Jul 08, 2005  |  By: Chris Crain  | COMMENTS     

entertainer said his busy lifestyle made marriage difficult; besides, it wasn’t what he wanted.” Can you say “gay,” everyone?

IF AP CAN’T manage to say the “G word,” Answers.com and Wikipedia can. The exact same information — in the exact same words — is reported on that site under a section of Vandross’ bio titled “Sexuality” that deals expressly with rumors that the singer was gay.

Wikipedia reports that Vandross was asked about being gay on the BET show “Journeys in Black,” and refused to answer the question.

Does any of this “prove” Vandross was gay? Maybe not, but it’s enough to make it into stories about his life.

Of course Vandross is partly responsible for the lack of real evidence here, but so is the mainstream media, which interviewed Vandross countless times in his career without ever reporting (or even asking?) anything about his romantic life.

The same could be said about Sontag and Merchant, who managed public careers of almost a half-century each while dodging almost any coverage of their personal lives.

The truth is that the mainstream press is afraid to ask famous people if they’re gay, and even more afraid to print their responses. And when the famous person dies, the same lily-livered editors claim that the public record is, tragically, too skimpy to merit mention in post-death coverage.

Luther Vandross talked often in interviews about his failure to crossover to mainstream pop stardom, putting it down to his refusal to “buy blond wigs” and “walk differently.” But he was willing to lead on his largely female fan base, wearing a “straight wig” as it were, and hiding his own romantic life.

He built his entire career “spinning romance into hits” and yet kept his own romances almost completely hidden. That storyline was surely deserving of more coverage than it got, and didn’t even require answering the question that Vandross so rarely got asked.