Is it Okay to be "In the Closet"?

If a Lavender Marriage comes with two bathrooms, I'm sold.

Yesterday, Barry Diller’s Who Knew was released, and given the monumental influence that its author has had on media in the half-decade plus that he has been active, the fanfare it had been receiving prior to publication definitely felt earned: his achievements include creating the “Movie of the Week” genre, bringing the groundbreaking Roots to the screen, steering Paramount Pictures to produce some of its biggest hits (Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Beverly Hills Cop), launching a fourth broadcast television network (Fox), mentoring some of the most influential entertainment executives of all time (Eisner, Katzenberg). Furthermore, New York residents and visitors (so, so many visitors) have him to thank for his support of the construction of the elevated park in New York known as the Highline. Quite a bit of ground covered within the book’s 300-plus pages, you might guess! However, since an excerpt was teased in the press two weeks ago, it seems like what people have most wanted to talk about was…his love life?

Someone as shrewd about public tastes as Mr. Diller would not need to be told that sex sells, and besides, such a response to someone’s life story is not without precedent: perhaps the biggest headline to register with the press and public from Britney Spears’s 2023 The Woman in Me were not revelations about the long arc of her career, her conservatorship, or her thoughts about the media’s borderline criminal intrusion into her life or the mental health struggles it exacerbated (if not activated), but her relationship with Justin Timberlake. In fact, I will confess that’s largely what I remember, and I read the damn thing. But those who might be tempted to interpret this as men too can finally have their professional accomplishments relegated to the backseat while their private lives are pushed into shotgun will disappointed, for it’s fairly undeniable that there’s one single reason that it's his romantic confessions have created such a stir: Mr. Diller is gay.

Of course, he is hardly the first prominent person to publicly identify as queer and in truth, his sexual attraction to men is something that many people who know even a few things about him have known for a long time. But it’s the first time that he has discussed it, and this does make him pretty unique within his industry, his generation and his valence of fame: most of the people whom we might (somewhat archaically) still term “openly gay” tend to be creatives ((artists, fashion designers, actors, musicians), not executives or – the word that probably best describes him – moguls. Though it may be hard to imagine now, there was an era in which both Elton John and Calvin Klein were married to women – without the messages that it was for estate planning or to have someone to let tradesmen in while they traveled. Believe it or not, we live in a world where even Liberace went to this death — from AIDS — without confirming what we all knew

A still from Herb Ritts’s video for the 1992 Michael Jackson’s single “In The Closet.”

Because I have not yet read the book – which has been described as “combination business memoir and personal journey” I cannot say whether the media’s hard emphasis on his declaration is warranted, but even if they have gone a bit overboard, I don’t want to diminish it either: no person’s understanding of who they really are is a quick or seamless process, and that extends to whom they desire intimately. But in a time as marked by uninterrogated heteronormativity and casual homophobia as his must have been would surely have made this reckoning particularly maze-like; Mr. Diller is now 83 years old, making him over thirty when homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). But I do think the reaction bears the evidence that that we as society have a long, wide and very deep orientation toward regarding to anything other than heterosexuality as an “alternative” lifestyle even if we don’t “judge” it per se, and examples are all around. How else to explain the attention given to straight (usually male) actors playing gay characters, or the fact that charges of deploying gay storylines for titillation or controversy is a thing – see everything from Basic Instinct, poor lovelorn, never-a-groom Matt on Melrose Place to this novel by Tinx (is this a book Substack now?).

But while the hetero-pilled mainstream seem to have welcomed Mr. Diller’s disclosure as “brave” or a watershed, we all know better than to think that the story ends there. I happened to encounter an except via the New York Magazine Instagram as was quickly reminded that if you haven’t visited a comments section, can you say you know what people really think? It was there that I learned that there are those who are not applauding Mr. Diller’s courage, not everyone feels inspired or “seen” by his disclosure, not at all. In fact, they are are saying: what took you so long, dude? They regard his ambivalence – best embodied (according to them) by his 2001 marriage to Diane von Furstenberg – as a gesture that just reinforced the shame and invisibility that a hostile society inflicts. Though I generally think that citing social media comments is a cop-out (I immediately dismiss any article or promotion that relies on Twitter feedback as a source and probably so should you), I do think they best crystallize of if not the discourse, then the counterpoint, the dissent, the nuance in the cultural conversation, so here goes: “Selfish to marry a woman,” someone wrote, while another user said “Mr. Diller is entitled to his privacy…but I do hope his self- reflection has allowed him to look into the blatant homophobia and self-loathing that kind of statement represents.” A different reader opined “He wanted all the perks of being straight, and all the sexual upsides of being gay. He got them. Most gay people don’t have that luxury.”

It's not hard to understand how people feel this way – there are those still living who sacrificed much to be able to live authentically, and faced much greater risks and steeper consequences – violence, job loss, lack of legal protection and more; their struggles are hardly ancient history. My own generation (X) exists within in a funny tidal pattern in the sea change of gay acceptance: it was much more common for those just above us to be (or remain) closeted within all but a very limited network if they were gay, while their non-gay counterparts might claim to not know any gay people. Meanwhile, their own presence in popular culture was limited to gags, like Jack Tripper playing the randy, limp-wristed clown in order to keep his name next to Janet and Chrissy’s on the lease and M*A*S*H’s Colonel Klinger’s cross-dressing to earn a military discharge. Meanwhile, the generation below us got to be formed by a world that contained realrepresentation of dimensional queer identities and themes: think Pedro Zamora on The Real World, or Willand Jack on Will & Grace. By my early thirties, I found myself bookended by friends ten years older who had waited until well after college to come out, and friends ten years younger who had never been “in.”

We should recognize the men and women who did make the bold choice, especially given that they all had significantly less influence to use as leverage or stop the tongues of the scolds and moralizers than a brilliant executive at the top of the worldwide entertainment industry did. But I don’t think this prevents us from having empathy for however someone in Mr. Diller’s position might have seen his own options, or that what the “cause” had to gain was his to personally lose. For all his talent, maybe a more formal disclosure of his sexuality would have jeopardized further career advancement, even if it was just the difference between something everyone knew and declaring it out loud. Could living as an out gay man have been an empowering gesture of pride and solidarity with all sorts of marginalized people who would have supported him in kind? Possibly, but there’s no way to know if that’s how it would have played out, or if it’s just a Hollywood version of Diller’s Hollywood story.

But I think there are bigger concepts for us to contemplate here, and like many things, they’re wrapped up inside a lot of other, maybe unanswerable questions. Thanks to social media, the obligation we tend to hang – though sometimes fairly – on powerful people to be the standard-bearers for certain causes is currently as widespread as it is peculiar. I’ve talked about the challenges of the argument that people with “followings” should “use their platforms,” and the speed with which we conflate doing good, doing nothing and doing harm. Ironically, “Silence Equals Death” was a slogan of the AIDS crisis that probably protected and extended many lives by rallying people across the country to push for more research, acknowledgment and compassion in the fight against HIV and AIDS; nearly four decades later, the idea of “silence equals violence” has destroyed any immediate chance for coalition by putting people of similar political persuasion at each other’s throats.

I will be the first to admit that there is something that strikes me as puzzling and inauthentic about the public figures who are rumored to be gay but consistently shut down all conversation about their romantic lives, participate in so-called “contract relationships” or otherwise pursue resolutely and insistently macho personae in their roles or appearances. But then I have to remind myself that I have no idea what it’s like to bear someone else’s cross, or even why they struggle with that cross at all. I also have to acknowledge that likely because I belong to marginalized groups whose presentation cannot be concealed or switched, it’s harder for me to conceive of the idea that of revelation probably feels kinda scary – especially when you’ve been seen as a straight white male your whole life, which (according to legend at least) lets you feel prettydamn good, all of the time. It can’t help that sacrifice is not a virtue that we Americans tend to embrace.

Inside this backlash, those of us who are even a little on the side of progressive ideals are issued a further caution: we need to be more diligent about spotting the inconsistency in embracing a wholesale “live and let live” approach as long as the results aren’t “problematic,” i.e., at odds with our overall agenda and ideals. We’ve seen other versions of this: women who snipe about women who dress provocatively, “using” their sexuality; ethnic minorities who call on their fellow group members to speak (or stay silent) about certain issues and regard any contrary ideology as betrayal. The point of letting people be who they are is…letting people be who they are. Sometimes our quest for collective liberation (or just protection from harm) results in bruising purity tests that ultimately cede more ground to oppressors – or turns us into them. As much as we would wish it were true, the fact is that that there is no single way to be a “good person,” no silver bullet of equality or justice. So ultimately, if we are one the side of “love is love,” we cannot be affronted if a member of the group this slogan was meant to champion ends up marrying the opposite sex. By Diller and von Furstenberg’s mutual accounts (and those of the people who know them), it was in each other that they unquestionably found their “person,” so they simply made it official. What that entails – in terms physical or metaphysical – is not for us to know, and not for any of the salacious reasons, but for this one alone: could you be compelled explain why and how you love your own beloved? As Pablo Neruda wrote, you love a person without knowing when or from where; you love because you know no other way.

In the midst of all of this, however, is the fact that the political stakes of this game have changed with unprecedented speed. The current administration’s active erasure of gay and trans visibility does not just call on group members to be “courageous,” it asks this of us all: it’s no “weaker” to stay in the closet than it is to enable or endorse the maniacs hell-bent on constructing them.