During HER 10 years as a famous person, Lindsay Lohan has worn a dizzying number of public masks.
She began as a beloved Disney tween queen and a much-praised box-office lure. That unraveled soon enough, as she became another wounded, doomed celebrity girl careening through the tabloid world: Lohan the despondent daughter of reckless parents, the on-the-set monster destroying her career and holding up expensive productions, the luckless dater whose boyfriends and hookups trash-talked her and did her no good, the cocaine-and-alcohol-fueled road menace who seemed rehab resistant.
But lately, there's been another twist in the Lohan saga that the mainstream gossip media -- her unofficial biographers -- have been feeding to their readers in regular doses. US Weekly, OK!, Star, the New York Post's Page Six, Life & Style and all of the other cogs in the celebrity news machine have been regularly publishing reports about her relationship with DJ .
Which from all happy and seemingly sober appearances -- they kiss, they hug, they hold hands, they shop for groceries -- is a romantic one.
Neither Lohan nor Ronson has spoken to the media about their relationship, and not surprisingly, Lohan's publicist would not comment for this story nor make Lohan herself available, writing in an e-mail that Lohan "wants to keep her private life private." (Ronson likewise did not respond to a request for comment made through her website.)
Yet the celebrity magazines have kept the stories coming. Mainstream editors used to be squeamish to the point of erasure when it came to unconfirmed same-sex relationships. Unless a star was willing to say, "Yep, I'm gay," as so famously did on the cover of Time in 1997 -- and as a trickle of others have too in years since -- print publications (including this one) have generally employed their own form of don't ask/don't tell when covering gay or bisexual celebrities who have not come out via press release or some other explicit declaration.
While many celebrities themselves have stopped hiding their same-sex relationships, the media have not until Lohan followed suit. , an openly gay columnist for the , who himself has never engaged in that kind of self-censorship, has noticed a change. As Musto sees it, we've reached a moment in which the Lohan-Ronson pairing can simply be reported as a fact because people have, you know, eyes.
