We have learned in the past several weeks that Neil Patrick Harris (“Doogie Howser, M.D.”) and T.R. Knight (“Grey’s Anatomy”) are gay, facts they announced after goading from celebrity bloggers, the men and women who have made it their sacred duty to peer into the bedrooms, closets and even grocery carts of the famous.
We have also learned–thanks to a photographer with a keen eye for ordinary behavior–that first daughter Barbara Bush had two plastic cups, one in the hand, one in a back pocket, at the recent Yale-Princeton football game and that such cups, in the opinion of the blogger who posted the photos, are commonly used by college students at football games for drinking alcoholic beverages.
On yet another celebrity-watching blog–one of approximately 435,000 of similar intention, proving that Americans, collectively, need to get lives of their own–we have seen a snapshot of comedic actor Will Ferrell, taken on somebody’s camera phone.
Ferrell was–get this–voting in L.A. What a … what a … citizen!
Even the fact that it happened during one of the roughly 17 minutes in the past year when Ferrell wasn’t acting in an upcoming movie or promoting a just-released one doesn’t make it newsworthy, blogworthy or even worthy of the slight decrease it caused in the life span of the picture-taker’s telephone battery.
This rash of celebrity crapulence suggests the blogosphere, for all the good it has done in serving as a check on politics and the press, is increasingly acting as a counterweight to privacy, a concept that needs more help on its own side of the scale.
The Internet, with its automatic credit-card entries and lingering records of searches executed and sites visited, is already an assault rifle against privacy. When it comes to celebrities, and even to people related to celebrities, bloggers are converting the weapon to automatic fire, dozens of rounds per minute.
How long will it be, one might wonder, before they come for the non-celebrated, putting previously private behaviors up on the bathroom wall that the Net can sometimes be? Already, there are Web sites about bad tippers and bad boyfriends, to name two categories that most men fit into, at one time or another.
Holding one of the biggest guns in the celebrity hunt is a Los Angeles man known as Perez Hilton. His eponymous blog was likely most responsible for Harris’ coming out. Hilton, born and still officially named Mario Lavandeira, has no qualms.
“My position is that if you are a politician or a celebrity, you’re making a choice to live your life in the public arena,” Lavandeira, a gay sometime actor himself, said in a telephone interview. “And when you’re a public figure, you need to be prepared for the public’s talking about you.”
Or taking your picture. The Ferrell photo ran on another celebrity gossip blog, Defamer, under the regular feature, “Citizen Paparazzi,” although the site did at least give the item a self-mocking caption.
There is also, Lavandeira argued, a bigger question of tolerance when most Americans seem to think marriage needs defending more from homosexuality than from, to name one example, Britney Spears. And the Perez Hilton blog is determined to help gays go mainstream, said Lavandeira, 28.
After Harris came out, Lavandeira posted a blog item listing other celebrities he thinks are homosexual and saying, “You’re next”:
“We are throwing down the gauntlet and issue a challenge to all the closeted celebrities out there: Come out. Come out NOW! Come out in droves!!”
“In my own subservient way,” he said in the interview, “whether people agree with me or not, I’m trying to make the world a better place.”
And if you don’t like it? “Scroll down and go to the next item.”
Not all of his readers–2.6 million daily, he said–agree.
“Seriously, this is sad,” wrote one in response to the “You’re Next” post. “Do you really believe you’re some kind of Rosa Parks of the gay movement? … You forcing people out of the closet isn’t heroic, in fact, you’re just as bad as the people who want to force gays and lesbians to stay in the closet!”
The most potent argument for violating people’s privacy, of course, isn’t that they’re famous and that it goes with the territory. Nor is it that they’re gay and the revelation of this, no matter their own feelings on the topic, might push a nation toward tolerance.
It’s that whatever they’re keeping private is, in some way, hypocritical–in opposition to their public selves.
The celebrity sightings feature in the L.A. and N.Y. gossip blogs Defamer and Gawker (which are otherwise generally spot-on in their dissections of their cities’ cultures) offers up unconfirmed reports, e-mailed in from people who claim to have seen celebrities out and about.
This forum, which turns obsession or mere happenstance into a kind of low-grade stalking, is not worth violating privacy.
On the other hand, it was important and defensible when the celebrity gossip blog TMZ.com exposed Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic ranting to police.
Gibson had held himself up as someone qualified to speak, via his movie “The Passion of the Christ,” on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The revelations of the private Gibson gave credence to critics who thought they detected anti-Semitism in the film.
But few celebrities are vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy on a societal level. Playing a heterosexual lothario, as Harris does in the CBS comedy “How I Met Your Mother,” is just a role, not an endorsement of one sexual orientation or condemnation of another.
Closeted gay politicians who speak and vote against gay rights don’t have such logic on their side. That’s why Michael Rogers draws a distinction between what he does, reporting on the private lives of politicians on blogActive, his Washington, D.C.-based site, and what gossip sites do.
“To me, outing is the willy-nilly disclosure of people’s sexual orientation for no purpose other than gossip,” Rogers said.
The mainstream press is still figuring out how to handle all of this. Without independent confirmation and some direct relevance, the traditional media by and large don’t reprint, say, names from Rogers’ list of closeted politicians.
When, as happened recently, comic Bill Maher goes on Larry King’s CNN show and names a prominent Republican Maher says is widely known to be gay, CNN scrubs the exchange from the transcript, and the New York Times reports on the scrubbing without naming the name.
The blog world and its march against privacy “is putting pressure on journalists to be faster and to sidestep the process of verification” in an attempt to keep up with perceived “buzz,” said Kelly McBride, ethics faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla. “The problem with that, as journalists, is it forces us to skip the step where we ask ourselves what our purpose is in covering the story.”
She’s suggesting a standard for journalists–verify and don’t let “buzz” replace “newsworthiness”–but it applies just as well to bloggers and to people who read blogs, too. Privacy is eroded, of course, not just by people who publish information that ought to be personal, but also by those who fall into the trap of consuming it.
As we scroll through a Web-based list of gossip items, we might look at another Citizen Paparazzi photo and pause to ask ourselves, is it really all that interesting that Joey Lawrence shopped, at least once, at H&M?
———-
sajohnson@tribune.com
