock many of us, though some Trekkers are doubtless as jarred as if a Klingon had suddenly burst into Norwegian.

Takei spent a chunk of his childhood in internment camps for Japanese-Americans, and he grew up feeling ashamed of both his ethnicity and his orientation. In his view, racial prejudice and anti-gay prejudice stem from the “same mentality.” But he’s seen a ton of positive societal change in his lifetime, “both in terms of Asian-Americans in the theater and television and films, but also for gays and our self-image, and the ability to move in our society.”

One American life. From the camps to coming out. That’s a breathtaking trajectory even Mr. Spock couldn’t have programmed.