Luke Ford

If you know Ray Richmond, you don’t immediately think "gentle" and "sensitive."

He’s a slashing writer and conversationalist.

In his column today, however, Ray sounds like a poor man’s Oprah Winfrey as he tries to repair his reputation as a good Hollywood liberal after outing Merv Griffin last week.

Sparking this level of tumult was not my intention going in, nor certainly was specifically "outing" Griffin. My goal was instead to see if honesty, sensitivity, context and tone made any difference whatsoever when addressing the subject of sexual orientation — or if snickering behind someone’s back and making them the object of sophomoric jokes remained somehow more palatable so long as the elephant in the room stayed publicly unacknowledged.

…What I continue to wrestle with is the whole question of how such a gentle, respectful utterance could provoke such a severe and polarizing reaction. I naturally acknowledge that there are two ways of looking at this, and one is that I had no right to override Griffin’s personal decision to keep his private life his own business. I opted instead to err on the side of truth and candor, with the idea that disclosing Merv’s being gay can’t personally impact him after death and — unless we attach shame to it — ought not to taint his legacy in any way.

…His homosexuality should be treated as another mundane detail in the larger picture of a great and fascinating life. That it remains so profoundly significant and scandalous in the minds of so many should alert us to the land mines that obstruct the arduous journey to enlightenment.

Ray reminds me of an actress justifying doing nude scenes in the name of art or a director justifying the insertion of a hardcore scene in his movie by calling it gentle, sensitive, and sophisticated.

Of course a person’s sexuality, particularly in this sexually obsessed age, is going to be an important part of who they are.

As long as this society is shaped by Judaism and Christianity, most people are not going to think that men sodomizing other men is cool. No matter how sensitive and supportive the outing, much of the population is going to say, "I always knew he was a fag!"

Sex is so powerful that it tends to overwhelm all other considerations. A homosexual could invent a cure for cancer and he would still be primarily known to at least half the population as a homo.

I’m not saying we should drag them behind trucks. I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with being interested in somebody’s sex life.

If you claim you are interested in Jane Doe but have no interest in Jane Doe’s sex life, then I doubt you have a genuine interest in Jane Doe.

As a great man once said, "Everything we do affects other people." That includes what we do with our genitals.

Why would Ray be so naive as to think that a gentle and sensitive outing would be any less controversial than a crass outing?

The sensitivity with which someone is outed is about 1/1000th as important as the outing.

Richmond either knew when he wrote the column that he was going to spark a tumult or he’s a moron.

I don’t think Ray’s a moron.

I think he knew he was writing a controversial column but once he was in the middle of the tempest realized he didn’t like it.

I have few qualms about outing celebrities. If someone has devoted their life to becoming famous and constantly seeks publicity, then they shouldn’t complain when their sexual orientation is revealed.

(If a celeb does not seek attention, if the celeb is a serious actor such as Jodie Foster and Meryl Streep, then I believe they are more deserving of being left alone.)

Ray writes: "His homosexuality should be treated as another mundane detail in the larger picture of a great and fascinating life."

On what planet? On this planet, if somebody violates the sexual norms of society (and man-on-man sex violates the norms of all those with traditional values, particularly those who believe God is the ultimate author of the Bible), that’s likely to be the most talked-about part of their personality.

Ray wants a person’s sexual orientation to be a mundane fact.

What a dull world he seeks.

I wonder what role politics plays in all this.

As George Will wrote in The NYT Book Review:

For more than three decades, [Jeffrey Peter] Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth, has been a senior editor of National Review. There he has seen, and helped to referee, conservatism’s struggles of self-definition. His book is a gossipy memoir leavened by a quick skimming of 50 years of political history. "I confess," he says, "to a fondness for gossip, which, indeed, is a conservative genre. Gossips do not want to change the world; they want to enjoy it."