According to the New York Times, when the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association met for its first convention in 1992, “the morality of identifying secretly gay public officials, a practice known as ‘outing,’ was the question discussed most often.” The issue of outing burst onto the journalistic scene in 1990, but the concept—if not the term—arose at the very dawn of modern gay consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century. The idea that homosexuals constitute a “people” set apart from the society in which they live, however invisibly, has led inevitably to the question of what obligations they have to this “community.” While outing has been a constant temptation, until recently lesbian and gay journalists, like gay people in general, abided by a social contract they never actually signed but were informed about when they came out into the gay community: we keep each other’s secrets. But after nearly ten years and more than a hundred thousand deaths from AIDS, this contract was becoming frayed.
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, came into being in March 1987 and quickly infused a new burst of militant energy into the AIDS and gay movements. ACT UP combined streetwise activists and newly radicalized middle-class professionals who had been propelled into politics by their experience with the AIDS epidemic. It was a group of men and women, largely lesbian and gay, who believed in doing its homework and in using outrageous media-attracting tactics that successfully dramatized the issues of AIDS research, treatment, and health care.
The journalists who tore up the fraying social contract are members of the ACT UP generation. This is also a generation that has lived its entire life in the age of mass media gossip and infotainment. From People magazine to Liz Smith, from Jay Leno and David Letterman to Oprah and Jerry Springer, from the National Enquirer and the Globe to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe, we have become a society drenched in gossip and “news” about celebrities of all sorts. Whether it’s the fifteen minutes of fame haphazardly awarded to random individuals catapulted by events onto the public stage, or the perennial allure of Liz Taylor or Madonna on the cover of a magazine, we have come to expect that anyone hit by the media spotlight will share his or her private life with us.
Despite the explosion of lesbian and gay visibility since the late 1960s, the near total absence of openly gay celebrities insures the continuing importance of gossip in the crafting of gay subcultural identity. Insider gay gossip has always focused heavily on the exchange of names of famous people who are secretly gay, just as Jews have told each other with pride about rich and famous people who are, but not generally known to be, Jewish.1 The denial and erasure of lesbians and gay men from the formal curricula of our schools and from the informal but even more influential curriculum of our mass media leads to the understandable desire to discover and celebrate the contributions of lesbian and gay figures. Just as African American activists and educators have brought out the often obscured achievements of people of color, and just as feminist art historians have uncovered the accomplishments of women artists whose work had been misattributed to men, so too have lesbian and gay scholars assembled lists of famous people who were homosexual.
In such a climate it should not surprise us that some gay journalists became increasingly impatient with the code that bound the media in a conspiracy of silence and deception about the real lives of lesbian and gay celebrities. Not only do the media draw the line of discretion much farther from home when writing about gay people than when writing about nongay figures; they actively engage in obfuscation and collude in outright lies—what some have called “inning.” Outing was adopted as a tactic in opposition to the tacit agreement by which gay private lives were granted an exemption from the public’s “right to know,” thus protecting the closets of the rich and famous and leaving unchallenged the distaste of the media—and the public—for facing the reality of lesbian and gay existence.
Michelangelo Signorile is a member of this generation that came of age after the explosion of gay liberation—he was born in 1960—but who scarcely knew the gay world in its brief “golden age” between Stonewall and AIDS. After studying journalism in college Signorile landed a job with a Broadway press agent and quickly learned the difference between the “rules” of journalism and the practice of gossip writing: “Some of my anger about the media came from seeing these people. It was so corrupted.” Around this time he became involved with ACT UP and was soon politically engaged in AIDS activism. In June 1989, OutWeek, a new lesbian and gay weekly news magazine, signed Signorile as features editor and columnist. His disillusionment with the ethics of gossip journalists, fueled by his newly militant gay politics and AIDS activism, turned to anger which he unleashed in his “Gossip Watch” column.
The names that appeared in Signorile’s columns were likely to be those of the targets of his ire; for this was not the usual gossipy listing of who had been seen where and with whom. This weekly dissection of New York’s and Hollywood’s celebrity and gossip elite attacked the media for failing to pay enough attention to AIDS, pretending that lesbian and gay celebrities are heterosexual, and flattering politicians “who are keeping us down at best, murdering us at worst.” Signorile’s most frequent targets were the gossip writers who reported on the doings of the “elite,” flattering their egos and, in many cases, reporting on their nonexistent heterosexual romances.
Around the same time, gay author Armistead Maupin began spicing up book tour interviews with the gay press by naming names and challenging them to print them: “If the gay press has any function at all,” Maupin believes, “it’s to tweak the conscience of famous people who are in the closet; and certainly we shouldn’t continue to lionize those among us who are making a success of themselves in the mainstream while remaining so determinedly in the closet… I’m taking the hard line on it and saying homophobia is homophobia.”
Maupin’s disclosures were printed in many gay papers and periodicals, but the mainstream press ignored this novelty, just as they had earlier declined to specify precisely what ACT UP demonstrators were saying about Illinois governor James Thompson. Within a few months, however, the mainstream media had joined the gay press in playing the game while simultaneously debating the rules. An article on the ethics of outing by media critic William Henry in Time described the new developments without naming any names (Governor Thompson became “an outing victim [who] had endorsed legislation allowing hospitals to test patients for AIDS without their consent”) and posed the ethical conflict between the right to privacy and the importance of coming out. Henry came down against outing: “it claims an unjustifiable right to sacrifice the lives of others.”
In February 1990 billionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes died and the outing season was soon to be in full swing. The March 18, 1990, cover of OutWeek showed a photo of Malcolm Forbes on his motorcycle, with the bold headline: “The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes.” The article, by Signorile, began with Forbes’s funeral, noting the presence among the mourners of many prominent homophobes, including Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley, and asked whether they knew “that they were coming to pay homage to someone who embodied what they ultimately detested?” Signorile described a pattern of sexual behavior that was attested to by many young men. “People talked and, in quite a few segments of the gay male community at least, it seemed that everyone knew someone who’d done it with Malcolm Forbes. He was also quite showy, liking to ride around with his ‘dates’ on his motorcycle.” Among those who were aware of these stories were New York’s gossip columnists—the very writers who were major perpetrators of the false Malcolm Forbes/Liz Taylor romance, trying to convince readers that they were a hot item.
Signorile concluded his article with a defense of outing Forbes. First, he noted that, “All too often history is distorted,” and the fact that one of the most influential men in America was gay should be recorded. Second, “it sends a clear message to the public at large that we are everywhere.”
Although several papers outside New York picked up the Forbes story, the New York press ignored it until reports from other places made it difficult to avoid. The stories that began appearing all carried headlines that focused on the issue of conflict between privacy and the tactics of outing. The next round of mainstream newspaper analyses focused as well on the dilemma outing posed for the media. The Sunday (Portland) Oregonian titled its thoughtful article on outing, “Controversial Tactic to Expose Alleged Closet Homosexuals Just One Example of New Militancy Splitting AIDS Lobby,” and accompanied it with a sidebar: “Practice puts press on spot,” quoting the editor’s determination to make decisions about whether to publish such allegations on a case-by-case basis.
When it came to the articles they printed, however, the papers were not always as consistent in their unwillingness to name any names. The San Francisco Chronicle, which editorialized against outing the day after running its article on the subject, cited not only Forbes and deceased California publisher C. K. McClatchy as outing victims (in the latter’s case, it was a newspaper, not gay activists, that revealed that he had AIDS, after he died of a heart attack), but also named living outing targets Ed Koch, Calvin Klein, and Cher’s daughter Chastity Bono (who had been the subject of front-page stories in the supermarket tabloids). Chronicle city editor Dan Rosenheim did not see a contradiction between the paper’s policy not to out people and the printing of these names: “it was our feeling that the information had been distributed sufficiently widely that it had become part of the general public awareness.”
When gay activists Michael Petrelis and Carl Goodman held a press conference in May 1990 on the Capitol steps and read the names of twelve men and women in politics and music whom they described as secretly gay, the press showed up but no major news organization published or broadcast the names. Writing about the press conference, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call noted that the list included “three Senators, five House members, two governors, one official of a Northeastern city, and, inexplicably, one leading figure in the entertainment industry.” Roll Call’s “Press Gallery” columnists posed the hypothetical question of whether the press should report that a member of Congress with an antigay voting record was gay, if they were provided with evidence for this claim. Their answer, citing a spokesman for the gay lobby Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in addition to the publisher of Washington’s gay paper, the Blade, was “a resounding no,” although they might report the fact that someone else had accused such a person of “being a homosexual hypocrite.”
The alternative and gay press joined the debate over outing, but in these cases the articles were written by openly gay people who presented the issues in a longer historical context and with a more complex awareness of the arguments on both sides. In the letters column of the Village Voice of April 24, 1990, two leading gay writers responded to some of the central arguments of the outing controversy. Lesbian novelist Sarah Schulman, while admitting her ambivalence over the morality of outing, objected to the characterization of the tactic as an invasion of privacy: “Most gay people stay in the closet—i.e., dishonor their relationships—because to do so is a prerequisite for employment. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn’t a ‘right,’ nor is it ‘privacy.’ Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, or value-free condition. It is maintained by force, not choice.”
In the same issue longtime gay activist and writer Vito Russo noted that to say someone is gay is to talk “about sexual orientation, not their sexual activity.” But, most critically, he pointed out, “Signorile is saying that if being gay is not disgusting, is not awful, then why can’t we talk about it? After all, it’s not an insult to call someone gay. Is it?”
Michelangelo Signorile had long been receiving tips about Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams from people angry over the Department of Defense’s policy of excluding lesbian and gay people from the military, but with Williams’s sudden media visibility during the 1991 Persian Gulf War “[I] got a tidal wave of information about the topic once again as well as a lot of pressure from colleagues urging me to expose the truth.” Signorile was well aware of the severity and the cost—in dollars and in human suffering—of the military’s discriminatory policies. In fact, despite the gay movement’s dramatic gains in securing protection against discrimination in cities and states around the country, under the Reagan and Bush administrations the Pentagon’s antigay efforts had intensified.
In June 1991, Air Force harassment of Charles Greeley, a captain who had marched in a Gay Pride parade the day before he was to be discharged, proved to be the spark that exploded Pete Williams’s closet door. Michael Petrelis called a press conference at which he announced that “Pete Williams, an openly closeted gay man, hypocritically remains silent in his job as Pentagon spokesman while the Department of Defense continues its irrational policy of ejecting thousands of gays and lesbians from the armed services.” Petrelis and his associates in Washington’s Queer Nation chapter also put up posters around town, showing Pete Williams surrounded by large print: ABSOLUTELY QUEER. PETE WILLIAMS. PENTAGON SPOKESMAN, TAP DANCER. CONSUMMATE QUEER.2 In somewhat smaller print it read, “Gay Bush appointee sits by while gay servicemen and women are burned.” The posters were quickly torn down, but the town was electric with the news, which had become the chatter of Washington dinner parties, the buzz in gay and right-wing circles, and, according to insiders, the hottest gossip in every boardroom at the Pentagon itself.
Already at work on an article about Williams, Signorile had completed the bulk of the research by the time the Greeley incident turned Pete Williams into the latest Queer Nation poster boy. But before it could be published, Signorile’s story hit a snag of a totally different kind. OutWeek, the magazine that had launched outing and given Signorile a platform, was shut down by a fight among its owners. Signorile’s story about Pete Williams, scheduled as the cover story for the next issue of OutWeek, then found a home at the Advocate, which set it as the cover story for the August 27 issue. Aware that mainstream media had ducked the story when Queer Nation outed Williams in Washington, the Advocate decided to build an irresistible groundswell by distributing advance copies of the article and by linking the outing of Williams to the military’s increasingly violent exclusion of gays and lesbians from the armed forces.
The Advocate’s strategy paid off, because this time the story broke through the resistance of the media’s gatekeepers who had squelched the June outing. Jack Anderson’s syndicated column for August 3 was headlined “Gay Group Tries to ‘Out’ Pentagon Spokesman.” Anderson’s column is syndicated in approximately eight hundred newspapers around the country, but some of the largest, such as the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, declined to run this installment. Still, the story did run in hundreds of papers, and many more picked up the lead and ran their own stories. The majority of the articles, whether they included Pete Williams’s name (e.g., Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, New York Daily News, Oakland Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Williams’s home state Saturday Wyoming Tribune-Eagle) or declined to print the name (e.g., New York Newsday, New York Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times), clearly framed the issue in terms of hypocrisy and discrimination, as when New York Newsday coyly referred to “a prominent, high-ranking civilian official of the Department of Defense, an agency that routinely discharges members of the armed forces for being gay or lesbian.”
The exposure of Pete Williams’s homosexuality at the same time that the Pentagon was booting out lesbian and gay Gulf War veterans put the military on the defensive. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney was squarely on the hot seat because Pete Williams was his protégé, a Wyoming journalist who had joined Cheney’s staff when Cheney was a congressman and moved with him to the Defense Department. The New York Times reported that the Secretary “defended the right of homosexuals to hold civilian jobs at the Pentagon, saying that as long as they fulfilled their professional responsibilities their private lives were their own business.” But though Cheney stood by the basic policy of exclusion, repeating the mantra that “homosexuality is incompatible with military service,” the magical powers of this phrase had been seriously weakened by the exposure of the hypocrisy embodied by Pete Williams. Within weeks of the Advocate’s article both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran editorials attacking the military’s antigay policy, and Time magazine published a lengthy account of the controversy surrounding the issue that was clearly sympathetic to the gay cause.
The outing of Pete Williams was a prime exhibit for the defense of outing as a political strategy: it placed the issue of the military’s antigay discrimination squarely on the public agenda. The late Thomas Stoddard, then executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, who had previously criticized outing, said that the Pete Williams story was “the only example in which outing has advanced the interests of gay people.” Some writers in the mainstream media agreed with this judgment, such as openly gay Detroit News media critic Michael McWilliams, who argued that “outing should be used only in extreme cases … some cause-and-effect relationship must be established between a gay person doing his or her job and doing damage to other gay people.”
In the Los Angeles Times, Marshall Alan Phillips focused on the double standard of the media when it comes to gay people: “If a public figure is Jewish or Jehovah’s Witness or Hindu, divorced or married or single, Asian or Icelandic or Kenyan, those personal and private facts, if adequately verified, may be duly reported. No need for an on-the-record admission. Only in the case of gays does this silly rule of invisibility apply. It is based on the hackneyed straight assumption that, somehow, being a gay person is innately bad.”
Marjorie Williams, a Washington Post reporter, published an article in the Washington Monthly of September 1991, which reviewed such episodes as the Gary Hart adultery case and the many uncovered stories of Washington alcoholics. She also briefly mentioned “a radical outing publication … trying to interest the major media in a civilian Pentagon official who is gay.” Williams gave her vote to those who decided to preserve his privacy: “It does terrible violence to the ideal of a common interest to carry too far the insistence that a particular person, by virtue of gender or sexual orientation or color or any other index, has a greater responsibility than others to address a particular issue.”
But this is precisely the heart of the issue of outing as considered by gay people. While the mainstream media have been preoccupied with the question of political hypocrisy, calibrating their measuring instruments to determine whether a particular case reaches their threshold of outrage, lesbian and gay activists and journalists are more likely to factor into their calculations the question of communal responsibility.3
The involuntary exposure of closeted homosexuals was long a favored tactic used as a form of social control by the enemies of gays.4 Now, the adoption of outing as a political tactic challenges their ability to determine the meaning of gay identity and the consequences of its visibility. While the Pete Williams story did not resolve the debate over outing, neither did it destroy the life or career of its target. After the Democratic victory in the 1992 elections, Pete Williams lost his Pentagon job but was quickly hired by NBC News as a Washington correspondent. Thus, although Williams has never publicly affirmed his homosexuality, there is at least one on-air network reporter who is known to be gay.
The furor over outing shifted the line toward more equal treatment of public figures by the news media and a greater willingness to include someone’s homosexuality when it is relevant to a story. One of Michael Petrelis’s targets had been Wisconsin Congressman Steve Gunderson, a Republican who had never supported any gay causes in his eleven years in office. After Petrelis and other activists made his homosexuality public, Gunderson began to be more supportive of gay issues and more open about his sexuality. In October 1994 he was the subject of a profile by gay journalist Chandler Burr in the New York Times Magazine, with the headline “Congressman (R) Wisconsin. Fiscal Conservative. Social Moderate. Gay.” By 1996 Gunderson, who decided not to run for reelection, had published a memoir together with his lover, architect Rob Morse, and become active in gay Republican circles, as well as serving on the board of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian-gay political organization.
In March 1995 the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article reporting that Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner “left the home he shared with his wife and three young children and began a relationship with a young male staffer at Calvin Klein.” As former OutWeek editor Gabriel Rotello put it, “If OutWeek’s Forbes article ignited the outing war with a bang, the Journal’s piece on Wenner—and follow-up articles in Newsweek, the Washington Post, and elsewhere—symbolically ends it with a whimper.”
The war might have ended, but outing remains a tactic in activists’ arsenals, as closeted legislators Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and Congressman Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) discovered after they voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 (Kolbe had previously voted to maintain the military’s antigay policies). Kolbe beat the Advocate to the punch by coming out himself, telling a reporter, “I feel a tremendous burden lifted. It’s a relief.” Like Gunderson, Kolbe has become a supporter of the Log Cabin Gay Republicans. After confronting Mikulski at a New York book-signing, Signorile and media activist Ann Northrop proposed National Outing Day. “From this day forward, the day before National Coming Out Day will be National Outing Day,” Signorile said. “It’s a day to out a favorite public figure to everyone you know, through e-mail messages, voice mail messages, notes and letters in the mail, and in casual conversation throughout the day. And if there happens to be an elected official who voted anti-gay and who is making a public appearance, it’s a day to go and confront that person.”5
By the end of the decade the status of outing remained ambiguous, as positions shifted in the political breeze. Speaking to the International Network of Lesbian and Gay Officials in November 1999, Signorile defended the outing of public figures as responsible journalism—telling the truth—“when someone’s orientation is relevant, it [should be] looked at and it’s not something used as a blackmailing tool.” And, in fact, public figures coming out and being identified as gay in the media is becoming more common and even less newsworthy.
When longtime L.A. city councilman and mayoral candidate Joel Wachs came out the same week that Signorile spoke, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed piece on “The Yawn Heard ’Round Los Angeles.” At the same time, however, there was a thunderous silence from the lesbian and gay movement when Vice President Al Gore appointed Donna Brazile as his presidential campaign manager in October 1999. Brazile’s appointment attracted media attention because, as the Washington Post put it, “everyone took note that Brazile, 39, is the first black woman to hold such a high post in a major-party campaign.” The lengthy Post profile, like a similar article in the New York Times, went into great detail about Brazile’s history of political organizing—including her well-publicized firing from Michael Dukasis’s 1988 campaign after she urged journalists to cover George Bush’s alleged adultery. But while the Post noted Brazile’s involvement in the lesbian and gay rights movement, including her membership on “the board of the Millennium March on Washington—a gay rights event planned for April” (Brazile resigned from the board after she was appointed to the Gore campaign), her personal life was deftly ushered offstage. “The last time I talked about someone’s personal life, I got fired. I’m not about to make my personal life public,” she says. “I’m single and available. If I had a personal life, I’d have a sexual orientation.”6
U.S. News and World Report was puzzled by the silence of the Human Rights Campaign, the major sponsor of the Millennium March, which might have been expected to herald the appointment of a leading activist to head Gore’s campaign. Yet according to the Human Rights Campaign, “It’s just not news,” while U.S. News quoted a gay rights activist as saying the Gore campaign wanted “the spotlight to shine instead on the fact that Brazile is the first black woman to run a presidential campaign.” The Human Rights Campaign, which organizes the National Coming Out Day every October, seemed desperate to avoid what most observers thought was a notable story. The HRC’s communications director David Smith told the Atlanta Southern Voice, a gay paper, “I have no idea about her sexual orientation,” a statement the paper characterized as “false, if not an intentional lie.”
Yet if HRC was in the dark about Brazile’s sexuality, conservative gay writer Andrew Sullivan was not. Writing in 1995, Sullivan had denounced outing as the tyrannical enforcement of ideology, traumatizing individuals by obliterating their “complex negotiations of self-disclosure,” invading their autonomy and sacrificing their dignity. Sullivan criticized the outing of Pete Williams—whom he referred to, rather quaintly by that point, as “a civilian in the Defense Department”—and as “a man … for whom there was no proof of his hostility to homosexuals, and some evidence that he may have been doing good.” If Pete Williams could be so described, what description would fit someone who had long worked for lesbian and gay rights? But in Donna Brazile’s case, Sullivan sounded more like Signorile in 1991 than Sullivan in 1995 (when he published his autobiography, Virtually Normal), except that he was writing in the New York Times Magazine, not the Advocate.
In an article with the unambiguous subhead, “When It Comes to Public Figures Disclosing Their Sexuality, the New Rule Is Kinda Ask, Sorta Tell,” Sullivan leads off with an account of the Brazile appointment and subsequent obfuscation, concluding that, “Of course, Brazile has every right to say nothing if she wants to, even to the point of seeming ridiculous.” Sullivan’s article, which makes points all-too-familiar to the activists he labeled as tyrants a few years back, goes on to talk about—one might even say out, if any of this were really news—politicians Ed Koch, Janet Reno, and Donna Shalala (all Democrats, by coincidence?), and entertainers Rosie O’Donnell, Ricky Martin, and Richard Simmons. Sullivan’s conclusion? “I don’t believe in ‘outing’ people. But I don’t believe in ‘inning’ them, either. … There comes a point, surely, at which the diminishing public stigmatization of homosexuality makes this kind of coyness not so much understandably defensive as simply feeble: insulting to homosexuals, who know better, and condescending to heterosexuals, who deserve better.”7
The New York Times, which had consistently criticized outing and refused even to name Malcolm Forbes and Pete Williams when reporting on their outing, responded to questions about Sullivan’s piece by noting that he was a columnist expressing his own views and not the paper’s. It added, “He is not invading anyone’s privacy. He is dealing with how people portray themselves.”