A little late, I've been directed to
a column in The Nation, the ultimate Bush-baiting leftwing
bible, by David Corn. Surprisingly, he offers a thorough critique
of the outing of Jeff Gannon. Corn writes:
Bloggers have made much of his apparent effort to earn a buck as a prostitute for men. This is not gay-baiting, they say, it's hypocrisy. The question is, hypocrisy on whose part? On Gannon/Guckert's? He's been accused of being a gay-baiter. But how true is that?
As part of my investigation, I had my assistant, Alexa Steinberg, search through a collection of Gannon/Guckert's articles for pieces on gay-related themes. She found eight pieces. Most were straightforward accounts of political tussles over gay marriage.... This is pretty tame stuff....
Gannon/Guckert clearly was writing for a conservative audience. But he was hardly a flame-thrower on gay issues. His observation about Kerry was clumsy but not homophobic.
Sure, he worked for an organization that supported an administration and party opposed to gay rights, and he was a Bush-backer. But does that automatically qualify him for outing? Should a lesbian reporter who works at the Wall Street Journal or at any metropolitan daily that editorializes against gay marriage be outed? Reporters are not elected officials. They do not legislate the behavior of others....
[H]e has been hounded for being a gay male hooker. Should we even care if a reporter is moonlighting on the side in this fashion? I don't-let Helen Thomas be a professional dominatrix in her free time-unless that reporter explicitly claims to be a person of family values or publicly decries homosexuality or prostitution. I have not seen evidence that Gannon/Guckert struck such a stance.
The line of attack, supported by outing-advocates in our comments area (and vigorously opposed by other commenters), has been that Gannon deserved to have his sex life publicized because he was anti-gay, but it appear his only "crime" was being a reporter for a Republican-supporting news outlet. It was said he lied to gain entrance to the press briefings, but it now appears he used his real name and driver's license to sign in, and that use of a pen name is hardly unheard of (one anti-outing commenter points to the NY Times's Nick Gage/Nikos Gatzoyiannis). And it's been said he broke the law by being an escort (another commenter asks if Gannon's critics would have made the same case against all gay reporters in jurisdictions that had sodomy laws, and whether outers favor enforcing the anti-escort laws).
Conclusion: Gannon was a victim of the politics of personal destruction. He transgression was being a supporter of the Bush administration. As another commenter puts it, for the Bush-haters that, unfortunately, seems to justify all.
Update: He says he's "bruised, not broken" -
Jeff Gannon's blog, and
more power to him!
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