Gay, straight or whoever we are, our secrets need not be fodder for public curiosity – Sydney Morning Herald

I have always believed that an individual’s sexuality is their own business and should be of interest only if there is a reasonable prospect that you might have occasion to proposition that individual for sex. Which is why I am disappointed when someone’s sexuality becomes news. And more so in the past week when it became clear Rebel Wilson had cause to fear her sexuality might be revealed by this masthead without her permission.

But it also made me wonder about the many other private revelations which are still tolerated, even celebrated, despite dubious public interest.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, “outing” was in vogue. Activists, believing themselves to be crusaders on behalf of the gay community, dragged prominent gay people “out of the closet”. Armistead Maupin, author of the iconic and groundbreaking Tales of the City about gay culture in San Fransisco, defended “outing” as a means of lifting the stigma of homosexuality, by being “matter-of-fact about it”.

Maupin publicly “outed” his friend and erstwhile lover, the actor Rock Hudson, after Hudson had appeared emaciated on a talk show. The actor was succumbing to AIDS at a time when the disease was a death sentence, so in a sense, it was a double outing.

The outing movement put up posters in public of supposedly gay people without their permission, labelling them “absolutely queer”. The media published stories about people who were “caught” being gay. In Australia, as recently as 2010, Channel 7 filmed a married Labor minister entering a gay sex club. The minister resigned minutes before Seven broke the story and his resignation was accepted.

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Since then the public attitude towards outing has crystallised against the practice. But even in its heyday, many people questioned whether it was ethical. And, as always happens when there is an ethical challenge to something people really want to do anyway, many excuses were generated as to why in this or that case it was justified. Maupin argued outing would normalise homosexuality when society – and other gay people – realised that many wonderful people were comfortably, unashamedly, even fabulously gay. He also believed in exposing the supposed hypocrisy of public figures, who had the temerity to be gay while presenting themselves as traditional family men.

In 1990, then editor of the US publication OutWeek justified his decision to out a gay millionaire on the cover of his magazine by pointing to the fact that “extramarital sex, abortion, drug and alcohol addiction, and embarrassing medical problems are often disclosed by a press eager to satisfy the voracious public appetite for gossip about the rich and famous” and that excluding homosexuality could create the impression “that homosexuality is, in effect, the worst thing in the world”.

“After all,” he argued in the piece reflecting on the ethics of outing, “if you can write about extramarital affairs, abortion, a first lady’s drug problem, or a rock star’s penchant for beating his wife, but you can’t write about Malcolm Forbes’s sexual orientation, what other implication could there be?”