Outing

Based on Wikipedia: Outing

In 1957, the flamboyant pianist Liberace won a libel suit against a British tabloid for merely suggesting he was gay. Thirty years later, he died of an AIDS-related illness, and the newspaper asked for its money back. This paradox—the legal right to deny being gay even when you are, wielded against a press that couldn't prove what everyone suspected—captures something essential about the tangled history of outing.

What Outing Actually Means

Outing is the act of revealing someone's sexual orientation or gender identity without their consent. The term didn't enter common usage until 1990, when Time magazine published an article titled "Forcing Gays Out of the Closet." But the practice itself is far older, and its motivations have ranged from the noble to the malicious to the merely opportunistic.

The word itself is a play on "coming out"—that is, coming out of the closet, the metaphorical space where LGBTQ people hide their identities. When you come out, you control the narrative. When you're outed, someone else does.

This distinction matters enormously. Coming out can be an act of liberation and self-determination. Being outed can destroy careers, shatter families, and in some parts of the world, prove fatal.

The Kaiser's Inner Circle

The first major outing scandal of the twentieth century erupted in Germany between 1907 and 1909, and it reached all the way to the imperial court.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German emperor who would later lead his country into World War I, surrounded himself with aristocratic advisors. Left-wing journalists opposed to his policies discovered a potent weapon: several members of the Kaiser's inner circle, particularly the diplomat Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg, were gay.

A crusading journalist named Maximilian Harden published accusations against Eulenburg, triggering a chain reaction. Other journalists followed suit, including Adolf Brand, who ran Der Eigene—the world's first gay magazine. The scandal consumed German politics for years, with trial after trial exposing the private lives of powerful men.

Early gay rights activists were horrified. They called this approach "the way over corpses." These outers weren't allies trying to normalize homosexuality—they were political enemies using gayness as a weapon of destruction.

The Philosopher's Exception

But even among early advocates for gay rights, some saw limited justifications for outing. In 1928, the German activist Kurt Hiller proposed what might be called the hypocrisy exception: outing could be permissible when targeting someone actively working to harm other gay people.

Our solidarity with the homosexuals of all classes and political viewpoints extends very far; but it does not include traitors to their own cause.

This argument would echo through the decades, becoming the central moral question in debates about outing: Does a gay person forfeit their right to privacy when they use their power to persecute other gay people?

Ernst Röhm and the Nazi Dilemma

The question became acute in the early 1930s, when left-wing German journalists outed Ernst Röhm, one of Adolf Hitler's closest allies and the head of the Nazi paramilitary force known as the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Detachment).

Röhm's homosexuality was an open secret in Nazi circles. Hitler knew and apparently didn't care—at least not until Röhm became politically inconvenient, at which point Hitler had him murdered in the 1934 purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.

But when left-wing journalists exposed Röhm in 1931 and 1932, hoping to embarrass the Nazi movement, the gay rights community split.

Adolf Brand defended the outing: when someone tries to control other people's intimate lives, he argued, that person's own love life "ceases to be a private matter and forfeits every claim to remain protected."

Kurt Tucholsky, writing in Die Weltbühne, a prominent left-wing magazine, disagreed: "We fight the scandalous Paragraph 175"—Germany's anti-sodomy law—"everywhere we can, therefore we must not join the choir of those among us who want to banish a man from society because he is homosexual."

This was the trap. Using homosexuality as a political weapon reinforced the idea that being gay was shameful, even when wielded against a Nazi.

The Lavender Scare

In 1950s America, the paranoia that Senator Joseph McCarthy directed at suspected Communists found a parallel target in suspected homosexuals. This period, known as the Lavender Scare, operated on the theory that gay people posed a security risk because they could be blackmailed—a self-fulfilling prophecy, since it was precisely the stigma that made blackmail possible.

Tabloid magazines like Confidential emerged to feed public appetite for scandal. They outed political figures including Sumner Welles, a former Under Secretary of State, and Arthur Vandenberg Jr., who had briefly served as President Eisenhower's appointments secretary.

These outings weren't motivated by any principle. They were simply profitable. Sexual scandal sold magazines.

After Stonewall

The 1969 Stonewall Riots—a series of violent demonstrations against a police raid at a gay bar in New York City—marked the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. In the 1970s, activists began coming out publicly and loudly, chanting: "Out of the closets, into the streets!"

The logic was simple. Visibility was power. The more openly gay people there were, the harder it became to demonize homosexuality as an abstract perversion. Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, made this case explicitly: gay people should come out to everyone they knew, because personal relationships changed minds in ways that political arguments could not.

But what about people who wouldn't come out voluntarily?

In 1975, Oliver Sipple became briefly famous for helping to save President Gerald Ford's life during an assassination attempt. When Sara Jane Moore pointed a gun at Ford, Sipple grabbed her arm, deflecting the shot.

Harvey Milk and other activists outed Sipple to the press, hoping to combat the stereotype that gay men were weak or cowardly. Here was a gay hero who had saved the President of the United States.

The result was catastrophic. Sipple's mother, who hadn't known he was gay, stopped speaking to him. He fell into depression and alcoholism. When he died in 1989, his body wasn't discovered for two weeks.

Sipple's case became a cautionary tale. Even well-intentioned outing could destroy lives.

Conservatives Join the Game

Not all outers were LGBTQ activists. Some political conservatives saw exposure of homosexuality as a weapon against their enemies.

In 1981, a young conservative commentator named Dinesh D'Souza, then editing The Dartmouth Review, published the letters of gay students. A few years later, his successor Laura Ingraham—yes, that Laura Ingraham—had a meeting of a campus gay organization secretly recorded, then published the transcript along with attendees' names.

The editorial accompanying the transcript denounced the group as "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites."

This was outing in its crudest form: pure hostility, meant to shame and intimidate.

AIDS Changes Everything

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s outed people against their will in the cruelest possible way: through their deaths.

When Rock Hudson, one of Hollywood's most famous leading men, died of AIDS-related illness in 1985, his homosexuality—carefully hidden throughout his career—became public knowledge. The same fate befell many others, their private lives exposed in their obituaries.

But AIDS also radicalized a generation of activists. ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and other groups engaged in confrontational tactics, driven by fury at government indifference to the epidemic. Some activists argued that closeted gay people in positions of power—politicians, business leaders, celebrities—bore responsibility for that indifference.

If these people came out, the argument went, they could change public attitudes and save lives. Their silence was complicity.

The Outing Wars

In February 1989, Michael Petrelis and a small group of activists disrupted a fundraiser in Oregon to announce that Senator Mark Hatfield was gay. Hatfield, a Republican, had supported anti-gay legislation including the Helms Amendment, which restricted federal funding for AIDS education materials deemed to "promote" homosexuality.

Later that year, Petrelis stood on the steps of the United States Capitol and read a list of twelve closeted gay figures in politics and music. The press showed up. No major news organization published the story.

The media's reluctance frustrated activists but made legal sense. Outing someone who denied being gay risked libel suits. In American law, calling someone gay had historically been considered defamatory—a position that said more about society's view of homosexuality than about the facts of anyone's sexuality.

But in March 1990, Michelangelo Signorile, an editor at the New York gay magazine OutWeek, broke the taboo. In his column "Gossip Watch," he outed the recently deceased Malcolm Forbes, the fabulously wealthy publisher of Forbes magazine.

Forbes had been known for his playboy lifestyle and his high-profile relationship with actress Elizabeth Taylor. But Signorile revealed that Forbes had also been gay—a fact well known in gay circles but never reported in mainstream media.

The column sparked outrage. Signorile was called everything from "one of the greater contemporary gay heroes" to "revolting, infantile, cheap name-calling."

The Hypocrisy Doctrine

Through the 1990s and 2000s, a rough consensus emerged among outing advocates: targeting ordinary private citizens was wrong, but public figures who actively harmed LGBTQ people were fair game.

This became known as the hypocrisy doctrine. Congressman Barney Frank, one of the first openly gay members of Congress, articulated it during the 2006 Mark Foley scandal: "I think there's a right to privacy. But the right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy."

Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, had resigned after sending sexually explicit messages to teenage male congressional pages. He had previously supported legislation restricting gay rights.

The activist Michael Rogers made outing his specialty. In 2004, he exposed Edward Schrock, a Republican congressman from Virginia who had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and co-sponsored a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Rogers posted audio on his website that allegedly captured Schrock using a phone sex service to meet men. Schrock didn't deny it and announced he wouldn't seek reelection.

Rogers saw this as simple justice. "The same week that Schrock was using that service," Rogers noted, "he was voting to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage."

The Senate Bathroom Scandal

Perhaps the most famous outing of the era involved Senator Larry Craig of Idaho, a staunch opponent of gay rights who in 2007 was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

An undercover police officer reported that Craig had signaled interest in sex through a series of gestures—tapping his foot, reaching under the bathroom stall divider. Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, then held a press conference insisting he was not gay and blaming his guilty plea on a panic-driven mistake.

The 2009 documentary Outrage, directed by Kirby Dick, examined Craig's case and those of other allegedly closeted politicians who supported anti-gay policies. The film argued that mainstream media practiced a form of "institutionalized homophobia" by refusing to report on gay politicians' private lives while freely covering the sexual scandals of heterosexual politicians.

When Outing Kills

The hypocrisy doctrine assumes that the person being outed has power—that they're a politician, celebrity, or public figure who can weather the exposure. But in many parts of the world, outing carries far more severe consequences.

In 2021, Ali Fazeli Monfared, a twenty-year-old Iranian man, was murdered by his relatives in what was described as an "honor killing." His family had discovered he was gay when they saw his military exemption card, which listed his sexual orientation as the reason for his exemption from service.

The Iranian government, in other words, had effectively outed him to his family by documenting his sexuality on an official document. Human rights activists called for the exemption card policy to be changed, recognizing that what might seem like a bureaucratic accommodation in one context becomes a death sentence in another.

Tara Far, a human rights investigator, called outing "dangerous" in societies where LGBTQ people lack legal protection or family acceptance. The stakes aren't embarrassment or political setback—they're survival.

Outing as State Violence

Perhaps the darkest use of outing occurs when governments weaponize it against their own citizens.

Following the 2020-2021 protests in Belarus against President Alexander Lukashenko, security forces arrested thousands of demonstrators. Some of those detained were forced to record "confession videos" in which they disclosed personal information under duress—including their sexual orientation.

In some cases, gay men were forced not only to out themselves on camera but to reveal the names of their partners. These videos were then broadcast on pro-government Telegram channels and state television.

The outing was typically combined with other forms of humiliation: forced disclosure of psychiatric diagnoses, labeling protesters with opposition symbols, emphasizing stigmatized characteristics. The goal was clear: to associate political dissent with sexual deviance, and to use the stigma of homosexuality as a tool of political repression.

Human rights organizations condemned these practices as violations of privacy, human dignity, and international prohibitions against degrading treatment.

The Four Levels of Justification

Scholars Warren Johansson and William Percy have identified four increasingly aggressive justifications for outing:

The first and most conservative position holds that only the dead may be outed. Malcolm Forbes, Rock Hudson, historical figures—their privacy no longer protects them, and the historical record deserves accuracy.

The second permits outing hypocrites who actively oppose gay rights. This is the Larry Craig principle: if you vote against gay marriage while soliciting sex in bathrooms, you've forfeited your right to privacy.

The third extends to passive accomplices—people who help run homophobic institutions without necessarily advocating for anti-gay policies themselves. A closeted gay person who works for an organization that discriminates might fall into this category.

The fourth and most aggressive position justifies outing prominent individuals simply because their visibility would shatter stereotypes. Under this logic, outing a beloved actor or successful businessperson serves the community even if that person hasn't done anything wrong—because their example proves gay people can be admirable.

This last position finds few defenders today. It treats individuals as means to a social end, sacrificing their autonomy for a political goal they haven't chosen to serve.

The Media Paradox

Gabriel Rotello, who once edited OutWeek, framed outing as "equalizing"—treating homosexuality the same way the media treats heterosexuality. When a politician has an affair with a woman, it's reported. Why should an affair with a man be different?

This argument has a certain logic. Discretion about gay relationships, even when well-intentioned, reinforces the idea that homosexuality is shameful—that it belongs in the category of things polite people don't mention.

But Signorile, who did more than almost anyone to mainstream outing, insisted he wasn't exposing private details. He was challenging the closet itself—the system that made gay identity unspeakable.

The distinction matters. There's a difference between reporting that a politician is gay and reporting the intimate details of their sex life. One challenges stigma; the other exploits it.

The Military Exception

One surprising consequence of outing activism was its impact on military policy.

In 1991, Signorile outed Pete Williams, the Pentagon spokesman under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Williams was a prominent public face of a military that officially banned gay service members. The contradiction was stark.

Signorile later argued that the Williams outing "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."

Every major Democratic candidate and independent Ross Perot publicly promised to end the ban. Bill Clinton made it a campaign pledge. After his election, the resulting compromise—the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy—was deeply flawed, but it represented movement. The policy was finally repealed in 2011, allowing gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans to serve openly.

Today, the armed forces of most developed democracies permit open service by LGBTQ members. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Israel, and all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) except Turkey allow gay people to serve openly. In the UK since 2000, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is explicitly forbidden, and pressuring LGBTQ service members to come out is itself prohibited.

Where This Leaves Us

The ethics of outing remain contested, but certain principles have emerged from decades of practice.

Outing private citizens is widely considered wrong. People have a right to control their own identities, to come out (or not) on their own terms, to their own families, in their own time.

Outing public figures who actively work against LGBTQ rights finds more support. San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts, who covered the AIDS epidemic for years before dying of the disease himself, put it bluntly: "A truism to people active in the gay movement is that the greatest impediments to homosexuals' progress often are not heterosexuals, but closeted homosexuals."

British activist Peter Tatchell, whose organization OutRage! outed fourteen bishops of the Church of England in 1994, framed it as self-defense: "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."

But this justification has limits. It requires a genuine abuse of power, not merely private hypocrisy. It requires considering whether the outing will actually help the community or merely satisfy a desire for revenge. And it requires acknowledging that even hypocrites have families who may suffer collateral damage.

The philosopher Richard Mohr defended outing by distinguishing it from McCarthyism. The Red Scare, he noted, "fed gays to the wolves, who thereby were made stronger." But principled outing "does not invoke, mobilize, or ritualistically confirm anti-gay values; rather it cuts against them."

This is the crucial distinction. Outing that reinforces shame accomplishes nothing. Outing that challenges the closet—that says being gay is not shameful, that hypocrisy is shameful—serves a different purpose.

But purpose isn't everything. Even well-intentioned outing can destroy lives, as Oliver Sipple discovered. The question isn't just whether outing serves a good cause, but whether it's worth the cost to the individual—a cost that others don't get to decide.

In the end, outing remains what it has always been: an exercise of power over another person's most intimate truth. Sometimes that power is wielded by enemies, sometimes by allies, sometimes by the state. The reasons may vary. The violation does not.