How long do you keep a secret?

That was the question recently at a seminar for gay journalists, entitled The Closet Six Feet Under. It was a question that came up here at Nightcharm when we published a remembrance of Luther Vandross and casually mentioned in the first line that, of course, the singer was gay. A heated battle followed (see the Vandross comments).

Objections were raised, some of them preposterous: What if his mother read our entry? Why were we “desecrating” his memory? We suspect these cries from the heart came not from our regular readers but from the stray — yes, probably female — fan who had wandered in through the back door of the Google search engine. Apparently, the revelation of homosexuality in a beloved celebrity makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even ones who profess to know better (again, see the Luther commentary.)

Whether to guard the closet door or swing it open, after death, is now a real concern at high-profile newspapers like The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The issue came up after the recent death of the intellectual Susan Sontag (right), who back in the 60’s penned a philosophical essay, Notes on Camp, that rightly pegged “camping” as a specifically homosexual species of irony, becoming the first scholarly work to look at the gay aesthetic with any seriousness.

Sontag’s death, life and 40 years of influential output were solemnly memorialized in high-end papers across the country. Yet there was scarcely any mention of Anne Leibovitz, the famed Vanity Fair photographer, who was her surviving partner. The ensuing outcry, primarily from publicly out members of the media, generated much soul-searching at editorial board meetings that continues these many months later (Sontag died in December, 2004). Here’s where things stand today:

Mark Fitzgerald reports in Editor & Publisher:

When the essayist and public intellectual Susan Sontag died last December, the obituaries marking her passing created more of a stir among some gay writers and activists than the fact of her death.

In letters, blogs, and even an Op-Ed piece in The Los Angeles Times, there were complaints that much of the press, like the Times and The New York Times, mentioned nothing or almost nothing about Sontag’s relationships with women, including the photographer Annie Leibovitz. The New York Times‘ then-Public Editor Daniel Okrent wrote in his column soon after the obit that the newspaper “could find no authoritative source that could confirm any details of a relationship.” He noted that Leibovitz would not talk with the Times about it, and Sontag’s son also declined to confirm the relationship.

Look for more of these controversies in the future as the mainstream press wrestles with the still-contentious issue of noting sexual orientation in the obits, a panel of obituary editors and writers said Friday at the 15th annual convention of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA).

After decades of employing code words such as “lifelong bachelor” or passing off as “pneumonia” as the cause of death for someone with HIV/AIDS, newspapers increasingly insist that their obits include the full truth about their subjects.

The problem is that people lead complicated lives, and do not always see their sexuality as something they want to appear in a newspaper. The NLGJA panelists said they did not want to perpetuate the phenomenon that gave the convention session its name — “The Closet Six Feet Under” — but they are also limited by journalistic standards of accuracy and fairness.

“If you’re not going to be truthful and out there when you’re alive — what are we supposed to do with you when you’re dead?” said Charles Strum, the New York Times obituaries editor since 2000.

While Sontag once referred in an interview to her relationship with Leibovitz as an “open secret,” Strum said that sort of supposedly widespread perception is not enough to merit mention in an obituary. “‘Everybody knows’ is not my standard of reporting,” he said.

Hank Stuever, a writer for The Washington Post’s Style section, made the same point: “I mean, this sounds weird to say, but once someone is dead, they can’t come out.”

While many more gay people are open about their sexual orientation, there remains a generational split among homosexuals, he said. “We still have too many people who think that [noting] the fact that someone is gay would mar an obit,” Stuever said.

Stuever called for more openness among the living, so that euphemisms and code words will no longer be necessary, and one gay skill can be allowed to atrophy: “Gay people have always known how to read a newspaper. We’re like detectives. We can read between the lines of anything.”

At the New York Times, Strum said, the decision about mentioning sexual orientation, or listing a surviving partner, is made by the family — defined broadly. “So if there’s a partner, that’s family,” he said.

But even then, there are complexities. What, for instance, do you call the surviving party in the relationship? “Do [surviving] gays want to be known as ’spouses’? I don’t know,” Strum said. “Is ‘partner’ a better word? I don’t know” …

Gay people angry about, say, Sontag’s obituaries, should redirect their criticism, the Washington Post’s Stuever said: “Instead of all the blogging about how badly newspapers do in covering gay people in obits — we should focus on how badly newspapers do in covering gay people who are alive.”