Originally a branch of philosophy, rhetoric is the delivery system of information, the method of making people believe that information is true, whether or not it actually is. Rhetoric itself, as a discipline, remains indifferent to the truthfulness of information, excepting practical considerations. For example, people often believe true information more easily than they do untrue information. Also, convincing people to believe untrue information might damage the writer\u2019s character, which can future persuasion more difficult, since the reader might no longer trust the writer. Whether true or untrue, rhetoric is the force behind information; and make no mistake, some information can be given quite a lot of force, as I will attempt to show below.<\/p>\n
In the song \u201cJason Donovan \/ Tessa Sanderson,\u201d Cornershop thematized rhetoric, information, and truth by posing the interesting question, is there ever a case where successfully convincing people of the truth is actually less desirable than allowing them to continue believing a falsehood?3<\/sup><\/strong> Is truth always preferable to error? To query this theme, Cornershop took the cases of Jason Donovan and Tessa Sanderson, both of whom had sued British periodicals for printing untrue, defamatory information about them, which is to say libel.<\/p>\n What\u2019s surprising, given the band\u2019s general hostility to the popular press (see Part I<\/a> of this series), is that the song heaps scorn on Donovan and Sanderson, the victims of the libels, but remains silent on the guilty periodicals:<\/p>\n I\u2019m getting my head together You remind me of Tessa Sanderson I don’t expect many American readers will be familiar with Jason Donovan. I first heard his name in the Cornershop song. In Britain, however, Donovan became a famous teenage heartthrob in the 1980s, first for his role on a soap opera, then for dating another teenage celebrity (Kylie Minogue), and then as a pop star with three number one hit singles.<\/p>\n [Video recording removed for accessibility. Recording showed the first thirty seconds of Jason Donovan\u2019s \u201cToo Many Broken Hearts\u201d performance on Top of the Pops<\/em>, Christmas Day 1989. \u00a91989 BBC]<\/p>\n After 1989 his career began to stall, as tends to happen with teenage heartthrobs, but in 1991 he landed a second, if somewhat diminished, stardom with a lead role in the West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat<\/em>. His troubles began almost immediately after he premiered in this role, when he became the target of an outing campaign orchestrated by the gay activist organization FROCS (Faggots Root Out Closeted Sexuality).<\/p>\n Outing purports to reveal the truth about someone\u2019s concealed sexuality, but in actuality it produces information, not truth. The information needn’t be supported by evidence. Probably it would be more accurate to describe outing as an allegation or accusation about someone’s sexuality. It is information launched into the world with varying levels of rhetorical force. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick best describes this rhetorical dimension in Epistemology of the Closet<\/em>, published just one year before the Jason Donovan outing: \u201c[outing] is always an intensely volatile move, depending as it does for its special surge of polemical force on the culture\u2019s underlying phobic valuation of homosexual choice (and acquiescence in heterosexual exemption),\u201d and elsewhere, in the same book, she so perfectly captures the frisson over such disclosures: \u201cTo the fine antennae of public attention the freshness of every drama of (especially involuntary) gay uncovering seems if anything heightened in surprise and delectability,\u201d5<\/sup><\/strong> hence the insatiable appetite for such information.<\/p>\n The outing of Donovan lacked evidence, but the lack of evidence didn’t matter because, as Sedgwick argues, the closet implicates everyone: you can never definitively prove that you are not in the closet, except by coming out of the closet: a trap that can only be evaded by actually being homosexual, and by publicizing your homosexuality, and even that act only serves to tighten the snare on everyone else. What’s more, twentieth century psychology offered the tantalizing possibility that a person might not even possess full knowledge of his own sexuality: \u201cno man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual.\u201d6<\/sup><\/strong> Therefore, the information that \u201cJason Donovan is gay\u201d (which he wasn’t) must be accepted as information tout court<\/em>. Even taken as mere information, however, it possessed no inherent value. The value of an outing lay in the uses to which it could be put.<\/p>\n In the case of the FROCS<\/abbr> campaign, the purpose of the information was to make homosexuality more socially acceptable; FROCS<\/abbr> claimed to believe that outing celebrities could increase the visibility of gays in public life: if people realized just how many widely-admired men and women were gay, then they might become more accepting of homosexuality. In other words, the subjects of the outings, usually celebrities or politicians, were selected for effect-potential, which is classic (not to say classical) rhetoric. Of course, an outing can have a purely vindictive purpose as well, but FROCS<\/abbr> denied any such intent; the nastiness of their tactics, however, belied both their denials and their claim that they merely wanted to provide positive role models for \u201cyoung lesbians and gays.\u201d7 <\/sup><\/strong>In the case of Donovan, for example, the outing was accomplished through posters depicting him in a photoshopped t-shirt emblazoned with the words \u201cQueer as Fuck,\u201d which, for the early nineties, when a word like \u201cfuck\u201d remained pretty shocking, does not seem especially well aligned with the group’s supposed mission (providing positive role models for gay youth).<\/p>\n Whereas Donovan could have enjoyed his moment in lexical history, he instead became angry. When the Face<\/em> magazine, in an article on the recent spate of celebrity outings, printed a picture of the poster, Donovan sued the magazine for libel.<\/p>\n The Face<\/em> magazine was a \u201cstyle magazine,\u201d a type of magazine unique at that time to Britain. Style magazines were for both men and women, and covered music, film, fashion, and culture more generally. Many consider the Face<\/em> to have been the first such magazine. Benn’s Media Directory<\/em> described the Face<\/em> as a \u201cVisual-oriented youth culture magazine; emphasis on music, fashion and films.\u201d It was \u201ca small-circulation magazine [and] the bible of youth style and culture.\u201d For two decades (the eighties and nineties) it was the essential guide to British youth culture, widely read by taste-makers outside Britain as well. \u201cThe Face<\/em> chronicled\u2014and in some cases predicted\u2014the twists and turns when street fashion and pop music were co-opted for individual personal expression and as forms of social and political critique.\u201d Though not a fashion magazine, it resembled one, in its design, more than it did other magazines marketed to young adults.<\/p>\n Dylan Jones, editor of British GQ<\/em>, described the Face<\/em> as \u201cthe benchmark of all that was important in the rapidly emerging world of British and\u2014in a heartbeat\u2014global \u2018style culture\u2019.\u201d Donovan himself \u201cregularly bought the magazine to keep abreast of trends.\u201d9<\/sup><\/strong> It’s difficult to think of anything like it today, in terms of its influence. At the same time, its circulation was relatively small\u201465,000 in 1991, compared with, for example, Fiesta<\/em>, the readers’ wives magazine we examined in part one, which had a circulation of 300,000, or Smash Hits<\/em>, a magazine more likely to have been read by Jason Donovan fans, which had a circulation of 555,000, or the Express<\/em>, one of the tabloids that had more viciously smeared him, which sold 1,500,000 copies every single day. And yet the Face<\/em> was the magazine Donovan chose to sue, a decision that, for a young British celebrity, seemed like nothing so much as career suicide.<\/p>\n \u201cLibel\u201d is a legal term: lawmakers establish the criteria defining it, and courts determine whether a specific case satisfies those criteria. Because libel is a matter of law, it differs from nation to nation. In the matter of libel, Britain is known for having weaker press protections, and a lower burden of proof, than the United States. In Britain, a libel is a published statement that is false, and \u201cthat tends to lower the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking people.\u201d Those are the two principal criteria. \u201cIt is also open to the plaintiff to innuendo a statement, that is, to show that a statement which is not, on the face of it, defamatory, actually has a defamatory meaning.\u201d10 <\/sup><\/strong>Although what really angered Donovan was the reproduction of the outing poster, his case against the magazine seems to have been largely based on this innuendo provision. Because the offending article never claimed Donovan was gay, and in fact specifically cited his denials, Donovan’s lawyers argued that the article implied he was gay, for example by describing him as \u201cthe boy with the bleached hair.\u201d11<\/sup><\/strong> In other words, the jury was asked to accept that gay stereotypes were legitimate signifiers of homosexuality, and that being homosexual would be something \u201cthat tends to lower the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking people.\u201d Gay shaming formed the predicate for Donovan\u2019s entire lawsuit. His lawyers characterized the supposedly-defamatory article as a gay \u201cslur,\u201d and this phrasing quickly caught fire in the British media: Jason Donovan had been the victim of a \u201cgay slur.\u201d<\/p>\n Donovan won his lawsuit, but found his character damaged in the process. As a Guardian<\/em> interviewer put it many years later, \u201cby trying to protect your reputation, you succeeded in destroying it.\u201d12<\/sup><\/strong>\u00a0(An example, by the way, of rhetorical antithesis.) The Guardian<\/em> interviewer rightly noted that Donovan\u2019s character was hurt more by his lawsuit against the Face<\/em> than it ever was by the article he felt had so grievously defamed him. The tenor of the backlash can be seen, for example, in Vox<\/em> magazine\u2019s end-of-the-year readers\u2019 poll for 1992, where Donovan was shortlisted for both \u201cBerk of the year\u201d (I had to look up \u201cberk,\u201d the meaning of which, apparently, is even more unprintable than \u201cfuck\u201d) as well as for \u201cMost wildly over-rated heap of cack\u201d (guessing you can use your fill-in-the-blank skills to infer the meaning of \u201ccack;\u201d otherwise I refer you to Green\u2019s Dictionary of Slang<\/em>). Musician<\/em> magazine labeled him a singer \u201c[f]or those who found Rick Astley too manly.\u201d For his part, Donovan continued to cast himself as the victim of serial misrepresentation: \u201cWhat was really disappointing was that people saw my action as a dig against homosexuality. I have no feelings against homosexuals whatsoever. However, I think I lost out through misrepresentation, because of the loss of respect from the gay community.\u201d13<\/sup><\/strong>\u00a0Clearly the victim of a vast, gay conspiracy.<\/p>\n Although he was bothered by the idea that homosexual men might think him sexually available\u2014\u201c[Donovan] said the rumors that he was gay had made people [presumably homosexual men] \u2018take a second look at me\u2019\u201d\u2014he evidently had no such qualms about similar impulses from underage girls. The Guardian<\/em>, which he did not sue, described him as \u201ca lust-object […] for his barely pubescent girl fans,\u201d14<\/sup><\/strong>\u00a0a striking, negative example of homophobia in the progressive-leaning Guardian<\/em>, since, one hopes, Donovan would find sexualized attention from a \u201cbarely pubescent girl\u201d even more objectionable than sexualized attention from an adult male, but fear of these latter misapprehensions is entirely the point. Sedgwick, again, provides the most illuminating description, for its time (which was Donovan’s time), of how the closet affected not just gays, but all men: \u201cSo-called \u2018homosexual panic\u2019 is the most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century western men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic blackmail,\u201d which Sedgwick elsewhere labeled the \u201cdouble blind\u201d in (male) same-sex friendship,15<\/sup><\/strong> and which Donovan himself unwittingly described when he lamented that, because of the article, he could no longer enjoy the company of his male friends, \u201cIt’s no longer a friend or mate of mine from Australia; it is more than that.”16<\/sup><\/strong> In his court testimony he said that being called gay was \u201chumiliating\u201d and that he \u201ctook one look at [the article] and was disgusted.\u201d17<\/sup><\/strong> Strong language, but consistent with Sedgwick’s account of male homosexual panic.<\/p>\n Sedgwick argued that outing depended, \u201cfor its special surge of polemical force on the culture\u2019s underlying phobic valuation of homosexual choice,\u201d and we must therefore establish whether those conditions obtained in Donovan’s case. Public opinion polling might not prove \u201cphobic valuation,\u201d but it does reveal, even if only in broad strokes, prevailing social attitudes. Polling data also, when available as time series, have the potential to show changes in those social attitudes, and these changes might offer one explanation as to why Donovan won his lawsuit, but ultimately lost his public’s support, and possibly even why his experience of the double-bind produced so intense a response.<\/p>\n When Donovan sued, public attitudes towards homosexuality were beginning to change after a long decade of increasing intolerance. British polling firm Social and Community Planning Research found that, from 1983 to 1990, the percentage of respondents who considered homosexuality to be \u201calways wrong\u201d or \u201cmostly wrong\u201d held steady at well-above 60%, with the numbers hovering around 70% in the six years preceding the Face<\/em> magazine article. A clear majority of respondents chose \u201calways wrong\u201d in every survey except 1983, a dramatic shift which the study authors attributed to the impact of AIDS on public attitudes towards the gay community.18<\/sup>\u00a0<\/strong>In 1983, 61% of respondents said that sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex were always or mostly wrong, but by 1987 that number had spiked to 75%. 1983, the year disapproval of homosexuality began to increase again, is also the year when media coverage of AIDS began heating up, first with an episode of the BBC program Horizons<\/em>, \u201cKiller in the Village,\u201d followed by a steady escalation in press coverage, much of it stigmatizing the disease as a \u201cgay plague,\u201d until 1985 when media coverage \u201csuddenly exploded […] peaking in 1987.\u201d19<\/sup><\/strong> Public opinion towards homosexuality closely tracked the media\u2019s coverage of AIDS.<\/p>\n Only after 1987, when the AIDS epidemic entered what Berridge and Strong call the phase of normalization,20<\/sup><\/strong> did public opinion slowly begin to shift again, with a decline in the percentage of respondents who considered homosexuality to be always or mostly wrong, eventually returning to pre-AIDS epidemic levels around 1994. Even in 1995, however, a clear majority of respondents still believed homosexuality to be always or mostly wrong.<\/p>\n
\nSo I can stamp on yours
\nBecause at best<\/p>\n
\nIt must be the way that you throw the javelin,
\nAnd a strong resemblance to Jason Donovan.4<\/sup><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWho Was Jason Donovan?<\/h3>\n
Outing: Kaleidoscopic Realms of Information and Rhetoric<\/h3>\n
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What Was the Face<\/em> Magazine?<\/h3>\n
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Adjudicating Truth, Injury, and Consequences<\/h3>\n
A Pyrrhic Victory<\/h3>\n
Male Homosexual Panic<\/h3>\n
An Unanticipated Shift in Public Opinion?<\/h3>\n