7

The Ethic of Transparency

These days, if you want to know a secret, you just turn on the television.

—MARION WINIK,
“The Neighbor, d. 1978,” 2007

In striking fashion, both the “record prison” and the state’s watchful eye on the citizenry became objects of public contention in the 1970s. In response, many Americans sought to better shield themselves from the agencies that tracked their affairs. They did so in part by turning the tables on the watchers. New legislation promising citizens access to record-keeping systems and the formation of oversight committees intended to put some brakes on the clandestine activities of the government were course corrections.¹ Each targeted the level of privacy claimed by central authorities in American society. And each offered “transparency” as a solution to the political problem of cloaked power, whether in the form of state secrets, military cover-ups, or the routine whirring of the bureaucracy. If a person could be exposed through the traces he or she had left in the society’s files, perhaps the same logic could be applied to the record keepers. Although transparency did not necessarily translate into effective law—as FERPA and the Privacy Act attested—its ethos shaped many aspects of American political culture in the post-Watergate years, “a presumption of disclosure” replacing “the presumption of secrecy.”² Openness and access were seized as tools for balancing the scales between powerful authorities in American life and ordinary citizens, between the knowers and the known.

A new insistence on transparency, evident in public talk and social movements, coexisted uneasily with heightened concerns about citizens’ visibility to gatekeepers of all kinds. Americans of means redoubled their efforts to secure their private affairs in these years, often by inviting technologies of surveillance and counter-surveillance into their daily lives. A booming market in do-it-yourself spying was only the most obvious way that surveillance was domesticated in the post-Watergate years. In the 1970s, CCTV cameras had been trained on city streets in the name of public safety. By the 1980s these tactics came home, as property owners borrowed from new theories of urban policing, design, and management.³ Gated communities, caller-ID, video surveillance, and other home-monitoring devices arose, fittingly enough, out of privacy concerns—and from the sense that citizens were on their own in facing them. Security systems first used by the military and then by industry moved into the consumer realm as part of the “larger political culture’s story of ubiquitous threats and individual solutions.”⁴

Historians have pegged the steep investment in private communities, or “gated utopias,” and enclosed shopping malls in the 1980s to Reagan-era truisms about the failures of government as compared to private enterprise and to associated disinvestments from public streets, services, and schools. In that decade, white middle-class Americans “increasingly deserted parks for private health clubs, abandoned town squares for shopping malls, enrolled their children in private schools, and moved into gated communities governed by neighborhood associations and policed by private security patrols.”⁵ Fears of crime, and often of black neighborhoods, quickened the trend. But the “privatization of everyday life” can also be understood as a consumer-driven quest for more control over personal and domestic privacy. Americans with the ability to do so privatized their very claims to privacy in that decade, relying less on the law, regulatory agencies, or courts and more on individualistic strategies to protect themselves from trespasses onto their private space and affairs. To a certain extent, as had been true of the mass migration to the suburbs after World War II, privacy could be purchased. In the 1980s and 1990s this would take the form of private communities, complete with their own services and zoning requirements as well as gates, guards, and entry codes. The fastest growing residential designation in the United States, such communities, nearly as racially homogeneous as their 1950s counterparts, would by the mid-1990s house 28 million Americans.⁶

Even as upper- and middle-class homeowners patrolled their own property lines, however, they made prurient excursions into others’ affairs. Practices seemingly hostile to individual privacy—surveillance, voyeurism, and the extracting of confessions—would to a surprising extent in the 1970s and 1980s migrate from authorities to the citizenry itself. New modes of capture and surveillance, from investigative reportage to documentary filmmaking, became firmly rooted in American society from the 1970s onward. So did demands for increasingly full disclosure in the name of the public’s “right to know.”⁷ Tracking and exposure would no longer be the privilege of state authorities or powerful corporations alone. These tools, it became clear, could be wielded by voters, directors, journalists, audiences, and activists too. As a consequence, the hidden moments not only of public figures but also of private citizens became more accessible.⁸ Political speeches and social protests were conducted in a new key, with personal matters right at the fore. In the newspaper and on TV, audiences peered into the intimate secrets of ordinary people, made interesting through exposure, as experimental media formats ushered cameras into formerly private spaces. Surveillance was becoming a spectator sport.

The consumer market helped to prod this new culture into being, but so did the media and the courts. A press that went far beyond the invasiveness of Warren and Brandeis’s day led the way. Newly aggressive investigative reporters competed with avant-garde filmmakers to pry open the hidden facets of public persons. Domains of life that had once been largely off-limits, most notably domestic and intimate relations, were subjected to searching scrutiny. An ethic of transparency could in this way shade into intrusion. If journalists pushed the envelope of what could be asked and printed, courts struck down restrictive speech and dress codes as violations of free expression. The same Warren Court that had affirmed a right to privacy dismantled obscenity laws.⁹ One irony of the “right to privacy” was that it enabled “images, messages, and behaviors once considered private” to “saturate public culture.”¹⁰

Although for different ends, social movements also pushed for a more open and transparent, and thus, many believed, a more authentic and liberatory politics. Feminists and gay activists insistently questioned the rationale for keeping personal matters out of public view. We might think of them as cultural whistleblowers who hoped to banish certain kinds of secrecy from politics and social life. Ordinary citizens may have been tracked more thoroughly by social agencies in the 1970s. But those in the public eye were also held to account for their private lives as never before. Politicians as well as homosexual and reclusive celebrities were among those affected by a new standard of personal disclosure linked to the citizenry’s right to know.

Many things, then, in the name of transparency, lost their privateness in the 1970s. As the covert acts of powerful authorities came under suspicion, so too did concealment of all kinds. The shedding of secrets may have begun as a tactic to make American politics and public life more accountable. But as openness became an instrument for social justice as well as entertainment, the impulse transformed private life too, unsealing adoption records, the intimate details of marriages, and other matters that had in the past been carefully sheltered from public knowledge.¹¹ By the end of the era it was unclear if there was any agreement as to what ought to be honored as a secret, whether medical procedures, family dysfunction, or sexual identity. Indeed, some asked, should anything remain private if exposing it could be considered a social or political good? Surveillance would sneak into American culture, beguiling even those who had meant to evade it.

Shedding Secrets

There had been rules about what belonged in the political sphere and what did not: matters that properly should be kept quiet versus those that needed to see the light of day. In the 1970s, these conventions began to break down. Scandals as well as social movements subjected the traditional buffer between public and private life to interrogation. How much did an individual’s private affairs—his finances, his family, his infidelities—bear on his fitness for office? What could or should be revealed in political venues? Ought voters judge public figures by the secrets they kept or by those they spilled? Questions like these unsettled the established line between public affairs and private talk and wound up redrawing it.

The New Left’s search for authentic personhood as against the formulas and codes of Cold War society was one form of a more “personal” politics, as was Black Power activists’ targeting of cultural identity as a dimension of social power, encapsulated in the phrase “black is beautiful.”¹² In their claim to a new politics, activists of all stripes reworked the boundary between private and public, discovering the links between individual subjectivity and social domination. But it was feminists who most radically politicized private life, spying in mundane family, reproductive, and sexual relations the inexorable workings of male power and hierarchy. That standard bearer of women’s liberation, “the personal is political,” depended on the airing of “private” sentiments and experiences as the precondition for a truly transformative politics. Understanding women’s oppression as shared and systematic, whether through consciousness raising or other means, was a crucial step in toppling sexual inequality.¹³ To protect certain matters—abortion, rape, and sexual abuse—from public view came itself to be seen as an unjust act of power.¹⁴

An explicit politics tying transparency to the exposure of injustice was one impetus for the distrust of secrets in public life.¹⁵ Already in the 1960s civil rights and New Left activists challenged a “politics of civility” that privileged deference and politeness over racial and military obscenities thrown into stark relief by bloody battles in Selma as well as Vietnam.¹⁶ The sexual revolution underwrote the linkage between sexual liberation and political freedom, an equation that, as one historian notes, “had rumbled and murmured among ‘free lovers’ and bohemians for at least a century.”¹⁷ But letting it “all hang out,” in that evocative phrase of the era, spoke to a still broader cultural transformation, as citizens of all political stripes began to cast off earlier strictures on behavior and discourse. In their language, their dress, and their attitudes toward authority, many Americans adopted a more casual and less decorous style of social interaction. This was true in private spaces—bedrooms and living rooms—but also in public arenas, where “ties were loosened or disappeared entirely, top buttons came undone, hair was allowed to hang down to shoulders, mustaches drooped, sideburns crept, chest hairs peeked and first names began to replace formal modes of address.” A new attention to “identity, life-style, and the appropriate means of self-regulation” began with the counterculture, but it made notable inroads elsewhere in a process sociologist Sam Binkley refers to as a “loosening” of middle-class culture.¹⁸ This new benchmark of authenticity and transparency in personal relationships loosened secrets too.¹⁹

Whatever the precise combination of forces, it is clear that there was by the mid-1970s a new legitimacy to, and even a demand for, public disclosure of matters formerly deemed private. The shift was perhaps clearest in the realm of national politics. Abigail McCarthy, former wife of the 1968 Democratic presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy, tracked the changing standard neatly. Writing of her very first speech as a candidate’s wife in 1948 in St. Paul, Minnesota, itself a novelty (in her opinion, the “speaking wife” was a political “gimmick”), McCarthy recounted her decision to omit an anecdote about how she had met her husband. She recalled, “Gene always had a horror of revealing anything personal in public and even at that time refused to use the pronoun ‘I’ in his speeches.”²⁰ But the grammar of politics would change across the next decade, and by the 1960s it entailed exposure and publicity, not just for the candidate but for his family as well. McCarthy later told the story of her slow, sometimes agonizing coming to terms with the demands of publicity and disclosure. It was during a campaign stop for her husband in Indiana, McCarthy recounted, that “I finally carried out my resolution to overcome self-consciousness and laid aside any reluctance to be photographed or to face television.” Soon enough, she was taking all interviews that came her way, “one local Indiana station after another.” She appeared on television’s Today Show with Dick Cavett, traveled for a week with Life magazine, and spent three solid days with reporter Haynes Johnson so that he could write a profile of her, the candidate’s wife.²¹

“I found that it was not such a horrible experience after all,” wrote McCarthy. Still, she struggled with being “constantly under the observation of the women’s press corps” and wrote, as the 1968 Democratic convention loomed, of “fortifying myself for this final glare of publicity for Gene and me and for the children.” Ailing with gallstones, McCarthy was particularly troubled by advice from the campaign in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s assassination that she discuss her illness publicly. Ironically, her advisors considered this an unimpeachable explanation for her desire to stay out of the spotlight and to refrain from commenting on the tragedy, something she chose for herself out of “a sense of decent restraint.” But McCarthy balked, recalling “press reports of previous hospital stays” as “unattractively anatomical,” including a headline that read simply, “ABIGAIL’S GALL BLADDER.” She protested what she called “an undue interest in my insides”; as she recalled, “I argued that it was very bad taste to discuss the mechanics of my various illnesses.” Observing that such “medical frankness had been started by President Eisenhower,” McCarthy simply stated, “I did not feel the same obligation.”²² Resisting political pressure to reveal what she considered to be intimate information, she kept her own counsel.

By 1972, however, McCarthy was moved to tell the story of her personal history and marriage. In her memoir of that year, Private Faces/Public Places, she wrote of a life “defined by others—by wifehood and motherhood,” with “no individual achievement to measure.”²³ Abigail McCarthy’s book reflected on the pains of publicity and took the form of a personal narrative, although it was not what we have come to expect of such a work. Her recounting of the end of her marriage, for example, comes at its conclusion, in a just a few stark sentences. Gene McCarthy, she writes, “left our home in August of 1969.” Her explanation: “He had long since come to the conclusion that the concept of life-long fidelity and shared life come what may … was no longer valid. And many people today do find this—or any permanent commitment—an impossible ideal.”²⁴ This terse and rather abstract statement, which admitted nothing of her own anger or anguish, was as personal as McCarthy would get about the dissolution of her long marriage. Like McCarthy’s illnesses, her husband’s affair (with a journalist, it turned out) and desertion were not in her view appropriate material for public consumption.²⁵ And so, despite promising to probe the private effects of publicity, her book’s contents, like its title—taken from a W. H. Auden poem—reinforced the sturdy border between one’s public persona, on the one hand, and one’s intimate life, on the other.

The line between proper and improper disclosure that Abigail McCarthy walked in 1968 and even 1972 would shift significantly by the mid-1970s, propelled by fast-moving developments. One of these was Watergate. With its origins in the illegal machinations of the executive branch and the extensive cover-up that sought to hide it, the scandal led to urgent calls for public accountability.²⁶ Desperate to restore trust in government, Congress passed a flurry of post-Watergate reform measures even beyond FERPA and the Privacy Act of 1974, including legislation making campaign contributions public for the first time in American history.²⁷ Many politicians also took the unprecedented step of voluntarily disclosing their tax returns. By early May 1974, sixty members of Congress had already released their private financial data to the public, with more planning to follow their lead.²⁸ Noted one such member of Congress, who acknowledged this practice as an invasion of his and his colleagues’ privacy, “Under the circumstances we face today I think we must take that extra step … to win back the confidence of the people in this country.” He went on to say that “as distasteful as it is personally to me—and it frankly is—I think it is the price we have to pay.”²⁹

Sociologist Michael Schudson has observed that Congress in the 1960s was “shielded from the public,” not only by its own traditions and procedures but also by a “complacent and compliant journalism and the absence of watchdog public interest groups.”³⁰ These norms were changing already by the late 1960s, a response to civil rights agitation, frustration with entrenched rules by newly elected legislators, and democratizing efforts within Congress itself—by Eugene McCarthy, among others. As public disclosure came to be associated with good government, “sunshine” reforms led to the public recording of votes, the disclosure of campaign contributions, the right to judicial records, new ethics codes, and the airing of congressional procedures to those beyond the corridors of the government, including by television and radio broadcast.³¹ Watergate simply, but crucially, exerted additional pressure. Openness and transparency were becoming the watchwords of politics.

This sort of accountability was on the rise in many corners of American society: in movements for “truth in packaging” and “unit pricing,” as well as “truth in lending” and environmental impact statements.³² It came with a high level of intrusion into public figures’ affairs. As late as 1972 there was surprisingly little vetting of a political candidate’s biography, finances, friendships, or medical history. Only after Thomas Eagleton was named as the candidate for vice president on the Democratic ticket that year, and through an anonymous tip, for example, did his hospitalizations for depression and electroshock treatment became public knowledge. The party’s presidential nominee, George McGovern, reluctantly confirmed this report with the psychiatrists in question, and Eagleton was swiftly removed from the ticket.³³ The “Eagleton affair” marked the end of an era. The lesson was that private life was now fair game in politics and that secrets could end a career in public office. Openness could engender its opposite: tremendous caution and careful scriptedness of candidates and campaigns. In a world of transparency, a politician could not afford a misstep or checkered personal history.³⁴ The scrutiny of Republican Gerald Ford during his confirmation hearings for vice president just a few years later, following Spiro Agnew’s resignation, showed that the lesson had been learned: the vetting drew on the work of 350 special agents from 33 FBI field offices, who interviewed 1,000 witnesses and compiled 1,700 pages of reports. Americans, one scholar notes, “knew more about Ford than they had ever known about any president or vice president.”³⁵

On assuming the presidency after Nixon’s resignation, Ford declared, “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor.”³⁶ And yet it was the new president’s wife, Betty Ford, who was more responsible for ushering in new levels of frankness to national politics. She began her career as a political wife finding “all those interviews … terrifying.”³⁷ As First Lady, however, she embraced all that Abigail McCarthy had found distasteful. Often considered the most “outspoken” woman to occupy that role since Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford ventured strong opinions, lobbying on behalf of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.³⁸ But the new transparency in politics was exemplified by Ford’s public handling of her personal life, especially her hospitalization for breast cancer and her resulting mastectomy in September 1974.³⁹ Normally, this was a matter that would have been kept quiet, by the patient and her staff alike. The diagnosis and treatment of cancer—and especially breast cancer—were still spoken of in hushed tones, if at all.⁴⁰ As recently as the 1950s, the New York Times, for instance, would not publish either the word “breast” or “cancer.”⁴¹ In her press secretary’s words, however, the First Lady and the White House vowed to be “extraordinarily candid and complete in reporting on her operation and its aftermath.”⁴²

That decision was undoubtedly motivated by Betty Ford’s interest in publicizing the disease and its diagnosis to counter the shame many women associated with it. But it was also a political calculation, meant to draw a contrast between the Ford administration and its predecessor. Nixon’s stonewalling press office was the obvious point of reference.⁴³ As a New York Times editorialist perceived, “In a curious way, the publicity given to the breast surgery of Betty Ford and Margaretta Rockefeller [the vice president’s wife, who was also diagnosed with breast cancer soon after] seems to be related to the Watergate-induced need to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, instantly and preferably on color TV.”⁴⁴ The First Lady herself pinned such openness to the political climate. “Rather than continue this traditional silence about breast cancer, we felt we had to be very public,” Ford told an interviewer. She assured him that “there would be no cover-up in the Ford administration.” The confluence of political reckoning and Ford’s temperamental frankness led in one scholar’s estimation to “the most candid remarks that a first lady had ever made in public about her health.”⁴⁵

Speaking openly about the disfigurement and scars from her operation and the effect of losing a breast was a dramatic departure for someone in Betty Ford’s role. Its reverberations were immediate, measurable in the uptick not just in mammograms but also in more forthright public discussions about women’s health.⁴⁶ Many commentators praised Ford for bringing new attention to a disease that had received so little. Public support came in the form of 5,000 calls to the White House switchboard and in letters to the editor, such as one woman’s praise of Ford for her bravery in talking about “a disease a lot of people would like to hide, like leprosy.” Given that “most don’t want to read or hear about [breast cancer], let alone have it on the front page headlines,” she judged that the First Lady had performed a valuable public service.⁴⁷

7.1.   Betty Ford, here shown post-surgery with Gerald Ford, garnered both praise and criticism for her openness about medical matters.

As this writer suggested, the extensive publicity attending the First Lady’s mastectomy was not uniformly applauded. The press came in for a beating for offering too much detail, too relentlessly, and so too did readers for their “voyeurism” in following it all.⁴⁸ Critics raised questions about medical privacy (one noted that the press was reporting on Ford’s post-op condition before the anesthesia had even worn off), about the exploitation of illness for political gain, and about the patient’s right to dignity. Ever since Betty Ford’s surgery, wrote one, “the world has been immersed in clinical detail about her case.… People say that since it’s the First Lady, we have the right to know, but do we? What about her right to privacy?”⁴⁹ Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman opined that “one of the worst things about being a public person—by marriage and not by choice—must be having a private problem. When the removal of your breast becomes a media event, you’ve had the ultimate invasion of privacy.”⁵⁰ Similarly, a reader of the Hartford Courant expressed disgust at “the sick invasion of privacy foisted on people in the public eye.” The “reporting on Mrs. Ford’s operation is the last straw,” this writer fumed. “Why couldn’t the press have the decency, the good manners, and the sensitivity to report this as a straight news item, without sensationalism, lurid details, and gloomy prognostications?”⁵¹

For writers in this vein, the intrusion of personal details into reportage was not just irrelevant to public affairs but a corruption of them. “What price news?” asked a writer for the Atlanta Constitution, the lament triggered by Betty Ford’s appearances on Barbara Walters’s talk show and the cover of McCall’s magazine. Tagging such coverage “exploitation,” he moaned, “Aren’t things bad enough to have to drag a humiliated Betty Ford before an already cancerous economy. Is there no shame?”⁵² To assume that shame was involved in speaking openly about one’s health, and breast cancer specifically, however, could no longer be counted on. Reactions to Betty Ford’s outspokenness reveal the way codes about public speech were rapidly being retooled, the joint product of a bolder, even brazen, press and the elevation of transparency and authenticity as social values.

Betty Ford’s breaches of propriety went beyond the medical domain. The First Lady shocked many Americans with her plain talk about all manner of issues, including a glib reference to sleeping with the president “as often as possible.”⁵³ The high-water mark, however, was her spilling of family secrets in a 60 Minutes television interview with journalist Morley Safer in 1975. On air, when asked, she speculated about her four children’s possible marijuana use, as well as her unmarried daughter’s likeliness to conduct a sexual affair.⁵⁴ (As the New York Times reported it, “Mrs. Ford suggested that in general, premarital relations with the right partner might lower the divorce rate.”⁵⁵ The CBS press release simply explained: “This is an unusual interview with an unusual woman.”⁵⁶) Afterward, Ford admitted that she had been thrown by the question about how she would react to her daughter having an affair. To that or any other question, she might have demurred. Instead, wrote a handler, she answered in a manner “unheard of in a First Lady.”⁵⁷ Ford once again linked her remarks to her political surrounds—to the principles of “an open administration” and the values of “openness and candor.”⁵⁸ Her on-camera admissions triggered plenty of hate mail blaming the First Lady for tarnishing the reputation of the White House and the presidency.⁵⁹ But Betty Ford was also deeply popular, her poll numbers the highest of any First Lady in history (and higher than her husband’s).⁶⁰ Like her willingness to talk personally about her cancer and recovery, the First Lady’s refreshingly “modern” remarks about family life gained her many admirers.

Betty Ford’s frequent departures from decorum were as important to the evolving culture of disclosure in the United States as lawmakers’ post-Nixon political quest for transparency. Her direct talk on delicate matters dovetailed with a more aggressive journalistic ethos that had been building in the era of civil rights and Vietnam, severing the cozy mid-century relationship between the press and the politicians it reported on.⁶¹ Journalists beginning in the 1960s instead set themselves up as the exposers of backstage politics and the enforcers of public accountability. As Michael Schudson explains, as the press took on this role, the government and other powerful institutions became “eager for media attention and approval,” adapting to “a world in which journalists had a more formidable presence than ever before.”⁶² Watergate would cement the profession’s new emphasis on ferreting out secrets in the name of exposing abuses of authority.⁶³ But that impulse was not so easily contained. One media scholar observes, “it would be very difficult to maintain a sharp distinction between secrets bearing on the exercise of power and secrets concerning the conduct of private life.” Indeed, investigative journalism “would easily shade into a kind of prurient reporting in which hidden aspects of the exercise of power would be mixed together with hidden aspects of the lives of the powerful.”⁶⁴

60 Minutes, a “surprise hit,” was a case in point. Its very premise was built on parting the curtain separating the public figure from the ordinary citizen: “here one got the story behind the story and experienced a feeling of intimacy with America’s most famous people.”⁶⁵ Betty Ford’s biographer notes that her invitation to appear on a television newsmagazine show “was, in and of itself news.”⁶⁶ No other First Lady had been asked to do so, the closest parallel perhaps being Jackie Kennedy’s televised 1962 tour of the White House for CBS News, a carefully scripted production. And the queries of Morley Safer, who had gained acclaim for his tough reportage of U.S. Marines’ “search and destroy” missions in Vietnam, probed further than many thought appropriate. Conventions around observing a polite distance were going by the wayside. Ford was asked, for example, whether she believed her husband had even been unfaithful, if she had ever visited a psychiatrist, and how she would characterize her relationship with her children. Her press secretary, Sheila Weidenfeld, demanded, “Would anyone have dared ask Mamie Eisenhower about subjects like that?” Weidenfeld worried about the effects of her boss’s use of “shock words” like divorce, abortion, and marijuana on national TV, but then thought again, saying, “I suppose these are shock times.”⁶⁷

The publishing industry, at any rate was not shocked: it thrived on Betty Ford’s revelations and ardently pursued more. Taking a page from her mother, Susan Ford accepted an invitation to write a regular column, “White House Diary,” for Seventeen magazine, which among other topics dealt with male chauvinism and her own embattled privacy.⁶⁸ Soon enough, Betty Ford’s press secretary was telling her own tales about the administration in a memoir of 1979, First Lady’s Lady—“one of the first of what would be a long line of kiss-and-tell books written by White House employees.”⁶⁹ This brand of “news” fell into the category of entertainment or even gossip, but investigative journalists were pouring more and more of their energies into uncovering intimate revelations about other public figures, especially those in government.⁷⁰ In 1976, for example, the Washington Post, celebrated for piecing together the Watergate scandal, produced another exposé, this time the story of Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes, who had employed his mistress as his secretary. Hayes’s impropriety was newsworthy in part because it was an abuse of public trust but also because it violated new feminist norms of appropriate behavior. The sexual affairs of other politicians, from Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s to John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, had not been the stuff of news, even when well known to reporters. But by the mid-1970s, historian Edward Berkowitz writes, the Washington Post “saw such a story as fair game and, even more, as a story of vital news importance that should run on page one.”⁷¹ Once the old taboos were broken, political and sexual scandals became increasingly valuable quarry for investigative reporters.

Clearly, the norms of political decorum were shifting. Figures in the public eye—and not only politicians’ wives—felt compelled to issue more intimate and revealing details in public statements. Not just tax returns but also personal foibles and indiscretions moved into the spotlight. Just after he was nominated as the Democratic candidate for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter, for example, owned up in a Playboy Magazine interview to committing “adultery in his heart many times.” If Carter went too far, the New York Times calling his admission “unusually candid for a Presidential aspirant” and many evangelicals whom he had courted withdrawing their support for his candidacy, his comments were calibrated to meet a new political standard.⁷²

The Domestication of Surveillance

In the 1970s, “secrets were simply more secret,” writes author and professional blogger Marion Winik, who has herself crafted a career out of highly personal stories. “Back then, there were only three [television] channels and none of them had shows where people who were not professional actors wept and threw chairs at one another.”⁷³ But in fact secrets were already becoming much less secret in that decade. A key force was TV itself, which beginning in the early 1970s challenged all sorts of proprieties about what could and could not be done in public view and earshot. All in the Family, Norman Lear’s hit show for CBS that premiered in 1971, gleefully broke old barriers, showing childbirth and mentioning menopause on the air. In preparation, the network “arranged for extra operators to take complaints from offended viewers.” Few, however, came in, and the show led in the ratings for five years.⁷⁴ Curse words and flushing toilets, previously banned in television programming, soon followed.

The year before the Privacy Act was signed into law by President Ford—and attracting far more attention, it must be said—another groundbreaking television program appeared in the nation’s living rooms. An American Family, which first aired on January 11, 1973, was a new breed of on-screen entity: a documentary series that chronicled seven months in the life of a real family, the Louds of Santa Barbara, California.⁷⁵ The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) ran the series for twelve weeks, immersing upward of ten million viewers every Thursday night, at 9:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, in the domestic turmoil of Bill and Pat Loud and their five teen-aged children: Lance, Kevin, Grant, Delilah, and Michele. As the episodes unfolded, the audience was privy to Delilah’s romantic explorations, Grant and his father’s squabbles about ambition and work, and Pat’s visit to her aging mother, as well as to glimpses of family breakfasts, dance recitals, and summer jobs. More serious matters were aired too, as emblematic of the forces transforming American families in the 1970s as they were unprecedented as TV content. Millions watched as the oldest son, Lance, made clear to his mother, in scenes shot at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, that he was gay.⁷⁶ And viewers remained riveted as they followed, hour by hour, the dramatic arc of the series: the collapse of Pat and Bill’s twenty-year marriage.

Unlike Betty Ford and Jimmy Carter, the Louds were not public figures. Until the camera arrived in their living room, their personal affairs were obscure, well and truly their own. But what the Louds represented—the white middle-class American family—was as ripe for unveiling in the 1970s as were politicians’ sex lives, as Ford herself was soon to discover on 60 Minutes. The domestic sphere, and the middle-class home specifically, had been figured as the bulwark of American private life in the postwar era, perhaps privacy’s last best hope. Filmmakers in the early 1960s who had hoped to document the “home side” of Kennedy’s presidency were rebuffed by Jackie Kennedy, who declared, “Nobody is going to move into the White House with me.”⁷⁷ Suburban architects and the Supreme Court itself in Griswold v. Connecticut had affirmed that the private spaces of family life, especially the heterosexual, marital bedroom, were off-limits to intruders. The camera’s invasion of the Louds’ domestic intimacies—puncturing its outward placidity to discover the raging emotional conflicts of the contemporary suburban family—suggested a more penetrating view on the matter. Like the franker revelations of public figures, the dissection of middle-class family life signaled a more skeptical stance toward the surfaces and sanctities of American life. As such, the PBS series collaborated in a broader collapse of personal secrets, seemingly announcing the end of a certain species of privacy.

Funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation to the tune of $1.2 million and culled from 261 days of shooting and 300 hours of footage, the 12-hour program that comprised An American Family is now widely acknowledged to be the progenitor of reality television.⁷⁸ Its producer, Craig Gilbert, had cut his teeth on documentaries about public affairs—wartime events in The March of Time and Victory at Sea—and public figures such as artist Pablo Picasso and Irish writer Christy Brown. But in the later 1960s the documentary was being put to new ends: both the “private exposure of public events and figures” and “the public display of private, even secret, lives.”⁷⁹ Filmmakers were “turning increasingly to more private subject matter in autobiographical forms,” and Gilbert turned with them.⁸⁰ At an opportune moment he pitched the idea of recording the life of an ordinary middle-class family to National Educational Television, PBS’s predecessor. He was surprised but gratified to get the green light.⁸¹

Even in an age of experimental “direct cinema,” Gilbert’s creation was unique. PBS publicists crowed, “There has never been anything on television—or anywhere else—to prepare you for ‘An American Family.’ ” For all the hyperbole, they captured a truth. The show’s unscripted content, its unsparing exposure of intimate relationships, and, perhaps most of all, its ordinary subjects willing to conduct their affairs before the camera heralded a new form. The series “announced the breakdown of fixed distinctions between public and private, reality and spectacle, serial narrative and nonfiction, documentary and fiction, film and television.”⁸² These features made An American Family “the most hotly debated documentary ever broadcast on American television.” Not coincidentally, the series also drew the largest audience for public TV of the 1970s.⁸³ Anthropologist Margaret Mead (who had been Gilbert’s subject in an earlier documentary) praised the series as “a new kind of art form … as new and as significant as the invention of drama or the novel—a new way in which people can learn to look at life.”⁸⁴ Media scholars would later judge An American Family one of the most influential and innovative television shows of the decade.⁸⁵

Unable to forecast a future of televised reality contests, video diaries, and personal webcams, however, most critics reacted to An American Family with a mix of bemusement and outright hostility. The series was unsettling in both its form and content. Many acknowledged the powerful, if disturbing, picture of the nuclear family that the series projected.⁸⁶ If this was a profile of the American family, rather than simply “an” American family, critics intoned, that institution was in trouble.⁸⁷ Many found fault with the affluent Louds themselves, whose on-camera image was unflattering: shallow, uncultured, materialistic, uninterested in public affairs, and disconnected from one another. Unpersuaded by the documentary’s “realness,” other detractors blasted the truth of a depiction that could only be captured by an ever-present film crew. Surely, they argued, those additional members of the household distorted the family portrait.⁸⁸ But the greatest number of reviewers leveled their critique at the series’ very premise. What was it, exactly, that the producer and filmmakers had hoped to reveal? Howsoever did the Louds agree to it? And why did Americans so avidly watch it?

Novel as it was, An American Family was shaped both by avant-garde filmmaking—the dream that the camera could erase “the divide between public and private”—and network news reportage that was by the 1970s carrying gritty images from the Vietnam War into American homes.⁸⁹ Filmmakers and journalists alike pressed forward into foreign social and moral territory, casting aside old tropes and verities. They counted on a less deferential audience, one more inured to shock and less satisfied with generic or political conventions. One scholar pegs 1969 as the year that prime-time television programming began to shift, adopting “a more abrasive style and more open confrontation with contemporary social issues,” as compared with the harmonious family dramas of the 1950s and 1960s.⁹⁰ The same year that the PBS series aired, viewing audiences were treated to a new level of sexual explicitness and moral ambiguity in films like The Godfather, Deep Throat, and Last Tango in Paris, as well as in books like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.⁹¹ Equally scandalous real-life productions were waiting in the wings. The Watergate hearings, billed by one commentator “the greatest miniseries ever,” would play out on television screens that summer—competing, in fact, with the rebroadcast of An American Family.⁹²

Turning an unvarnished gaze on the domestic realm, an arena long prized as a sanctuary from public life, had disorienting results. An American Family revealed in the first instance a dissolving marriage. But it also exposed a set of intertwined issues that were coming to a head in the 1970s: changing social values, evident in the way the series undid traditional images of parenting, gender roles, and sexuality; the tug of media, especially television, on citizens’ lives; and, of course, the moving line of what Americans considered to be private.⁹³

For the Louds themselves, the meanings of An American Family came in two waves. The first, and easier, stage was the filming itself. It was guided by a set of ground rules negotiated by the family and filmmakers. The Louds would allow microphones, cameras, and a film crew (led by a young married couple, Alan and Susan Raymond) into their lives. They would make available, in addition, home movies, family photos, and other memorabilia. Access to their private affairs extended even to their telephone line. Midway through the shooting—even as debates over wiretapping raged in the broader society and Richard Nixon installed recording devices in the Oval Office—the Louds permitted the filmmakers to tap their phones so as to better record both ends of family members’ conversations.⁹⁴ On the other hand, the camera was not to go behind closed doors. Gilbert explained, assuming a level of compartmentalization that may not have been possible, that the Louds could “transact interactions they didn’t want recorded before or after the camera crew’s arrival and departure.”⁹⁵ The family on occasion exercised veto power over the filming of particular events—Pat’s informing of her children (although not her husband) that she would seek a divorce, for instance.⁹⁶ Some things, if not many, were simply “too private for the series.”⁹⁷ Although she went along with the filming of them, even Susan Raymond apparently “balked at capturing several of the series’ rawest moments,” including a pivotal scene of an argument between Pat and Bill Loud at a restaurant.⁹⁸ The Louds were permitted to review and raise concerns about the footage before it aired, a stipulation rare for that time.⁹⁹ Otherwise, they were “to live their lives as if there were no camera present.”¹⁰⁰ That injunction perhaps indicated how much an older distinction between public and private matters had already faded.

Ignoring ever-present surveillance presented a challenge. At times, as Pat described it, the knowledge of being watched weighed heavily: “That camera was fixed in my brain like a tumor. It took months until I wasn’t aware of it every minute.” She referred to the camera as “another parent, an eleven-million-people parent” that she didn’t want to let down. At other moments, the presence of the filmmakers seemed to offer Pat solace or at least distract her from her family’s woes.¹⁰¹ The Louds became quite close to the young film crew, especially Susan and Alan Raymond. The filmmakers, on the scene day in and day out, found themselves involved in aspects of the children’s lives—Grant’s breakup with his girlfriend, for instance—to which their parents were not privy.¹⁰² And while she avowed that the series postponed rather than caused her split from Bill, Pat also suggested that the crew’s presence emboldened her to seek a divorce, a move she had contemplated for several years.¹⁰³ Their arrival in her household meant that she “had an unprecedented amount of support”; her family simply “expanded” to include “everybody … who dropped in and dropped out, and we were one big functioning unit.” This new family ensemble “took the edge off” her plan to separate from Bill.¹⁰⁴ Yet it was also true, Pat acknowledged, that playing to the camera had its own logic: “We were living a story that had to be told, and the story was building to a climax.”¹⁰⁵

The end of that story, along with the daily scrutiny of outsiders, brought its own difficulties. The family, it turns out, had become used to being watched. On December 31, 1971, a full seven months after the crew arrived, “the series was suddenly over,” Pat wrote, “and they all packed up their cameras, their lights, their sound equipment, their problems, concerns, and what had been for me, their magic, and they left.” Regular life paled in comparison. “We were done, back to a life that seemed appallingly ordinary, waiting for what was going to happen next.” Pat described the time that elapsed while the editors worked on the film as a “state of suspension.” For a whole year, “it didn’t matter to anyone what we said or did, because nobody was filming us anymore.”¹⁰⁶ Private life without an audience felt different—lonelier and drained of significance.

The second stage, the broadcast of An American Family from January through March 1973, would bring the bright lights back. Whatever reservations Pat Loud had harbored during the filming, she declared herself “simply astounded, enormously pleased and very proud” of the finished series, praising the filmmakers for handling her family’s affairs honestly and with “as much kindness as possible.”¹⁰⁷ But the critical response to An American Family was not as the Louds had envisioned, whether Bill’s belief that they would come across as a West Coast version of the Kennedys or Pat’s half-conscious hope that “if Bill didn’t love me, a lot of the viewers out there would.”¹⁰⁸ Whereas the family had experienced the filming as an “intimate affair,” the same could not be said for the glare of publicity that followed.¹⁰⁹ Pat Loud described her shock and sense of betrayal at their portrayal in the advance publicity from PBS and the raft of reviews that followed, claiming “horrid psychic damage.” She lamented, “We’ve lost dignity, been humiliated, and our honor is in question.”¹¹⁰ Only then did the consequence of letting the camera in become clear. The Loud family would be “embattled and condemned in the center of a mass-media paroxysm of interest, comment, zings, arrows and judgment.”¹¹¹

Critics roundly decried the way the Louds conducted their affairs. Almost invariably, they fastened that judgment to the family’s decision to expose their private lives to anyone who would watch. Explanations for such untoward behavior ranged from simple vanity to a more troubling cause: a vacuum in the Louds’ family life that publicity promised to fill. Irving Horowitz, the same sociologist who had so stoutly defended Tearoom Trade, told Time magazine that the Louds revealed “a tendency towards exhibitionism,” and that the “very act of being filmed for public television” made them atypical of America’s families.¹¹² But a lurking worry was that the Louds’ desire to enact their private woes in the public spotlight made them all too representative. Perhaps the constant presence of observers and recording equipment in the lives of the Louds did not constitute an invasion at all. Quoting the show’s producer, a writer for the New York Times speculated that the family allowed the film crew in because its members had lost the ability to communicate with one another. They hoped “the presence of the camera—an objective third party—might help ‘fill in the empty spaces.’ ”¹¹³

Unlike the subjects of sociological and behavioral research, who by the early 1970s were characterized as vulnerable and even in need of rights, the subjects of the PBS documentary were regularly censured for their participation in this particular social experiment. The Louds’ seeming hunger for attention set them apart from the unwitting performers in Laud Humphreys’s study or Stanley Milgram’s laboratory. Only a few observers even made the comparison. Allen Grimshaw, a sociologist concerned with researchers’ use of sound and image recording, referred to the Loud family as an exemplary case of “severe individual distress” caused by being captured on film. He quoted Pat Loud’s post-broadcast statement that she was frightened and confused, finding herself “shrinking in defense, not only from critics and detractors, but from friends, sympathizers and, finally, myself.” Grimshaw linked the Louds’ exposure to increasing media intrusiveness in society writ large: public officials being caught on camera in bad behavior, Jackie Onassis and her children being harassed by paparazzi, and distraught families in the face of tragedies being queried by reporters: “how do you feel?”¹¹⁴

Likewise, a writer on documentary film, Calvin Pryluck, noted that, although the medium had “shown us aspects of our world that in other times would have been obscured from view,” the gain in social knowledge could be a loss for those it documented. Documentary film, he argued, was “filled with pitfalls for the people involved.” Inevitably, this brought him to what he called “actuality filming” and the Louds. “The criticism—deserved or not—directed to the Loud family following their appearance as An American Family,” he wrote a full three years after the broadcast, “is too well-known to bear repeating.”¹¹⁵ Pryluck wondered about the damage that had come to the Louds in its aftermath. Like many supporters of research subjects’ rights, he considered the securing of documentary subjects’ consent inadequate, nothing more than a fiction useful to the filmmaker.¹¹⁶ It was a violation of a “fundamental human right,” he claimed, to force subjects “to disclose feelings they might prefer to keep hidden.” This is what made “coerced public revelations of private moments … so clearly objectionable.¹¹⁷

Pryluck’s was a rare intervention, however. And his key assumptions seemed wobbly: objectionable, after all, to whom? Even the Louds—with some wavering only from Pat—allowed that, given a choice, they would do it all over again. Lance, despite his substantial critiques of the final form of the documentary, vowed that he would agree to the filming again “in a minute.”¹¹⁸ Most critics would thus view the problem of “public revelation” as not one of improper suasion, but its opposite: a baleful willingness to disclose. To some, the PBS production suggested that hitherto private feelings and actions were losing their privateness, or worse, becoming the very currency of American public life. If coercion played a part in bringing secrets out into the open, it functioned in much subtler fashion than did the standard inducements of social scientists. And if overly eager subjects required protection, it was not from the prying camera or filmmaker. What they needed protection from was themselves.

The Loud family was one concern. But so was their audience. This was because An American Family was wildly and, to some critics, inexplicably, popular: one night’s episode, for instance, reportedly drew more than 70 percent of Boston’s entire viewing audience.¹¹⁹ The Chicago Tribune quipped that the documentary “made the trials of the Louds a shade better known than those of Job.”¹²⁰ And the fact that acclaimed essayist and human rights activist Elie Wiesel refused to watch the show alongside other dinner-party guests was considered newsworthy.¹²¹ Fan letters, cartoons—references to the Louds appeared in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” as well as The New Yorker—and extensive media coverage cemented the series’ place in popular culture. The Louds, it seemed, had exposed not only themselves but also a voyeuristic streak in the population at large. The series raised troubling questions about the lure of televised “reality” and the disrobing of private life. What did the Louds’ readiness to be filmed in the intimate, daily rounds of their household mean? And what was signified by millions of viewers’ commitment to tuning in, twelve weeks running?

For Pat Loud, the most interesting questions sparked by the series were not about her family at all, but about the watchers. She wondered, “What nerve have we touched? … What is it that has switched on the audience”?¹²² The Hollywood-esque attractiveness of the Louds was part of the answer. More than one critic commented on Pat’s striking resemblance to Jackie Onassis.¹²³ But something else seemed to be at work behind the “unusually intense level of interest in the Louds.”¹²⁴ Although the family was largely condemned as shallow and detached when the show aired, critics conceded that the Louds’ experiences and troubles resonated with middle-class viewers.¹²⁵ Few of them doubted Americans’ tendency to identify with the Louds or their capacity to enter into intimate dramas enacted by strangers. Commentators implied as much of the documentary’s producer. An “angry man,” Craig Gilbert was, one speculated, upset at the failure of his own marriage and hoping for illumination and therapy by wielding a camera.¹²⁶ In the Louds, he hoped to find answers: to the decline of the American family in the 1970s but also to the end of his own. The intentness with which viewers followed the Louds spoke to the power of domestic secrets unleashed.

7.2.   Advertisements for the premiere of An American Family promised that there had “never been anything on television” like it.

The family of An American Family—shot through with infidelity, homosexuality, adolescent angst, profanity, and alcohol—may have offered some relief from impossible domestic ideals in the 1970s. Viewers’ identification was strongest with Pat, who referred to “boxes and boxes of letters, some two thousands of them, most of which tell me how brave and honest I am” that arrived from fans. These missives empathized with, encouraged, and even thanked the family’s matriarch for her candor about her domestic struggles and divorce. Unlike the critics who branded the Louds “untraditional”—who were “scared,” Pat suggested, by a family seemingly “too loose, too scattered”—the television audience of 1973 seemed to find itself reflected in the documentary’s frank, conflict-filled depiction of domestic life.¹²⁷ Even as a reviewer asked whether television was “the right form for this content,” she admitted that she was, “quite frankly, surprised at how interested I became in [the Louds]” and unprepared for how difficult it was to find “critical distance” from the residents of 35 Wooddale Lane.¹²⁸ Novelist Anne Roiphe likewise claimed to feel “despair and fascination” while watching the Louds’ lives unfold, which, she admitted, “could only have been caused by vibrations ricocheting down through my own experiences.” The Louds, she wrote, were “enough like me and mine to create havoc in my head.”¹²⁹

Throughout 1973, commentators bewailed the Louds’ willingness to subject themselves to publicity. But they also noted viewers’ readiness to affirm them for it. The popular response to An American Family, like voters’ embrace of Betty Ford, points to broad changes in sensibility around the sharing of “private” material. Peering into others’ households from the comfort of one’s own living room was an old impulse, stretching from the Puritans to the 1950s picture window. What was new was the public rather than surreptitious nature of the surveillance. As such, the “looser” family that played out on the nation’s TV screens helped erode one of the key private planks of American public life.

Living out Loud

Even critics who conceded that the PBS documentary was helping Americans make sense of cultural and familial change were skeptical about the medium. Could true self-awareness really come from watching strangers air their dirty laundry on national TV? “An American Family was hailed as a great breakthrough in the use of the camera in the service of knowledge,” wrote Abigail McCarthy, who was tapped to review the documentary for the Atlantic Monthly the spring of its broadcast. Comparing the PBS series to photographer Edward Steichen’s panoramic, globe-spanning images in the “Family of Man” exhibit (1955), where the family was taken to be a “paradigm of unity,” McCarthy saw in the Louds only “disintegration and purposelessness.” She believed that the viewer was “diminished and drained” by the watching—not elevated, as with Steichen’s images, but instead “humiliated.” The former wife of a presidential candidate, McCarthy knew something about the fine line between private life and public exposure.¹³⁰ Her reticence about her own failed marriage in her 1972 memoir may account for the mix of fascination and dismay with which she greeted the Louds’ separation before the eyes of millions the following year.

McCarthy was aware that many reviewers belittled the Louds for putting themselves in the sights of a film crew, but she thought this reaction wrong-headed, betraying “ignorance of the unique hold of the medium on people today.” In public life, she averred, “one learns quickly that everyone wants to be on television.” Surely thinking of her husband’s presidential campaign, she mused, “Let a television crew appear to follow a campaigner and a crowd gathers almost at once, pushing each other, pressing close so that they, too, will be on screen. Appear on a talk show and you take on new reality, even for close friends.” McCarthy went on to offer other examples, including that of the wife of a released prisoner of war who had permitted her husband’s very first phone call—unbeknownst to him—to be recorded by a television crew. McCarthy stated as fact that “there are very few private people left.” Given this and other signs of television looming larger than life in contemporary culture, she asked, “Can we condemn the Louds?”¹³¹

Pat Loud, in her autobiography of 1974, echoed McCarthy’s sentiments (which she had devoured, along with any number of reviews and essays on the PBS series). In the chapter titled “Why We Did It,” she asked, with a hint of sarcasm, “Doesn’t everybody want to be on television?” Referring to her initial understanding of the terms of her family’s participation in the documentary, she continued, “Wouldn’t anybody have done it, thinking it was going to be for one hour on educational television? Or even not thinking?”¹³² In another venue, Pat framed the question as others had: “Why did we let the cameras in, and once in, why did we let them roll on, over our lives, apart and together, soaking up things that many people wouldn’t tell their lovers or tax accountants?”¹³³ But Pat didn’t actually think this decision required explanation, even if it had entailed “serv[ing] up great slices of ourselves—irretrievable slices.”¹³⁴ The thrall of a mediated life was all too clear.

Indeed, many were coming to the conclusion that what mattered to citizens was life on the public stage, one’s image only as it played out in full view. One media analyst explained, “The Louds were not disturbed by the nationwide publication of facts that are usually considered embarrassing (divorce, homosexuality). They were upset, rather, by the gracelessness and lack of style they exhibited on the screen.” The family’s reaction to the broadcast of their lives made evident that “it was not their privacy but their performance that had been abused.” Closely following their reviews and energetically disputing their portrayal, the Louds were first and foremost interested in managing their public personas. “In other words, they have conducted themselves as show business people,” was his scathing conclusion.¹³⁵

The problem of An American Family, in this view, was not that it had swept unsuspecting people into a world they didn’t understand, altering their private lives through the glare of publicity. It was that the Louds had in some way anticipated the performance. Pat commented that, when the family was approached about the series, “Bill, of course, was dying to do it.” (She later relayed that her husband “adored being filmed—he basked in it. He was the only one who ever asked to be filmed.”) She added, “The kids, of course, were desperate to do it” too.¹³⁶ In that repeated “of course” was the supposition that her audience would have felt the same. To the extent that Pat was correct, charges of the Louds’ exceptionalism were undermined. Craig Gilbert had told the New York Times that part of the selection process for the series entailed locating a family that “would put up with a major invasion of privacy.” But in fact, none of the several dozen prospective families he interviewed was unwilling to take part.¹³⁷ Was it possible that their ready embrace of the camera’s surveillance was the one feature that actually made the Louds—living on the West Coast; upper-middle-class owners of a swimming pool, four cars, and a horse; and who traveled widely—representative of American families?

The PBS series in this fashion raised questions that pressed far beyond the flaws of one particular family or the documentary form. It laid bare a shift, some critics sensed, in how Americans were imagining themselves. Central to this transformation were the mass media. The more closely one looked at the Louds, the more shaped by its codes and products they appeared to be. Wanting the family to be instantly recognizable from domestic dramas and TV commercials, the producer’s experiment in realism had from the beginning relied on fictional and televised models. For this reason it was apparently crucial to Craig Gilbert, despite all the transformations that were rewriting gender roles in the 1970s, that Pat be a housewife.¹³⁸ The title sequence for the finished series, framing each family member separately but simultaneously on screen, even bore a strong resemblance to those of contemporary hits like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family.¹³⁹

But Gilbert had not in any simple sense invaded the home with a mass-mediated sensibility. That sensibility—it was clear—had already moved in. The Louds, regularly portrayed on TV watching TV, were fully fluent in media references and keenly aware of the power of publicity. Pat referred to the powerful grip that cinema had on her as a young woman.¹⁴⁰ Lance easily analogized happenings in his home to the soap opera As the World Turns.¹⁴¹ One critic noted that the Louds thought it would be “fun” to be on TV: “They know they are attractive, and no fewer than three of the five children hope to be performers”—rock stars or even makers of documentary films.¹⁴² For the Louds, the in-home camera was less an intruder than a potential ticket to stardom.¹⁴³

The interpenetration of the family and the medium went still deeper, apparent in the way the Louds borrowed the very terms of the filmmakers to relate their experiences. Pat, for example, named the episode in which she revealed to her brother and sister-in-law her aim to separate from Bill (a conversation she was initially averse to having filmed) “her best scene.”¹⁴⁴ She also referred to herself and her eldest son as the “stars” of the show.¹⁴⁵ Kevin Loud complained on the Dick Cavett Show that he had only been given the opportunity to play “walk-on laugh parts.”¹⁴⁶ Pat even implied that she and Bill were “luckier than most people” in being able to do “our big number”—by which she meant their splitting up—“on nationwide TV.” Others’ marital spats, by contrast, were small-bore affairs, consisting of “tiny ineffectual little knocks within the privacy of their houses.”¹⁴⁷ Something about the fact that those “knocks” were registered only by the parties directly involved diminished them.

Comments like these could only heighten long-standing concerns about the force of mass media in Americans’ lives, and especially television’s improper inroads into sturdy families and selves. One critic observed that Pat Loud “talks as though she believed until recently that she was a producer of the film,” a member of the cast rather than the subject of the filming, with creative control over the product. This was, he thought, because “she was, after all, the producer of the live show on which it was based.”¹⁴⁸ If An American Family had invaded the family’s intimate home life, such critics suggested, the door had already been propped open by a thoroughly mass-mediated existence. Under such conditions, could the camera capture the private Louds? Had the family indeed ever lived a truly “private” existence?

The TV set and American family life had first intersected in the suburban living rooms of the postwar era, when it became clear that the new and overwhelmingly popular medium would largely be devoted to domestic drama.¹⁴⁹ A form of entertainment “whose imagery has always been fundamentally familial,” television both beamed out an invigorated domestic ideal and reorganized the households in which it came to play so prominent a part.¹⁵⁰ Already by the late 1940s, researchers had observed that the “electronic hearth” was profoundly shaping family members’ behaviors.¹⁵¹ The enormous success of An American Family sparked a new debate over television’s infiltration into not just homes but also psyches and imaginations. The documentary would serve as a platform for gauging the reach of the medium into U.S. citizens’ very subjectivities. By the 1970s, one scholar reported, television had become “more common to us than any race, creed, or political affiliation, electromagnetically living in 98.5 percent of American homes.” Watched, in average, an excess of six hours a day, television was “a constant resident in the American home” and “intimately ingrained in family life.” Characterizing the TV set as an “electronic invader,” this writer also personified it, unnervingly, as an increasingly compelling “friend” to the watcher. “Because it poses no physical threat as would an undesirable stranger, TV has all the time it wants to say and do whatever it wants.” He speculated that “its relationship role will become ever more critical for many.”¹⁵²

The blurred line between television-as-intruder and television-as-entertainer had been there all along, and it spoke to an ambivalence about being exposed on screen. Candid Camera, a program designed to “catch unsuspecting people in the act of being themselves,” first arrived on TV in 1948 and became a syndicated hit by 1960.¹⁵³ Its creator, Allan Funt, used secret recordings to entertain, making ordinary people “candid stars.” He dreamed in 1952 of photographing “the way a man spends his entire working day—every public minute of it,” so as to capture “a sunrise-to-sunset documentary of the life of an average man.”¹⁵⁴ Funt intended his camera to provoke awareness of the craftedness of self-image, the contrast between what people “feel about themselves on the inside and what they see of themselves on the outside.”¹⁵⁵ This is not far from what Craig Gilbert desired for his PBS series. In both cases, the idea was to make the “private” person less so: more accessible, tangible, and transparent to viewers and perhaps even to him- or herself. This ambition distinguished Candid Camera from its nineteenth-century counterpart, “instantaneous photography.” To capture individual personality on TV, candidly, was to reveal the real person, not the actor. The show’s popularity, though, arguably inspired greater self-consciousness about behavior in public, one’s every move potentially recorded for a viewing audience.¹⁵⁶

Sociologists like Erving Goffman and historians like Daniel Boorstin had tagged American society as a peculiarly dramaturgical or spectatorial one already by mid-century, the consequence of living in an “image society.”¹⁵⁷ An American Family supplied compelling evidence for that analysis. Early tidings of a new sort of media constellation could be found in the widespread interest occasioned by the Louds’ reactions to their own broadcasting: the criticisms that individual members of the family lobbed at An American Family as it aired, ranging from what they saw as sensationalistic press releases to the accumulated misrepresentations wrought by editing.¹⁵⁸ A critic at the New York Times complained that, at this point, “the content of ‘An American Family’ slowly began sinking into a mindless ooze about the making of ‘An American Family.’ ”¹⁵⁹ Media outlets, capitalizing on the series’ popularity, were happy to provide a platform. (The Louds, one reporter snidely observed, have been “highly available to the media.”)¹⁶⁰ The entire family’s appearance on ABC’s Dick Cavett Show in the middle of the program’s run was a kind of turning point.¹⁶¹ As it turned out, the documentary (or docudrama, as some labeled it) was just the opening act in the creation of celebrities from the stuff of ordinary lives, media “personalities” who became such simply by virtue of having the camera trained on them.

Even after the cameras had ceased rolling and the broadcast had come to its conclusion, it seemed, the Louds couldn’t stop performing—and the audience couldn’t stop watching. A second national broadcast in the summer of 1973, along with a spin-off of transcripts and fuzzy images from the series packaged as a Warner paperback, suggested that the family, in allowing their personal lives to be exposed, had claimed more than an ephemeral place in public consciousness.¹⁶² The Louds may have been disabused of their status as “co-producers” of the series. But it was becoming obvious that they would command the cameras after the fact.

On the Cavett show, Craig Gilbert was given a few minutes of airtime at the program’s outset, but then was “gently eased out of the picture.” After that, the Times reported, “the show belonged to the Louds.”¹⁶³ This was literally, but also metaphorically, the case. When, after the show’s taping, security guards offered to escort the Louds through the crowd of autograph seekers, Bill reportedly said “Hell no” and “marched out to meet his fans.” And “teen-aged girls stood in line to kiss Grant and Kevin, the rock musicians.”¹⁶⁴ For the Washington Post, the family’s talk-show appearance cemented that the Louds had been lifted “to celebrity status.”¹⁶⁵ Rumors swirled that Delilah and Grant had been invited to appear on The Dating Game, itself a new genre of televised reality, that Lance was writing his own account of the show for Newsweek, and that Bill had received an offer to host a game show.¹⁶⁶ As Pat noted, with not a little pride, Dick Cavett “got the highest ratings for that show he had ever gotten.”¹⁶⁷ The New York Times viewed this same fact as tragedy. Rather than the series being remembered for the important questions it had raised about “values, institutions, and consumerism,” its success would be marked by the Louds having “almost doubled” Cavett’s ratings. The way was cleared for the “massive publicity-entertainment mills” to “devour the Louds.”¹⁶⁸

Indeed, the family made a tour of the talk-show circuit—appearing on the shows of Mike Douglas, Jack Paar, Dinah Shore, and Phil Donahue, as Pat recalled—and had additional stints on radio, the BBC, and Dutch TV.¹⁶⁹ The Louds would grace the cover of Newsweek’s issue on the state of the family, trivial details about its members would be dissected in print, and the real-life drama of their disputes with the filmmakers would make headlines.¹⁷⁰ “If there is a superstar in the Loud family, Pat is it,” proclaimed one writer, citing a host of magazines profiling the “real” Mrs. Loud’s interests and routines.¹⁷¹ A single issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1973 included not one but two articles about the new celebrity: “Pat Loud Talks about Love, Marriage, Divorce—and Herself” and “A Beautiful Week for Pat Loud.” Lance Loud would find another sort of fame as television’s “first openly gay TV personality.”¹⁷² He became a bit player in Andy Warhol’s factory, writing for the artist’s magazine Interview—even penning a few installments of its “Invasion of Privacy” column—and headed a punk rock band called the Mumps.¹⁷³ Although Lance’s minutes of fame stretched longer than Warhol would have predicted, they derived first and foremost from his having appeared in the televised documentary.¹⁷⁴ His was a persona brought into being by the technology of publicity itself. The Louds, one critic proclaimed, had “achieved stardom of a kind only possible in America.”¹⁷⁵

What one newspaper billed as “The Loud Phenomenon” is common enough in the twenty-first century. The Louds’ peculiar celebrity, one critic wrote in 2002, was the “first instance of the hall-of-mirrors effect that has become so achingly familiar in the age of O. J. and Monica … in which folks who’ve been on TV programs about themselves then turn up on other TV shows and write books to defend or explain themselves, after which the whole process repeats till exhaustion.”¹⁷⁶ But in the mid-1970s, this sort of publicity feeding on itself struck contemporary commentators as novel. One reviewer remarked that writing about the Louds was like “reviewing a novel in which the characters spin on after the last page, popping up in the Daily News or on the Dick Cavett Show to demonstrate new attitudes, new characterizations and new hairstyles.”¹⁷⁷ Another critic mused that “a delightful only-in-America scenario presents itself: will the Louds eventually appear on TV to promote the book they’ll write about having been on TV?”¹⁷⁸ In fact, they would.¹⁷⁹ Yet another accused the Louds of turning their private lives into “spectacle.”¹⁸⁰

Commentators’ befuddlement about this state of affairs begged larger questions. How was it that people could become celebrities merely by baring their private lives on TV? What did it suggest about the hold of the medium and its faux reality, seemingly more compelling than the real thing? And what did it reveal about the status of privacy in American society? Queried about the experience of having her adolescence tracked by a film crew, Delilah Loud ticked off her grievances. But did she expect to “fade into obscurity” after the series’ end? She replied, “I hope not. I really hope not. I enjoy talking to people of the media.” Citing interviews with magazines like Vogue and the opportunity to meet celebrities, she continued, “I’ve really enjoyed the experience and I hope I can go on into it.”¹⁸¹ In her embrace of publicity with full awareness of the cost to her secrets, Delilah looked like the harbinger of a new culture.

Outing Privacy

In 1973, Lance Loud looked like something new under the sun too, jarring viewers’ sensibilities with his unconventional style of dress and behavior, even appearing in one scene wearing his sister’s makeup.¹⁸² As a television presence, Lance was novel enough that commentators had trouble finding the right words to describe him, some opting for the code of “lifestyle” and others awkwardly referring to him as “living in a homosexual scene.”¹⁸³ His family’s tolerance further baffled some. In an essay for the New York Times Magazine, novelist Anne Roiphe, whose Up the Sandbox! (1970) was a feminist sensation, condemned Lance’s “flamboyant, leechlike, homosexuality.”¹⁸⁴ Roiphe wrote that Pat, visiting her son in New York, was “confronted, brutally and without preparation, with the transvestite, perverse world of hustlers, drug addicts, pushers, etc., and watched her son prance through a society that can be barely comprehensible to a 45-year-old woman from Santa Barbara.”¹⁸⁵ She was astonished by the fact that Pat, although critical of her son for traveling to Washington, DC, to protest the suppression of the Pentagon Papers, “expressed no open horror at Lance’s homosexual friends or ways.”¹⁸⁶ Another writer for the Times opined that Pat’s unflinching visit to Lance could be judged admirable had it stood for acceptance. “But it doesn’t.” In twelve installments, “not once do they utter the word ‘homosexual.’ ” The Louds, she wrote, “simply refuse to acknowledge the reality. In the end the silence is shattering.”¹⁸⁷

Roiphe’s aversion and the Louds’ silence alike would be targets of the gay liberation movement that sprang, newly confident, from the Stonewall protests ignited by the routine policing of a New York gay bar in 1969. Shouting “out of the closets and into the streets!” activists gave voice to a new phase of the quest for civil rights, one built on “the potency, magnetism, and promise of gay self-disclosure.”¹⁸⁸ This milestone in the modern history of gay activism would be followed by others, including the removal in 1973 of homosexuality as a disorder in and of itself (although the disorder would remain in other forms) from psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.¹⁸⁹ But Lance played a role too, one critic later noting that “American television came out of the closet through An American Family,” and another singling out Lance’s appearance as “one of the defining images of the Gay Decade.”¹⁹⁰ Judging by his fan mail—letters thanking him “for being a voice of outrage in a bland fucking normal middle-class world”—Lance meant something different to gay youth than to the Times’s critics.¹⁹¹ He stood for “being yourself,” a new catchphrase of the era, and also for a changed assessment among gay Americans about the perils of keeping one’s sexual identity hidden.

The 1970s cracked open the vexed relationship between privacy and what Laud Humphreys and his dissertation committee would have called the “gay world.” Feminists had laid the critical groundwork, challenging dominant assumptions about privacy’s beneficence as a public value. In consciousness-raising groups and manifestos, they disrobed privacy’s politics, arguing that male prerogatives were maintained by sealing off the “private” sphere of family and home—and thus domestic violence, child abuse, and marital rape—from state intervention. As feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon would summarize, for women, “a right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift.”¹⁹²

Privacy would take on a new aspect for gay liberationists as well. Secrecy and discretion had long appeared the best protection for American men and women living outside the bounds of normative sexuality, who—if found out—risked their jobs, their families, and their physical security. The need for sanctuary from a hostile society would give rise by mid-century to the metaphor of the closet, an outward performance of heterosexuality that masked the truth within.¹⁹³ Correspondingly, the organized homophile movement of the 1950s, in the form of the Mattachine Society, had explicitly counseled a quiet respectability as the best path to securing civil rights.¹⁹⁴

But the call by gay liberation activists in the 1970s for public rights, including the right to freedom of sexual expression, challenged these counsels of discretion.¹⁹⁵ Gay organizations began to argue that, to the extent that homosexual behavior was tolerated only because it was contained behind closed doors—that is, “private”—it was rendered shameful to its participants and negated by the larger society.¹⁹⁶ To choose privacy was one thing, but to be coerced into it was quite another. Privacy and liberation, that is, seemed to be at loggerheads. As such arguments took hold, the closet would be figured more as prison than protector, preventing homosexual men and women from living free and authentic lives. “Coming out” was a disavowal of stigma. But it was equally a repudiation of a particular kind of privacy. And so, as historian Robert Self writes, even as gay men and lesbians demanded “the right not to have their lives policed, the right to be left alone,” many recognized that to obtain true privacy as gay men and lesbians, they had to make their sexuality public.¹⁹⁷

Countering critiques of his invasion of tearoom users’ privacy in the early 1970s, Laud Humphreys had demanded whether it was better for social researchers “not to know.” More swiftly than the sociologist could have anticipated, visibility would become the watchword of gay liberation.¹⁹⁸ Humphreys’s own career exemplified the shift. Four years after filing his dissertation and just two years after his first book appeared, he published Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation (1972). From into the tearooms to out of the closets, from a stance of secrecy and shame to one of liberation and pride, the sociologist’s scholarship pivoted with the times. His personal life did too. In a dramatic public confrontation with a fellow scholar of homosexuality at a session of the American Sociological Association in 1974, Humphreys “came out” for the first time as a gay man, his stunned wife sitting next to him in the audience.¹⁹⁹ The sociologist had made a career of concealment, disguising the reason for his presence in the tearooms, his study’s objectives, and his own appearance to the men he interviewed. His last and perhaps most successful deception—his public persona as a heterosexual man who “passed” as gay in the name of social inquiry—was thus uncovered. Or, rather, it was voluntarily abandoned.

Even as he watched men having sex in the tearooms and defended his decision to invade others’ privacy in the ensuing years, Humphreys had always carefully sheltered his own private self from public view. By 1974 that project was over, and not just for Humphreys. The following year, Time magazine devoted its cover to a photograph of Air Force sergeant Leonard Matlovich, who had, after boldly coming out to his superiors and with full knowledge of the consequences, been discharged from the military. The headline read simply, “I Am a Homosexual.” The magazine referred to recent “jolting” public announcements of homosexuality “by a variety of people who could be anybody’s neighbors—a Maryland teacher, a Texas minister, a Minnesota state senator, an Ohio professor, an Air Force sergeant.”²⁰⁰

Time recounted what was in fact for many a gradual and agonizing decision to unseal sexual secrets. In an article titled “Gays on the March,” it quoted an anonymous oil company executive: “Other minorities have everything to gain by demanding their rights,” he pondered, but “we have everything to lose.”²⁰¹ It also offered the story of Dr. Howard Brown, a former New York City health commissioner, who had been urged by gay activists to reveal his homosexuality. “At one point before he did so, all Brown could think of was ‘What will my secretary say?’ ” As Time had it, what ultimately compelled the doctor to come out was his belief that doing so would advance collective rights.²⁰² It would “help free the generation that comes after us from the dreadful agony of secrecy, the constant need to hide.”²⁰³ Others, of course, sought to preserve the secret of their sexuality from the straight world. The same year that Time placed homosexuality on its cover, an ex-marine, Oliver Sipple, thwarted an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford. He also launched an invasion of privacy suit against the San Francisco Chronicle, which had implied in its coverage of his heroics—based on the former marine’s frequenting of the city’s gay bars and community events—that Sipple was homosexual. Sipple had been “out” to friends, but closeted to his family in Detroit. In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, reporters besieged him, his mother disowned him, and he began a decline into alcoholism and early death.²⁰⁴

Assumptions about the benefits of sexual secrecy and the harms of disclosure were not lightly shed. But they were undergoing rapid revision. The changing reputation across the 1980s and 1990s of Laud Humphreys—billed in the 1970s as a violator of “deviant” men’s privacy—is instructive. Although his professional star dimmed after Tearoom Trade, the sociologist continued on the faculty at Pitzer College, becoming an expert on violence against gays in the 1980s and, eventually, a part-time psychotherapist in Los Angeles. His work on gay liberation, criticized for its “tendentiousness and partisanship,” was less celebrated than had been his first book.²⁰⁵ A small corps of scholars of homosexuality acknowledged, however, that Humphreys had helped make research on the “growing gay movement,” not to mention “sexuality in general,” legitimate. If in the decades to come Tearoom Trade was still invoked by sociology textbooks primarily as an object lesson in unethical research, the nascent field of queer studies would come to recognize it as a pioneering work. In 1991, a group of scholars commented that the “research and the risks” that Humphreys had undertaken “opened the way to almost all sociological research on gay topics that followed.”²⁰⁶ Many would come to agree that the “importance of Tearoom Trade to the early years of gay studies” was clear, its conclusions revisited, confirmed, and warmly praised.²⁰⁷

Indeed, Tearoom Trade found in the 1990s a much more comfortable landing, as scholars once again took up the question of sex in public places. For the young field of gay and lesbian studies, the 1970 study’s flaws were outstripped by its daring efforts to “look” and understand. Humphreys appeared prescient in his questions as to what was truly private about sex and truly public about public space, which were really questions about the ongoing state regulation of sexuality.²⁰⁸ Moreover, the privacy protections in the form of ethics codes, institutional review boards, and federal regulations that would now halt a study like Humphreys’s were greeted with new skepticism from scholars of homosexuality. For many, especially in the age of AIDS, the need for social knowledge about gay practices outweighed the need for stringent research regulations. Some stressed the “limitations of such constraints” and devised “alternative proposals for ethical compliance.” Introducing a collection of essays on public sex that paid elaborate homage to Humphreys, the anthropologist William Leap argued that “discussions of ethics, while certainly important, should not become impediments to effective inquiry.” This extended to not waiting to obtain “informed consent agreements from all participants” when investigating men participating in public sex, if doing so “would irreparably disrupt the situated intimacy which we are attempting to describe.”²⁰⁹

As visibility became central to gay politics, invasions of privacy could appear less urgent than the work of recognition and representation. Indeed, many were beginning to question the privileging of privacy rights, the path that had been carved by Griswold and Roe.²¹⁰ In some activists’ hands, “privacy” was being conceived as a barrier to progress rather than a coveted entitlement. If the state had the power to enforce normative sexuality and determine whose private behavior was protected from interference and whose was not, as in Griswold, did a “right to privacy” signal freedom—or oppression?²¹¹

Gay men and lesbians had desired sexual privacy as much as anyone in postwar America. But by the 1980s, they had had enough of it. Or perhaps privacy was simply shape-shifting, coming to rest on a new foundation. If so, it was first evident in the changing tactics of gay activists. One sociologist observes that the distinctive feature of the social movements of the later 1960s and 1970s was the way the “issue of civil rights was tangled with the issue of cultural rights … the right of persons to a measure of social space and a degree of social tolerance, even acceptance, of differences.”²¹² Like feminists and black power activists, gay liberationists contended that full citizenship hinged not simply on being admitted to but also being seen in the public sphere.²¹³ Eventually (and often pejoratively) labeled “identity politics,” this kind of agitation took seriously how, when, and where gay—or black, Latino, or female—Americans appeared in policy decisions as well as news coverage, the professions as well as popular culture. One gay activist noted in 1982, for instance, that “it is primarily our public existence, and not our right to privacy, which is under assault.”²¹⁴ Trumpeting the values of community, collective identity, and publicity, some liberationists came even to believe that “limiting the goals of the gay movement to the right to privacy” amounted to “sexual counterrevolution.”²¹⁵

Two developments on the national stage in the mid-1980s propelled the strategy of disclosure to the forefront of gay activism. One was a case that came before the Supreme Court in 1986, Bowers v. Hardwick, which concerned the right of the state of Georgia to regulate sodomy. In what looked like a stark reversal of trends in privacy jurisprudence since Griswold, the Court ruled that the right to privacy did not extend to homosexuals because their sexual behavior had “no connection” to “family, marriage or procreation.”²¹⁶ Privacy rights were not faring well on the Right by the 1980s.²¹⁷ Even despite this, the outcome in Bowers might have been predicted, following as it did the heteronormative and procreative logic of Griswold. It would not finally be reversed until 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas. Yet, as historian Marc Stein has shown, popular readings of the Court’s privacy jurisprudence were significantly more progressive than the Court intended.²¹⁸ This made Bowers a crushing blow for gay activists.

When the Court flatly declared that privacy rights did not apply to homosexual Americans, those rights began to look like just another form of discrimination. As had been revealed already in the 1960s in the context of “midnight raids” and public restroom patrols, a right to privacy that looked universal on its face served in reality to prop up dominant sexual norms. As one commentator put it, “All the senses of sexual privacy that are relevant to gays—the status of not being spied on, the integrity of the body, the importance of personally affecting values, and the need for sanctuary” were violated by the Court in Bowers.²¹⁹ Literary scholar Deborah Nelson observes that the ruling posed “excruciating questions about self-representation, identity, public discourse, and political action.” In her analysis, the solution to the crisis was found “not in a reconceptualization of privacy but in the formation of queer publics.” This was because sexual autonomy could only come in a “transformed public space.”²²⁰ It was more proof that, paradoxical as it might seem, public visibility was the key to sexual privacy and thus full citizenship.

If Bowers was an important factor in demoting privacy rights among gay activists, the AIDS crisis was crucial. Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which first appeared in the early 1980s tagged as a “gay disease” and sometimes as the “Gay Plague,” was virtually—and many concluded, scandalously—ignored by Ronald Reagan’s conservative administration.²²¹ As it became clear that the speed with which the epidemic traveled and the number of lives it claimed would not be joined by a proportionate federal response, activists mobilized to make AIDS awareness unavoidable. As in the case of breast cancer—with advocates adopting the slogan “Don’t Die of Embarrassment”—publicity became central to the attack on foot-dragging around the epidemic.²²² It meant that HIV infection was treated simultaneously as one of the most private of facts about oneself and a status desperately in need of visibility.

A series of organizations in the 1980s and 1990s—the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD) in 1985, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987, and Queer Nation in 1990, among others—placed the gay and lesbian presence in the U.S. public sphere at the top of their agendas.²²³ “Die-ins,” “kiss-ins,” and “Queer Nights Out” in public venues were just a few of the collective tactics activists employed in an effort to remake public culture as well as attract attention—political, scientific, and medical—to the crisis.²²⁴ The demand for cultural representation did not banish privacy as a political goal: privacy and gay rights activists fought to keep HIV-infected people’s names out of public health registries for fear of “coercive, even draconian control measures” that might further stigmatize.²²⁵ But slogans like “We Are Everywhere” and “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” would reshape privacy’s meaning for gay politics. Stated the director of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights in 1991, “I believe we are in the long run fighting less for the right to privacy than for the right not to have to be private.”²²⁶

ACT UP’s slogan, “Silence = Death,” telegraphed the stunning inversion of the mid-century homophile stance.²²⁷ The equation suggested that “language, discourse, public manifestations, and the production of identity are necessary weapons of defense in a contemporary strategy of gay survival.”²²⁸ This was, after all, an era when AIDS victims’ families attempted to hide the diagnosis even after death, and obituaries did not name the disease, “famous bachelors preferr[ing] to die of other causes.”²²⁹ The silence and discretion that had once offered protection were now judged fatal to individuals, as well as to the larger gay cause. Hiding one’s sexual identity had in some corners of the gay liberation movement become “a kind of violence in itself.”²³⁰

In this new context, disclosure and exposure were seized on as critical political tools. AIDS “taught two lessons,” writes communications scholar Larry Gross. “First, a disease that strikes gay people (and people of color, and drug users, and poor people) will not receive adequate attention. Second, people will begin to pay attention when famous and important people are involved—even if they are revealed to be gay.”²³¹ The second of these lessons, concerning publicity, carried implications beyond the epidemic. Gay Americans had in increasing numbers since the 1970s voluntarily called attention to their presence in the society by coming out of the closet. By the 1990s, propelled by the AIDS crisis, as well as by setbacks in gay civil rights, a small group of activists saw the “next logical step” as forcing others’ hands, particularly those of prominent politicians and celebrities unwilling to publicly acknowledge their homosexuality.²³²

“Outing,” the term first coined by Time magazine, was intended as a “condemnation of passing” and a demand for “public affirmations of gay identity.”²³³ The man who took credit as “outing’s pioneer” in the early 1990s, the activist and journalist Michelangelo Signorile, argued that “truthful discussion of the lives of homosexual public figures” was crucial to the project of emboldening “gay people who stay in the closet out of fear and shame.”²³⁴ The lesbian and gay weekly newsmagazine, OutWeek, led the way by reporting the story of Malcolm Forbes’s many homosexual liaisons soon after the publishing magnate’s death in 1990.²³⁵ A rush of similar “open secrets” were committed to print. Gossip columnist Liz Smith, actress Jodie Foster, Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Williams, and a string of congressional Republicans became targets of the campaign.²³⁶ These and other “outings” of closeted politicians and celebrities pressed the point that gay Americans could be found in all walks of life.

To its detractors, including the writer of a New York Post article under the headline “Magazine Drags Gays out of the Closet,” outing was an outrageous and unethical invasion of privacy—a kind of sexual McCarthyism.²³⁷ Although Signorile acknowledged the practice to be divisive, he insisted on treating a secretive, fearful recourse to privacy as a form of harm. “May the individual privacy of sexual orientation be infringed upon when the exercise of privacy in this area clearly damages a larger group?” he asked.²³⁸ Far from invading gay citizens’ privacy, he and others argued, outing was critical to advancing their dignity and civil rights. Outing attacked the urge to “speak in codes and treat homosexuality as some scandalous secret, the name of which we can’t invoke.”²³⁹ The debate it sparked raised the question of whether sexual identity (unlike sexual behavior, as its advocates were at pains to explain) was or should be considered “private information” when the seemingly analogous categories of race and ethnicity were not.

Never a mainstream practice, outing created deep fissures within the gay community.²⁴⁰ The controversy nevertheless revealed how much assumptions about sexual privacy had shifted since mid-century. The “power of exposure” had typically been a weapon wielded against homosexuals. It deprived World War II veterans charged with homosexuality of GI benefits, and it drove gay men and women out of government service in the McCarthy era, most obviously.²⁴¹ But it also worked to police their conduct in every other sphere. As Signorile put it, “For years the media had no problem reporting the names of closeted gay private citizens who had been arrested in dubious public-restroom sting operations or wrongly accused of child molestation.” These were private rather than public figures who were “wrenched from the closet for all the wrong reasons” and found their lives destroyed. The personal damage that came of exposure had made Laud Humphreys vigilant in protecting the names of men he observed in the tearooms. Now that same act could empower gay activists. None other than Lance Loud, writing for the gay news magazine The Advocate, would report on Queer Nation’s plans to disrupt Hollywood’s Academy Awards ceremony in 1992. Protesting the industry’s simultaneous marginalization and demonization of gay people in its products, activists threatened to “out” sixty movie stars. The tables had been turned on exposure. “Revealing who is homosexual,” crowed Signorile, “would now advance the lesbian and gay movement.”²⁴²

Advocates of outing named their real target as a homophobic media that, although in all other respects by the 1990s fed on gossip about famous people’s private affairs, maintained a “conspiracy of silence and deception about the real lives of lesbian and gay celebrities.” “Somehow,” wrote Signorile, “to publicize heterosexual liaisons was right—it was considered ‘reportage’—while to cover homosexuality was to invade people’s privacy.”²⁴³ That the highly intrusive media were complicit in this secret keeping exemplified the second-class status of sexual minorities. As in other political arenas, publicly exposing collective secrets was intended to unmask hypocrisy, in this case the “tacit agreement by which gay private lives were granted an exemption from the public’s ‘right to know.’ ”²⁴⁴ If reporters were willing to write about the sex lives of straight public figures—“from Gary Hart and Donald Trump to Liz Taylor and Warren Beatty”—they were duty bound to write about the sex lives of homosexual ones too. To act otherwise furthered the stigmatization of gay people. In essence, outing’s advocates demanded equal opportunity for privacy invasions. Only in an age in which publicity had gained such esteem, secrets had incurred so much suspicion, and cultural visibility had moved to the center of gay politics could such an argument stand.

A robust critique of surveillance took root in 1970s America. But secrets and hidden lives—of public figures, of families, and of sexual identity—also came under increasing scrutiny as the century wore on. Calls for the vetting of politicians’ private lives and the announcing of one’s authentic sexual self alike spoke to this new cultural mode. The government would be held to a new standard of transparency, but so too would its citizens. In the process, the variable functioning of privacy in American life and its associations with power came to light. “How can being gay be private when being straight isn’t?” demanded Signorile.²⁴⁵ No longer could privacy—or privacy rights—be an unquestioned social good, assumed to play a benign role in all citizens’ lives and prospects. As with so many other goods in U.S. society, this one was inequitably distributed and unevenly claimed. The politics of privacy had been outed.

If a culture of exposure had arrived in the United States by the century’s close, there seemed no better proof than the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal of the late 1990s, during which a sitting president was impeached on the grounds of lying about an improper sexual relationship with a 24-year-old intern in the White House.²⁴⁶ It was a long way from Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview. But the spectacle played out as the logical culmination of a society that mandated the public vetting of private affairs, in both meanings of the phrase. The scandal was propelled by now-familiar set pieces: a highly invasive media complex; the outing of (hetero)sexual secrets; and the extraction of embarrassing personal details, this time from the most powerful man in the nation.²⁴⁷

The road had been paved earlier in the decade, on the same 60 Minutes program that had gotten Betty Ford into hot water in 1975. On that program, presidential candidate Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, along with his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, discussed allegations of his adultery before a television audience.²⁴⁸ Clinton, in 1992, admitted to “causing pain in my marriage.” But he also lodged a protest: “I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more than candid. And I think what the press has to decide is, are we going to engage in a game of gotcha?”²⁴⁹ Hillary Clinton added, “There isn’t a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting on this couch detailing everything that ever went on in their life or their marriage. And I think it’s real dangerous in this country if we don’t have some zone of privacy for everybody.”²⁵⁰ That same season, charged sexual claims would enter even into the business of the Supreme Court, roiling the nomination proceedings for Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee, Anita Hill.

Six years later, new Clinton allegations surfaced, from Lewinsky and others, leading not only to a sexual harassment suit but also impeachment hearings. The spectacle, not surprisingly, attracted unremitting attention. By one account, nearly 50 percent of the news stories aired on major networks in the early months of 1998 concerned Clinton and some aspect of the Lewinsky scandal.²⁵¹ Journalist Jim Lehrer would pronounce the trial that ensued that May “tabloid Nirvana.”²⁵² Attracting almost as much coverage was the inquiry provoked by the scandal, the infamously extensive Starr Report, meticulously compiled by independent investigator Kenneth W. Starr. Left-leaning critics did not mince words in describing the report. Investigative journalist Renata Adler billed it “an utterly preposterous document,” “a voluminous work of demented pornography,” and “prurient gossip raised, for the first time, to the level of constitutional crisis.”²⁵³ Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books wrote in disbelief about an “attempt to take down the government” that was “based in its entirety on ten occasions of back-seat intimacy as detailed by an eager but unstable participant who appears to have memorialized the events on her hard drive.”²⁵⁴ Citizens may have been inured to the swirl of intimate matters in the public sphere, but not to this use of them.

If one could see past the thicket of salacious details, the key questions raised by the scandal turned on the meaning of “public” affairs, “private” behavior, and the proper relation between them. Conservatives like William Bennett berated President Clinton for the “seamless web of deceit” connecting his “private and public life,” positing this link as the rationale for removing him from office. In doing so, they revealed their embrace of a thoroughly personalized politics. Liberals took aim instead at the conditions of Clinton’s exposure, citing society’s failure to clearly demarcate the difference between public and private issues.²⁵⁵ The president may have crossed a line, they argued, but so had his inquisitors. Yet these positions were flexible, as Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation earlier in the decade—and the role reversal of partisan critics—had made painfully obvious.²⁵⁶ What mattered was that private life had become a newly volatile, and seemingly permanent, ingredient in national politics.

Critical commentary about the Starr Report was not unlike that concerning the tell-all memoirs and talk shows that had become fixtures of late twentieth-century popular culture. U.S. News and World Report called the Starr Report “breathtaking” in its revelations, which included graphic accounts of blow jobs, masturbation, and phone sex; the New York Times noted that there was “no end” to the detail; the Wall Street Journal charged Starr with “stepping over the line” by including material that was “gratuitous and embarrassing to the president”; and USA Today simply asked of the investigator, “Have you no decency, sir?”²⁵⁷ Others implied voyeurism in the report’s “own limitless preoccupation with sexual material” and the press’s doggedness in reporting it.²⁵⁸ Noting that the FBI in the 1960s had secretly recorded and circulated the sexual transgressions of Martin Luther King Jr. in an attempt to discredit him, Renata Adler pointed out that public officials and the media in that instance had refused to circulate those reports. The difference in the 1990s with respect to such materials was that “the press welcomes, broadcasts, and dwells upon them; the House rushes to publish them, with the congressional imprimatur.”²⁵⁹ This was transparency—“the right to know”—with a vengeance.

The president himself was subject to conflicting interpretations. Some applauded his effort to preserve some privacy for himself and his office by admitting to inappropriate behavior while also calling the investigation—and especially the level of disclosure it sought—unseemly. “Even presidents have a private life” he maintained. “It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”²⁶⁰ Pointing to his high poll numbers throughout the episode, supporters asserted that Clinton’s claim to privacy resonated with citizens: that most Americans saw his affair as a private matter, not a public one.²⁶¹ Even as the media called for fuller confession and contrition, writes one scholar, “the public in general gave the impression that it had heard enough and wanted no more.”²⁶² Others, however, found the president not forthcoming enough, his legalistic arguments unsatisfying to a populace accustomed to more lavish tales of sin and redemption.²⁶³

In the 1970s and beyond, a host of old proprieties slipped away as private material, not least sexual and familial relations, moved out into the open. Citizens worried about control over their personal financial, medical, and identifying data. They sought to limit their legibility to authorities. But they simultaneously released the floodgates on what could and even should be revealed in public life. Transparency’s newfound cultural and commercial value—evident in second-wave feminism as well as documentary filmmaking, lawmakers’ financial disclosures as well as gay liberationists’ tactics—ushered legitimate forms of surveillance into election campaigns, popular entertainment, and social movements. The undoing of secrets would become the very substance of politics and self-making alike. In an era of new privacy rights, it turned out, many things would become less private, and more citizens would be watching.