Michelangelo Signorile became embroiled in a controversy when he published a story outing the former Assistant Defense Secretary Pete Williams. The scandal brought even more discourse about the hipocricy of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding gays serving in the military.
Signorele is one of the most notable gay activists of our time. A journalist, radio talk show host & an author, Michelangelo Signorile helped pave the way for gay people to come out more easily. There may be a bit of controversy attached to his name from his actions, but his work helped change the way gay people can freely live their lives today, including the right to serve in the military.
Signorile was born on this day in Brooklyn. His childhood was spent in Brooklyn & Staten Island. He recognized his sexual preference at an early age, but he chose to keep it a secret from his family & friends, because of his Roman Catholic upbringing.
During the 1970s & the 1980s, Michelangelo Signorile studied journalism at Syracuse University. After graduation, he landed a job at public relations firm in NYC, & his job involved getting his clients into the city's gossip columns. Later on, he ended up working as a gossip columnist himself.
"Outing" was a word coined by Time magazine. The term itself is controversial, even to this time, because the definition is to cause a closeted homosexual to admit his or her sexual orientation publicly by force. In the early 1990s, Michelangelo Signorile found himself at the center of that controversy.
For OutWeek magazine, Michelangelo Signorile watched the gossip columns of other publications. It became the goal of his work in OutWeek to challenge what he perceived as the media's double-standard when it comes to being silent on reporting on homosexual celebrities while glamorizing heterosexual couples.
Among the celebrities that Michelangelo Signorile was credited for outing are film & record producer David Geffen & gossip queen Liz Smith.
Perhaps the most controversial outing that Michelangelo Signorile was responsible for was the publishing tycoon, & frequent Elizabeth Taylor date Malcolm Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine. Within weeks of Forbes' death in 1990, Signorile published a story about Forbes being a closeted gay. It is a fact that was known in the social circles of New York but was never publicly declared.
The Forbes story became the subject of scandal at the time & many other mainstream media refused to report on Malcolm Forbes' sexuality until months later.
Signorile was once arrested for disrupting a speech made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1988. Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, wrote many of the policies of the Catholic Church against homosexuality & the use of condoms at the time. Signorile attended the speech only as a spectator, but hearing Cardinal Ratzinger talk, Signorile said that his childhood experiences of homophobia came back to him & filled him with rage. This rage prompted Signorile to jump up the platform, point to Cardinal Ratzinger & declare the cardinal as the devil.
I am so shallow; I need to admit that I started reading him because I found him to be so hot. He grew to be one of my favorite writers on the subject of gay rights.
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