Everything about Outing totally explained
In the late twentieth century,
outing became a common term for taking someone "out of
the closet" - that is, publicising that someone is
gay. The term can be used to refer to any publicising of a person's homosexuality without their consent, or only to cases where those doing the outing support gay rights, and object to what they see as the target's hypocrisy, rather than their homosexuality. The term can also be used more broadly to mean publicly disclosing other personal characteristics, such as political affiliation or religion, that someone wishes to keep secret.
History of outing
It is hard to pinpoint the first use of outing in the modern sense. In a 1982 issue of
Harper's, Taylor Branch predicted that "outage" would become a political tactic in which the closeted would find themselves trapped in crossfire. "Forcing Gays like Mike Howes Out of the Closet" by William A. Henry III in
Time (
January 29 1990) introduced the term "outing" to the general public. (Johansson&Percy, p.4)
While the term is recent, the practice goes back much further. Outing was a common put-down of
Greek and
Roman orators. Before the
Christian era,
sodomy wasn't illegal in
Greek or, most believe, in
Roman law, between adult citizens, but
homosexual acts between citizens were considered acceptable only under certain social circumstances. Both Romans and Greeks sneeringly deemed the "guilty" vulgar.
The
Harden-Eulenburg affair of 1907-1909 was the first public outing scandal of the twentieth century.
Left-wing journalists opposed to
Kaiser Wilhelm II's policies outed a number of prominent members of his cabinet and inner circle - and by implication the Kaiser - beginning with
Maximilian Harden's indictment of the aristocratic diplomat
Prince Eulenburg. Harden's accusations incited other journalists to follow suit, including
Adolf Brand, founder of
Der Eigene, a journal that advocated Greek style
paederasty.
Left wing journalists outed
Adolf Hitler's closest ally
Ernst Röhm in the early 1930s, causing Brand to write, "when someone - as teacher, priest, representative, or statesman - would like to set in the most damaging way the intimate love contacts of others under degrading control - in that moment his own love-life also ceases to be a private matter and forfeits every claim to remain protected hence-forward from public scrutiny and suspicious oversight."
After the
Stonewall riots of 1969, swells of
gay-libbers came out aggressively in the 1970s, crying out, "Out of the closets, Into the streets!" Some began to demand that all homosexuals come out, and that if they weren't willing to do so, then it was the community's responsibility to do it for them. Such radical measures provoked opposition. Some argued that privacy should prevail, and felt it was better for the movement to protect closeted gays, especially in
homophobic religious institutions and the military. Despite their best efforts, most
gays and
lesbians were still unwilling to come out.
Some political
conservatives opposed to increased public acceptance of homosexuality engaged in outing in this period as well, with the goal of embarrassing or discrediting their ideological foes. Conservative commentator
Dinesh D'Souza, for example, published the letters of gay fellow students at
Dartmouth College in the campus newspaper he edited (
The Dartmouth Review) in 1981; a few years later, succeeding
Review editor
Laura Ingraham had a meeting of a campus gay organization secretly tape-recorded, then published a transcript as part of an editorial denouncing the group as "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites".
In the 1980s, the
AIDS epidemic led to the outing of several major entertainers, including
Rock Hudson.
The first outing by an activist in America occurred on
February 23 1989. Michael Petrelis, along with a few others, decided to out
Mark Hatfield, a
Republican United States Senator from
Oregon, because he supported legislation initiated by
Jesse Helms. At a fundraiser in a small town outside of
Portland, the group stood up and outed him in front of the crowd. Petrelis later tried to make news by standing on the
Capitol steps and reading the names of "twelve men and women in politics and music who ... are secretly gay." Though the press showed up, no major news organization published the story. (Gross, p.85) Potential libel suits deterred publishers.
OutWeek, which had begun publishing in 1989, was home to activist and outing pioneer
Michelangelo Signorile, who stirred the waters when he outed the recently deceased
Malcolm Forbes in March 1990. His column "Gossip Watch" became a hot spot for outing the rich and famous. Both praised and lambasted for his behavior, he garnered responses to his actions as wide ranging as "one of the greater contemporary gay heroes," to "revolting, infantile, cheap name-calling." (Johansson & Percy, p.183)
Other people who have been outed include
Fannie Flagg,
Pete Williams,
Chastity Bono, and
Richard Chamberlain.
In 2004,
gay rights activist
Michael Rogers outed
Edward Schrock, a Republican
Congressman from
Virginia. Rogers posted a story on his website revealing that Schrock used an interactive
phone sex service to meet other men for sex. Schrock didn't deny this, and announced on August 30, 2004 that he wouldn't seek re-election. Rogers said that he outed Schrock to punish him for his hypocrisy in voting for the
Marriage Protection Act and signing on as a co-sponsor of the
Federal Marriage Amendment.
New Jersey Governor
Jim McGreevey announced that he was a "gay American" in August 2004. McGreevey had become aware that he was about to be named in a
sexual harassment suit by
Golan Cipel, his former security advisor, with whom it was alleged McGreevey had a sexual relationship. McGreevey resigned, but unlike Schrock, McGreevey decided not to step out of public life.
Motives
Gabriel Rotello, once editor of
OutWeek, called outing "equalizing", explaining, "what we've called 'outing' is a primarily journalistic movement to treat homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality in the media...In 1990, many of us in the gay media announced that henceforth we'd simply treat homosexuality and heterosexuality as equals. We were not going to wait for the perfect, utopian future to arrive before equalizing the two: We were going to do it now. That's what outing really is: equalizing
homosexuality and
heterosexuality in the media." ("Why I Oppose Outing",
OutWeek, May 29, 1991)
Their aim isn't only to reveal the hypocrisy of those in what Branch termed the "closets of power" but also a gay person awareness of the presence of gay people and political issues, thus showing that being
gay and
lesbian isn't "so utterly grotesque that it should never be discussed." (Signorile, p.78) Richard Mohr noted, "some people have compared outing to
McCarthyism...And vindictive outing is like McCarthyism: such outing feeds gays to the wolves, who thereby are made stronger....But the sort of outing I've advocated doesn't invoke, mobilize, or ritualistically confirm anti-gay values; rather it cuts against them, works to undo them. The point of outing, as I've defended it, isn't to wreak vengeance, not to punish, and not to deflect attention from one's own debased state. Its point is to avoid degrading oneself." Thus outing is "both permissible and an expected consequence of living
morally." (Mohr, Richard.
Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.)
Further, outing isn't the airing of private details. As Signorile asked, "How can being gay be private when being straight isn't?
Sex is private. But by outing we don't discuss anyone's sex life. We only say they're gay." (Signorile, p.80) "Average people have been outed for decades. People have always outed the
mailman and the
milkman and the
spinster who lives down the block. If anything, the goal behind outing is to show just how many gay people there are among the most visible people in our society so that when someone outs the milkman or the spinster, everyone will say, 'So what?'" (Signorile, p.82)
Virtually all who take a position on outing have qualified the limits to which it's permissible for one to go. The extremes are to out no one or to out everyone. In between, four intermediate positions can be discerned (Johansson & Percy, p.228):
1) Hypocrites only, and only when they actively oppose gay rights and interests;
2) Outing passive accomplices who help run homophobic institutions;
3) Prominent individuals whose outing would shatter stereotypes and compel the public to reconsider its attitude on homosexuality;
4) Only the dead.
Assessing to which degree the outer goes allows insight into the goal striven towards. Most outers target those who support decisions and further policy, both
religious and
secular, which discriminate against gay people while they themselves live a
clandestine gay existence. A "truism to people active in the gay movement [is] that the greatest impediments to homosexuals' progress often [are] not heterosexuals, but closeted homosexuals," said
San Francisco journalist
Randy Shilts. (Johansson & Percy, p.226)
Outing in the clergy
The recent wave of
Roman Catholic sex abuse cases has outed many members of the
Roman Catholic clergy. The
most recent outing scandal to hit the church
flared up in
New York, where
New Jersey priest Bob Hoatson accused
Cardinal Egan, the
archbishop of the
New York Archdiocese of not only covering up rampant
sexual abuse amongst his clergy but of also being a practicing homosexual, of which Hoatson stated he'd personal proof. As of 6th March, 2006, the matter was unresolved.
Outing in the military
See articles Don't Ask, Don't Tell and Sexual orientation and military service
Impact and effectiveness
The effectiveness of outing as a political tactic depends on the willingness of the media to report that a person has been outed. The advent of the internet has made outing public figures much easier. Twenty years ago Michael Rogers would have had to persuade a newspaper or other media outlet to risk legal action by reporting his allegations about Schrock. Today he can publish them himself on his website and other media will then report that he's done so.
Signorile argues that the outing of Pete Williams "and its aftermath did indeed make a big dent in the military's policy against gays. The publicity generated put the policy on the front burner in 1992, thrusting the issue into the presidential campaign," with every Democratic candidate and independent Ross Perot publicly promising to end the ban. (ibid, p.161).
Support for outing
Many gay rights activists defend outing as a tactic. The
British activist
Peter Tatchell says "The lesbian and gay community has a right to defend itself against public figures who abuse their power and influence to support policies which inflict suffering on homosexuals." In 1994 Tatchell's activist group
OutRage! named fourteen bishops of the
Church of England as homosexual or bisexual, accusing them of hypocrisy for upholding the Church's policy of regarding homosexual acts as
sinful while not observing this prohibition in their personal lives.
"Outing is
queer self-defense," Tatchell says. "Lesbians and gay men have a right, and a duty, to expose hypocrites and homophobes. By not outing gay Bishops who support policies which harm homosexuals, we'd be protecting those Bishops and thereby allowing them to continue to inflict suffering on members of our community. Collusion with hypocrisy and homophobia isn't ethically defensible for Christians, or for anyone else."
President of Finland Tarja Halonen released a book for the reelection campaign in 2006, where she mentions the her legal work in promoting
sexual equality in the effect of the president of
SETA, a LGBT rights organization. She criticizes the people in
the closet for "not daring to do anything themselves, but being happy when we [SETA] did their work for them".
Criticism
Some gay activists, however, continue to disapprove of outing as a political tactic, arguing that even anti-gay conservatives have a right to personal privacy which should be respected. Steven Fisher, a spokesman for the
Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocacy group for gay and lesbian issues in the United States, commenting on the Schrock outing, said he opposed using "sexual orientation as a weapon." Christopher Barron, political director of the
Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing gay and lesbian Republicans said: "We disagree strongly with the outing campaign, but we also strongly disagree with President Bush's sponsorship of the anti-family
Federal Marriage Amendment."
Roger Rosenblatt argued in his January 1993
New York Times Magazine essay "Who Killed Privacy?" that, "The practice of 'outing' homosexuals implies contradictorily that homosexuals have a right to private choice but not to private lives." (Signorile, p.80)
Other criticism concerning outing centers upon the harm that outing individuals as homosexual, transgender, or transsexual does to them personally and professionally and upon the fact that some individuals have been erroneously outed or have been outed when there's no proof to substantiate the 'allegation' that they're gay, transgendered, or transsexual.
Christine Jorgensen,
Beth Elliott, Dr.
Renée Richards,
Sandy Stone,
Billy Tipton,
Alan Hart,
April Ashley,
Caroline Cossey ("Tula"),
Jahna Steele, and
Nancy Jean Burkholder were outed as transsexuals by European or American media or, in the case of Billy Tipton, by his
coroner. In many cases, being outed had an adverse effect on their personal lives and their careers.
In some cases, individuals have been outed as transsexual or
intersex when, in fact, there's no proof that they were ever members of the opposite sex. Two examples are actress
Jamie Lee Curtis, beauty contestant winner
Elodie Gossuin (Miss France 2001).
The rumors that Curtis was
intersexed seems to be based on the facts that her name, Jamie Lee, is androgynous, and that she's opted to adopt rather than to bear children. However, there's no proof that she was born male or intersexed
(External Link).
Days after winning the Miss France crown, Gossuin became the victim of a rumor posted on January 8, 2001 on a French language website that wrote that the 20-year-old Gossuin was in fact a 27-year-old male transvestite named Nicolas Levanneur. Although the story provided no proof, it evolved to state that she might be a post-operative transsexual. While she at first dismissed it as nonsense, the news article made its way to other websites around the world and Gossuin became the butt of numerous jokes, cartoons, and wildly enhanced fabrications to the original story.
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