Do ask, do tell

During her 10 years as a famous person, Lindsay Lohan has worn a dizzying number of public masks, from Disney tween queen to yet another wounded, doomed celebrity girl careening through the tabloid world.

But lately, there’s been another twist in the Lohan saga that the mainstream gossip media – her unofficial biographers – have been feeding to their readers in regular doses: her relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson.

Which from all happy and seemingly sober appearances – they kiss, they hug, they hold hands, they shop for groceries – is a romantic one.

Neither Lohan nor Ronson has spoken to the media about their relationship. Not surprisingly, her publicist would neither comment nor make Lohan herself available, writing in an e-mail that Lohan “wants to keep her private life private.” (Ronson likewise did not respond to a request for comment made through her Web site.)

Yet the celebrity magazines have kept the stories coming.

Mainstream editors used to be squeamish to the point of erasure when it came to unconfirmed same-sex relationships. Unless a star was willing to say, “Yep, I’m gay” – as Ellen DeGeneres so famously did on the cover of Time in 1997, followed by a trickle of others in years since – most publications generally have employed their own form of don’t ask/don’t tell when covering gay or bisexual celebrities who have not publicly come out.

Michael Musto, an openly gay columnist for the Village Voice, has noticed a change. As he sees it, we’ve reached a moment in which the Lohan-Ronson pairing can be reported as a fact because people have, you know, eyes.

“Traditionally, the media has been as interested in closeting celebrities as the celebrities themselves have been,” Musto says.

But lately, he adds, “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 – who devoted a recent cover to Lohan and Ronson, asking “Is Lindsay Gay?” – says the story has presented a unique set of issues for celebrity magazines.

In a sense, stories about the doings of “LoRo,” as they’ve been called, are just standard celeb-gossip fare. And yet, Shapiro says, there is undeniably a larger issue looming over each story.

“At what point do we editorialize and say why we think this is important?” he asks.

None of the other weekly magazines or gossip columns seems to have reached the 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 People.com story. On the cover of its July 14 issue, Star offered “Lindsay & Samantha: Inside Their Hot Romance.”

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 anything more than a friendship. So to discuss it looks a lot like outing.

No less an authority than Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of US and Star and numerous other publications, says: “I don’t think we’ve ever been in the business of outing celebrities at celebrity news weeklies.”

Maybe, with fame culture and its now-rote privacy invasions having brought us to a state of flux about what secrets a celebrity is entitled to, long-held anti-outing stances are crumbling.

There are other, more subtle factors at work in the case of Lohan, of course. This is, in tabloid terms, an over-covered disaster who has entered into a same-sex relationship. After all the dirt they’ve dished on her, why would the gossip mill back off now?

There’s also the reality that the mainstream celebrity media must compete furiously to survive. It would be surprising if they did not scuttle the old rules to be able to document this latest Lohan chapter.

And there’s yet another open question: Do editors assume that their readers are, at this point in history, largely accepting of – and possibly even interested in – gay relationships? (At least when it’s two women?)

Online gossip columnist Perez Hilton, who like Musto is openly gay, has drawn criticism from the gay community for his outing of allegedly closeted celebrities on his blog, Perezhilton.com.

“I’ve been fascinated by the reluctance of anyone in the mainstream media to talk on the record about the issue,” Hilton says of the Lohan story. “Most of these big media organizations – still to this day – have an unwritten policy against, quote, ‘outing’ people.

“What’s especially interesting to me is that the publication that first jumped on the Lindsay-and-Samantha relationship bandwagon … is People magazine! And People magazine, of all the celebrity weeklies, is the tamest, the most celebrity-friendly and the most by-the-book.

“I’m fascinated by why they’re doing it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just surprising to me.”

Musto, who was the first to report – in tandem with the New York Post’s Page Six – that DeGeneres and Anne Heche were dating, has been writing about closeted gay celebrities for many years.

“It might seem shocking, but there were days when Ellen and Rosie (O’Donnell) and Boy George and George Michael were not out, and I was running pieces about them being gay,” he says.

“I did get vilified in the old days,” Musto says, sounding wistful. “Like I was considered a lunatic.”

Life & Style’s Shapiro says that whatever happens going forward, covering Lohan-Ronson has been a relief.

“This relationship, I will be honest with you, is a breath of fresh air for Lindsay Lohan coverage,” he says.

“None of us wants to be writing about the train wreck that Lindsay Lohan was. We don’t want to see her back in rehab, that doesn’t do anyone any good. We love that she’s with Sam Ronson and that she’s happy – Lindsay looks better than ever.

“People want to get emotionally involved in this stuff, that’s why they buy the magazines and read this stuff – they want to be taken away,” Shapiro says. “When it’s Lindsay and Sam, it’s like, ‘Oh, they found each other.’ “