Gay Culture Debates
Signorile wrote columns and feature stories for The Advocate for several years, including the groundbreaking two-part cover story "Out at The New York Times"—in which the paper's gay and lesbian staffers, its top editors and its then-new publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., spoke for the first time, to Signorile, about years of homophobia at the paper of record and how they were charting a new course. In 1994, Signorile left the Advocate for the then new glossy, Out magazine, which was founded by his friend and OutWeek colleague Michael Goff and former OutWeek editor Sarah Pettit. In 1995 Signorile published his second book, Outing Yourself, a 14-step program for coming out as gay or lesbian.
At that time, as an Out magazine columnist and editor-at-large, Signorile soon was at the center of often-heated debates among gay activists, sexual liberationists and HIV prevention experts about gay male sexual culture and the prevalence of unsafe sex and HIV transmission. Signorile wrote a column for Out that sparked much discussion, titled "Unsafe Like Me," in which he addressed the issue by admitting to have slipped up himself, having had an incident of unprotected sex, and discussed what may have led someone like him—a prominent AIDS activist, immersed in the issues of prevention—to have such a lapse. The column was adapted to the op-ed page of The New York Times and inspired a CBS "60 Minutes" treatment of the issue in which Signorile was profiled. Signorile followed up that column with several others that focused on what he saw as some unhealthy aspects of gay culture that contributed to low self-esteem and risk-taking. This eventually grew into his 1997 bestseller Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles and the Passages of Life, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. The columns and the book created controversy among some activists; Signorile was criticized by the group Sex Panic! which believed that he and other writers had inspired government crack-downs on gay sex through their writings. Many other commentators and activists disagreed with Signorile's critics, and fierce debates broke out in both gay and mainstream media. Signorile also inspired much discussion and debate with pieces in Out on pro-life gays, animals rights vs. medical research, gay marriage and high-profile antigay hate crimes.
In August 1998, Signorile left Out magazine abruptly in a disagreement with the new editor James Collard. Former Out editor and co-founder, the late Sarah Pettit, a long-time colleague of Signorile's who was also an editor at OutWeek, had been ousted from Out that year in a shake up (Michael Goff had been pushed out earlier) in which she had charged sex discrimination. The new editor, from the UK, had been a promoter of the "post-gay" sensibility, which seemed to eschew activism. According to Signorile, speaking to gay journalist Rex Wockner, Collard wanted him to tone down his writing. "We had a heated discussion and he insulted my sensibilities and it made me so angry I threw water in his face," Signorile told Wockner. "They did not want me to write biting commentary and opinion. They wanted me to do more feature-driven work and I refused to do that because my column in Out has always been a space where I could do commentary, political analysis, features, whatever I wanted. I think it's important to have commentary and solidly researched journalism in the same forum."
Read more about this topic: Michelangelo Signorile
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