It only seemed as if it took six weeks. On Jan. 30, Advertising Age was the first to flat out declare what everyone in the New York media world had been whispering about for months: Married Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner had done the unmentionable--he'd acquired a male companion.

By the time six weeks had passed, the mainstream press had gone full tilt into action, rippling out waves of reportage now that another publication had named names. Accounts of Wenner's personal and business entanglements cropped up in the hallowed Wall Street Journal and in New York magazine, and major mainstream publications such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times repeated the news in pieces on the media hoo-hah.

"Everyone wants to be first to be second," says Michelangelo Signorile, author of "Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power" and one of the leading advocates of "outing."

But the seeds of Wenner's unwilling descent into the glare of public scrutiny go back further than that, if you accept the timeline offered by San Francisco Chronicle columnist and outing pioneer Armistead Maupin. He says the clock began ticking for Wenner 10 years ago, when Maupin outed Rock Hudson via an interview with San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts.

"When I came out of the closet (in 1973), I came to the revolutionary conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being gay and that included everyone else as well," Maupin says. "It became clear to me that the only way to lift the onus was being as matter of fact about it as I possibly could. I've never accused anyone of being gay because I don't think it's worthy of an accusation."

A decade ago, Maupin was widely castigated for his views. But now his argument in support of outing is gaining ground in the gay community, and it's helping to prod the heretofore reluctant mainstream in the same direction. When such an unlikely publication as the Wall Street Journal joins the vanguard of reporting on a public figure's personal life, the line guarding one's privacy has shifted one step further.

And debate is raging among gay and mainstream journalists over whether that step is headed forward or backward.