Michelangelo Signorile is among the most famous?some would say infamous?figures in contemporary gay journalism. Born and raised in Brooklyn and Staten Island, he has lived in Manhattan for the last 17 years. He became involved with ACT UP in the late 80s, and in 1989 cofounded OutWeek, where his name became synonymous with the controversy over outing. Through the 90s he wrote for and was an editor at The Advocate and Out, and for the last year has been editor-at-large for Gay.com, writing a weekly column there. His books include Life Outside and Outing Yourself. A few weeks ago, he caused a new furor with a piece in LGNY "outing" conservative gay columnist Andrew Sullivan's taste for unprotected sex.
He met with us at the New York Press offices Thursday, June 7.
Russ Smith: What's your fondest memory of OutWeek?
Fondest memory? God?fondest memories really were all of the people. We really just had an absolute ball writing things that would get people pissed off. And as you know, it's a thrill in this city to get people pissed off, because there is such an arrogant ownership of what's supposed to be the media and what's supposed to be out there. We were just loving writing stuff that people didn't want to see in print. And really, my fondest memories were when people would call up and be mad.
RS: Who would call up?
People in media, people in City Hall. Not really rival gay publications as much as a lot of people in the mainstream media.
RS: Were the people you were pissing off from an older generation?
A lot of them were the older generation, for sure. Although Gabriel Rotello, another founding editor, was older than me?he's about 46 or 47 at this point. We had a lot of older people who were very supportive, particularly activists and what-not. I'd say a lot of it was the activism coming off the streets that we were infusing into the publication?that was definitely the younger generation at the time.
RS: How did it all end? It was messy?
Yeah?everything there was dramatic [smiles]. For every high, there was a low. It was a crazy place, and I was trying not to pay attention to the fact that the magazine was about to fold. There were all kinds of political divisions. There was a staff mutiny, and a vote of no-confidence in Gabriel, that was all sort of manipulated by the investors... I think a lot of us who were writers didn't want to pay attention to that stuff, and one day it just folded.
RS: How would you describe the difference in gay activism now from 10 years ago?
Things have become very, very mainstreamed, very complacent, very corporate. Back then, you had mainstream groups and gay politics figures, but you also had a tremendous amount of activism on the streets, and those mainstream leaders weren't as powerful as they are now. So that activism on the streets really had a lot of power in its own right. Today, those mainstream leaders have much more power. There's been a corporatizing of the gay movement. A lot of the AIDS fundraising that was done back then, which was necessary because there was no money, was all about bringing corporate people into the gay movement. Consequently, they all just?
RS: So a lot of people have been assimilated?
Absolutely. What you have now is that a lot of people who are on the boards of gay groups are lobbyists for corporations. They don't see a conflict of interest at all. They see it as, well, it's good that we're lobbyists, we have experience lobbying in Washington. Whereas when you look at something like when the Human Rights Campaign endorsed D'Amato?what was that all about? Can you divorce the fact that a lot of the people on the board who voted for that endorsement are lobbyists for companies like AOL Time Warner, and might benefit from Al D'Amato? So, that's the kind of corporatizing that's happening, at the same time that the activism on the streets has pretty much dried up.
John Strausbaugh: Isn't that the natural evolution of a successful political movement, though? From the streets to the mainstream?
I think in some ways when you have institutions and prominent figures supporting you, there's no question that that's a good thing. Part of that was the Hollywoodizing as well. Hollywood had initially ignored AIDS, ignored gay rights, and by the mid-90s you had prominent studios and celebrities supporting gay rights. All of that is good.
The downside is that the activist voice is lost. It becomes all about treading lightly and all about diplomacy, and you have a very feeble interaction with the powers that be. I think you see that in other civil rights movements. Look at the recent election campaign and you see that. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed Al Gore before the primaries were even over. Their thing with him was probably, you endorse me early, and I'll be with you later. But the truth is he dropped gay issues entirely. And they spent all summer attacking Nader, who, in the end, gets 3 percent of the vote. How much of that is gay votes? You're talking about this small amount of people. They spent all summer traveling with Gore and attacking Nader, instead of telling Gore, "Why don't you talk about gay issues and show how you're different from George Bush?" Then when the vote comes out, 25 percent of the gay vote goes to Bush, 5 percent to Nader and the rest to Gore. That 25 percent to Bush would've made a big difference. That 5 percent would've been nothing.
RS: Well, also that's a block of votes that Gore took for granted. Same thing with blacks. Thinking that he's got them in the bag and doesn't want to alienate the swing voters he has to get. Which is so insulting.
Absolutely. With blacks he might have a point, because when you look at the numbers they did overwhelmingly go for him. I think they underestimated how incredibly diverse the gay community is. It's economically exactly in the same place that the whole country is. It's not economically oppressed in a way that, say, black people are. So, the candidates are going to speak to a lot of different issues. You can't take the gay vote for granted. If you think George Bush is gonna be bad on gay issues, you've gotta really say that very forcefully.
RS: It seems to me that the gay vote is somewhat similar to the Jewish vote.
I think that's true.
RS: Bush took 20 percent of the Jewish vote, and you say he took 25 percent of the gay vote?that's a big block for the Democrats not to get.
And particularly when you look at the steady progression of this?and I think this has probably happened with Jews as well. In 1992, Bush Sr. took something like 12 or 14 percent. In 1996 it's up to 23 percent. In 2000, it's up to 25 percent. So you see the Democrats losing that incrementally. Part of it in the last one was Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act right before the elections. Part of it was Gore allowing himself to think, "Oh, I've got them in the bag," and not really speaking to the issues.
JS: Has the analysis been done on who that 25-percent block is, how they break down demographically within the larger pool of gay voters?
That's interesting. No, I haven't seen any breakdown. I think there's been a breakdown by male and female, and it's overwhelmingly male. Lesbians tend to be much more Democratic. I'm not sure in terms of age group. I've seen a state-by-state breakdown, and certainly in conservative states it's bigger than that 25 percent.
But I agree that the gay movement is similar to the situation of Jews in America, because they're not economically disenfranchised disproportionately. They don't wear their difference. They're not like women or African-Americans, where you know right away. They can closet themselves at different moments.
RS: Well, and different gays have different concerns, too. That's progress, really.
Yeah, it's the double-edged sword, really. Everything kinda starts to break down, with a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full situation. It's almost like there's more progress in the beginning than later on. Okay, there's been a cultural acceptance to an extent. Now, it's trying to push legislation through, and I think that's tougher.
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RS: Chris, you can talk about this, since you're the youngest one here. There's been all sorts of writing about the 20th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, and all sorts of stories about rising complacency. What's that about with your generation? With the understanding that it seems to be disproportionately in the black population, what's happening?
Christopher Carbone: I think it's a variety of things. Part of it is that people in the age group 23-to-29 haven't necessarily lost someone to AIDS, or haven't grown up seeing someone with it. But I think a lot of it is a complacency that the media has lulled people into. You read different articles about the drug cocktails, making it seem like AIDS is more manageable and discounting the fact that these people still have to take 20 different pills per day...
I just wrote a column about how it's almost like we've gone full circle. It's very similar for this generation to what it was for my generation in the early 80s, which was then our early 20s. Early 80s, I was in college, you don't have a care in the world. You hear about this thing. It's not really being played up in the media. There's this idea out there that you're supposed to protect yourself with a condom. You do it, sporadically. You don't do it all the time. You kind of think it's not about you. It's about these older people. No one's really talking about it. For my generation, the real thing was, in this celebrity culture, when Rock Hudson went in 1985?suddenly, it was, "Oh my God, this thing is real."
And I think it's similar to today. Around the mid-90s, coverage just dropped on AIDS. The idea is out there for young people. They don't know anybody. They think it's just older people who have it. They think it can't really affect them. So now we're seeing these infection rates that are back to almost where they were in the 80s.
CC: I read an article recently about how the New York City Dept. of Health is doing a study on how faith communities, with government assistance, can try to educate people about prevention. A lot of African-Americans tend to come from more religious backgrounds. And I think it's kind of strange that complacency is so high in that community.
There's a lot of complicated reasoning behind it. Gabriel Rotello wrote in his book Sexual Ecology about core groups and sexual mixing?about how sometimes it can really stay in one small group if there isn't a lot of sexual mixing.
It is about education and religious beliefs. I also think a factor is the drugs. White people and middle-class people have more access to these drugs, and the drugs bring your viral load down. You're less infectious. Still, overall?because the number in the white [gay] community, 2.5 [rate of infection], is still way too high?the epidemic will continue to grow. The unsafe sex is overcoming [the effect of] the infectiousness being brought down by the drugs. In the black [gay] community, it's now a 14 percent infection rate per year.
RS: When did the drugs start becoming mainstream?
People were in clinical trials in the early 90s. ACT UP and other groups really scored a victory with the FDA and the NIH by getting access to these drugs very quickly. A lot of people were getting into the clinical trials. These drugs were approved very rapidly, upon seeing an effect in people. So by the mid-90s you really had quite a few people?'95, '96?on the drugs. And we weren't [yet] seeing any long-term side effects. Now, I think I read in Newsweek yesterday, every one of the 450,000 people on these drugs is going to develop long-term side effects. The number-one cause of death for people with AIDS is going to be liver disease. These drugs have extraordinary side effects. People wanted to believe this was it, but this isn't it.
Plus, this virus is extraordinarily adept at mutating. I talked to someone the other day?and this was about the fourth or fifth person I've spoken to?who was on their last combination of the drugs, and there's nothing new really in the pipeline. Already getting opportunistic infections. Was this a reprieve? Who knows?
CC: With all of these mutations, is a vaccine where the new research should be?
Yeah, but with all the mutations, that presents a problem, too. If you have all of this unsafe sex going on, and rapid transmission of drug-resistant strains, how does a vaccine keep up with that? You'd have to have several vaccines for every new strain, and meanwhile they're spreading.
RS: So, what do you think will happen in the next couple of years? It clearly seems that, if not today, in a year this is going to reach another crisis point.
It definitely seems the case. In '97, when my book Life Outside came out, and Gabriel Rotello's Sexual Ecology, we both?and this was not prophetic on our part, we're journalists and we were doing the research?we both said this was going to happen. And we were under enormous attack. Larry Kramer was speaking out, as he normally does, and we got attacked as being neocons, we were trying to create a sex panic and we were trying to scare people and all of this kind of thing. That was when this glamorization of unsafe sex, bareback sex, began coming to the forefront. And now we're seeing?well, it's four years later. Back then, they were alarmed that the infection rate was 2.5 percent overall, and now it's doubled, almost, to 4.5 or something like that, so it's happening.
You know, I have to give credit to Gabriel, because he really did the science, and everything that he said has been coming true. If more of what he said comes true, in a couple of years, you're absolutely right, it's going to be a much more acute crisis. Laurie Garrett, too, had written all of this in Esquire about two years ago. Her timing might've been a little off, on when we'd start to see the drugs start to fail people, but it's happening. The way she described it was we have a dam, we have all these new infections, and the drugs are holding them off, but once the drugs start failing, the dam's gonna break...
Some of those people who were at the forefront, many of them activists who had the connections and got in the clinical trials?they're either on their last combinations or they're dead. That's the other thing. People think people aren't dying. I know several people in the last few years?particularly in the last year and a half?who were original, they started on AZT and all these combinations way back, and they're dead now because nothing worked.
JS: Is this one of the issues that would be better addressed from a more activist stand or a mainstream stand?
It's very frustrating. We tried to kick up a storm in 1997. I wrote columns, and it again played out the way it did in the 80s. [Back then] you had people yelling at Randy Shilts for doing his reporting, you had people claiming that the government was twisting the figures, you had people claiming the media was distorting it all, it was all an attempt to hamper gay sex. The only thing that stopped all that was people dying?then all of a sudden, everybody stuck to the safer-sex ethic. The gay community did an extraordinary job sticking to a safer-sex ethic while it was all really scary. I wrote a column a couple of years ago in The Advocate saying fear really works, and I was attacked like you wouldn't believe, saying fear doesn't work, you need to have an understanding with people?well, yeah, that's true, but fear works. And when you have people afraid that they're gonna die, and they know people with AIDS and they see it in the media and they see images, they're fearful. When they just see, as it is now, drug companies advertising drugs with people climbing mountains and looking beautiful, it doesn't seem like AIDS is that bad... And as Chris was saying, the media has tended to focus on AIDS as manageable, and it's kind of like a sidebar, the idea of what the regimens are, the side effects, etc. But those pictures of Larry Kramer in Newsweek this week, I think go further to really send the message out there, like this is your future. You're going to have advanced liver disease and look like this. He looks pregnant, he's out to here [motions with hands] with his liver about to explode.
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RS: What did you think of Brendan Lemon's talking about his closeted baseball-player lover in Out last month?
I was amazed at the attention that it got. I guess it had a great titillation factor. My first reaction on reading it was thinking, "Is this for real? Would this guy really...?"
RS: I thought it was a brilliant publicity move for Out.
Would this guy really talk about this man he's involved with in this way, and put him at that kind of risk of exposure? After reading some interviews with him, though, I think it's true. A lot of people put up a trial balloon when they're coming out. They'll test the waters. He just happens to be a big celebrity. I was thinking, though, it's a great publicity stunt even if it's true, because now if the guy does come out, where's he gonna do it? On the cover of Out.
RS: I don't know if it's true or not, but I think it's great marketing. Whether it's a hoax or not, it's terrific. People were talking about it. I was at Yankee Stadium and the people ahead of me in the concession stand were saying, "Do you think it's a Met or a Yankee? God, I hope not a Yankee."
That's funny.
RS: People who'd never heard of Out went to that website.
It was incredible. Then you had all these sports columnists, dying for something to write about, writing great things. So it did a lot of good in that sense. It got a lot of talk out there.
RS: I wonder if an active male sports figure will come out.
Sports and Wall Street are the last frontiers.
RS: Hollywood, too.
Hollywood, too. Although Hollywood is a strange one because it's all about the product. Otherwise they're very tolerant. You can be gay in Hollywood if you're a producer, a director, a writer. That's all fine and everybody has benefits and everybody's great.
RS: But not if you're the star of a World War II movie.
No. The idea is, look, that's our bread and butter, so we're not gonna mess with that. Money is always conservative, no matter how liberal the industry is. They've been that way forever. There's always been a disconnect between Hollywood's liberal politics and a lot of the product that it produces, even going back to how Jews were in the industry.
RS: Why do you say Wall Street?
Wall Street has this idea of your personal life, in general, that is something that you're supposed to keep very discreet. There's one openly gay member of the New York Stock Exchange, whose family's been in the business for generations. And he's even said, when he came out at first, everybody was accepting, but he's felt this homophobia now after a couple of years. I interviewed him once on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and you get it once you're down there. It is like a sports arena. It is about male bonding, and gay men might be threatening in that environment. It's a place where the bluebloods and the guys from Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island mix for that moment. It's very sportslike, it's very much about aggression. There aren't many women, really...
For instance, I worked on that list for the New York gay cover, and Wall Street was a tough one. That whole thing was very weird. Again, it reminded me of Jews 50 years ago, it was like, "Yes, I'm Jewish, but do I really want to advertise it?" There were a lot of people who are out but who didn't want to be photographed for the cover. "Well, I don't know if I wanna be on this list." Like you're singling me out for my sexual orientation, and maybe that's not the best thing for my company to see, even if it's okay with them. Wall Street was one area where we really had a problem getting people to be on that list.
RS: What about politics?
In New York politics, every politician has several openly gay aides, and the gay community is a big constituency.
RS: Sure, but that's New York. Obviously DC has a huge gay population. It stands to reason that, since politics is the main industry there?
Yeah, DC is a weird place. Back in '92, when I was working on my first book, it became clear to me that among staffers on the Hill there's a disproportionate number of gays and lesbians. Because in general it requires people who are so dedicated, they don't have to go home to kids, a husband or wife, they're gonna live right there in the District and work until 11 o'clock at night, and a lot of gay people fit that bill. They don't have three kids at home living in the suburbs?although obviously there are a lot of gay people doing that. So you have a lot of them working on the Hill, even working for members of Congress who are antigay.
RS: You don't have many openly gay?well, no senators?
No senators. What is it, three congresspeople? Barney Frank, [Jim] Kolbe, Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin. She's the first one to actually win an election, first term, being openly lesbian.
RS: They've gotten reelected?
Right, right. But she was the first whose whole career was open. So it's taken that long to just get one representative in Congress.
RS: Which seems sort of amazing. You would think there'd be a gay member from New York or California.
Yeah, it may take another generation. Because right now you have?New York and California are perfect examples?several people in the state legislatures who are openly gay, and that may be their next logical step. Here we've got Tom Duane, Deborah Glick. And you've got a bunch of people on City Council who probably are gonna go up to state legislature. And California, you have quite a few. I think Sheila Kuehl will probably at some point run for Congress out of California.
RS: In the New York mayor's race, where do you see the gay block going?
The New York City gay community is pretty liberal, left. I think Green is going to take most of it, Hevesi will take some, there'll be a little bit for Bloomberg. But I think in the primary we're gonna see probably Green take most of it.
RS: Green by default, or Green with enthusiasm?
I think Green with enthusiasm, because he's got a good machine speaking to the gay community, he's got good people who are very connected and have in the past been able to turn out the gay vote. I think people see him as somebody who's loyal on a lot of the issues.
RS: Who would you like to see as the next mayor?
I have been supportive of Green. If it were between Hevesi and Green, I don't trust Hevesi, I think he's been very opportunistic in terms of which way he'll go. Whatever you say about Green, he's liberal-left, he is there. Bloomberg is trying to court the gay vote. I'm curious to see what he's gonna talk about and what he's gonna do.
Giuliani really did a pretty efficient job of getting a lot of gay voters and speaking to their issues. Even while with other constituencies, you know, he had a problem. I think he split a lot of gay voters, who maybe didn't like his racial politics. But if you were just gonna vote for him on gay issues, he was good. He probably did more?he did do more?than any other mayor has done. If Bloomberg could articulate the same thing, he has a shot at taking a lot of the gay vote.
RS: I think Giuliani did well with gay voters not just on gay issues, I think he did it on quality-of-life issues as well. You know, it's a lot nicer walking down Houston St. having lights on and not stepping on crack vials.
Absolutely. And I think that for a lot of people, they couldn't argue that things weren't better. Who knows where the homeless people were sent, but they weren't on the street anymore. He didn't give too much to be angry about in terms of gay issues. He marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade, but he marched in the Gay Pride parade. In many ways he was not that much different from Bill Clinton. Giuliani was instrumental in getting domestic partnership benefits for city employees. And if Bloomberg is gonna portray himself as Giuliani without the baggage, he may get a lot of voters, too, in the gay community.
RS: A big question is, who does Staten Island vote for?
Absolutely. I grew up in Staten Island. I had a talk with one of Bloomberg's people about that. Staten Islanders are all Reagan Democrats. They went for Giuliani because he said, I'm gonna do all this stuff for you. And they helped him. He did tons of stuff for Staten Island, but they are not to be taken for granted as Republican voters. They will just as soon go back to the Democratic Party. He will have to fight for them and promise them a lot of things. I'm not sure that Bloomberg is up for going out into the trenches of Staten Island and walking about the Staten Island Mall.
RS: It's hard for me to see that borough going heavily for Green.
It's interesting. My family, I kinda use them as a barometer a lot. They did Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Dole, Gore. And their whole feeling on Gore versus Bush was a very conservative vote. They felt with Gore that everything's going fine, why screw everything up? That's the kind of conservative they are out there. So I'm curious how they look at this now?which one out of Green and Bloomberg is the status quo that you go with? That's the interesting question.