Why does Cecil Adams refuse to be photographed? I’ve read and bought his old books back in the ‘day’ and noticed he always keeps himself mysterious.
I admit this question may have been asked here before but I couldn’t find it.
So why does he never show his face or reveal himself? Seems strange–is he trying to build up suspense? I would have thought he could have been on TV with a show, or do the talk show rounds.
There is some evidence that Cecil is a pseudonym and doesn’t want his identity known.
Though it’s pretty clear who he probably is.
Cecil Adams is a character. The current Cecil, Ed Zotti, was the third person to do the Straight Dope column. The third in less than five years. Nobody thought at the time that he would be stuck with it forever. And don’t forget that the original column started when the Chicago Reader was marketed to the hip and hippie community, who got the joke that this mysterious Cecil Adams would answer disgusting/sexual/gross/dopey-in-both-senses questions that nobody in the straight news field would touch.
Those days are long gone. Today it is simply part of the story that Cecil is a separate personality. Nobody knows if Ed actually has a personality, and if he does it’s probably not the one that Cecil projects. (This is true of a large subset of writers. In real life, I’m an extreme introvert.)
There was a Straight Dope television show. Naturally, it didn’t have Ed as host. It wasn’t all that great either. (Not really bad, but nothing like the column.) The host was Mike Lukas, whose only other credit was as “Bald Guy with Frog on Head.” (Seriously.) The show went over with a soft thud, exactly as one would expect.
Ed has done radio interviews in the past, and somebody will dredge up the link from some magazine article of him captioned as Cecil.
Mainly, though, the answer is that often the myth is greater than the reality. It is here, as well. There have been, as you guessed, about a thousand threads on this and most posters get mad at anyone who spoils the joke. The Internet spoiled the joke first, since researching weird subjects pre-Net was truly difficult and the results truly interesting. Now it’s just a sideshow to life and the columns reflect that. The Board is the true Dope now and has been for years. Cecil is superannuated, a word I get to use far too infrequently.
Has anyone ever asked him?
He has been. Once. With a relative. You can understand why he’s a little camera-shy.
What method did you use to try and find it?
Cecil tends to get in a lot of bar fights and other scrapes with the law and chooses to keep his visible profile to a minimum and deniability to a maximum when adopting his much used “Shaggy defense”.
O snap!
Vampire. It turns out the whole “doesn’t reflect in a mirror” thing also applies to photographs.
Well, he is a guest and so can’t search the threads. He can search the columns, but obviously you wouldn’t find this subject there. I don’t see any way in which this was an inappropriate comment to make.
Sam probably thinks that there are no search options for guests and that therefor this guest must be lying or hiding something. If this is, indeed, the case then Sam is wrong. If it isn’t, then I’m not sure what his point is.
I have heard that Cecil is 1/4 Amish.
Heretic.
When my share of Sir Francis Drake’s lost fortune finally clears the British courts of law, you shall rue your impudence!
Well?
Did you hear me?
Start rueing!!!
The *real *reason Unca Cecil is never photographed, is that the edicts of the Secret Rosicrucian Masters of the World™ forbid it.
But, you didn’t hear that from me.
…And the other three quarters is Chuck Norris. He doesn’t post much because the strength of his data and his arguments tends to break CRT monitors when displayed. His sarcasm melts the LCD type.
I heard that his real name is McGuffin…
Expano: Ed is Cecil’s editor. As such, he does a lot (a helluva lot) of fact-checking, but he is NOT Cecil.
Cecil is extremely eccentric, to say the least. He doesn’t like being around people, and he has a somewhat inflated view of his own celebrity. He thinks that, if his picture were known, he’d be unable to go to the grocery store without having crowds of fans ripping at his clothes, bothering him for autographs, etc. We’ve tried to convince him that (a) he’s not THAT big of a star, and (b) fans don’t do that anymore… but to no avail.
You’re only halfway there, C K. It used to be that way, but Cecil has finally realised the truth. So he doesn’t want his photo taken and then nothing to happen at the grocery store. 
Considering the fact that Ed published a book under his own name which lifted entire sections of text from Cecil’s columns, either Ed is Cecil or he’s a blatant plagiarist and Cecil didn’t call him on it.
Cite?
Seems rather ironic for a website dedicated to uncovering, shall we say, the straight dope.
Or the simplest explanation - he asked and received permission to do so.
