"Traditionally, the media has been as interested in closeting celebrities as the celebrities themselves have been," Musto said. "I've read things in gossip columns that would never go there in the past and realized, 'Wow, they're going there now.' They don't consider gay a dirty thing anymore. And it's very cool."
Jared Shapiro, the editor of Life & Style, said that the Lohan-Ronson story has indeed presented a unique set of issues for celebrity magazines. "Why is this couple different than every other couple?" Shapiro asked rhetorically recently on the telephone. "We know they're not friends -- we know they're in love, we know they're dating.
"Major movie star! Gay, question mark? Bisexual, question mark? Um." For Shapiro, those questions are just the first stop, and his magazine devoted its cover this week to them, asking, "Is Lindsay Gay?"
Before that, Shapiro said, the magazine had chosen to "follow their step-by-step," which is fairly easy because the couple are out so often. In a sense stories about the doings of "LoRo," as they've been called, are just standard celeb-gossip fare. And yet, Shapiro said, there is undeniably a larger issue looming over each story.
He returned to the rhetorical to ponder the question: "At what point do we editorialize and say why we think this is important?"
None of the other weekly magazines or gossip columns seems to have reached that point of what-does-it-all-mean analysis, either. Each has used the same template for this relationship as they do week after week for, say, "Eva and Tony" or "Nicole and Keith": "Lindsay Lohan Turns 22 With Samantha Ronson at Her Side" read the headline of a from this month. On the cover of its July 14 issue, "Lindsay & Samantha: Inside Their Hot Romance" to its readers; and on its Love Notes page on June 30, US asserted that "those close to the pair call it love" under the headline "Lindsay & Samantha: This Is for Real."
Nothing is official
Still, THE facts can't be pushed aside: There has been no official acknowledgment from Team Lohan -- or Team Ronson, for that matter -- that the relationship is Sapphic. So to discuss it looks a lot like outing, which is, to paraphrase , "publicizing homosexual behavior without the person's (or people's) consent."
No less an authority than Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of US and Star and numerous other publications, who is both credited and blasted for creating the current gossip world we live in, said in a telephone interview, "I don't think we've ever been in the business of outing celebrities at celebrity news weeklies."
