Public Good--or Private Matters? : Advocates of ‘outing’ gay celebrities and powerbrokers say the process is just a part of gaining equality. But critics say it’s crossing the line between gossip and news.

It seemed as if it only took six weeks. On Jan. 30, Advertising Age was the first to flat out declare what everyone in the New York media world had been whispering about for months: Married Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner had done the unmentionable--he’d acquired a male companion.

By the time six weeks had passed, the mainstream press had gone full tilt into action, rippling out waves of reportage now that another publication had named names. Accounts of Wenner’s personal and business entanglements cropped up in the hallowed Wall Street Journal and in New York magazine, and major mainstream publications such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times repeated the news in pieces on the media hoo-hah.

“Everyone wants to be first to be second,” says Michelangelo Signorile, author of “Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power” and one of the leading advocates of “outing.”

But the seeds of Wenner’s unwilling arrival into the glare of public scrutiny go back further than that, if you accept the timeline offered by San Francisco Chronicle columnist and outing pioneer Armistead Maupin. He says the clock began ticking for Wenner 10 years ago, when Maupin outed Rock Hudson via an interview with San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts.

“When I came out of the closet (in 1973), I came to the revolutionary conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being gay and that included everyone else as well,” Maupin says. “It became clear to me that the only way to lift the onus was being as matter of fact about it as I possibly could. I’ve never accused anyone of being gay because I don’t think it’s worthy of an accusation.”

A decade ago, Maupin was widely castigated for his views. But now his argument in support of outing is gaining ground in the gay community, and it’s helping to prod the heretofore reluctant mainstream in the same direction. When such an unlikely publication as the Wall Street Journal joins the vanguard of reporting on a public figure’s personal life, the line guarding one’s privacy has shifted one step further.

And debate is raging among gay and mainstream journalists over whether that step is forward or backward.

Outing proponent Signorile acknowledges the gossip allure of outing Wenner in the press, but he argues that it’s a necessary evil on the way to equality. Being gay “has moved from being unspeakably scandalous to being acceptably scandalous,” he says. “Before you can become a mundane fact of life, you have to go through that phase. And I think what happened was the message that I and others were saying finally sunk in, and that was, ‘If you’re going to treat us equally, one way has to be in the way that public figures’ homosexuality is treated.’ Most people would say that sounds reasonable, but five years ago, that was completely and utterly unacceptable.”

But some gay journalists and activists argue that such gains are being made on the backs of unwilling subjects in a world that still discriminates against homosexuals.

Richard Goldstein, executive editor of the Village Voice, wrote a March 14 column lambasting Wenner’s treatment: “Outing Wenner may seem like progress, but it’s actually another sign that we are living in nasty times.”

“I think his homosexuality was much of what made the story news,” Goldstein says in an interview. “If you argue that it’s an equal standard, if he were going out with a nubile female model, it would have been a one-day story on the gossip pages, and it would have died on the vine. Instead, it blossomed, not because his company was being split up, but because there was a homosexual angle to the story.”

The Wall Street Journal justified its outing decision on the grounds that the potential breakup of Wenner’s marriage could affect the lucrative Wenner Media Inc., which includes Us magazine and Men’s Journal as well as Rolling Stone. A divorce could mean a split in the empire Wenner owns with his wife, Jane.

“The operative thing was, this was relevant,” says Wall Street Journal spokesman Roger May.

But some journalists question whether the details behind the breakup were needed to understand the potential impact on Wenner Media.

“That’s the subliminal message, that there’s some connection between his homosexuality and his story, where in reality there’s none,” says Jeff Yarbrough, editor in chief of the Advocate, a national gay issues magazine. “He could have left his wife for a sheep, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

Wenner has consistently declined to comment on the outing, and a Wenner Media representative said that he would not discuss it for this story. Wenner’s discretion has earned him applause among some gay journalists.

“Jann Wenner handled it beautifully, because he remained so incredibly silent,” Yarbrough says. “Selfishly for me being gay, it made him seem less concerned than it would have to come out with blazing guns legally, which would perpetuate the stereotype that gayness is something dirty that shouldn’t be talked about.”

But some media observers say the Wenner story may exact a toll. They bemoan its implications for the state of journalism, which is inching further and further behind the closed closet and bedroom doors of public figures, gay and straight. For them, the issue is not about a gain in equality, but a loss of privacy.

“I don’t think (outing Wenner was) based on any kind of highly thought-out journalistic or ethical position,” says Bryce Nelson, director of graduate studies at the USC School of Journalism. “I think it’s very questionable, the media getting into a lot of private matters that don’t affect public performance, whether among corporate presidents or politicians, whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual activity.

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“If it’s relevant to do articles on the sexual and marital life of the head of Rolling Stone, why not do them on all media organizations--the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post? They’re more important than Rolling Stone. It’s all titillation. If the media is going in this direction, there’s no legitimate way to stop it.”

Representatives for most mainstream newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, say their policy is to report on a public figure’s sexual orientation only if it’s relevant to the story, and such decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

The New York Times did not report on Wenner’s outing. New York Times spokeswoman Nancy Neilsen said in a statement: “It’s not the newspaper’s role to reveal private aspects of a person’s life unless it’s relevant to the story or if the person wishes the sexual information to be released.” But she didn’t return phone calls to explain why the New York Times did not consider it relevant in Wenner’s case.

For the Los Angeles Times, “the question is one of intent,” says Editor Shelby Coffey III. “Looking at people’s private lives purely for either prurient reasons or in ways that are not affecting matters of public interest or the public lives of officials certainly raises questions.

“If you say we’re not going to look at these particular issues even though they have wide currency and are in the general discussion, you run the opposite risk of being an ostrich. Striking that balance is not necessarily a perfect art, but it’s part of what reporters and editors have to do.”

After Hudson, flamboyant publisher Malcolm Forbes became the next big public figure to be outed in the mainstream press, albeit posthumously. A month after Forbes’ death in February, 1990, outing advocate Signorile jump-started the media blitz over his personal life in a cover story for the now-defunct magazine Outweek, “The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes.”

Although Forbes’ sexuality and the controversy surrounding it were eventually reported by such established news outlets as USA Today, People magazine and the the Los Angeles Times, Signorile was vilified by the media, mainstream and gay. New York Newsday branded him “truly frightening and offensive.” The New York Post likened him to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Gay writer Gary Indiana accused him of being a psychopath.

But even then, there was one acid test for outing that many gays found they could support. Those applying it include the Advocate, which outs “only people who fit a strict code--somebody who was actively harming people in the gay community through actions and living a homosexual lifestyle covertly or privately,” Yarbrough says.

One person who met the Advocate’s code was a senior Pentagon official whom Signorile outed in the magazine in 1991. The pro-outing forces argued that it was hypocritical to leave him in the closet in light of the military ban on gays.

But some have countered that outing only people who meet the code enforces the notion that there’s something wrong with being gay. Gabriello Rotello, a gay columnist for New York Newsday and former editor of Outweek, calls it “vindictive outing--when you discover a conservative politician voting the wrong way is gay, you set out to expose his hypocrisy and embarrass him. I always argued against that because it seemed to me that by doing that as an activist thing, you were using homosexuality as a weapon to get somebody in much the same way the right wing used homosexuality as a weapon--blackmail, etc.--against people they didn’t like for years.”

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The Pentagon official was not named by many mainstream news outlets; editors debated the relevance of his orientation. But some observers see another reason beyond a consensus on relevance for so many in the press jumping on the Wenner bandwagon four years later.

“Some of those involved would undoubtedly deny it, but Jann Wenner was a celebrity in the way this Pentagon official was not,” says Howard Kurtz, Washington Post media writer. “He’s a household name, and he’s identified with the hot news magazine of the ‘80s. The temptation to lift the veil on his personal life is so much greater than it is in the case of someone who occupies an important position but is not a household name.

“There’s just more of a pack mentality in media these days where high-minded news organizations are much more willing to follow their low-rent cousins into reporting sleazy or sensational stories. And that’s obviously true not just about stories about homosexuals. The main thing is the Gennifer Flowers syndrome--once a salacious story is out, we can’t keep it from our readers and viewers anymore.”

But some outing proponents see the Wenner story as symptomatic of positive changes in the culture, namely a growing acceptance of homosexuality.

“I think activism directly and indirectly created it,” Signorile says. “ACT UP and Queer Nation generally put a face to AIDS and gay issues in general and had a ripple effect throughout our society and culture. So many people came out of the closet--gay journalists and celebrities. Previously, even the most liberal editors deep down thought saying someone was gay was the most horrible thing imaginable.

“Thirty years ago, it might have been the most horrible thing to say a celebrity was having a baby out of wedlock. Homosexuality is reaching the point where no matter what you think about it, it’s not the most horrible thing to report. It won’t ruin someone forever.”

These days, outing seems to be picking up steam. This month alone, an Advocate cover featured two Oscar nominees whose sexual orientation has sparked rumors. Spy magazine ran a story alleging the existence of a “gay Mafia” of Hollywood powerbrokers.

And model Rachel Williams may have become the first celebrity to be “inned.” The New York Post reported that she’d left her girlfriend, British pop singer Alice Temple, to return to her ex-boyfriend, Manhattan restaurateur Eric Goode, and that she was pregnant with his child. Williams’ manager reportedly denied that his client’s lesbian relationship was over.

“Diligent culture observers who had only just learned how to use the phrase lesbian super-model were now confronted with another oxymoron to reclassify-- closet straight --and with it the concept of reverse outing,” Ariel Kaminer wrote in New York magazine.

Irony aside, one of the biggest proponents of outing hopes for the day when such reports no longer make news.

Says Maupin: “I went through a lot of pain during the Rock Hudson episode, because I felt completely misunderstood. What I hated most of all was the notion that I’d been engaging in sleaze by discussing in a calm manner someone’s homosexuality. That term is still used today in reference to outing-- sleaze-- once again suggesting that the discussion of homosexuality is sleazy but heterosexual affairs are romantic.

“And I’ve gradually watched the world changing around me. I hope I live long enough to see the whole thing become a non-issue. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could just celebrate whoever anyone chooses to love in this world?”