The cyber mafia

Former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon gets exposed as a phony journalist and a male escort to boot. Mark Foley’s aggressive pursuit of young male congressional pages leads to his resignation and a crisis in the Republican Party. Lance Armstrong gets asked by Details magazine about the nature of his close friendship with Matthew McConaughey. Actors Neil Patrick Harris and T.R. Knight and singer Lance Bass all confirm to the world in the pages of People magazine that they are gay.

These are just samples of the gay-related headlines that piqued national interest in 2006. None would have seen the light of day in the mainstream media had they not been either broken or nudged along by a group of increasingly influential gay bloggers who are changing the way we get our news about the famous and powerful.

Sites like AmericaBlog, TowleRoad, BlogActive, PerezHilton, and Defamer have become must-reads from Washington, D.C., to Hollywood, where secrets—especially gay-related ones—are getting harder and harder to keep.

“They give us the opportunity to access breaking news and are very efficient for us,” says celebrity publicist Simon Halls, who helped Harris craft his coming-out statement. “TowleRoad has a lot of helpful information on a societal level. I think that’s the new wave of journalism.”

Andy Towle, 39, rises about 6:30 a.m. most weekdays in his New York City apartment. He turns on his computer and starts scanning the Web sites of The New York Times and other mainstream news organizations as well as “about 100 blogs” to see what might be of interest to the readers of TowleRoad, his well-regarded and popular gay-interest site that serves as a digest and a link to news of the day. The topics are a mix politics and entertainment news, and just about every day there is a beefcake shot of an actor or athlete usually in some form of undress.

“I think that blogs have definitely created a greater awareness of gay culture in general, particularly because blogs have propelled political stories like Mark Foley and Jeff Gannon and celebrity stories like Lance and Reichen [Lehmkuhl, a former winner of the reality show The Amazing Race] into the public consciousness—[stories] that people watching mainstream news or reading mainstream magazines would not have become aware of so quickly,” observes Towle, a Vassar graduate and former editor of Genre magazine.

On the opposite side of the country—and taking the opposite approach—is a flamboyant 28-year-old blogger known as Perez Hilton. The self-described “queen of all media” can be found at a table at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sunset Boulevard near West Hollywood, Calif., constantly looking for dish to post with his unique attitude and flair.

Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, is on a roll. The day it was learned that Britney Spears was divorcing Kevin Federline, PerezHilton.com received more than 2.3 million visits. But it was his aggressive postings about Bass and Harris that many believe led to both men publicly coming out. In May, Hilton published photos of Bass and Lehmkuhl wearing each other’s clothes. On November 2, when a former publicist of Harris’s denied to a Canadian publication that the actor is gay, an irate Hilton went into overdrive, asking readers to post about their experiences with the actor; the next day he asked them to share any photos.

“The word outing is not part of my vocabulary. I don’t out anybody. I report on the private lives of public figures,” Hilton insists. “We’ve had three [performers come out] this year and not a single one of note in 2005, and that speaks volumes. I’m not going to take credit for it, even though people are trying to say, ‘Oh, it’s because of you.’ I will take credit for maybe greasing the wheels and maybe leading the conversation.”

Hilton doesn’t pretend to be modest: “I’m a new phenomenon, a new thing, a new creature, this rogue renegade character. I’m not Carson Kressley. I’m not some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy safe homo: I’m dangerous. I’m not afraid to offend; I’m not afraid to push the envelope.”

Watching and reacting to Hilton’s site and other blogger sites is 34-year-old Seth Abramovitch of Defamer, the Los Angeles–based site that is a West Coast version of Gawker. Defamer got over a million visits in a day when it was the first to post pictures of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s new baby.

“It was huge for our traffic,” says Abramovitch. “Sites like ours are setting a quicker velocity for the rest of the media just because of the nature of it, the way we’re throwing stuff up. We’re not waiting for a team of lawyers to tell us to do it; we’re just doing it. At the same time we’re saying, ‘Take this for what it’s worth.’ We’re a hub through which the Hollywood buzz can have a voice.”

Abramovitch, an associate editor at Defamer who was hired just over a year ago by editor Mark Lisanti, made hay mocking Lehmkuhl’s attempt at coining the word “Lanced,” his term for the media’s outing of Bass.

“Trying to actively out someone goes against what Defamer is,” Abramovitch says. “But if there’s something funny out there like [Reichen] turning his boyfriend into a word, then we’re going to jump on that and maximize that and use whatever else is already out there. Are we supportive of people coming out of their own volition? Yeah. I’m gay, and Mark is as gay-friendly as they come, but we’re not ever going to push somebody out of the closet.”

Hilton took credit for Bass’s People cover story, saying in a November 20 Los Angeles Times profile, “If I had not been talking about Lance Bass as much as I was before he came out, there is no way he would have gotten the cover.” He also touts the bloggers’ ability to generate enough interest in these topics to make them front page news. Which brings up the question, What exactly is the line between blogging and journalism?

“We can’t go with a story unless we get it from the source,” says People assistant managing editor Jess Cagle, himself a gay man. “Someone printing rumors or speculation is not the same as breaking a story. But any time we hear anything, yeah, we go check it out. The blogs are another voice that everybody hears. We definitely hear them; we definitely read them.”

Towle, who reported on his blog last summer that he had seen and spoken to Bass and Lehmkuhl together in Provincetown, Mass., says he is not in favor of aggressively outing celebrities for sport but adds, “I’m all for outing legislators and figures in government who are promoting antigay agendas and living their lives in a way that is extremely hypocritical.” He believes it’s up to the blogs to get the ball rolling. “I think mainstream media are too afraid,” Towle says. “They’re big corporations, and they have much more at stake than blogs and independent publishers. It’s interesting that blogs have become the stepping-stone for certain issues and how they reach the mainstream media. When enough blogs publish the same information, it creates a snowball effect for a larger news outlet to pick up.”

While most media outlets go with a double-sourcing policy on stories where the source is not identified, bloggers have so far made up their own rules and criteria when it comes to breaking a story with unnamed sources.

“I don’t need a double source,” says AmericaBlog’s John Aravosis. “I will print something where I absolutely know the source.”

Hilton insists that he holds himself “to a higher journalistic standard than a lot of the celebrity weeklies in this country. [Other] people will flat-out print lies. I’ve worked too hard over two years to develop a pool of reliable sources and nurture and gain the respect of mainstream media to self-sabotage that by lying to my readers. I’m not stupid.”

Still, there are signs that the guerrilla tactics that have made blogs so popular are starting to have a backlash. Photo rights, for instance, have become a sticky issue. Bloggers have been able to garner huge hits by posting a photo that the legal departments of established news sources and even tabloids would have to avoid. (Hilton has, on more than one occasion, posted photos of Lindsay Lohan’s vagina.) Even though he has not yet been sued by any of his outing targets or arguably mean-spirited posts, photo agencies are getting litigious with him for unauthorized use of their photos on his site. He was even served with a cease-and-desist order by Splash News in November. Hilton declined to talk about the brewing legal matter.

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