A brouhaha is brewing over the fact that such liberal bastions
as the New York Times, the L.A. Times and Washington Post failed to
mention that recently departed author and "public intellectual"
Susan Sontag had lived for many years in a lesbian relationship
with photographer Annie Leibovitz that was not, shall we say, kept
secret. According
to an item in the N.Y. Daily News:
Don't look for gay ladies in the Gray Lady. The New York Times paid tribute to the late Susan Sontag yesterday with a beautifully written obituary, plus a moving tribute by Charles McGrath, totaling almost 4,000 words. But apparently that wasn't enough space to mention that she was the partner of celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz for 20 years.
Writes reporter Steve Koval on the
Houston Voice's blog:
Whatever Sontag's reasons for remaining coy about her sexual orientation, why is it that in 2004, the obituary of a famous gay (or bisexual) social critic gets de-gayed?
He then quotes gay firebrand Larry Kramer defending Sontag's
public silence on the subject; in Kramer's words:
"Susan is...beyond being a lesbian. I know I'm probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn't really fit into that category.... What she is more than anything else is an 'Intellectual,' with a capital 'I.'
Says Koval, "With all due respect to Larry Kramer, I don't know what 'beyond being a lesbian' means. Apparently, the New York Times and other straight publications do."
The Miami Herald and Chicago Tribune, by the way, were among a number of newspapers that did refer to Leibovitz as Sontag's "longtime companion."
For those unfamiliar with Sontag, according to ABC
News:
Writing in the 1960s about the Vietnam War she declared "the white race is the cancer of human history." Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she criticized U.S. foreign policy and offered backhanded praise for the hijackers.
But when it came to gay equality, she kept mostly silent. Even
her famous essay on gay men and "camp" sensibility, Paul
Varnell notes, was full of caustic observations:
"Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense," she wrote. "Camp is the solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation. ..." A decade later Sontag viciously attacked Camp and its aesthetic sensibility because it was corrupting and "the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous." But for those who read carefully, that was her view from the beginning.
So what does this all add up to? I'm not sure. I don't believe
in outing, but if a very public person is living openly in a
same-sex relationship that's widely recognized within her social
circle, then keeping that fact out of her obituary seems, to me,
unacceptable. Yet apparently many on the liberal left are quite
willing to play "let's pretend" when it comes to one of their
own.