As much as I sympathize with his motivation, I come down on the side that Milk’s actions were unethical.
I’m not sure what sort of compensation Sipple should have received, however. His lawsuit failed, but did anything else go his way?
It strikes me as wrong that Harvey Milk is getting all the blame for Sipple’s plight. It seems to me that Herb Caen is at least as culpable, and arguably more so. Just because Milk gave him the tip, Caen was under no obligation to run the item. Caen wasn’t naive; he knew full well the social ramifications of exposing someone’s homosexuality in 1975. He could have used some discretion.
Milk blabbed to one person, Caen blabbed to thousands.
Well, yes.
But Caen wasn’t just “one person;” Milk blabbed knowing that the result would be publication to thousands.
But you’re right that Caen could have chosen not to run the item. He’s a jerk as well for that decision.
He was acting in his capacity as the first gay city supervisor. It’s like saying Obama isn’t acting in his official capacity as President when he talks about race.
Milk based his whole career on the fact that he was gay, and that he was representing the gay community. He outed Sipple because Milk thought this would be good for gays.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll join the chorus condemning Milk’s actions. I actually have an easier time understanding Caen printing it (it was sensationalistic, after all, and his career was dependent upon him enticing potential readers), but then, I didn’t think too much of Caen to begin with.
Well, yeah. Exactly. If Obama says in a press conference, “You know who I hate? White people,” that’s not a violation of the fourteenth amendment. If he proposes legislation outlawing white people, then it is. Similarly, Milk saying, “Oliver Sipple is a total 'mo,” isn’t a violation of his right to privacy. Milk introducing a resolution naming Tuesdays “Oliver Sipple is a Fag Day” would be.
Sure. But that doesn’t make it an act of government.
Am I the only one who thinks “Oliver Sipple” sounds like a name from a dirty limerick?
I tried to come up with a reasonable devil’s advocate defense of Milk, but I have to say it’s extremely hard. It was a dickish move that doesn’t reflect well on him at all.
On the one hand, you can sort of see it as being a different era, when homosexuality was much more stigmatized and oppressed than it is today, giving a moral impetus toward putting the end over the means. At the same time, those different circumstances made Milk’s decision to publicly out Sipple all the weightier; it could well have ended with him homeless and totally cut off from his family.
And I’m skeptical that Sipple’s outing actually did that great an amount of good for the movement, anyway.
The only gay people who deserve to be outed are the hypocrites who discriminate against gays while hiding their own sexuality. Oliver Sipple should have been the only one to decide, if ever, whether to announce his sexuality.
Well, ultimately, of course that’s what they’re saying. ISTM though, that the passage above skips a few steps in the reasoning.
Because the fact that Milk was an elected official at the time he made his dick move was purely incidental to the situation. He did not out Sipple in his (Milkl’s) capacity as an elected official.
Every dick move made by a person who has a job in government is not necessarily an act of government making dick moves.
Outing someone against their will is a shitty thing to do. Participating in culture and expecting them to keep your involvement secret which sometimes requires them to lie is also a shitty thing to do.
I would never out someone against their will. I will also not associate with men who choose to be closeted. I will not lie to keep others comfortable.
I can understand Milk’s position. He was furthering an agenda that was as a whole beneficial to the gay community. Those interested in remaining closeted were preventing the populace as a whole from seeing who the gay population really was. He was using the ends to justify the means. He was a dangerous man to those in the closets.
I hate this ‘outing’ stuff because it is no different from the old prejudice flying the PC flag. It still comes down to the same prejudices about macho straights and effeminate gays, and to the same belief that a man can have as many heterosexual relationships as he likes but one homosexual - he’s gay, all the heterosexual appearance was just that, meaningless appearance.
For women it can sometimes be the other way round, but often Political Lesbianism amounts to no more than old-fashioned ‘Victorian’ man-sex-fear instilled in a lot of women’s conservative background even today. All it amounts to is never growing up to believe women just as capable and equal in sexul matters as men and returning to “Ooh Sir Jasper do not sully my fluttery eyelash helpless girlhood with your barnyard animal lusts” Bollox! And most women would be the first to say so.
I’m sick of hearing how great leaders in the past were ‘gay’ no matter how good their relations with women - they had a relationship with a man so that makes them ‘gay’ in the eyes of activists every bit as much as in the eyes of bigots prejudiced against it. Their bigotry and their assessment is identical. It’s time more people had the guts to stand up and say that people are complicated, people are sexual, inability to respond to one sex or the other is a matter of cultural indoctrination that does not need to happen. We are all by nature mixed.
The way we treat it now is like crowing that the old SS-Missourri laws that one non-Aryan ancestor in 8 generations makes you 100% non-Aryan are dead and gone and swept away and anybody who is not proud to be 100% Black or Jewish or Chinese because they had one ancestor of that kind 8 generations ago is a white supremacist. The only difference lies in the value given to the prejudice, not in the prejudice itself. We are all mixes. Before puberty we cannot be ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ because we just plain are not ‘sexual’. So if we convince children who do not fit the required heterosexual stereotype or dare to stray from it than there is no return and they must forever exclude themselves from heterosexuality, they will forever exclude themselves and make the ‘prophecy’ fulfill itself. Now look at so many other cultures where that rigid distinction has just not existed.
I don’t believe this is remotely true. Do you have any citations to support this?
I doubt we’re “all” anything.
This seems to be a new take on an old idea–that sexual preference is a choice.
As we’ve discussed in many other threads, this is absolutely not true. Most gay people, myself included, had same-sex feelings at a very early age. Straight people undoubtedly do as well, but don’t really think about it because it’s society’s “norm.”
That’s reasonable… but completely unrelated to the events here. Milk didn’t have to choose between a lie and maintaining a closeted cover for someone else. He actively chose to call Caen and reveal Sipple’s sexuality. If he doesn’t pick up the phone, he’s not lying.