At the start of the 1990s, the gay and lesbian movement – as it was then known – had been through the wars. The previous decade had seen the AIDS pandemic and battles over Section 28, a pernicious piece of legislation banning what was termed the “promotion of homosexuality”. There was a combative spirit among gays, some of whom turned their fire on powerful and influential closeted gays in politics and the church. The view was that these people did little to further equality or they were even hostile. So, some activists resolved on a campaign of outing society’s top closet cases.
Gay outing gets underway in the United States
In 1990, the “outing” movement got underway in the United States – and it proved very divisive. But it also brought the issue of gay rights to mass public attention. Throughout 1990, there seemed to be a competition between gay media publications and supermarket tabloids to see who could out certain government officials, movie stars, TV personalities and – the top prize – Christian fundamentalist preachers.
One argument in favour was that despite the numerical strength of gays and lesbians, they remained invisible because many pretended to be heterosexual in public. Only when gays and lesbians were more visible could a stronger case be made for equality. Note the argument by some homophobes today that the number of LGBT people has risen in recent years, which they assume is due to some kind of sinister social pressure – instead of the fact that LGBT people always existed, but didn’t declare their sexuality openly.
There was also the argument that gay people lacked role models in all walks of life. If they could see that people like themselves held high office or were famous, it would build confidence.
Many gays opposed outing as an understandable but wrongheaded approach – especially in reaction to government foot-dragging over measures to combat AIDS. They claimed that outing ran contrary to the spirit of tolerance and acceptance that was the hallmark of the gay scene and that lives would be ruined needlessly by this activity. The strongest argument from the anti-outing lobby was that people should able to come out on their own terms and not be dragged from the closet in such an unpleasant manner.
One of the leading proponents of gays outing gays was Michelangelo Signorile who, in his magazine Outweek, published the names of fifty people a week in a column titled Peek-a-Boo. Some were out and some were not.
Pentagon official outed
In July 1991, a Pentagon official was outed by The Advocate magazine. This was at a time when the Department of Defense in the US was actively rooting out gay and lesbian serving officers in the armed forces and forcing them to quit. When a soldier or marine was identified as gay, they were not politely shown the door. Instead, the individual was subjected to an interrogation to extract a list of other gay people they knew in uniform. Failure to oblige could result in a prison term.
Interestingly, when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was asked about the Advocate article on chat shows, his defence of homophobia in the armed forces was noticeably weak. He dismissed as an “old chestnut” the well-worn notion that gay people posed an inherent security risk.
Gay Congressman Barney Frank summed up the growing view of outing in the United States in the early 1990s. In most cases, the right to privacy should be respected. But where a legislator, for example, was supporting anti-gay measures in opposition to their own secret sexuality – then they should be outed.
United Kingdom gets the gay outing bug
In September 1991, an organisation called Frocs – Faggots Rooting Out Closet Sexuality – met at the Lesbian and Gay Centre in Farringdon. This was an impressively large community centre for gays and lesbians funded by the Greater London Council. I hesitate to say it was for LGBT people as that term wasn’t used at the time – and also bisexuals were banned at one stage!
Frocs announced it was going to out gay judges, clergy, and MPs. Posters soon popped up around London claiming that a certain pop star was gay (whose name I shall not divulge as it all ended up in the courts). The intention was to make public the names of the Top 200 gays in public life. The media – both broadsheet and tabloid newspapers – went into something of a frenzy. Not least because some journalists might have been worried about being outed. But they were also – undoubtedly – being contacted by establishment figures urging them to shut off the oxygen of publicity to the outing campaign.
Then, very suddenly, Frocs claimed at a press conference that the whole thing had been a hoax. Some argued that Frocs had engaged in a stunt to expose the hypocrisy of the tabloid press, which had been outing gay people for years in a hostile manner. Though it was also claimed that the tabloids had been threatening to doxx members of Frocs – making public their names and addresses – and they had decided to climb down.
Outing gay bishops
On November 30, 1994, ten Church of England bishops were outed by the pressure group OutRage. The Daily Telegraph – a Conservative Party supporting newspaper – dubbed this “homosexual terrorism”. One of the bishops had already been outed by another newspaper over an incident in a public toilet twenty-six years previously. The Telegraph could barely contain its hatred and I’ve reproduced its thundering editorial below. Outing was based on nothing more than “gossip among homosexuals” and referred to homosexuality among the clergy as “misdeeds” incompatible with being in the Anglican clergy. Inevitably, it made an offensive analogy with pedophilia among Roman Catholic priests.
Gays outing gays continued into the mid-1990s by which time the political climate was changing. The age of consent had been lowered to 18 and would be equalised with the straight age of consent in the year 2000. The dark ages of the 1980s had given way to a new optimism and a very vibrant pub and club scene across British cities.
