Or one might enlist your lawyers to shoot Gawker a five-page document threatening to sue. So we should just lay off, right?īut here’s the thing: last month a Gawker post ( The Secret Sex Life of John Travolta) detailed John Travolta’s alleged frequent sexual dalliances at the LA City Spa, according to a possibly completely unreliable source who’d written an entire book on the matter. John Travolta hasn’t necessarily talked shit about gay people. Generally, the rule seems to be you can out a hypocrite (e.g., Ted Haggard, Larry Craig) but it’s unseemly to out anyone who hasn’t talked shit about the gays. The politics of “outing” are murky, and there’s a bit of outrage on both sides regarding Carrie Fisher’s statement. Obviously I felt that mentioning “John Travolta is gay” would not interfere with John Travolta’s grieving process - primarily because John Travolta doesn’t read/care about (or, probs, any gay media), but mostly ’cause I hate the idea that “gay” = NEGATIVE. I remember once mentioning John Travolta being gay in an Autostraddle article and a commenter getting pissed at me for my lack of sensitivity towards Travolta when his son had recently died. It only draws more attention to it when you make that kind of legal fuss. Look, I’m sorry that he’s uncomfortable with it, and that’s all I can say. Wow! I mean, my feeling about John has always been that we know and we don’t care. One of those things was, “We don’t really care that John Travolta is gay.” I know you and Travolta go way back, so let’s get really blunt here: Does his legal team have any business demanding Gawker remove a recent post suggesting that he’s given blow jobs? In the September 2009 issue of Out, you participated in its monthly Can I Be Blunt? column by sharing 10 things that gay men should know about straight women. Now the deal has been sealed via Carrie Fisher in The Advocate : My grandmother knows it and she barely speaks English.” But also, this guy from said: “Frankly, just about everyone knows John Travolta is gay. Sometimes I feel like we unknowingly live in a bubble that might be imaginary where we make shit up and then circle-jerk our way into believing our own rumors.
For example, Alex’s Dad did not know that John Travolta was gay and was not taking my word for it. It turns out that “John Travolta is gay” is not a thing that everybody knows about or agrees upon. “John Travolta is gay,” is a thing I thought I could say out loud at a dinner table and it would be about as innocuous and unanimously-agreed-upon as a statement like, “these rolls are delicious!” or “your daughter is a very talented designer!” This came up at some point during a dinnertime “conversation” a few months back at Autostraddle Design Director Alex‘s family’s house when I mentioned off-hand that John Travolta was gay.