The Rebel Wilson matter raises broader privacy concerns. The titbits from others’ lives are not our business, and that goes for your correspondent: Avid Reader No. 1.
I have always believed that an individual’s sexuality is their own business and should be of interest only if there is a reasonable prospect that you might have occasion to proposition that individual for sex. Which is why I am disappointed when someone’s sexuality becomes news. And more so in the past week when it became clear Rebel Wilson had cause to fear her sexuality might be revealed by this masthead without her permission.
Maupin publicly “outed” his friend and erstwhile lover, the actor Rock Hudson, after Hudson had appeared emaciated on a talk show. The actor was succumbing to AIDS at a time when the disease was a death sentence, so in a sense, it was a double outing. “After all,” he argued in the piece reflecting on the ethics of outing, “if you can write about extramarital affairs, abortion, a first lady’s drug problem, or a rock star’s penchant for beating his wife, but you can’t write about Malcolm Forbes’s sexual orientation, what other implication could there be?”The editor concluded that outing was almost a public service, while calling a publication which castigated him for sensationalism and disrespect hypocritical, because it then ran a story about...
The ex-WAG whose friend accidentally broadcast her snorting a line of cocaine off a Kmart plate was no hypocrite. And yet she became the focal point for some highly hypocritical commentary from people who tut-tutted magnificently while forgetting their own colourful histories.And then there’s my very own hypocrisy, because your correspondent is Avid Reader No. 1 of all these salacious titbits which attract the interest of the public without being in the public interest at all.