Libel And Celebrity Outing From Liberace To Barry Goldwater

Which one didn't seek redress from the courts to save his manly honor?

Last year, one of the most notorious white shoe law firms on K Street, Sidley Austin-- also the sixth largest law firm in the U.S.-- spent a few weeks harassing me over a post I did about one of their shadier clients, right-wing extremist John Shadegg (R-AZ). Shadegg is on constant alert over publicity concerning his illicit affair with the wife of a congressional colleague, Jon Christensen (R-NE), an affair that resulted in either one or two fist fights between the two right-wing imbeciles. Shadegg's lawyers claim everyone involved-- except the former Mrs. Christensen, who refuses to comment on the record-- denies it ever happened. They threatened to sue me if I didn't take down the post. After several months of discussing it with them-- as well as free speech attorneys who said I could be sued-- I took it (basically an excerpt from a book that exposed Shadegg) down. Of course a 3 month old post isn't that big a loss, especially since it had been widely propagated. I then proceeded to get an insurance policy that covers libel.

I wasn't even aware that public figures could successfully sue for libel and slander-- but I was so wrong. This month's Out has a column talking about famous people who have successfully sued to remove the "stain" from their reputation after being outed. Tom Cruise's suit against French porn star Chad Slater is probably the most famous, but Liberace's successful 1959 suit against the Daily Mirror is certainly the most telling of the absurdity of these suits. Liberace "reconstructed his actual emotions with difficulty afterward, he said, but 'plain, simple, ordinary fear is what I think I felt,' he related. 'I had a secret feeling I was about to get clobbered.' As he described it, 'I find it difficult to put into words how I felt that Monday, June 8, 1959, as I sat in an English courtroom, Queen's Bench Number Four, surrounded by black-robed, white-wigged gentlemen, and prepared to hear myself vilified, as well as defended, and waited to find out whether I'd done the right thing or the wrong one in following the insistence of my conscience and the confirmation of my attorney.'"

The way Liberace's attorney defended him against the attacks of U.K. gossip monger William Conner (aka- Cassandra) brings to mind Glenn Beck on Fox News: "a literary assassin who dips his pen in vitriol, hired by this sensational newspaper to murder reputations and hand out sensational articles on which its circulation is built."

While the trial took many ducks and turns, one phrase in the article dominated the proceedings from both sides. This was Conner's identification of the pianist as "the summit of sex-- Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want."... If Conner could smirk about his language, it horrified the pianist. It named the nightmares from his childhood. "I prayed I'd never seen that, never heard it and that I'd never hear it again. That was the passage that decided me to sue. That was the one I was afraid would haunt me all my life."

The trial did rotate on the phrase. The defendants argued that Conner had intended it as a statement of the pianist's sex appeal in general. They calculated all their evidence and witnesses to this end, to prove the "sexiness" of Liberace's act. The plaintiffs countered this strategy by affirming the basis of Liberace's appeal to family and traditional values. They also leapt onto the phrase's challenge to Liberace's masculinity or maleness... "I had put myself on the block of public opinion in defense of one of the three most important things in a man's life ...," he testified, "perhaps all of them. They are Life itself. Manhood. And Freedom." He elaborated: "Naturally my life, as such, was not at stake. But the attack on me had threatened my mother's health and so, her life. And, perhaps the quality of my life had been put in jeopardy. Certainly my manhood had been seriously attacked and with it my freedom... freedom from harassment, freedom from embarrassment and most importantly, freedom to work at my profession."... The idea, of course, was that Liberace was homosexual and that homosexuals were not men-- not real men, not natural men-- not Men. That was the issue for Liberace... Denying one's homosexuality, then, equaled defending one's manly prerogatives of earning a living. Liberace managed it like George Cukor, Anthony Perkins, and Rock Hudson. In denying his homosexuality, he confirmed his career.

During the trial Liberace claimed he was not a homosexual, had never had sex with a male and that he opposed "the practice because it offends convention and it offends society." He was lying his gay ass off but he won the case as well as $22,000, "the largest settlement of any libel case in British history."

All but one of the other gays who sued to clear their good names were entertainers: Jason Donovan and Robbie Williams. The remaining plaintiff was a conservative American politician, who was also a gay rights advocate, Barry Goldwater. Lately news of gay Republican politicians being accused of raping young boys or trying to fellate undercover police in public restrooms is so common as to be nearly passe. But in 1964, claiming a Republican politician was gay was still shocking. Doing his part to bury the Goldwater campaign in 1964, Fact publisher Ralph Ginzburg tarted up a special issue entitled "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater." The goal wasn't so much to prove that Goldwater was homosexual as to prove he was mentally unfit to be president. The Fact articles ran some kind of a poll of the 2,417 psychiatrists (out of 12,356 they had contacted) of which 1,189 said Goldwater was unfit to be president. after his historic defeat, Goldwater sued for libel, winning one dollar from the jury, which also awarded him $75,000 in punitive damages because of the magazine's "recklessness." Although the kooks and fascists on the far right who make up the Republican Party today pay homage to Goldwater as one of their movement's founding fathers, he would clearly be repulsed by what the GOP has degenerated into. Goldwater had a distinctly libertarian bent to his brand of conservatism and certainly defended abortion rights and gay rights and had nothing but contempt for the Elmer Gantry religionists that control so much of the GOP these days.

Now that the history lesson is done, see if you can guess which one is either Jason Donovan or Barry Goldwater, Be sure to stay 'til the end when all is revealed: