Date: Sun, 12 Mar 1995 00:44:38 -0500 From: Gabo3@aol.com New York Newsday - Thursday, March 9, 1995 The 'Inning' of Jann Wenner by Gabriel Rotello New York - The Washington Post called it "the secret that everyone seemed to know but no one dared to print." And for a while, it seemed no one would. For six weeks after Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner left his wife and moved in with his boyfriend, the story behind the split was the talk of the fashion, publishing, advertising and, needless to say, gay worlds. But mainstream journalism suppressed it. Briefly, anyway. And that has become a story in itself. As the cover up - you might call it the 'inning' of Wenner's gay affair - was in progress, there were tales that Wenner and his wife were vigorously lobbying editors and publishers to keep the story out of the papers. That advertisers were threatening to withhold major accounts from any news outlet that broke the silence. That powerful gay media moguls were pulling out all the stops to suppress the story. Journalists gossiped about articles that had been prepared for major magazines and newspapers and subsequently killed by squeamish publishers. We'll probably never know how many of those tales are true. But it is true that as the press hesitated, journalists like me began to worry that a major gay facet of a major story would go unreported out of some misguided desire to protect, to cover up, to repress. So when the story finally came out last week, still against Wenner's fervent wishes, it marked perhaps the watershed event in the history of outing. The first to break silence was the New York Post's gossipmeister Richard Johnson, who first carefully listed all the reasons why he had not reported the story weeks earlier. The Post has a "long-standing policy" against outing, Johnson wrote. Wenner's wife was "having a hard time coping with the idea that her marriage had been a sham." Wenner's kids might be "teased by schoolmates." Johnson then went ahead and reported the story anyway, because, he explained, it had been reported by some newspaper in England that nobody over here reads. Right, mate. Hypocritical or not, Johnson set the tone for the coverage that followed. People wrote less about the outing than about the inning that had preceded it. Not about why the press chose to disclose Wenner's private life, but why it waited so long. After the story of Wenner's gay romance appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal - the high water mark of outing so far - New York magazine's Jeanie Kasindorf opined that "Wenner may have thought he was protected by an unstated policy deeming celebrity gayness the last taboo subject. But," she rightly concluded, "he was done in by the press's increasing impatience with the have-it-both-ways hypocrisy of it all." "What I don't like is the double standard," fumed conservative society columnist Taki. Not about the outing, about the delay. "Whether a celebrity runs around with young girls or young boys, the story needs to be reported. I would have thought equal rights for homosexuals meant just that." Go, Taki. All this is a far cry from just a few years ago, when gay journalists like me who made these same points - double standards, have it both ways hypocrisy - were called radicals. But we're still a distance from the day when celebrity gayness is truly treated like celebrity anything else. After all, Jann Wenner's wild and crazy life - the lost weekends, the drugs, the boozing at board meetings - has been a matter of public discussion for a quarter century. If there is anything left about him that deserves to be hushed up in print, it must be something terrible indeed. The press had to decide this month whether Wenner's homosexual affair is that terrible. So terrible it warrants being the one unmentionable in an otherwise open life. In the end, thankfully, the press decided no. But it had to think a while.