No more gawking at gay leaders, people

The rising acceptance of gay leaders has taken the sting out of stories outing them

In 2016, Gawker Media was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy when it lost a case against Terry Gene Bollea, whom regular readers of this newspaper are unlikely to recognise as the wrestler known better by his trade name, Hulk Hogan. It later turned out Mr Bollea’s lawsuit — he had sued Gawker for publishing a sex tape — was financed by Peter Thiel.

Mr Thiel, a well-regarded entrepreneur and investor from the Silicon Valley in the United States, was upset with Gawker, which, nine years previously, had written about his being gay. That was the sort of thing Gawker did, as it became, as many reckon, the first media outfit that truly made use of the tools internet technologies put in the hands of journalists.

Some would however object to using the term “journalists” to describe those who wrote for Gawker. Indeed, they changed the rules by breaking the cycle of writing and publishing, which, until then, was largely a replication of the print journalism cycle. A typical Gawker writer wrote by truckloads, sometimes many articles in a single day.

They were also abrasive and brought a paparazzi-like zeal to their coverage. They were more keen on peeping into people’s private lives than asking probing questions that would lead to stories of significance and public interest. Their thing was more about “revealing” that a well-known founder had dated his former colleague, or a well-regarded CEO was a playboy, or that someone else had had an over-the-top wedding.

As Mr Thiel told The New York Times after Gawker lost the lawsuit: “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest”.

Gawker is dead now. Bustle Digital Group, which bought it in a bankruptcy auction, said in February last year it was going to be shut down. Its spirit, though, might not be dead.

Scores of “news” outfits have mushroomed, deriving sustenance from doing, or aspiring to do, things that Gawker did. If nothing else, they try to titillate with keywords, headlines, click-bait, and what not. Given a chance, many of them would like to write about people indulging in things about which they want to be discreet. These outfits do not care whether there is another side to the story. They do not ask themselves whether the story deserves to be told at all. All they care about is, how to weaponise the bits of information they have, or think they have.

The good news is, one of those stories, someone being gay, may no longer be worth telling. Because many leaders, in business and politics, are not trying to hide it anymore. Increasingly, they are choosing to tell others what their sexual orientation is. It might not be easy; they must be grappling with the legitimate question why anyone needs to know. But they are doing it anyway, probably because there is no better way to kill a sensational story about you than telling it yourself.

Gabriel Attal, at 34, has become the youngest Prime Minister of France and, as widely reported, the first openly gay leader of the government. But he is not the first in the European Union. That honour goes to Edgars Rinkevics, whom Latvia’s Parliament last May elected as the new President, making him the EU’s first openly gay head of state. Interestingly, most of Mr Rinkevics’s profiles spoke more about his support for Ukraine than his 2014 declaration on social media that he was gay.

Around the time Mr Attal was elected, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got married to his longtime boyfriend, Oliver Mulherin. While speculation was rife whether the wedding pictures were generated by artificial intelligence, Mr Altman confirmed his wedding in a text message to NBC News.

No surprises there; Mr Altman, who would

be 39 this year, had declared his orientation when he was 17.

Mr Altman is not the first tech leader to be so open. Tim Cook, Apple Inc’s CEO, wrote a personal essay for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014, in which he said: “I’m proud to be gay.” Citing Martin Luther King, Mr Cook spoke of an increasing sense of duty to do his part to improve the situation of gay people and other minorities. “I’ve come to realise that my desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today.”

Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, married his boyfriend, Sean Eldridge, in 2012. Claudia Brind-Woody, vice-president and managing director of IBM, is — according to her LinkedIn profile — a recipient of the Out & Equal Trailblazer Award.

There are others, but not too many yet. Mr Cook’s coming out did not exactly start a deluge. An article in Fortune magazine, published in June last year, said in the years since Mr Cook’s personal essay, three additional openly LGBTQ executives sat atop Fortune 500 companies: Jim Fitterling at Dow Chemicals, Jeffrey Gennette at Macy’s, and Beth Ford at Land O’Lakes.

This despite the increasing acknowledgement that diversity in the workplace is good for business.

For those still sceptical about the rising acceptance of gay leaders, France’s new prime minister’s profile in The Guardian, dated January 9, is recommended reading. Its headline is, “Who is Gabriel Attal, the French PM who climbed the ranks in record time?” The strap says, “France’s youngest prime minister, son of privilege, is known for his ability to think on his feet.”

Gawker would probably have said, “Gabriel is totally gay, people.”

But that would not be much of a story today.