

A rainbow colored flag flies in front of the Supreme Court in Washington on April 27, one day before the court heard arguments on the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage. (Andrew Harnik/Associated Press)

Gawker, a publication designed to make waves, found itself swamped by something more akin to a tsunami last week after publishing a story about David Geithner, an executive at Condé Nast and the brother of former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The piece, sourced by a sex worker David Geithner had hired, chronicled how a hired tryst turned into something uglier when the man Geithner had hired tried to get him to use his brother’s influence to resolve a housing dispute and then threatened to blackmail him. Gawker’s piece was outrageous because it helped fulfill that attempt at extortion. But it also revived an ongoing, and unresolved, debate about when it counts as news that someone is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender — and even when it is, whether it’s worth it to publish.

In a very interesting Kinja post about the Geithner story and the broader calculations involved in running a story that outs someone, Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak explained why he didn’t publish the story that “initially felt like the scoop of my career.”

“I reasoned that while an out NFL player might change the patriarchal organization’s climate, thus potentially making the world a better place, it would certainly alter the life of a fellow human being,” Juzwiak writes, explaining how he weighed the newsworthiness of the story. “The player in question was not famous enough to assure me that he could weather whatever storm came his way as a result of the revelation. The risk was too high to be worth the potential cultural reward, and it certainly wasn’t worth the pageviews. ”

The news rationale for publishing the Geithner story was even thinner. Gawker didn’t appear to have evidence that Geithner was anti-gay. Former Gawker editor Max Read, who resigned over the decision by the company’s business executives and founder to pull the piece, suggested another potential rationale: that it’s always of interest when a married executive of a large company appears to be stepping out on his or her spouse. That said, marriage isn’t what it used to be: Whatever Geithner was up to, Gawker also didn’t appear to have proof that his behavior was contrary to whatever rules govern his relationship with his wife.

The better story, as Juzwiak suggested, might have been “Look at This Crazy, Conspiracy-Obsessed Porn Star Who’s Trying To Blackmail a High-Powered Media Executive (That I’m Not Going to Name).” It might even have been “Look At This High-Powered Media Executive Who Refuses To Use His Connections To His Powerful Brother,” a story that would have had the unsavory result of outing Geithner, but that would have attested to his integrity. Instead, whatever rationale Gawker had for the original piece as written, it was hard to avoid the implication that sexual contact between men is, in and of itself, still newsworthy.

With some stories, the news isn’t the fact that a person involved is gay or transgender — or at least not purely about that. Grantland, the sports and culture site founded by the now-departed Bill Simmons, got itself into a lot of trouble early in the publication’s run with a story called “Dr. V’s Magical Putter.” The article, about a golf club that was being touted by CBS golf commentator Gary McCord, initially started as an investigation about whether McCord’s claims about the putter were true. But in the course of inquiring into the supposed scientific principles behind the club and the credentials of its inventor, Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, reporter Caleb Hannan discovered that she was transgender. While he was working on the piece, Vanderbilt became extremely distressed by the prospect that Hannan might reveal her gender identity. She subsequently committed suicide, an event that became the conclusion of Hannan’s piece.

Earlier this week, the Longreads blog reported on a panel Hannan was a part of, in which he spoke publicly about “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” for the first time. “Out of everyone who read an early draft of ‘Dr. V’s Magical Putter,’ only Caleb Hannan’s wife asked him the most critical question of all: Did this story even need to exist?” the Longform piece explains. “Late in the process of vetting the story, Hannan said he was contacted by one of Grantland’s freelance fact-checkers …’ Some of the first words out of her mouth were, ‘There’s a chance this woman is going to hurt herself,’ … And that’s a conversation I immediately should have taken to my editor, but I didn’t.'”

Given Vanderbilt’s suicide, it’s proper that the panel and the piece about it focus on the harm that resulted from Hannan’s reporting. But his approach to Vanderbilt, and his decision to include her death in the piece, which framed the whole incident as a weird thing that had happened to Hannan himself, weren’t the only odd things about the story. Vanderbilt’s gender transition explained the holes in her credentials. But as I wrote at the time, the strangest thing about “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” was a question Hannan never bothered to answer: Why was someone of Gary McCord’s stature shilling for a dubiously effective golf club in the first place? That, not the fact that Vanderbilt was transgender, would have been the actual news in the story had Hannan stuck to his reporting, rather than getting sidetracked by his own curiosity about a trans person living in deep stealth.

All of these examples illustrate the strange moment we live in, when the vanguard of gay and transgender equality has made huge advances, but the rear guard is still catching up. The Supreme Court has made marriage equality the law of the land, but the idea of people we assumed were straight having sex with people of their own gender is still titillating to some. Caitlyn Jenner can grace the cover of Vanity Fair, but transgender people are still murdered at appalling rates. And if the fact that someone is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender is treated like its news, that’s because in some cases — as when male professional athletes come out in a still overwhelmingly straight environment — it is. The task for reporters and editors is to suss out when someone’s sexual identity or gender identity is a headline, and when it’s simply a fact.