Time was that the "outing" of closeted homosexuals was confined to the radical gay press. Now, the mass media are getting into the act, touching off a fierce debate about journalistic ethics - and heightening fears that the sleaze of tabloid reporting is seeping into mainstream publications.
The prime cause of the commotion was a story in Friday's Wall Street Journal revealing that Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner has left his wife, Jane, for a male lover.Although most of the 2,000-word Journal piece focused on the inner workings of Rolling Stone's parent company, Wenner Media, which the Wenners co-own, the third paragraph in the story by staff writer Patrick Reilly reported that 49-year-old Jann has moved in with a 28-year-old former male model.
The avid talk of New York gossips for weeks, the split was first reported in the Jan. 30 Advertising Age, by "Adages" gossip columnist Melanie Wells, who additionally named Wenner's lover. The Journal story did not.
Journal deputy managing editor Byron E. Calame defended his paper's piece as "a business story that took note of a relationship problem." That problem, he continued, could augur the break-up of Wenner Media, should the Wenners divorce.
"This is a story about a prominent business empire, maybe not General Motors as to its market value, co-owned by a man and his spouse," Calame said.
"If you were writing about a heterosexual couple, you might think `Well, in the end, they may rediscover each other.' But when you view his new relationship, his new orientation, that makes it seem less likely," continued Calame.
Outing became a phenomenon in the early 1990s, when gay organizations such as ACT UP and publications such as Outweek began to identify prominent closeted homosexuals to advance a radical political agenda and remove the public stigma from same-sex relationships.
The Advocate, a national gay and lesbian news magazine, outed the Pentagon's civilian spokesman in 1991 for his allegedly hypocritical defense of the U.S. military's policy against lesbians and gay men in uniform.
The apparent embrace of "outing" by mainstream business publications is cause for serious concern, according to Tom Goldstein, dean of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
"His private life is his private life," said Goldstein of Wenner. "Let him be. We should live in a world where people can live as they want."