Having myself outed a dead man—the publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes—back in the spring of 1990 ( while some of his sanitized obituaries were still being written ) , I've curiously watched the uneven coverage of Susan Sontag's life and death in recent weeks, as well as the critics' treatments of the late Kinsey researcher C.A. Tripp's controversial book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.
Outing the dead still isn't easy. There is a conspiracy of silence pervading the living, particularly in the journalistic and intellectual class. While the Tripp book has received some positive reviews, the negative ones have been much more telling. These generally take two forms.
Some portray Tripp, who died at 86, as having been off his rocker, his book filled with quaint Kinseyeque psychobabble and clichés. His arguments, they claim, are all speculative—such as when he obsesses about Lincoln's use of the words 'yours forever' in his letters to Joshua Speed.
Others argue that the evidence might be there—Lincoln and Speed did share a tiny bed with one another each night for four years, which even by Frontier America standards seems a bit queer—but even if it is true, why does it matter now?
In the case of Sontag, the excuses for the sloppy coverage have been less pointed, but no less obscuring. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times omitted any reference to the influential writer's sapphic romances, while People and CNN mentioned that she had been involved with photographer Annie Leibovitz. The crawl on WABC-TV actually called Leibovitz Sontag's 'long-time companion,' while the gay press spoke more fully about Sontag's relationships with other women, including Lucinda Childs. In response to a slew of letters—including a few from long-time activist Ann Northrop, which have made the rounds—the Times' public editor, Daniel Okrent, sent out a response claiming that the Times couldn't verify Sontag's sexuality with Sontag's son, David Reiff—who would neither confirm nor deny—and that Leibovitz would not comment, either. Okrent's response was only sent out via email, and has yet to actually make it into the paper.
Okrent's defense presupposes that the Times never prints anything about public figures' sexual lives unless the individuals involved or their survivors verify the facts. Of course, there are countless examples of the Times printing accounts regarding the sexual lives of heterosexual public figures, living and dead, without confirmation from the subjects and their partners. But in the case of Malcolm Forbes, another non-heterosexual public figure, the Times did so—albeit a few years after the fact.
Shortly after Forbes died, I wrote a cover story for OutWeek magazine, which included accounts from both named and unnamed sources attesting to Forbes' having engaged in sex with men, most of them individuals who'd worked at Forbes magazine. Some of these people were men who'd actually had sex with Forbes.
It's quite laughable looking back on it now, but no one wanted to touch the story. The New York Daily News had heard about it a week before, and negotiated an exclusive with OutWeek, with plans to put it on their cover the day the magazine hit the stands. But they got cold feet at the last minute, and instead ran with the suitably heterosexual scandal and headline: 'Marla Hid in Trump Tower.'
It took weeks for the Forbes story to trickle out, mostly in articles about the supposedly new practice of 'outing,' which was described as despicable. Some papers still wouldn't mention the dead Forbes by name. In its story, the Times would only refer to a 'recently deceased businessman' who'd been outed. The Times clearly saw outing the dead as distasteful, and, as with Sontag, editors certainly weren't going to dig deep enough to verify homosexuality.
Six years later, however, in an article about Malcolm's son Steve Forbes, the Times discussed 'the first published reports in the gay press of his father's homosexuality,' and even gave us this sensational little tidbit, which appeared to be lifted from my OutWeek story: 'In the last few years of his life Malcolm Forbes became increasingly indiscreet, and he was seen roaring up on his motorcycle in tight black leather to Manhattan nightclubs, and, according to current and former workers at [ Forbes ] magazine, pursuing some of his young male employees.'
The Times had no independent verification; editors had simply been emboldened by the passage of time. In the case of Sontag, the hypocrisy is even greater, since she had acknowledged affairs with other women herself—in The New Yorker and in an interview in Out magazine—even if she was circumspect about her sexual identity and her relationship with Leibovitz.
Likewise, it is not as if C.A. Tripp is delving into a subject that hasn't been discussed before. Going back to the 1920s, historians have hinted at the possibility that Abe Lincoln had a male lover. In his Salon review, however, Andrew O'Hehir rather harshly accuses Gore Vidal and Doug Ireland of being 'apologists' for Tripp, saying the evidence just isn't solid enough to herald the book, as both Vidal and Ireland have done. But when outing the dead—particularly someone as long dead as Lincoln—it's not the one smoking gun that is going to make the case, but rather the cumulative effect of circumstantial evidence.
To those who like to point to Lincoln's having been married and had children, I would point to Forbes and Sontag having done the same. And Tripp—like a few other historians—has shown that Lincoln's sexual life with the women he courted and married was not exactly on fire. Using his experience and knowledge as a Kinsey sex researcher—this methodology does admittedly get a bit loopy, fascinating as it may sometimes be—Tripp discusses several men who could have been Lincoln's male lovers and at least one, Speed, who most probably was. Writing a review in The New York Times, Richard Brookheiser, the conservative New York Observer writer, seems willing to accept that, but doesn't think it important.
'Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so erratic that the reader is often left on his own,' he writes. 'One wonders: What does it mean to be homosexual?'
This dismissive question denies a century of the religious right's growth and eventual dominance over Lincoln's Republican Party. It also ignores the party's current demonizing of those who engage in sex with people of the same sex while sanctifying heterosexual marriage and the family. Of course Lincoln wasn't 'gay' in the sense of the word today, as the categories of sexual identity didn't exist in his lifetime. But if every school kid learned that Honest Abe, in addition to having married Mary Todd, also had some very intimate male buddies, he or she might think a lot differently about what 'gay' is now.