Leave Lindsay Alone?

Welcome to the celebrity-friendly version of The Week in Gay. The most salacious story hitting the blogs and the big papers was the Los Angeles Times’ two-page Sunday spread devoted to the media’s treatment of the relationship between Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson.

The piece by Kate Arthur talks about the usually voracious celebrity media’s rather demure handling of the Lohan-Ronson pairing. In this case, the relationship seems to be met with the print version of a shrug -- at least until Life & Style dared to run a cover asking “Is Lindsay Gay?”

Perhaps, as Village Voice columnist Michael Musto suggests to the Times, “they don’t consider gay a dirty thing anymore. And it’s very cool.”

Or maybe they are just taking the lead from the couple themselves, who are out about it without stating it for the record. Sheila McClear of Gawker.com argued in a post last month (“Why Lindsay Lohan Is a Gay Hero”) that Lohan’s casual openness is revolutionary because it treats her same-sex relationship the same as her straight ones. She writes: “Here’s what’s cool: Lohan has been entirely matter-of-fact about the whole affair. She’s continued to appear in public with her rumored lover. There has been no moaning from her about private-life intrusion from the media, and no cries from her cougar mom to `Leave Lindsay ALONE!’ ”

The other possibility to consider -- and not a pleasant one -- is that the mags aren’t using the words gay and homosexual and lesbian because they don’t want to upset the more conservative segments of their readership. They are just putting out the story and the accompanying photos as if to say “Nothing unusual here!”

The Life & Style cover seems to have helped open the gateways for more explicit coverage -- New York Daily News gossip columnist Jo Piazza ran an item about Dina Lohan’s approval of the couple. She writes: “Dina was all smiles, telling partygoers just how cute she thought the pair looked, making sure reporters were never out of earshot.” Such a thing would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

Of course, like any celebrity couple, they have their ups and downs, as Gawker.com illustrates in another post. Hopefully, the relationship will go back up.