Outing
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While outing often refers to an outdoor excursion, in the late twentieth century, the term acquired an additional meaning, taking someone "out of the closet", that is, publicising that someone is secretly homosexual.
The term can also be used generally to mean publicly disclosing other personal characteristics, such as political affiliation or religion, that someone wishes to keep secret.
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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 Out of the Closet” by William A. Henry III in the January 29, 1990 issue of Time 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 triumph, sodomy was not illegal in Greek or, most believe, in Roman law – even 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 which advocated Greek style pederasty.
Left wing journalists outed 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." (Brand, Adolph. Political Criminals: A Word About the Röhm Case (1931) Reprinted in Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, edited by Harry Oosterhuis, 235-240. New York, Haworth, 1991.)
After the Stonewall riots of 1969, swells of gay-libbers came out aggressively in the 1970’s, crying out, "Out of the closets, Into the streets!" Reinventing the ideals of the pre-Hitler Germans, 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, but others felt it was better for the movement to protect closeted gays, especially in the homophobic Church and the military. Despite their best efforts, most gays and lesbians were still unwilling to come out.
In the 1980's, the AIDS epidemic outed 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, the Republican Senator from Oregon, because he supported homophobic 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 the activist, 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) Now many of his tactics are now seen as legitimate political and journalistic techniques for uncovering and revealing hypocrisy among those in power who are undermining equality for GLB Americans.
Other people who have been outed include Pete Williams, Chastity Bono, Richard Chamberlain and Lee LaHaye
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 did not deny the claim and announced on August 30, 2004 that he would not 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.
Motives
Activists and journalists out. Gabriel Rotello, once editor of OutWeek, called outing "equalizing", explaining, "what we have 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 would 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 is not only to reveal the hypocrisy of those in what Branch termed the "closets of power" but also to further awareness of the presence of gay people and political issues, thus showing that being gay and lesbian is not "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 have advocated does not invoke, mobilize, or ritualistically confirm anti-gay values; rather it cuts against them, works to undo them. The point of outing, as I have defended it, is not 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." (Morh, Ricahrd. Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon, 1992.)
Further, outing is not 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 do not 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 is 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 claimed he had personal proof. As of 6th March, 2006, the matter is unresolved and will soon go to trial.
Outing in the military
See articles Don't Ask, Don't Tell and Sexual Orientation and Military Service
Outing in textbooks
Activists have systematically outed the homosexual and bisexual heroes of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and early modern Europe, whom the Church had tried to ignore. Many continue the attempts today, increasingly from all cultures and times. At a time when sundry religious groups have acquired a voice over what is written about them in U.S. textbooks, many homosexuals want the same representation. Not a single American History text used in a U.S. secondary school or college today admits that even one president, vice-president, cabinet member, governor, supreme court justice or four-star general or admiral is or was homosexual or bisexual. Similarly European history textbooks fail to mention a single saint, pope, cardinal, patriarch or any other ranking prelate ever had sex with another male. For that matter, they rarely mention any emperors, kings, statesmen or generals did either. The impetus for change today is the same stated by Ulrichs in 1864: if important people were outed, “the rich and the famous, the geniuses and heroes, the saints and the self-sacrificers and benefactors of mankind…the derogatory stereotypes can be discredited.” (Johansson&Percy, p.24)
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 has 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-defence," 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 would be protecting those Bishops and thereby allowing them to continue to inflict suffering on members of our community. Collusion with hypocrisy and homophobia is not ethically defensible for Christians, or for anyone else."
Similarly, critics argue that if a gay politican supports anti-gay legislation and policies, the hypocrisy is so fundamental to that gay politician's personhood that it calls into question his or her character and fitness to be a public servant.
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 antifamily Federal Marriage Amendment."
Roger Rosenblatt argued in his January 1993 New York Times Magazine essay "Who Killed Privacy?" that, "The practice of 'outing' homosexuals [sic] implies contradictorily that homosexuals have a right to private choice but not to private lives." (Signorile, p.80)
Sources
- Cory, Donald Webster. The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. New York: Greenfield, 1951.
- Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1990
- Gross, Larry. Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing. Minneapolis & London, University of Minneapolis Press, 1993.
- Johansson, Warren & Percy, William A. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence. Harrington Park Press, 1994.
- Signorile, Michelango (1993). Queer In America: Sex, Media, and the Closets of Power. ISBN 0299193748.