‘Being gay shouldn’t be shameful’

Few treats are guaranteed to delight New York’s gay community more than a juicy bit of gossip, seasoned with a sprinkling of righteous indignation. The latest edition of Out magazine has provided just that, courtesy of a feisty, plain-talking British editor.

Out, which is the United States’s top-selling gay lifestyle publication, has emblazoned its May cover with mock-up portraits of two household names — Jodie Foster and CNN’s primetime anchorman Anderson Cooper. The pair have theatrical masks superimposed across their faces under the headline ‘The Glass Closet”.

Both stars consistently refuse to disclose their sexuality. But they are unwilling inclusions in Out‘s ranking of the US’s 50 most powerful gay and lesbian people. The other 48 people on the list, from billionaire entertainment impresario David Geffen to photographer Annie Leibovitz, are openly gay.

It is a taboo-breaking decision for Out‘s editor, Aaron Hicklin. The gay media generally frown on ‘outing” people, except in cases where powerful public figures are accused of hypocrisy. Critics have accused the magazine of an unwarranted intrusion into the lives of two popular stars who have done nothing to offend.

Gangly, slim and nattily dressed in jeans and a brown blazer, Wiltshire-born Hicklin had had a hectic week — his edition had prompted media coverage in the US, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. A former Scotland on Sunday journalist who covered the Bosnian war and the Middle East peace process, he is revelling in the spotlight — he cheerfully admits he is trying to give his magazine a bit of edge.

‘It’s beholden on an editor to challenge readers a little bit,” he says. ‘One of my prejudices when I took this job was that for the media, gay seemed to equate to superficial.”

He maintains that his critics are talking nonsense. Neither Cooper nor Foster, he says, are in any sense ‘closeted” — they are hiding in plain sight. For their fans, Out‘s declarations are hardly revelations — bloggers and online gossip sites have been on to them for years.

‘They haven’t gone to any lengths to hide their sexuality,” says Hicklin. ‘Anderson Cooper is regularly seen in gay bars in New York and Jodie Foster is in a relationship with another woman — they have two children together.

‘The only thing they do is avoid the subject when it comes up. The question for me is, why are they doing this? Being gay shouldn’t be shameful.”

In these days of progressive public opinion, Hicklin argues that there is no reason for the media to collaborate with celebrities who allow a cloud of mystique to surround their sexual orientation. He asks whether the media would stringently avoid mention of the fact that a celebrity was, for example, Jewish.

‘If they were hiding their religion, people would be outraged,” says Hicklin, leaning on his desk at the top of a Chelsea office block. ‘A lot of people see this as prurience — but we’re not prurient. I have no interest in discussing Anderson’s sex life — or Jodie Foster’s.”

Not everybody is amused. One of the US’s key gay rights groups, GLAAD, responded to the article by saying it did not condone outing people. Out‘s rivals have gone on the offensive. Chris Ciompi, editor of a competing gay title, Genre, says it is not the place of the gay media to intrude on a ‘personal journey” in people’s lives.

‘Coming out is a personal battle for every individual,” says Ciompi, who believes there may be perfectly legitimate reasons why stars choose not to talk about their orientation.

‘Instead of being known for being ‘that gay journalist on CNN’, maybe Anderson Cooper wants to be known as heavy-hitting and incisive,” says Ciampi. ‘Maybe Jodie Foster wants to be known as a woman who has had four Oscar nominations, rather than as a lesbian actress.”

The thorny issue of outing has split the media for years. As long ago as 1990, a New York gay publication, Outweek, caused a furore by revealing that the recently deceased magazine entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes, a divorced father of five, was gay.

The mainstream US media have generally shied away from the subject, although two stars last year came out of the closet reportedly to pre-empt threatened ‘revelations” — the N’Sync boyband singer Lance Bass and actor Neil Patrick Harris, best known for playing the precocious doctor Doogie Howser.

In Britain, the most notorious ‘outing” incident was in 1998 when journalist Matthew Parris informed the world that former government minister Peter Mandelson was gay during a live BBC interview.

In many areas of public life, gay people tend to be less open in the US. The subject is more polarising stateside — as has been clear in the level of US opposition to gay marriage.

Very few US politicians are openly gay. Out‘s ‘power 50” is packed with A-list entertainers such as Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell, but the only elected legislator is the Democratic Party congressman Barney Frank. He told the magazine that Capitol Hill is full of closet cases: ‘Probably five or seven in the House [of representatives] and at least three senators.”

The internet, however, has made discretion far more difficult.

Gossip-mongers such as the Hollywood blogger Perez Hilton have a huge following — Hilton recently had great fun posting alleged pictures of an American Idol star, Clay Aiken, from a gay dating site, Manhunt.

For Out magazine, Hicklin says this kind of competition is a factor if his publication is to remain cutting-edge: ‘The rise of blogs and blog culture has made the whole subject of outing very relevant again.” But, he says, he would only write about those inhabiting the ‘glass closet”, that is, those who make little effort to disguise their lifestyle except for when directly asked the question. Others in this category might include George Michael, who was only nominally in the closet before he encountered a Los Angeles policeman in a public toilet.

Since taking the top job at Out in April last year, Hicklin has tried to raise the level of reportage. Shirtless hunks have been expunged from the cover and Hicklin is particularly proud of dispatching a reporter to cover a gay-bashing case in the Caribbean. The magazine upset some readers by concluding that the real scandal in the case was not homophobia but the local police’s failure to pursue any murder investigation adequately, be it gay or otherwise: ‘People hated us for that.”

Although it has only been on newsstands for a week, Out‘s ‘glass closet” edition has already elicited a fractious mailbag from the magazine’s 190 000 readers. ‘The reaction’s been very mixed,” Hicklin admits. ‘I don’t mind that — I’d rather people love or hate the magazine than that they feel ambivalent.”

He does not plan on making a habit of outing stars — but he is unapologetic about his actions, quoting Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon who, on coming out as a lesbian, remarked: ‘If someone is chasing you, stop running. And then they’ll stop chasing you.” —