"To out or not to out?"

What’s the deal on outing? In the recent film, Outrage, the filmmakers out closeted gays in Republican circles. I always thought that members of our community agreed that coming out was a highly personal decision. Is outing good manners or bad manners?

It’s a good question and once again, quite timely. More than a decade ago, I wrote on this topic in The Essential Book of Gay Manners & Etiquette: “Outing a colleague — intentionally or unintentionally — is a violation of that person’s privacy. Don’t do it!” In the film Outrage, the director pursues deep-in-the-closet politicians with “secret double lives” because they fight against same-sex marriage, vote against AIDS research, and denounce adoptions by LGBT parents. And, indeed, names are named.

To cut to the chase, we have two conflicting values at war here: privacy versus hypocrisy. At the time I wrote Gay Manners — back in the ’90s — I often said in interviews that were I to have known that Senator Jesse Helms had gay sex, I would have outed him despite my earlier reservations. The harm his policies caused LGBT people in this country — for instance, discrimination against gays and his refusal to support AIDS funding initiatives — would have been more than sufficient, in my mind, to outweigh any right to privacy.

Today we have a new cadre of elected leaders who vote against LGBT rights and under cover of darkness — or away on vacation — maintain liaisons with same-sex companions. That is the definition of hypocrisy, and as gay Congressman Barney Frank says in the film: “People who make the law ought to be subject to the law.”

Yes, manners usually take up on the side of privacy, but when hypocrisy is at play, truthfulness and honesty are our more important companions — and values — in the struggle for fairness and equality (and proper manners).