aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, November 25, 2006

Pop the question. And report the answer.

Early in October I wrote a post that I thought framed Outing in an original way.

In it I explained that to accept that being called ‘gay’ is defamatory necessarily carries with it the assumption that there is some legally definable harm that comes as a consequence of being gay. Either our society has a ”straight-person’s privilege” protected by the courts or you cannot be defamed by being called gay.

Further, I argued, there is a ”straight person assumption” that carries with it that illegitimate “straight-person’s privilege.” That, too, should be eliminated in a just society. And with it the notion that ”outing” is a violation of privacy.

Pleased with my post, I sent it to a couple of my more conservative blogger buddies and waited for their impressed reply. You might guess that I waited in vain. They replied alright but were far less impressed than I might have hoped. The email dialog and posted responses left everyone more or less affirmed in their same previously held position.

Ha! I thought. Look at them! Mired in their unchanged position! Not budged a bit by my brilliant reasoning! Unwilling to consider different points of view! Closed to new ideas! Too smart for my own good, it did finally occur to me that my position had remained every bit as unchanged as theirs. So I sat and simmered; nary a post through what has been a banner season of outing chatter.

Until today. Using as occasion the SoVo piece reporting objections to CNN’s scrubbing (both transcript and video) of Bill Maher’s outing of Ken Mehlman on Larry King, I proclaim the latest iteration of my position on outing: Ask the question; report the answer.

I realize this is no revolution in my thinking; I’ve only budged a bit. But it is genuine ongoing considered and thoughtful evolution. The position is not original to me, it comes from Chris Craine:

Homosexuality has gone from the love that dare not speak its name, to the sex that dare not be asked about. It’s telling that a reporter who wouldn’t hesitate to ask a straight celebrity about who he’s dating would consider asking the same question to a closeted celebrity as prying into his sex life.

In reality, asking a female celeb if she has a girlfriend is no more and no less intruding into her bedroom than asking if she has a boyfriend. And simply asking “the question” and reporting the answer is not the equivalent of “outing,” as many in the mainstream press seem to believe.

Outing involves reporting that someone is gay despite their refusal to answer the question or their insistence that they are straight. It’s understandably controversial, and involves weighing the supposed hypocrisy of the closeted public figure against how private the evidence is of the person’s homosexuality.

It’s not outing to merely ask the question and report the answer. It’s what journalists do every day. And in those answers, the public can draw its own conclusions.

My position is further informed by my viewing of the excellent Frontline documentary, A Hidden Life. A couple pent up posts from my transition period follow…

Salon on the glass closet double standard:

As the AP’s Gazslay explains...it’s hard to have any kind of blanket policy about outing, even when you think you do. “It’s difficult to have a policy per se because of all the variables that go into decisions about when it’s relevant.” She falls back on relevance, which she tries to determine on a case-by-case basis.

But many gay activists, scholars and journalists think the mainstream media has a double standard when it comes to relevance. Most reporters don’t think twice about referring to someone’s heterosexuality. “The mainstream media, they do this thing where they cover gay stories ... and then dance around the whole subject of sexual orientation,” marvels Kevin Naff, the current editor of the Blade. “But the fact of someone’s sexual orientation alone is not a private thing ... Straight people wear wedding rings to advertise that they are married, they have kids. They don’t hide the fact that they’re straight.”

Gross and others believe that the media has a tendency to make private for gays what they would not for straights. “It is both derived from and supporting a stigma, which is that some things are just too private to talk about, or inappropriate in a family newspaper,” Gross says. “You can talk about certain things about heterosexual public figures where in the context of gay public figures you can’t talk about much milder things ... I think the exaggerated concern over that reveals the distaste, the stigma and all that rather than the fact that this is such a delicate matter.”

This one was to have been titled, “Thuggery and ghastly mudslinging.”

The good Captain Ed gets it wrong right off, calling an “orientation” a “preference” before moving on to more telling locutions in his The Left Hates Gays post taking to task Mike Roger’s for outing Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) for his alleged indulgence in the bathrooms of Union Station:

People wonder why we don’t attract a wider range of qualified candidates for public office. Michael Rogers sets himself up as Exhibit #1. The personal and degrading attacks convince many people to skip the trouble, and the people who do dare to run for office usually wind up experiencing the ruination of their reputations in one form or other. It comes from all sides to some degree, but this ghastly mudslinging really marks a new low.

These kind of slimy allegations have no way to be proven or disproven…

Hm. Leaving aside the notion that the values-voting Right finds one “qualified” for public office only so long as they stay in the closet, Ed implicitly assumes that to be out leads to ruination, when to be in the closet is what leads to said slimy activity. He ends his post by warning that “if he’s a libeler, he better get himself a damned good lawyer.”

I haven’t heard of a suit; and Rogers has moved on to poor Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.