BuzzFeed chief Los Angeles correspondent Kate Aurthur and Legal Editor Chris Geidner discuss the question of the weekend: What’s off limits when it comes to figures like Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, soon-to-be MSNBC host Ronan Farrow, and others? A recurring LGBT question in a new year.
Rep. Aaron Schock.
Kris Connor / Getty Images
Kate Aurthur: Chris! I thought last year was the gayest year in American history — a year so gay even the Supreme Court got on board. Yet we're only five days into 2014 and the journalist Itay Hod has engaged in some old-school outing of the Republican Congressman Aaron Schock on Facebook that was quickly picked up on Queerty and elsewhere. More on that later, though, because I'm sure you have some thoughts about it.
Let's go back to last year, which was bookended by two big celebrity coming-outs: We started 2013 with Jodie Foster's beautifully fraught Golden Globes explosion and ended it with Robin Roberts' tidy, (faux) casual mention of her girlfriend on Facebook. When Foster, who had guarded her privacy for so many years, said she wasn't going to do a "big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age" and it was only Jan. 13, we might have been wise to brace ourselves for the rest of 2013.
That was an incredibly big deal, I thought — especially to those of us who thought we'd go to our graves without Foster talking about her sexuality. And Roberts was a big deal too! And all the others — notably including several athletes, including Brittney Griner, Jason Collins, and Robbie Rogers — in between.
Which is all to say that I really disagree with — sort of obsessively! — David Carr's column in The New York Times from October in which he took Gawker to task for outing (for the millionth time) Fox News' Shep Smith. I admire Carr as a creative and brave loudmouth, and a truly valuable character in journalism, but when he wrote, "And now that gay marriage is a fact of life, a person's sexual orientation is not only not news, it's not very interesting," I found that assertion to be astoundingly wrong (both as a gay person and as a journalist). The thing that got us here — and the only reason we're in the news, was visibility; we can't go back now.
I can rant about The New York Times later. I want to know your thoughts about the current state of public coming out (as well as the rare outing). It seems like the mainstream media truly cannot figure these issues out.
Jodie Foster.
Mario Anzuoni / Reuters
Chris Geidner: Kate, it was definitely quite a year for public declarations of same-sex love — from those at the top of the media and movie world who were coming out publicly after years of rumors to younger folks on YouTube who did so in a more expected, but no less important, way.
And, you're right! Carr's column missed the mark in several frustrating ways because it ignored the continued resonance that coming out has. When Wentworth Miller came out in response to anti-LGBT legislation in Russia, people unquestionably cared. When, as you mentioned, Roberts came out, people cared.
When Carr wrote that "[t]he culture has moved on," he was right that the culture has moved on from thinking that being gay is salacious and to be avoided at all costs. What he missed — and why the Shepard Smith story went nowhere — is that the culture has moved on to caring about the LGBT people who come out and come into their lives. When Laverne Cox started her role in Orange Is the New Black, she was a proud trans woman playing a proud trans woman. And, though she was not technically coming out but was more accurately coming out as a public figure, people have gravitated to stories about her. When Tom Daley announced that he was dating a guy, we saw how much culture had moved on. As he posted a picture of himself with that guy, Dustin Lance Black, on Instagram last night, the comments that I saw — even from the many, many young female fans of the diver — were of support and happiness for them.
Sure, there are outliers. There are people who reacted with vitriol to Miller and Cox and Daley — and there certainly remain dangers for LGBT people in their lives, particularly for trans women of color — but coming out has always been about embracing who you are. And the culture, for the most part, has caught up to that. Coming out is still news because most of the public wants to embrace LGBT people as they are, so coming out remains powerful and resonant.
The other outlier, as you mentioned, are those who don't come out but are believed to be gay and are outed. I don't know whether Rep. Aaron Schock is gay. I've never seen him at a gay bar or with a man or anything of the like. Others clearly believe otherwise, although there generally has been vague or completely nonexistent sourcing for those claims. And, while many LGBT folks see Smith as a mostly harmless guy or even marginally helpful at a network they dislike, most of those same people see Schock as having voted against LGBT interests in Congress and thus "worthy" of an outing. (There also was the — what should it be called? — attempted outing of Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, which he denied.)
My issue, as I see it currently, is twofold: First, if you're going to out someone, then out them. Hod did not out Schock in his piece, he outed a "hypothetical" congressman who just happens to fit Schock's résumé. He also presented thin evidence, which consisted of hearsay from an unnamed journalist friend and video footage that he claims TMZ has of Schock "trolling gay bars." Hod knows a Facebook post is the only place this cuts it; that's why it appeared there and not at any publication.
Secondly, a group of several gay journalists and activists on Twitter — including Dan Savage, Michelangelo Signorile, John Aravosis, and Josh Barro — have decided that mocking Schock for exhibiting stereotypically gay attributes, like caring about his clothes and body, or following Daley on Instagram is the way of dealing with him. This is the same sort of behavior that the same people have said is harmful when it happens to closeted LGBT kids in schools. And, when I look at this happening publicly, I know that those closeted kids could be seeing it too. If it's harmful for those kids to see athletes say anti-LGBT things, how isn't it harmful for them to see prominent out people teasing Schock for his pants?