Perez with new baby (PerezHilton.com)

About 41 minutes ago (according to Tweetdeck), Modern Family actress Sophia Vergara wrote an angry message to Perez Hilton:

mobi.perezhilton.com/2013-02-27-sof… this is not news.this is desrespectfull.we know everyhing we need to know about my brother's death.

We followed the link and were surprised to find that the article was missing, and replaced by a new "Top Story" on the Hollywood gossip blog:

So far, no one is offering up any explanation of where this baby came from, but congrats? And good job deleting the story about Sophia Vergara's brother, or at least doing a bait-and-switch where you just put the story about his death elsewhere on your blog today.

Braving the elements on a rainy October Monday, we headed to the West Village for a Cointreau-cum-cabaret soirée headlined by the inimitable Dita Von Teese. As we ascended the spiral staircases, cocktails were being served up at every corner by bartenders who were far more … enticing than the limp canapés on offer. 

Propping up the bar was a friend and longtime fan of Ms. Von Teese, power blogger-turned-internet celebrity Perez Hilton. “Nobody is as good at burlesque as Dita Von Teese,” he gushed. “She really is the best in the world, and she’s the only person to have ever performed at my birthday party twice.” Dressed down in a long-sleeved T, the stargazer revealed that he is planning to stay in the city a while longer, having been seduced by the Manhattan party scene. “I love a good scandal!” he laughed, although for an event in which there was near-nudity and an endless supply of stiff drinks, a little more bad behavior wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The interiors were the real star of the evening, with the intimate feel of the Hudson Street townhouse going over quite well with the guests. “I love it here, it’s very quaint,” pouted human Barbie doll Yasmine Petty, who left little to the imagination in a dress that had seemingly undergone a vicious scissor attack. Ms. Petty couldn’t talk for long, however, as she was swiftly moved to the front of the performance area to watch the evening’s entertainment.

MC Lady Rizzo led the cabaret by singing a couple of numbers, but the raucous, Cointreau-soaked crowd mercifully drowned out her caterwauling, as well as the peculiar tantric séance-esque glass playing of Johnny Rogers. Not knowing quite how to react, the audience were already worshipping at the altar of Dita by the time Ms. Von Teese made her way through the crowd. As ever, her performance was a delight, although this particular routine was less Parisian couture, more Copacabana with stuffed birds of paradise and jaunty beach music. “The show is quite a departure from what I usually do,” the artiste explained. “I wanted to do something with a 1940s tropical theme, as some of my favorite films are from that era.” After one final shake of her nipple tassels, the guests were promptly thrown onto the rainy street with our coats after a rather calamitous cloakroom disaster, although watching the partygoers scrabble over their furs proved to be the best entertainment of all.

clytton@observer.com

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

At a crowded movie premiere in Midtown recently, The Observer witnessed a young movie and TV star—a dashing young man who’s been involved with several starlets despite whispers about his close relationships with other men—sitting for the entire party in close conversation with a well-groomed gent, even as his co-stars circulated. As we passed, the plus-one stared us down, as if to say, "Step off," or perhaps, "Don’t you dare write about this."

Nor did we, since the question of whether it is news that a virile young actor was enjoying the company of one man—if not the company of men—is very much still open.

For decades, the practice of aggressively outing well-knowns was largely forsworn. Jim McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey, didn’t get the gay rumors swirling around him put into print until he declared himself a "gay American." Jodie Foster’s long relationship with a female movie producer only went public when Ms. Foster acknowledged it in a 2007 awards acceptance speech. By that time, the pair had already raised two children together.

But with the increasing acceptability and mainstreaming of gay culture, the texture of how and why people come out or stay in the closet has become a more complicated issue, as has the media coverage surrounding it.

With the number of prying media outlets—TMZ, Perez Hilton, Gawker, TV newsmagazines like Extra, a vivified set of glossy tabloids—growing seemingly by the week, celebrities have come up with a new strategy to decline discussing their personal lives until they’re good and ready. Living in the so-called "glass closet," they can forestall the legitimate press inquiring after their home life while also ensuring that their orientation is hardly breaking news. It’s being basically out, without having to answer any questions.

For instance, Queen Latifah’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment on this article, even after her performance at a gay pride event in Long Beach, Calif., raised eyebrows ("Queen Latifah didn’t make any big announcements at the Long Beach Lesbian
& Gay Pride Festival this weekend, but it seems she invited the world to read between the lines," began one article on BET’s website). She was able to monetize the gay market with a wink and a nod, but actually coming out—if she is indeed gay—was out of the question. "I’ve never dealt with the question of my personal life in public," Ms. Latifah told Entertainment Weekly this month. "It’s just not gonna happen."

Or take Anderson Cooper. He’s built his brand by dishing on-air with gay icons Andy Cohen and Kathy Griffin, all while leaving his personal life very, very personal. Never mind all the photos of his trawling lower Manhattan with gay-bar owner Benjamin Maisani—or the fact that his revealing memoir omits any mention of a love life.

The "nobody’s business but my own" argument—which Mr. Cooper rarely if ever has even had to verbalize, despite being the author of a soul-baring memoir on many other subjects—may be familiar. It’s a cannier, more media-trained dodge of the question than Clay Aiken’s elision, in Rolling Stone in 2003. "One thing I’ve found of people in the public eye," he told that magazine, "either you’re a womanizer or you’ve got to be gay. Since I’m neither one of those, people are completely concerned about me." Or when Latin singer Ricky Martin told Barbara Walters in 2000, without gendered pronouns, in response to questions about his sexuality, "I live la vida loca!"

Both of those singers are, by now, completely out of the closet, though they were allowed to emerge, by the large media outlets, on their own terms—testament to the fact that outing is still the third rail of old-school print media. For instance, New York’s story about the city’s "trophy boys," which listed attendees at an all-gay party on Fire Island, prompted a number of angry letters and to this day is not on the magazine’s capacious website. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s marriage is treated as legitimate—and, hey, maybe it is! *NSYNC singer Lance Bass’s coming-out in People in 2006 was treated as breaking news, though gossip blogs cited photos of him in Provincetown, Mass., with a gay reality-TV star as meeting the burden of proof quite some time before.

Lance Bass.

The politics and ethics of outing, and indeed what constitutes outing, are, as ever, a subject of significant debate in the journalistic community.

Michelangelo Signorile, whose outing of celebrities became a flashpoint in 1990, when he reported for the now-defunct OutWeek upon the sex life of the late Malcolm Forbes, has seen the debate shift. "The Daily News got the exclusive from us and they wanted to put it on the front page. They killed it and instead went with Marla Maples—an acceptably heterosexual scandal," said Mr. Signorile, who is now a news commentator on the Huffington Post and SiriusXM Radio.

When is outing in the media acceptable? "There were two criteria journalistically that had to be met," said Mr. Signorile. "Is the sexual orientation relevant? And is it a public figure? If you’re a public figure where you open up your life for dissection by the media, and it’s relevant to the story, journalistically, that’s something that is perfectly acceptable. At the same time, I have also talked about how culturally, as a journalist working for a journalistic outfit, it’s not a tabloid, I see it as you report on it when it’s relevant to a larger story."

In other words, "Anderson Cooper is gay," were it verified, is not a story; "John Travolta sued for same-sex sexual misconduct" is.

But this sort of thinking leaves wide-open any number of loopholes. A.J. Daulerio, the current editor of Gawker, told The Observer, "Everything’s on a case-by-case basis. If you saw a story about a public figure and it’s someone newsworthy and someone interesting, there are so many different variables that I can’t say across the board." We were discussing Gawker’s recent article about ABC anchor Robin Roberts’s purported lesbianism, a story with valences both in her recent gay-rights exclusive interview with President Obama and good old-fashioned prurience.

"I don’t take exception to Gawker," said Howard Bragman, the publicist who is known for ushering closeted stars out of the closet (notably, 1980s TV star Meredith Baxter, who made a big announcement on Today after blogs noted her presence on a lesbian cruise). Referring to the practice of calling out stars who seem to be out to everyone but the public, he said, "They’re the ones who say the emperor has no clothes."

Blogs like Gawker and Perez Hilton (the latter having sworn off outing celebrities in 2010) have lately played the role that OutWeek occupied in its brief existence—after all, Mr. Signorile’s story was as much about testing the limits of what could be reported and written about an individual as it was the specifics of Mr. Forbes’s sex life. In comparison to the OutWeek 1990s, though, today "there’s nothing disparaging about saying someone’s gay," said Mr. Bragman. Indeed, an Albany appellate court recently ruled that claiming someone is gay, even falsely, is not libelous.

Just as for some media outlets, the sexuality of an individual who chooses not to comment can never be a news story, for others it will always be a news story. Kevin Naff, editor of the gay newspaper the Washington Blade, refuses to call writing about closeted individuals "outing": "I call it truth telling."

"If a celebrity is gay, it’s a fact," he explained. "We should report it. What you do behind closed doors is private. The fact of being gay is not a private fact. Being straight is not a private fact."

(If he were gay, would Mr. Cooper ever come out? "Probably when he needs a ratings boost on his talk show," Mr. Naff replied.)

One need only look at Gawker’s persistent if not incessant coverage of Mr. Cooper’s Downtown antics to see the end of the old decorum.

Brian Moylan, now a Hollywood.com writer once responsible for Gawker’s coverage of Mr. Cooper, views the longstanding media prohibition on outing to be a rights issue. "You don’t write a profile about Chris Evans being in The Avengers without asking who he’s dating. You ask Daniel Craig about his recent marriage—and he gets pissed off, but you report the answer. Not asking people about who they’re dating is discrimination. Plain and simple ... Reporters are under the obligation to ask that question and report the answer. [Mr. Cooper] needs to answer it, and they need to ask it like they would Katie Couric."

Neil Patrick Harris.

At a recent panel discussion on gossip, Gawker proprietor Nick Denton went even further. "Does everybody here know that Anderson Cooper is gay?" he asked the audience.

"Noooo!" yelled out a woman in mock horror as the rest of the room laughed knowingly.

Mr. Denton went on. "People will tell you, ‘Why would you want to report that? Everyone knows it already.’ No, they don’t! Most people in America do not know that Anderson Cooper is gay. So if you judge the differential, the gradient, between insider knowledge and public knowledge, there is still a gigantic gap. It will be erased. Probably in the next five years. And what’s going to happen in the next five years will be much more significant than what’s happened so far."

What does that look like? Sunny Bates, the panel’s moderator, asked.

"Everything open," said Mr. Denton. "All secrets out there."

The question arises: Is there no sphere of privacy for the celebrity anymore? After all, straight celebrity couples from Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem to Beyoncé and Jay-Z don’t acknowledge any element of their love in public, though they’re also not asked if they’re heterosexual. Why should Anderson Cooper or Queen Latifah have to dish about their love lives—or even acknowledge their sexuality?

But such a question seems academic, given the inclinations of Mr. Denton and others of like mind: regardless of the answer, the scrutiny will only mount in the future.

In response to such pressures, recent celebrity comings-out have been well-managed, low-key affairs—not nearly splashy enough to damage a career in the manner of Ellen DeGeneres’s years in the wilderness: Jim Parsons, star of the hyperpopular sitcom The Big Bang Theory got a mention of his sexuality squeezed in at the very end of a long New York Times profile recently. It clearly wasn’t the story—that would be his current starring role in Harvey on Broadway—but it got him enough cred to present at the Tonys. Star Trek’s Spock, Zachary Quinto, mentioned his sexuality in a New York interview about a new indie film he was promoting. Matt Bomer, star of the upcoming male-stripper movie Magic Mike, thanked his partner at an awards ceremony in February; he’s by now able to reference his and his partner’s children in interviews and still remain the object of the female gaze. All three stars had never hidden their sexuality—they’d lived in a glass closet whereby they never needed to say anything until they were comfortable doing so. But then why waste years of your career dodging questions when the truth will be unveiled nevertheless?

It is perhaps a question John Travolta has entertained, in the wake of his recent public relations disaster.

Mr. Travolta, who has long dodged rumors, recently uploaded a video slideshow of family photos to the site Vimeo just as the tabloid story of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by a male masseuse reached critical mass.

As his longtime acquaintance Carrie Fisher said in The Advocate, "We know and we don’t care. Look, I’m sorry that he’s uncomfortable with it, and that’s all I can say."

As with all matters of sexuality, it’s not that simple, though.

"It does bother me when I see some of these closeted actors deny that they’re gay or lesbian and I see them out at the bars and the clubs," said Dustin Lance Black, the openly gay screenwriter of Milk and J. Edgar. "And they’re taking advantage of the bravery of men and women so we can have bars. When I see these people who vocally deny their sexuality, who they are, and then take full advantage of the hard work of others ..." But he acknowledged that outing is not always a net good. "For those who are leading a private life because that’s their preference ... well, we have a right to privacy."

But he added, "When I have these conversations with actors who are closeted, they’re yearning to be a part of this movement that’s experiencing such progress."

Lance Bass, whose coming out in 2006 was occasioned by a number of tabloids threatening to run a story on his relationship with openly gay reality-TV star Reichen Lehmkuhl, told The Observer that it never occurred to him to come out in public before his hand was forced. "I had a boyfriend. My friends knew, my family knew, I didn’t think it was a big deal.

"I thought I would just casually reveal it—get married or something."

That performers like Mr. Quinto and Mr. Bomer have been able to "casually reveal it" in recent years indicates just how far public acceptance of homosexuality has come, even since 2006. However, major stars like Mr. Cooper, Mr. Travolta and Ms. Latifah—all of whom are at the forefront of their fields—have much more to lose than Mr. Bomer, an actor on a cable TV series, or Mr. Quinto, a still-emerging talent. The ridicule they and others face—"It comes to a point of silliness," said Mr. Bragman of various glass-closeted celebrities—is nothing compared to the definite loss of a fan base partially kept in the dark. (For every Neil Patrick Harris, who’s only gained credibility since coming out, there’s a Clay Aiken, whose female fan base was shocked and disappointed.)

Coming out is a potentially traumatic experience for anyone. Mr. Bass, for instance, recalled the two-day period between agreeing to People’s interview request and seeing the "I’M GAY" cover on newsstands: "It was 48 hours to tell the world your deepest, darkest secret."

Seemingly out of some remaining respect for the difficulty of making such an announcement, outing is still a delicate subject among the media community.

Cyd Zeigler, Jr., co-founder of the gay sports news site Outsports, said that he is sitting on knowledge of several famous athletes who are gay, but he did not expect them to come out anytime soon. "There’s a difference between breaking the news and getting the story. There are people I could write about but I don’t—because I want to know what their life is like, how they live. I want the story behind the news. People who just look at the news miss the story. There’s a lot of bad reporters out there who give us all a bad name."

Even Outsports’s policy is subject to subtle shading, though: Mr. Zeigler noted that the site has written frequently about rumors that Troy Aikman is gay. "Outing is knowing that they are gay and talking about the fact that they are gay against their wishes and explaining how you know they’re gay."

There’s also the simple matter of defusing the knowing laughter of a public that maybe just doesn’t care that much anymore. "If you’re in the closet," said Mr. Bass, "you get made fun of more than if you just come out!"

If he’s in fact gay, that’s a lesson Chace Crawford—the dashing, engrossed young man at the premiere—may do well to heed.

Additional reporting by Sarah Douglas

Hilary Swank, at a Santa Monica Cirque Du Soleil performance (Getty Images)

A selection of celebrities who have recently attended Cirque Du Soleil and been summarily featured in press on People or Us Weekly's web sites or PerezHilton.com, placed in ascending order of desperation for publicity:

• Christian Bale
• Halle Berry and Olivier Martinez
• Tim Tebow
• Pitbull
• Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Maddox Jolie-Pitt et al.
• Kylie Minogue
• "Pregnant Beyonce and hubby Jay-Z"
• Kristin Cavallari and Jay Cutler
• Perez Hilton

Mr. Taylor and Mr. Richie might use traffic to Mr. Lavandeira's site to boost the launch of a new collaboration that they are planning. Mr. Nolan speculates that the offer may just be a stunt to get attention for their new site.

Mr. Lavandeira has not indicated that his site is for sale or said how much he thinks it is currently worth. $20 million might be too low.

Mr. Lavandeira's involvement with the site after the buyout also remains unclear.

"You get a photo of it and, what do you do with it?" Mr. Osher asked The Observer. Well, put it on the Internet, of course! "The average person gets a photo of a celebrity and they save it to their desktop, they email their ten best friends and family, maybe they put it on their social networking site like Facebook and the story dies there," Mr. Osher explained. He decided to help keep these real-life encounters alive by creating MeetTheFamous.com—a site that enables its users to become their own celebrity blogger. Its tagline: "MeetTheFamous.com: Where YOU Are the Paparazzi."

"What I want to do is provide a home for these people," Mr. Osher, the site’s creator and chief executive, told The Observer from his Fifth Avenue office. "Instead of the story just dying on their desktop, is to share their encounter, share their experience, share their photos with the world and get paid for it."

At MeetTheFamous.com, users can create a profile and upload their own pictures and videos of celebrities. The site has signed an exclusive partnership with a top photo agency (Mr. Osher declined to disclose the name of the agency) to license and sell their photos to sites like TMZ and Just Jared and magazines like InStyle. Whatever the photo agency sells, users receive 50 percent of the commission through PayPal. Also, MeetTheFamous.com staffers choose several posts to be featured on the site's home page every day. Users who create those featured posts get a $25 bonus.

For "Jenny from Idaho who has never seen a celebrity in her whole life," Mr. Osher said, she can become their "own Perez Hilton," by blogging about photos posted on the site. There’s also a Celebrity Trivia game and a Celebrity Clue game that offers daily and weekly cash prizes. Features like Celebrity Closet also note the brand names of the clothing celebrities have on and where users can snag that skirt for themselves. The site also ranks the "most popular paparazzi" (based on profile views) and the best money-making "top paparazzi."

Launched in mid-October 2008, the site (which is funded by V.C's s in New York, Ohio, Connecticut and Chicago) has collected more than 16,000 photos of photos submitted by its 5,000 users. Headlines include: "Nicolas Cage Does a Hairplug Check"; "Lady Gaga Gets Horny On Stage"; and "Scarlett (Johansson) is one Transtastic Starlet." Mr. Osher said some of the most interesting submissions include one of Gerard Butler—the Hulk-like actor who played a king in 300. An old acting classmate submitted a photo of him looking much thinner, with floppy hair and a nerdy look. Mr. Osher said publishers were clambering to create a "before and after" feature with the picture.

Another was submitted by a tattoo artist of his recent work on Rihanna—two guns on her ribcage. "This was picked up by Extra TV and TMZ was on it," Mr. Osher said.

Mr. Osher came up with the idea for the site from his cubicle. "Just like the next person, I love the celebrity news and the celebrity gossip and I found myself going to these blogs," Mr. Osher said. "But there was never anything to do there. I was always, 15 seconds and I'm done, I'll wait for the next story to come. I always wanted more."

"If someone posts something like Madonna was spotted at a Starbucks at 43rd and 2nd at 9 a.m., what am I supposed to do with that? Am I supposed to sit at Starbucks the next day and wait for her?"

Mr. Osher said users can bank on getting photos that even the paparazzi can't get. Most celebrities know when paparazzi are watching and act accordingly. But if undercover, everyday folks are camera-ready with their iPhones, what will MeetTheFamous.com users catch them doing next?

For example, Mr. Osher used to live in Los Angeles and was "'attempting' to be an actor," he wrote in an email. He had a small part in the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith, starring then-undercover lovers Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. "I filmed a scene with only Brad and Angelina when the whole rumors of 'are they hooking up or not' were swirling around. If I had a camera phone back then, let's just say I could have taken a photo that would have been in all the celebrity magazines the next day. Unfortunately, there wasn't a place like MeetTheFamous.com to go and post the photo to back then."

Perhaps most MeetTheFamous.com users won't be so lucky and many of their submissions will capture celebrities going about their daily routines—getting coffee, picking up dry cleaning, picking their noses. But for some reason we’re just as obsessed with those pictures as the scandalous shots—just pick up an issue of In Touch for proof.

"Celebrities are everyday people," Mr. Osher continued. "They take their kids to school, they walk their dogs, they go to restaurants, they cheat on their spouses and they get in fights. And they're not ghosts. People see them on an everyday basis."

Mr. Osher might consider geo-targeting and mobile applications for MeetTheFamous.com. But for now he and his five other staff members, are focusing on getting the product right, building partnerships, and "'getting out into the mainstream,' of course," Mr. Osher added. "It has to get to the point where people are like, ‘I gotta get a picture on MeetTheFamous.'”

Last evening, the Cut ran an item celebrating their newfound fame—bloggers have to take what they can get!—while also seeming a bit confused by Ms. Zoe's breakdown. "Honestly, we're a little bewildered by Zoe's teary reaction," they write. "Especially since we were just reporting the facts. She even talked to our reporter for the item. We thought Zoe would be inured to press coverage at this point." You may recall that the Daily Transom has had our share of misunderstandings with Ms. Zoe, who recently accused us of "always twisting [her] words." Do we? Like the Cut, we like to think we just report the facts, but maybe we're all just insensitive? On her Bravo-sponsored blog, Ms. Zoe explains her reaction:

Not to split extensions or anything, that's not exactly how it works. Fact-checkers abound and, excluding the Jayson Blairs of the world, we would be careful about describing journalism as a profession in which people "sit there and lie." That's really more of a publicist thing.

Also, here is her take on a recent Times review of her show (the piece was, needless to say, negative; Times writer Ginia Bellafante called her "a pox on humanity"):

See? We're not all bad!

Also, we here at the Daily Transom would like to note that, while there was a screen shot of the Observer Web site in the preview for Tuesday's show, we did not make it into the actual episode. Why does the Cut get all the glory? We think Bravo is totally in the tank for New York! To get our hopes up only to have them dashed by unfair, insensitive Bravo film editors hurts, you know?

So, maybe all of us in the media universe should all try to be a little more fair to one another? Or, you know, toughen up!

And one more thing. Here is the penultimate line of Ms. Zoe's entry:

"The irony about the Times article was that people's reaction was, 'Wow, now I want to go watch.' She actually brought more attention to the show."

Well, yes—but we don't think that that particular phenomenon is, uh, news to Ms. Zoe.

When Mr. Hilton visited ABC talk show The View recently, co-host Joy Behar attacked him specifically for mocking celebrities’ children, like Demi Moore and Bruce Willis’ daughter Rumer, to whom the blogger often refers as “Potato Head.” “It’s like having sex,” he shrugged of the uncomfortable episode. “You always have high expectations, you always want it to be really good, but sometimes you have sex and it’s not that good, and it’s like, all right, what are you going to do, stop in the middle of it? Just take it till you’re done!”

Mr. Hilton is soon to make the leap to television himself, with a VH1 program, What Perez Sez, that debuts in early September. “It’s not like a reality show,” he said, adding loftily: “You know how Barbara Walters has her specials every once in a while? It’ll be like that.”

And how are things for him in the romance department? “I’m expecting to be alone for the rest of my life,” Mr. Hilton said, “but I’m taking steps to create my own happiness, however Oprah-ish that may sound—I love Oprah; I’m an Otheist. I want to create my own family. I want to have kids, and that’s forever. Boyfriends may come and go, but kids are ’til death.”

We'll let Perez tell you the news himself.

• PerezHilton.com

We're thinking he tipped his hand with this little illustration (right) which appeared on his Web site yesterday.

He's slotted to appear on the show today, and has promised big news at noon. We may or may not keep you posted.

• mediabistro.com
• perezhilton.com