The Press Respected Privacy – Twice   

Are there ethical criteria for outing a gay?

I hope you noticed the two instances this past summer when the dog didn't bark – or, to get down to cases, when the press refused to play follow-the-leader.

Traditionally, when one news organization breaks a story others have been sitting on, the operating assumption is that the information is now out, written across the sky in neon, and the rest of the press quickly follows suit. But when The New York Times and NBC News broke the name of the alleged Florida rape victim in the William Kennedy Smith case other editors and producers decided, almost unanimously, not to join in the demolition of the woman's privacy. It was a quiet but striking rebuke to the Times and to NBC.

More recently, columnist Jack Anderson and the New York independent television station WPIX both identified by name a high civilian official in the Pentagon who was said to be gay. (See Chris Kent's Free Press piece, page 13.) But most news executives around the country refused to participate in savaging the privacy of a public figure.

The gays who launched a campaign to "out" John Doeson (my name for the official) had a point – the hypocrisy of the Pentagon with its implacable hostility toward gays.

At the end of June, Air Force Capt. Greg Greeley made the mistake of leading a Washington gay pride parade on the day before he was scheduled to be discharged. The Air Force ordered him in the next day for a session of nasty questioning, including threats to delay his discharge.

That act of harassment prompted an outfit called Queer Nation to call a press conference and name John Doeson, Pentagon official, as a gay. Its members also put up posters of Doeson around Washington under the label "Absolutely Queer." But Washington news organizations, wary of Queer Nation and of outing in general, sent few reporters to the conference and did little with the story.

In August The Advocate , a respected gay magazine, came out with a cover story on Doeson, using his real name. The writer of the piece, Michelangelo Signorile, excoriated the Pentagon for discharging "13,000 queers" in the past nine years, interrogating and tormenting suspects, demanding the names of other gays in the service, threatening to take their children away, driving some of them to murder and suicide.

"In the face of such horrors," Signorile wrote, "the fact that a top Pentagon official is gay and is accepted as such by his superiors presents an enormous double standard...Certainly this information had to be made public."

But Signorile himself seemed uneasy about what he was doing. He managed to obtain Doeson's home phone number and called him up "around midnight," waking him up. After Doeson said he would not talk about his sexuality, Signorile recalls this exchange:

"Look, (John)," I explained. "I don't mean you any malice by any of this."

"Well, I can't absolve you, Mike," (Doeson) politely said. "If you're looking for absolution, I'm not the person who can do that."

"I guess my Catholic guilt is seeping out," I laughed. "What I mean is that I'm doing what I think is best for lesbian and gay liberation, for the community. This has been difficult to grapple with. It's one of those things in this job that you have to do but you might not necessarily feel comfortable with."

Citing the Queer Nation and Advocate accusations, columnists Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta managed to further the project to out Doeson while unctuously suggesting it was shameful. The columnists described Doeson as "a victim of modern-day vigilantism" perpetrated by radical homosexuals. (Many of their client papers withheld the column.)

But even after Anderson and WPIX had named Doeson, most editors and producers decided they did not have an ethical search warrant to rummage through his personal life.

Are there any ethical criteria for outing a gay person? Franklin Kameny thinks there are. Kameny is the longtime Washington gay activist who did something effective for Air Force Capt. Greg Greeley. Using both publicity and congressional pressure, he forced the Air Force to go ahead with Greeley's discharge only one day after it was due. Kameny believes these conditions justify exposure of gays: The person's homosexuality is confirmed; the person has a record of anti-gay activity; the individual is given fair warning – time to "repent," to change anti-gay policies.

In the Doeson case, Kameny said, all three criteria had not been met. Doeson, for example, had no record of anti-gay actions. So at least one militant gay leader supports those editors and producers who elected not to crash into Doeson's personal life.

And critics of the press, who like to say it would do anything to hype a story, should remember the summer of '91 when most of the press respected the privacy of a Florida woman in a sensational rape case and the privacy of a Pentagon official targeted as a gay. l