What Public Figures Were Outed Against Their Will?

Factual Questions
41

I’m not sure if Danny Kaye & Laurence Olivier’s longtime affair became public knowledge while either was still alive. I do know that Olivier was open about his bisexuality by the time he died (and his bouts of impotence with Vivien Leigh). Danny Kaye never came out, but people who knew of his friendship with Olivier probably guessed.

Chevy Chase was dealt a major financial blow when he jokingly referred to Cary Grant as a homo and “a great gal” on Tom Snyder’s show. Grant immediately filed suit, since the outing attempts had gone on for years and he had to spend much of his career defending his heterosexuality. They settled out of court, but according to Chase much later it was for about $100,000 and legal fees which wiped him out (he wasn’t nearly as rich then). Since his death there have been several books posthumously outing him, some of them to the point of the ridiculous. (One claims that he was diddling with the teen gardener who lived in the caretaker’s cottage when the Manson family killed Sharon Tate & guests, a claim that is just absurd on so many levels.)

42

Kinda; I think TO said “I won’t say JG’s gay, but if it walks like a duck…”.

I don’t know if it qualifies as “outing”, since Garcia refutes it. So it falls more under ‘name-calling’.

43

I don’t think it’s logically possible for Billie Jean King to have had a homosexual affair with Jim Florio.

44

To the same extent that sportswriter Skip Bayless outed Troy Aikman.

45

Well, Skip Bayless is the laziest sportswriter on the planet. He’s not so much a sportswriter as a stenographer.

In every city where he’s worked, he’s followed the same basic M.O.: latch onto somebody in a position of authority (usually the head coach), and become that guy’s personal mouthpiece for as long as possible, pretending all along that the opinions and stories the coach is feeding you come from your own hard-nosed investigating.

In Dallas, that’s what he did with Jimmy Johnson, and later with Barry Switzer. He spent a few years kissing Jimmy Johnson’s backside, and parroting EVERYTHING Johnson said, frequently with embarrassing results. See, in the early days, Jimmy Johnson had an unfortunate tendency to overrate players from the University of Miami. He wasted high draft picks on Alonzo Highsmith (never amounted to anything), Daniel Stubbs (a so-so defensive end at best), and Steve Walsh, because in his mind, Miami guys were BOUND to dominate in the NFL. Johnson spent two years insisting to Bayless that Aikman sucked and Steve Walsh was a superstar in the making. Bayless, like the lazy, empty-headed, brown-nosing ignoramus he is, wrote dozens of columns for the Dallas Times-Herald explaining how overrated Aikman was, what a bust Aikman was, and how Steve Walsh was already bound for Canton.

Look, EVERYBODY is wrong sometimes. I’ve been wrong about players far more times than I care to admit. But Bayless NEVER offers his own opinions. He merely passes on the opinions of his preferred source, and PRETENDS they’re his own.

Even now, Bayless will never admit he was 100% wrong about Aikman. He’ll admit only that “Jimmy Johnson said Walsh was better than Aikman.”

A few years later, when Barry Switzer became coach, Bayless became Switzer’s mouthpiece. Now, Barry Switzer and Aikman never much liked each other. Aikman is an old-school guy who believes in discipline, and made no secret of the fact that he considered Switzer a joke as a head coach (to this day, nobody has quite figured out what Switzer DID as head coach!).

Switzer, for his part, resented Aikman for undermining his authority (WHAT authority? Switzer was hired solely because Jerry Jones wanted a do-nothing yes man as head coach). Switzer tried to get back at Aikman by spreading rumors (yes, the rumors were around before Switzer, but Barry did a lot to fan the flames) about Aikman’s sexuality, through his toadying stenographer, Skip Bayless.

Bayless, who ordinarily likes to pose as a progressive kind of guy, was only too willing to go with Switzer’s rumors, to keep his favorite source happy.

46

I note Danny Kaye’s family denied he had an affair with Sir Lawrence Oliver.

(Still if one was going to be incorrectly labeled as gay, it would be better to be thought the lover of Sir Lawrence, than say Carrottop.)

47

One major involuntarily outed public figure in Germany was the mayor of Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, in 2003. Coincidentally the current the mayor or Berlin, Germany’s largest city, outed himself in 2001 to preempt being outed by hostile newspapers. Both won the election after their outing.

48

TCM did a great profile of Grant a year or so ago and the question of his bisexuality came up (of course). They asked one of his ex wives if he was bi and she said, “I don’t know - we’re were too busy fucking for me to ever ask the question.”

49

Buffalo Bill was supposed to be a composite character based upon Ed Gein, Ted Bundy and Gary Heidnik.

50

Who was that actor who was beaten to death on his own bed with his own camera tripod? I seem to remember the investigation into that pointed to a homosexual affair gone wrong.

Jeesh, I wish I could place his name.

51

Bob Crane?

52

Bob Crane? Though he apparently wasn’t gay, I remember the rumors about his murder too.

53

Crane definitely wasn’t gay. His co-star Robert Clary (the Frenchman Lebeau, and one of several actors from the show to have been persecuted by the Nazis in real life) was arrested a few years ago for soliciting in a men’s room, however. (He was married to the daughter of Eddie Cantor for many years, though she was dead by the time of his restroom cruise.)

Karl Malden was arrested for picking up a male hustler in the late 1970s, but the charges were either dropped or never filed (and he wasn’t a big enough star for it to cause a major scandal).

Possibly the first actor to be forcibly outed was John Gielgud, who went to trial in the late 1940s for “importuning”. It didn’t affect his career as he continued working into his 90s. (Alec Guinness was also arrested for the same charge but it didn’t become known until after his death.)

54

Oh man, the first name I thought of when I saw this thread was Oliver Sipple. He’s the guy who saved Gerald Ford’s life from would-be assassin Sara Jane Moore.

Sipple’s life was effectively destroyed by his outing. He sued the paper that outed him and lost. He became an obese alchoholic and died very young. Ford did not attened the funeral.

Sara Jane Moore became the namesake for Sara Jane Olson as both of them were SLA nuts.

55

Wouldn’t George Michael have stayed in the closet if he had stayed out of that park bathroom?

56

Are any knighted British thespians straight? :slight_smile:

57

Possibly a few.

One who wasn’t was Nigel Hawthorne, who was publicly outed by the British press while he was in America for the Oscars, having been nominated for The Madness of King George. Friends and colleagues had known his sexuality for years, but he’d never made it publicly known, being of the perfectly reasonable opinion that his private life ought to be, well, private. He was apparently hurt and upset, seeing it as an attempt by the press to smear him when he was enjoying a well-earned success.

If that was the press’s intention, they were some twenty year too late: the information that a popular middle-aged actor had shared a quiet home-life in the countryside with his long-term male lover for many years was received by the British public with the same mild disinterest they would have shown if told that a cabinet minister occasionally enjoyed a small brandy before bed.

58

Dame Judi Dench. :wink:

59

Really especially useless trivia: it was the same bathroom that Robert Clary had been caught in a few years before. Cite

60

:dubious: