On Dec. 29, 2004, major gay and lesbian news organizations announced that "lesbian writer Susan Sontag" had died. In its obituary of Sontag, the New York Daily News wrote, "Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz had been her longtime companion."
On Dec. 29, 2004, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported Sontag's death on their front pages, with more stories inside. Yet neither paper mentioned Sontag's relationships with Leibovitz and other women.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday January 07, 2005 Home Edition California Part B Page 13 Editorial Pages Desk 0 inches; 26 words Type of Material: Correction
Susan Sontag -- A Tuesday Commentary article said the publication year of a New Yorker profile on Susan Sontag was 1995. The article ran in 2000.
It seems that editors at what are, arguably, the nation's most respected (and liberal) newspapers believe that one personal detail cannot be mentioned in even the most complete biographies -- being a lesbian.
In a 1995 New Yorker profile, Sontag outed herself as bisexual, familiar code for "gay." Yet she remained quasi-closeted, speaking to interviewers in detail about her ex-husband without mentioning her long liaisons with some of America's most fascinating female artists.
An unauthorized biography written by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock and published by W.W. Norton in 2000, reports that Sontag was, for seven years, the companion of the great American playwright Maria Irene Fornes (in Sontag's introduction to the collected works of Fornes, she writes about them living together). She also had a relationship with the renowned choreographer Lucinda Childs. And, most recently, Sontag lived, on and off, with Leibovitz.
Sontag's reticence is surely part of why the two Timeses neglected this part of her life. But she didn't deny these relationships. And given that obituaries typically cite their subjects' important relationships, shouldn't the two best newspapers in the country have reported at least her most recent one, with Leibovitz, as well as her marriage, which ended in 1958?
Some will ask why revealing Sontag's sexuality is relevant. As Charles McGrath wrote in his appreciation of Sontag in the New York Times, "Part of her appeal was her own glamour -- the black outfits, the sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair." Sontag was well aware of herself as a sexual being and used her image to transform herself from just another intellectual into a cultural icon. She may well have felt that her true sexuality would limit her impact in the male-dominated intellectual elite, while an omnisexual charisma opened doors.
