Michelangelo Signorile
Michelangelo Signorile | |
---|---|
Born | Brooklyn, New York, U.S. | December 19, 1960
Occupation | Journalist, Radio host, political commentator, columnist |
Genre | LGBT literature |
Notable works | Queer in America |
Spouse |
David Gerstner (m. 2013) |
Michelangelo Signorile (
Signorile is noted for his various books and articles on gay and lesbian politics, and is an outspoken supporter of gay rights. Signorile's seminal 1993 book Queer in America: Sex, The Media, and the Closets of Power explored the negative effects of the LGBT closet, and provided one of the first intellectual justifications for the practice of outing public officials, influencing the debate and treatment of the issue among journalists from that point on. In 1992 Newsweek listed him as one of America's "100 Cultural Elite,"[1] and he is included as #100 in the 2002 book, The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present.[2]
In August 2011, Signorile was inducted into the
Early years
Signorile was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent his early childhood in the 1960s and 1970s in Brooklyn and Staten Island. He attended the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where he majored in journalism. It was in those years that he came to realize his own homosexuality, but remained closeted to many friends and to family.
In the mid-1980s, shortly after graduating from college, Signorile moved to
Activism
In his book Queer in America and in numerous articles and interviews, Signorile has discussed how he began to see that many in the media, among his circles as well, were either sensationalizing AIDS in the 1980s or running away from it. He also began to believe the government was negligent in the face of the epidemic.
Signorile became a gay activist in 1988, after attending a meeting of the controversial grass roots protest group, ACT UP, in New York. Within days of the meeting he was arrested at a protest at St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church at the Citigroup Center, where the Vatican's envoy and the author of much of the Vatican's recent positions against homosexuality, gay rights and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was to give a major speech. (Ratzinger would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI, succeeding Pope John Paul II upon his death in April 2005.) Signorile has explained that he went to the event solely to watch the protesters who were planning on standing up among the attendees and letting their voices be heard. But he became filled with rage while hearing Ratzinger speak, thinking about the homophobia he'd experienced as a child and the Catholic Church's decrees. (He was raised as a Roman Catholic.) "Suddenly," Signorile wrote in Queer in America about the protest, "I jumped up on one of the marble platforms, and looking down, I addressed the entire congregation in the loudest voice I could. My voice rang out as if it were amplified. I pointed at Ratzinger and shouted, 'He is no man of God!' The shocked faces of the assembled Catholics turned to the back of the room to look at me as I continued: 'He is no man of God. He is the devil!'" Signorile was pulled down, handcuffed, and carted off by the police.
Signorile soon became the chair of the media committee of ACT UP, organizing publicity for major, theatrical AIDS activist protests of the time, and taking on the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, New York's City Hall and other government agencies in the media, criticizing them for what AIDS activists saw as their foot-dragging while people were dying. Though controversial, ACT UP and its tactics have been credited with bringing more attention to AIDS among politicians and the media, and speeding the development and approval of HIV drugs in the 1990s. Signorile also was a co-founding member, along with three other ACT UP members, of the in-your-face activist group Queer Nation.
In May 2017, Signorile was criticized for an article that appeared on the Huffington Post. In the piece, he attacked Donald Trump and the Republican legislators supporting his agenda, stating that no Republican congressman "should be able to sit down for a nice, quiet lunch or dinner in a Washington, DC, eatery or even in their own homes", and "should be hounded by protestors everywhere, especially in public ― in restaurants, in shopping centers, in their districts, and yes, on the public property outside their homes and apartments".[7]
The outing controversy
Signorile has been considered a pioneer of outing (though he believes the discussion has often been distorted by the media, and he opposes using a violent, active verb to define the phenomenon).[8] Signorile has argued in favor of outing from a journalistic perspective, calling for the "equalization" of reporting on gay and straight public figures. He has argued that the homosexuality of public figures—and only public figures—should be reported on when relevant.[9] Signorile was a co-founding editor of the gay magazine OutWeek, which launched in June 1989, and which was quickly at the center of heated debates inside and outside the gay community, including controversies over outing. Signorile became the features editor at OutWeek, and eventually stopped working within ACT UP and Queer Nation, though, like most of the staff of OutWeek, he maintained deep ties to both groups.
Signorile saw his role at OutWeek as one of taking on the media and the entertainment industry. From the start of the magazine he wrote a weekly column called "Gossip Watch," which was just that—a watch of the gossip columns. He began writing about the media's double standard in reporting on gay and straight public figures, and how he believed it made gays invisible in the midst of the health crisis. Among those whom Signorile outed at that time included Hollywood producer David Geffen (who has long since acknowledged that he is gay). Geffen, as a record producer, was promoting Guns N' Roses, a rock group which had been attacked for antigay lyrics ("...faggots...spread some fuckin' disease"[10]) and other performers, such as comedian Andrew Dice Clay, whose comedy routines in the late 1980s were seen by many as homophobic and misogynistic.[11] Clay had said in a 1984 stand-up act that in Hollywood they have "herpes, AIDS and fag-itis." Clay has also mocked pleas for AIDS funding ("get a job, buttfucka"), and used antigay slurs; "they don't know if they want to be called gays, homosexuals, fairies," he has said. "I call them cocksuckers."[12] Signorile saw it as relevant to discuss Geffen's closeted homosexuality in that context. Signorile also outed the gossip columnist Liz Smith (who also eventually acknowledged her bisexuality), whom he maintained helped celebrities and others to present themselves as heterosexual when they were in fact gay.
The media and celebrity culture that Signorile vilified took notice of his work. The chic fashion industry bible,
The outing controversy became much larger in March 1990, when Signorile wrote a cover story for OutWeek revealing the homosexuality of the publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes within weeks of his death, headlined "The Other Side of Malcolm Forbes."[14] In a subsequent article in The Village Voice, Signorile charged a media cover-up of his Forbes story, claiming that various news outlets were going to report on it, but later decided against it. Eventually, over a period of months, the story was reported in several news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, but The New York Times still refused to name Forbes, only referring to him as "a recently deceased businessman" who was outed. (It wasn't until five years later, during coverage of Forbes' son Steve's run for the Republican nomination for president in 1996, that the Times reported on Malcolm Forbes' gay life.)[15]
OutWeek folded in June 1991. Signorile joined
Gay culture debates
Signorile wrote columns and feature stories for The Advocate for several years, including the groundbreaking two-part cover story "Out at The New York Times"—in which the paper's gay and lesbian staffers, its top editors and its then-new publisher,
At that time, as an Out magazine columnist and editor-at-large, Signorile soon was at the center of often-heated debates among gay activists, sexual liberationists and HIV prevention experts about gay male sexual culture and the prevalence of unsafe sex and HIV transmission. Signorile wrote a column for Out that sparked much discussion, titled "Unsafe Like Me," in which he addressed the issue by admitting to have slipped up himself, having had an incident of unprotected sex, and discussed what may have led someone like him—a prominent AIDS activist, immersed in the issues of prevention—to have such a lapse. The column was adapted to the op-ed page of The New York Times and inspired a CBS "60 Minutes" treatment of the issue in which Signorile was profiled. Signorile followed up that column with several others that focused on what he saw as some unhealthy aspects of gay culture that contributed to low self-esteem and risk-taking. This eventually grew into his 1997 bestseller Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles and the Passages of Life, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The columns and the book created controversy among some activists; Signorile was criticized by the group
In August 1998, Signorile left Out magazine abruptly in a disagreement with the new editor James Collard. Former Out editor and co-founder, the late Sarah Pettit, a long-time colleague of Signorile's who was also an editor at OutWeek, had been ousted from Out that year in a shake up (Michael Goff had been pushed out earlier) in which she had charged sex discrimination. The new editor, from the UK, had been a promoter of the "post-gay" sensibility, which seemed to eschew activism. According to Signorile, speaking to gay journalist Rex Wockner, Collard wanted him to tone down his writing. "We had a heated discussion and he insulted my sensibilities and it made me so angry I threw water in his face," Signorile told Wockner. "They did not want me to write biting commentary and opinion. They wanted me to do more feature-driven work and I refused to do that because my column in Out has always been a space where I could do commentary, political analysis, features, whatever I wanted. I think it's important to have commentary and solidly researched journalism in the same forum."
The radio years
Several months after leaving Out, Signorile joined The Advocate once again, in December 1998, as a columnist and editor-at-large; his first article was a cover piece taking on the notion of a "post-gay' society as espoused by Out editor Collard.[21] (Within a year after Collard took the post and six months after Signorile left Out, Collard left Out amid reports of a drop in circulation and negative response of a focus group to the magazine.)[22] In 2000, Signorile left The Advocate again, and became a columnist for global Internet site Gay.com, which had just merged with the pioneering LGBT site PlanetOut.com. Signorile traveled around the U.S. and around the world, writing online columns. He covered the controversy surrounding the Millennium March on Washington for LGBT Rights, which divided many in the community regarding its time and purpose and at which a theft occurred at the festival. Signorile reported from Australia and New Zealand, where his partner had taken a position as a professor, and reported on World Pride in Rome in 2000, where activists butted heads with the Vatican, which tried to get the event canceled. During that time Signorile also pioneered Internet radio, webcasting a weekly show on GAYBC.com beginning in 2000, covering the global LGBT community. In an interview, he has described a machine called a "vector" that he would plug into a phone outlet and which allowed him to webcast live via Gaybc's studios in Seattle.(Media Bistro Q & A with Signorile 2002)
In April 2003, Signorile began hosting a radio program, The Michelangelo Signorile Show, on
Signorile has been an editor-at-large and columnist for The Advocate, and an editor-at-large and a columnist for Out magazine. He has written for many newspapers and magazines, including
Books
- Queer In America (ISBN 0-299-19374-8) 1993.
- Outing Yourself (ISBN 0-684-82617-8) 1995.
- Life Outside (ISBN 0-06-092904-9) 1997. (Nominated Lambda Literary Award, Gay Men's Studies)
- Hitting Hard (ISBN 0-7867-1619-3) 2005.
- It's Not Over (ISBN 0-544-381-009) 2015. (Finalists for the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction)
Notes
- ^ Alter, Jonathan. 1992. "The Cultural Elite." Newsweek, October 5: 30–34
- ISBN 0-7582-0100-1
- ^ "Journalists Honored for Work in Media, Activism | News | the Advocate". Archived from the original on April 26, 2012. Retrieved October 8, 2011."Journalists Honored for Work in Media, Activism," The Advocate, August 1, 2011
- ^ Out 100 2012, "Out 100: Michelangelo Signorile," Out, December 2012.
- ^ "It's Not over". Archived from the original on December 30, 2021. Retrieved July 17, 2022.
- ^ NYC Protest and Civil Rights March Opposing Proposition 8, Andy Towle, Towelroad.com, November 13, 2008; accessed November 14, 2008.
- ^ "To Save America We Must Stop Being Polite and Immediately Start Raising Hell". HuffPost. May 10, 2017.
- ^ Signorile, Michelangelo Queer in America, 1993. Chapter 5, "Outing, Part I," pg. 70
- ISBN 0-299-19374-8, Chapter 5, "Outing Part I," pg. 69
- ^ "Lyrics from Gus-N-Roses One in a Million". Archived from the original on July 24, 2010. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
- ^ Queer in America, pg. 304 and Peter Cunningham bio of Clay[permanent dead link].
- YouTube
- ^ Queer in America, Chapter 5, "Outing Part 1," pg. 71
- ^ Signorile, Michelangelo (March 18, 1990), "The Other Side of Malcolm Forbes", Outweek (38): 40–45.
- ^ Bumiller, Elisabeth 1996, The New York Times: In Political Quest, Forbes Runs in Shadow of Father. "Mr.Forbes had to contend at the same time with the first published reports in the gay press of his father's homosexuality. His parents were divorced in 1985, and friends say Mr. Forbes did not discuss his father's life with them. But certainly in the last five years of his life, Malcolm Forbes became increasingly indiscreet..."
- ^ Miller, Stephen, FAIR, 1991. Outings and Innings: Media and the Closet.
- ^ Queer in America, Chapter 8, "Outing, Part II," pg. 161 and also noted in March 2010 Advocate column
- ^ Sarah Pettit, 36, NY Times Obituary 2003
- ^ Crain, Caleb. Lingua Franca 1997: Pleasure Principles: Queer Theorists and Gay Journalists Wrestle Over the Politics of Sex
- ^ Lehman, Susan, Salon, Dec. 24, 1998: "Out's Liquid Lunch" Archived September 7, 2011, at the Wayback Machine & Signorile, Michelangelo, The Advocate, Jan 19, 1999: "What Happened to Gay?"
- ^ Swanson, Carl, New York Observer, February 14, 1999.[dead link]
- ^ Sirius XM Radio Surpasses 25 Million Subscribers, Raises Full-Year Target Hollywood Reporter, July 9, 2013
- ^ "The Advocate 2009. The site offers, among much else, clips of Signorile's television appearances (like his debate with the conservative pundit Laura Ingraham) and a complimentary three-day pass to listen online to his radio show.
References
- Gross, Larry. Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing. University of Minnesota Press, 1993 ISBN 0-8166-2179-9
- Johansson, Warren & Percy, William A. Outing: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence Archived July 5, 2020, at the Wayback Machine. Harrington Park Press, 1994.
- Signorile, Michelangelo (1993). Queer In America: Sex, Media, and the Closets of Power. ISBN 0-299-19374-8.
- Gross, Larry & Woods, James (1999) "The Columbia Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics " ISBN 0-231-10446-4
- Media Bistro Q & A with Signorile 2002
- The Ethics of Outing by Gabriel Rotello
- Signorile and Ratzinger, Advocate.com 2005
- Salon Media Circus, Liquid Lunch Salon.com 1998 Archived September 7, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- Rex Wockner's "Quote UnQuote" 1998[permanent dead link]
- Sarah Pettit, 36, NY Times Obituary 2003
- Signorile's Advocate piece, "Out at the New York Times," reprinted in The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gays in Media, Society and Politics 1999, Larry Gross and James Woods
- Bumiller, Elisabeth 1996, New York Times article on Malcolm Forbes, citing that the multimillionaire was indeed gay
- The Advocate. "The Top 15 Gay(ish) Blogs." June 9, 2009. (accessed June 14, 2009).