CELEBRITY FRIDAY: "Boy Genius" Ronan Farrow Is Gay

Ronan Farrow is Mia Farrow's son, and is either the son of Frank Sinatra or Woody Allen. He is 25-years-old and has already graduated from Yale Law School (4 years ago!), won a Rhode Scholarship and served in the Obama administration. And apparently he is gay, according to Vice, although you wouldn't know that from recent media articles:

It's not as obvious to me that Farrow's sexuality needed to be mentioned in the Times profile, though again there's a dog-whistle issue: "When he wasn’t busy navigating world events, [Farrow] was adding some panache to the Washington social scene, often appearing at political fetes with Jon Lovett, a former Obama speechwriter”; and "he is guarded about his private life, suggesting a persona more carefully calibrated than he lets on." OK, maybe that's a little louder than a dog-whistle. It’s possible that the piece’s author, Michael Schulman, who often writes about gay celebrities, couldn't get anyone to verify Farrow's sexuality on the record. 

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As a gay man, I find Farrow's sexuality highly relevant—he's literally the gay Mia Farrow! It’s only by accepting a homophobic logic that we can perform the mental acrobatics required to decide sexuality should be off the table. It’s just as interesting as any other detail, and no more embarrassing. As a New York court ruled last year, outing is a banality—identifying someone as a homosexual never qualifies as defamation, even if it isn’t true.

I also find Farrow's sexuality relevant. And I support "outing," although I prefer the term Michelangelo Signorile used at the time: "equalization." To me the point is to equalize the treatment of celebrities' homosexuality with their heterosexuality by the media. The notion that homosexuality is some horribly shameful secret while tabloids will reveal every other piece of information about a person is just simply wrong in my opinion. One can argue that nobody's private sexual behavior should be discussed in tabloids, but if you're going to talk about it when straight people do it, I insist you give LGBT people the same treatment.