Witeck sees an entertainment industry that’s surprisingly brittle and outmoded, “behind on cultural change,” and which is, despite spending huge sums on audience surveys and marketing, still not able to properly “calibrate” its audiences the way professional pollsters do. “The world has changed,” Witeck says, “and Hollywood needs to catch up.”
Kevin Scanlon
Kevin Scanlon
“I didn’t want it in The Enquirer, so I called TMZ and told Harvey it’s a go.” —Howard Bragman on Chastity Bono’s transformation
Related Content
More About
On the day the documentary crew’s cameras started rolling, and the young producer started with a question about a gay slur, Howard Bragman had already been pondering the difficulties facing gay actors who stay in the closet. He figures it’s becoming increasingly impossible to live a public life that’s separate from a personal one.
“Clearly, we live in a very different time,” the publicist says. “You can bet that if you’re a gay actor and show up at a gay bar, someone will blog about it or Twitter it.”
To wit, in 2006, blogger Perez Hilton was first to report that Neil Patrick Harris is gay and, of course, TMZ revealed (with Bragman’s cooperation) Chastity Bono’s plan to become a man. Hilton regularly blogged about actress Lindsay Lohan and her relationship with Samantha Ronson, which eventually led to Lohan’s public confirmation in 2008 that she was dating Ronson.
“If you look at many of the cases of people coming out,” says Michelangelo Signorile, a gay writer who became famous in the 1980s and ’90s after outing entertainment mogul David Geffen and gossip columnist Liz Smith, and who now hosts a weekday talk show on Sirius/XM with a gay take on current affairs, “it’s happened because of the Internet.”
Signorile says that in the past he was only “reporting” a “truth” that mainstream media were either ignoring or actively distorting by claiming a gay man was in a serious relationship with a woman when that was not the case. “At the time,” says Signorile, who made big news when he claimed magazine mogul Malcolm Forbes is gay, “you had people outright lying. Journalists have to treat gay public figures the same as straight public figures. I called it reporting, not outing.”
TMZ’s Harvey Levin says he doesn’t try to find out if someone is gay. “We’re not bedroom bullies,” says the executive producer. “Celebrities do have zones of privacy. There are limits.”
Asked if TMZ has ever perpetuated the myth that a gay actor is straight, Levin says not to his knowledge. But he doesn’t think that “bold statements”— the kind that Bragman practices — are always best, and suggests that TMZ’s daily coverage allows the public to better connect with gay — or straight — actors as real people. “We show the day-to-day life of people over years.”
Kirby Dick, the documentary filmmaker, doesn’t necessarily see it that way. “A gay celebrity has more impact on the culture than a gay politician who comes out.” He calls such an event a “real boon” for gay rights.
By contrast, Signorile, author of Queer in America, about the power of media on gay life, says that when actors stay in the closet, “it puts out this idea that gay people in Hollywood don’t exist.”
Unless famous gay actors seek out Bragman, Hollywood will never dismantle its closet, says journalist Hernandez. “It’s up to the actors to do it. They have to not care about professional repercussions. They have to believe in their talent and be willing to possibly lose some jobs. They can change the system, and they have to come out to do it.”
Perez Hilton, who recently encountered a huge backlash from the gay community when he posted sex photos of Dustin Lance Black, the openly gay, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk, offers up an even more dramatic vision of the future: “If every single gay celebrity came out at the same time,” Hilton says, “it would rock this world.”
Contact Patrick Range McDonald at pmcdonald@laweekly.com.
