Presswatch / Out You Go!
Cony, John
Out You Go! by John Corry W hen Ed Koch ran against Mario Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York in 1977, his sexual preference was a great hidden issue. In certain communities in the...
...PEN's actions, obviously, are inspired by cultural politics and have nothing to do with literature...
...Changing rules on gender and sex leave the press confused...
...The attorney general said she was "just an awkward old maid with a very great affection for men," which was the same answer she had given People magazine...
...Howcould such a piece have appeared in the Times...
...Larry Kramer of ACT-UP was not so discreet...
...Catherine Crier recently asked Janet Reno on ABC's "20-20" if she was a lesbian...
...Senate staff members would rummage through Packwood's innermost thoughts, or, as he once described them, "the hopes and the dreams and the despairs of all of us...
...In the nineties the John Corry is a former New York Times reporter and media critic and the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade, to be published in January by Putnam...
...Packwood has been accused of making unwanted advances to some 38 The American Spectator January 1994 twenty women—or about one a year since he has been in Washington—and the Senate has voted, 94 to 6, to force him to hand over 3,000 pages of his personal diaries for use in its investigation...
...Nonetheless, neither could explain how the story got published...
...To their credit, many Times staffers were appalled, and a number of them protested...
...It talked in fulsome detail about her parking tickets, health problems, and romantic life, and suggested that whatever it was Willie Smith did to her that night on the beach outside the Kennedy house, she probably had deserved it...
...The reluctance that reporters once felt about prying into anyone's sexual proclivities, whether real or imagined, now seems almost quaint...
...Think now of the practice of "outing...
...Obviously, the young husband is gay, although possibly he doesn't quite know it...
...The quote appeared in New York newspapers and was heard on news broadcasts...
...Media feelings about privacy are shaped by political passions and not by old standards of discretion and decency...
...Patrick's Day parade holding hands and trying to look enamored...
...Other newspapers also criticized the Times...
...PEN is a harbinger of where the media winds are blowing...
...The New Republic did say that "the vast intrusion that the Senate has endorsed should have every civil libertarian knee a-jerking," but the magazine was in the minority...
...I'm not going to be blackmailed," Cortines replied...
...As noted in these pages recently, Patricia Schroeder, in letters to constituents and others, insists that Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, George Washington's inspector general, was gay...
...Meanwhile, you may think of sexual politics and the death of privacy as always centering on the homo/hetero divide, but that would be short-sighted...
...But then, just as the family is about to pass us by, the young husband's eyes will suddenly meet mine or Chris's in a fleeting, painful, haunted stare, and all at once we'll both realize that the picture is a lie, a forgery, and that this family's home is built on quicksand...
...As school superintendent in San Francisco, he had dared modify the demands of gay groups for special programs for gay and lesbian students...
...Eventually, though, a story in the New York Times noted that Cuomo campaign workers had chanted, "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo," while they drove sound trucks around Queens...
...There is also, however, an element of wishful thinking...
...It quoted someone who said she had "a wild streak," and pointed out that she had a daughter born out of wedlock...
...The headline ought to have said: "Slut Gets Just Deserts...
...Indeed, the Washington Post would run a story that said just that...
...The Times, which published two editorials denouncing Packwood, declared that "looking through diaries to find misbehavior may sound like an invasion of privacy, but that is only the senator's self-serving description...
...The Palm Beach story represented genderlessness run wild...
...As it related to me personally, I've said previously that I'm not going to discuss that...
...And I won't discuss it now...
...Therefore, the activists decided to out him, and when Cortines held his first news conference in New York, the matter arose almost immediately...
...p EN American Center, the American division of the international writers' association, for example, has formed a committee to "expose and oppose" the censorship of gay and lesbian writers...
...Therefore, PEN feels, it must "out" them...
...T he official newsroom ethos, at the Times and other great media organizations, no longer recognizes gender...
...The campaign for gay rights insists that everyone come out of the closet...
...No one would have been particularly angry if the Times had reported that Willie Smith was a lout and had a history of beating up women...
...That kind of inquiry is on its way to becoming routine...
...Hence the growing legitimacy of outing—practiced now on both the quick and the dead, whether or not they deserve it...
...Earlier that month, the Times had taken some of the dopier allegations in Kitty Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan and splashed them on page one...
...The politics of sexual disclosure, however, supersedes rational thinking...
...The Oregon senator's private life is being invaded just as the Palm Beach woman's was...
...Some have raised the question as to whether you are gay and haven't disclosed it," a television reporter said...
...their sensibilities are alike, and if they are not alike, they should be...
...She was standing inside the new parameters of journalism and looking at the world outside when she said it...
...T he idea, apparently, is to swell the ranks, and, as Torie Osborn says, achieve widespread visibility...
...It was cheesy, foul, and un-Timesy...
...The Palm...
...Will they be hurt by a vote that Patty Murray tried to characterize as a with-us-or-agin-us women's rights vote...
...Media reaction to this aspect of the Packwood story, however, has been muted, and occasionally jocular...
...Whatever the case, he has been outed...
...Anna Quindlen, Cokie Roberts, and Ellen Goodman's wrath would be unspeakable...
...The Times thought that Packwood should do the decent thing and resign...
...In the eighties, Jack Kemp was asked on NBC's "Today" if he had ever "committed a homosexual act...
...She said the people who found the story offensive were burdened by their own "baggage," and afflicted with "weird minds...
...Before Ramon Cortines arrived in New York this fall to take up his new duties as schools chancellor, gay activists called news organizations there and told them he was a closeted homosexual...
...The only question was how...
...Koch was right, of course...
...In a tirade heard on C-Span, he identified a member of the Clinton cabinet as a lesbian...
...The press would have tantrums, and the Times's editorials would be fierce...
...it was nobody's business, but his supposed homosexuality had become a campaign issue, and the press was sure to mention it sooner or later...
...The day after the Senate vote, Bryant Gumbel reported on "Today" that "the usual suspects lined up with Packwood—Alan Simpson, Jesse Helms, Arlen Specter, et cetera...
...Addressing the crowd at the gay, lesbian, and bisexual rally in Washington last April, Congressman Gerry Studds referred to "gay senators," although he declined to name one...
...As they move away from us, Chris and I, without exchanging a word, will look at each other pensively, ruefully, and shake our heads...
...In certain communities in the city—Orthodox Jewish in Brooklyn, for example, and Greek-American in Queens—it was thought he might be gay...
...He was not gay, he said, and even if he were, it was nobody's business...
...The paper's executive editor and managing editor replied that their own consciousness had been raised by the controversy, and that whatever it was that had happened would never happen again...
...David Garth, Koch's principal strategist, had staged a romance between his client and Bess Myerson, but still the rumors persisted...
...A profile the Times ran a few years ago about the young woman in Palm Beach who said William Kennedy Smith had raped her became famous for its mindlessness...
...The day after the story appeared, Koch spoke at a crowded news conference...
...It is perverse and nasty, political persecution, but it is being given a moral and even artistic rationale...
...Personal feelings are incidental...
...Consider the ordeal of Bob Packwood...
...media have embraced sexual politics, and care less about whom they wound or embarrass...
...PEN is often on the wrong side of issues, but even though it may be careless about facts, it usually does not overturn logic...
...The American Spectator January 1994 39...
...In fact, the writers are not being put back in the closet, and their works are not being censored...
...Political issue or not, however, reporters hesitated to write about the rumors...
...I hope so, because I wrote it...
...On the next to last page of his book, he describes an experience that he and his companion have "all the time": At first, seeing a young man walking toward us, arm in arm with his wife, one of them pushing a baby carriage or stroller or carrying an infant, we'll think we're looking at a nice ordinary happy little family...
...Beach story was worse...
...It identified the young woman by name, which even the tabloids did not do, and then besmirched her reputation...
...Shortly afterwards, Mike Wallace told Roy Cohn on CBS's "60 Minutes" that they had a mutual friend who thought Cohn wanted to "come out of the closet...
...The Times story, I think, was appropriate...
...Koch and the former Miss America even marched in the St...
...Imagine, though, if the Senate had voted to sequester the personal diaries of a woman—Barbara Boxer, say, or Barbara Mikulski—in a search for evidence of hanky-panky...
...Men and women co-exist without distinction...
...The Senate would never do this, of course, but forget that...
...So why, the reasoning must have gone, would anyone object to a story that said an alleged rape victim had an illegitimate child, personal problems, and so on...
...In A Place at the Table, Bruce Bawer, who is gay, and was once the film critic for this magazine, condemns outing as a cruel practice, but spoils it at the end with his whimsies...
...There but forwhat?—goes one or both of us...
...Meanwhile, a documentary about Alexander the Great on the Arts and Entertainment cable channel inserts a pointless reference to Alexander's "male companion...
...In the officially genderless newsroom, only people with weird minds would be upset...
...Possibly they themselves did not understand, although the national editor, who had shepherded the piece into the paper, might have explained it unintentionally...
...As Torie Osborn, the former head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said in an op-ed piece in the Times: "For this once hidden minority, widespread visibility is the absolute condition for all progress...
...PEN says it wants "to challenge the way textbooks are putting gay and lesbian writers back in the closet...
...Actually, it was an accusation...
...The dignified Cortines wanted to protect his privacy, but the press was an accomplice to the outing...
...PEN is upset because schoolbooks in Texas that carry autobiographical sketches of writers such as Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, and Langston Hughes do not identify them as homosexual...
...Allegations about homosexuality were too delicate a matter, even if the mayoralty hung in the balance...
...The ideal is not equality but sameness...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
