Word: outing
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...Senator, none of them incontrovertibly known to be gay. In each case, the official was identified as a homosexual via leaflets or noisy demonstrations. The rationale for exposing the politicians' alleged secret lives was that they were guilty of malicious hypocrisy on matters of life and death. One outing victim had endorsed legislation allowing hospitals to test patients for AIDS without their consent. Another backed a ban on funding to school programs that describe homosexuality as normal. A third supposedly failed to provide adequate public AIDS services. Yet in an odd twist that underscores the uneasy position of gays...
...continuity. When the rumors involve living people, however, discussion about who is "in the closet" has generally been held to a discreet murmur -- partly in deference to libel laws but mostly in defense of privacy. That consensus is fast breaking down with the spread of a phenomenon known as "outing," the intentional exposure of secret gays by other gays...
While the idea of outing a fellow gay used to be considered repellent under any circumstances, the tactic has become increasingly acceptable to mainstream homosexual leaders. It is practiced by some gay publications, and its propriety has even been debated in the corridors of Congress. Last June, when Republicans falsely implied that House Speaker Tom Foley was gay, Representative Barney Frank threatened to expose Republican officeholders who really are homosexual. Few in Washington doubted that there were such officials, or that Frank, an acknowledged gay, would be able to name them. Republicans were already keenly aware of the ironic fates...
Still, many gays and sympathetic straights remain troubled by the idea of outing, even if used only against the movement's avowed enemies. Says Sarah Craig, an associate editor of Chicago's gay-oriented Windy City Times: "Really, you're only using the same bludgeon used to injure you to injure someone else." As a practical matter, moreover, if outing a closeted gay ends his or her career, there is rarely any reason to believe that the target's successor will be more sympathetic to the gay cause. Nonetheless, some prominent gays favor forcing every closeted person to come...
...already been sent away to boarding school in England, a decision taken by my parents when the secondary school I attended in Berlin, the Franzosische Gymnasium (traditionally under French influence and supposedly immune from anti-Jewish manifestations), forbade all "non-Aryan" boys and girls to join the annual school outing, a boating party on the river Spree. That had been too much for my mother, whose great pride and joy was that I, then a twelve-year-old, had indubitably earned the coveted privilege of entertaining cruise passengers on my concertina, or, as it was (for this occasion aptly) called...