IGF CultureWatch

First used during the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s, outing has been mostly moribund for more than a decade. Now a couple of activists in Washington, D.C., abetted by a few media outlets, have revived it. While outing is justifiable under very narrow circumstances, these recent outings have not met the proper ethical and journalistic standards for doing so.

In recent months, activists Michael Rogers and John Aravosis have claimed that more than 20 members of Congress and congressional staffers are secretly gay. Their claims have been reported in a few gay and alternative newspapers, and have been repeated by Internet bloggers. The goal is to expose the hypocrisy of closeted anti-gay politicians and of closeted staff members who work for anti-gay politicians. This will presumably make closeted gays think twice before supporting anti-gay causes, especially the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Aravosis, himself a former aide to anti-gay Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), has compared the outing campaign to nuclear war. "Mutual assured destruction worked once," he argues, referring to the superpower confrontation during the Cold War. "Maybe it will again."

In the style of a person convinced the world needs him, Aravosis uses an overwrought metaphor. But it is also unintentionally apt. Destruction is the key, for outing has the potential to destroy lives and families. It has the whiff of cannibalism about it. Uplifting the cause of individual rights, it sacrifices real individuals. Defending a movement that has exalted privacy, it destroys personal privacy. Combating homophobia, it relies on homophobia for its power. On its best days, outing is a nasty business.

Nevertheless, outing is justifiable as an ethical and journalistic matter when two criteria are met.

First, the outed person's homosexuality must be directly relevant to some matter of public policy.

Hypocrisy by an officeholder meets this test, as when a closeted politician opposes gay equality for homophobic reasons. An example would be a legislator who declares marriage must be "defended" from gay couples while he has extramarital homosexual affairs.

It is not enough, however, that a closeted politician opposes a gay-rights proposal if the basis for the opposition is non-homophobic. For example, an officeholder might oppose an employment non-discrimination law on the ground that such laws are counterproductive or too costly for employers. She may be wrong; hypocritical she is not.

The relevance requirement would be met by someone like Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania), who has made clear the homophobic basis for his opposition to gay equality. For the most part, the members of Congress outed by Rogers and Aravosis meet this first standard.

But others, including the congressional staff members outed in some gay newspapers, do not meet the relevance requirement. Rarely would a staffer's sexual orientation be directly relevant to a public policy debate. Unlike officeholders, staffers do not vote on public policy. They frequently have no influence on what position their boss takes on gay issues. Many work on matters, like environmental policy, that have nothing to do with gay issues.

The main purpose in outing such people is retributive; it is punishment for aiding the enemy, however indirectly. That is an impulse I share, but it is not a matter of public concern.

Even as a device for helping the gay cause, outing congressional staffers is dubious since they can be useful sources of information about anti-gay legislative strategy only if they remain closeted. It's true that outing might deter a few people from working for anti-gay officeholders. But that's almost useless since there's no shortage of eager applicants to take such jobs.

Second, there must be credible evidence made available to the public that establishes the person is probably homosexual.

We must demand that this burden of proof be met because the cost of error can be very high. Outed individuals may lose their jobs, get cut off from their parents and friends, and lose their families - even if they're not really gay. We must also demand credible proof because, frankly, hearsay about celebrity homosexuality is as common as sand on a beach. Is there a movie star, ball player, or politician who hasn't been rumored to dilly-dally?

Few of the recent outings claimed by Rogers and Aravosis, and reported by some gay newspapers, meet this second requirement. If there is an adequate basis for believing that these outed politicians or staffers are gay, the public has often not been given that information.

In one case, a congressman was outed on the basis of an audiotape provided by an anonymous source who claimed the recorded voice was that of the congressman soliciting gay sex. There was no way to verify the information and no way to judge its credibility. That the congressman subsequently dropped his re-election bid lent some credence to the story, but only after the fact.

In another case, the Washington Blade reported in its July 23, 2004, issue that a named person working for the Republican Party had been "outed by local activists." That was it. While the article detailed the person's ties to anti-gay officeholders, it provided no basis for believing the person is gay other than the unsubstantiated claims of Aravosis and Rogers themselves. That isn't journalism; it's gossip.

The desire to punish the wartime traitor, to make an example of him, is understandable. But we must first be convinced that there really has been treason and that punishment will accomplish more than simply inflicting pain.

[On Sept. 23-24, 2004, Yale University's Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies co-sponsored, with the university's Department of African American Studies, an interdisciplinary conference titled "Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender, and Sexual Difference Center Stage."]

With a two-day scholarly conference on Michael Jackson, Yale has taken one more step into the depths of academic nihilism.

While I am hesitant to agree with the Yale Daily News' laudatory editorial asserting "scholarship shouldn't be deemed irrelevant or unimportant solely because its subject is contemporary culture," I can at the very least understand a seminar on Michael Jackson sponsored by the African-American Studies Department, touching on issues of racial identity. But what I cannot countenance is the leadership of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian & Gay Studies in hosting this celebratory conference on a man who is widely, and rightly, viewed by society as a disturbed individual who engages in questionable sexual activity.

The Larry Kramer Initiative (LKI) was founded in 2002 in honor of Larry Kramer, the noted author, playwright and AIDS activist. Meant to foster research and learning about gay issues historical, conceptual and political, LKI has increasingly drifted off into academic irrelevance due to its hosting of outrageously esoteric lectures and its heavy reliance on "Queer Theory," which thrives on themes of marginalization, segregation and oppression.

Modern LGBT-studies is a mish-mash of "social construction," essentially arguing that gender and sexuality are merely "performed" behavior and that homosexuality is not a biological condition. Queer Theory relies heavily on equal doses of Marxism and post-modernism, ranting on about oppression and the need to erase all forms of sexual limitation. It's a revolutionary doctrine, regardless if you want to be a part of the fight or not. As Hunter College art history professor Wayne R. Dynes put it:

For those opposed to "hierarchy," the concept of a core identity is unacceptable simply because it privileges the center over the margins, and is therefore a trope of domination.

Queer Theory thrives on the emphasis of sexual peculiarities and social marginalization, and there is no better representation of these two features than Michael Jackson. Attending the symposium last week, I sensed a general attitude of smug triumphalism amongst the conferees. There was a sensed mutual understanding, and appreciation, for the absurdity of this event. It was an act of academic resistance, and to Queer Theory enthusiasts, life as a queer person is just that, one big act of resistance. Queer Theory posits that the role of gays in society is to be subversive. By embracing the gender and sexuality-bending figure of Michael Jackson, then, queer studies advocates relish in their sexual deviancy.

If one were to randomly walk into a class at Yale, the thinkers that he might hear referred to by a professor would be individuals like Plato, Hegel and Kant, just to name a few. Yet in his opening remarks last Thursday, visiting LKI Professor Seth Clark Silberman cited such intellectual luminaries as the "E! True Hollywood Story," New York Magazine dilettante Simon Dumenco, Steven Spielberg and Moonwalk, the King of Pop's autobiography.

One of the conference organizers was introduced as having an interest in, among other rigorous academic pursuits, "Whiteness Studies." Todd Gray, Jackson's personal photographer from 1979-1983 and a professor at California State University, made a half-hearted attempt at academic legitimacy by citing Hegel's dialectic and Foucault's theories on colonialism in his presentation on the gloved one.

The papers presented at the conference, two of which were, "The Interface as Hieroglyph: Michael Jackson between Peter Pan and the 'Man in the Mirror'" and "Michael Jackson, the King of Melodrama: Innocent until Proven Guilty," demonstrated the arrogance of this whole pursuit as the assembled academics disguised the lack of intellectual worth inherent in the subject with an overdose of academic jargon.

Professors of queer studies might be surprised to find that most of their gay brethren do not view themselves as comprising an oppressed yet sexually rebellious vanguard. Most gay people, at least the ones I know, do not define themselves first and foremost as gay, and certainly not as "queer." We want to be viewed as normal Americans. We want to marry, maybe even have kids, heck, even live in the suburbs with a nice back yard and a golden retriever. Being gay is just a part, one of many parts, of who we are.

But to the academic queer theorists, who are still stuck in 1970s gay liberation mode, this desire to join the mainstream is the greatest threat to their existence on the margins. Gays who seek acceptance by straight people are suckers for "heteronormativity," you see, and criticism of the excesses of gay culture - multiple and anonymous sexual partners, the constant use of victimization rhetoric, an obsession with sex and the body in general - is oppressive.

Every straight friend of mine who heard about LKI's sponsorship of this conference plaintively asked me why any gay person in his right mind would ever want to be associated with Michael Jackson, a man who, in his disturbing relations with young boys, represents the worst and oldest smear against gay men - that of the pedophile. Gays just want to be part of the American family, but queer theorists are unwittingly doing the homophobe's work in trying keep homosexuals in the irrevocable position of social outcast.

What is most outrageous about this conference is not the fact that it happened, but that LKI spent resources that could have been used to host events exploring the social effects of gay marriage, gay child rearing, or gays in the military. Those issues, not hopeless theorizing about a serially alleged pederast, are of actual concern to gay people and, more importantly, are worthy of intellectual inquiry.

Imagine that. Gay people who do not want to be defined by their difference, but by their similarities. How queer.