I was never an admirer, much less a fan, of Susan Sontag, but I confess to being fascinated by the retrospective brouhaha over whether the New York Times should have outed her–which it didn’t–in its long, unabashedly admiring obituary. Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan has been linking to much of the relevant post-obit commentary, and today he’s posted a long and telling excerpt from a Sontag interview conducted in 2000:
She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. “No, hang on,” she says. “Actually, it’s nine. Five women, four men.” She will talk about her bisexuality quite openly now. It’s simple, she says. “As I’ve become less attractive to men, so I’ve found myself more with women. It’s what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out.” She doesn’t have a lover now, she lives alone. The rumours about her and the photographer Annie Leibovitz are, she says, without foundation. They are close friends.
Maybe it sounds foolish, she says. “Maybe everyone will think I have an aberrant life, or a low sex drive. Maybe I am consigning myself to the asexual here. But speaking candidly, and only for myself, there are so many things in my life now that are more important to me than my sexuality. My relationship with my son, David. My writing. Even my moral passions seem to me to be far more defining than my erotic life. People can conclude from this what they want.”
(You’ll find lots of other interesting Sontag-related stuff on Sullivan’s site, but his permalinks don’t always point directly to specific postings, so the best thing to do is go there, scroll down, and keep scrolling.)
Should the Times have described Sontag as a lesbian, or bisexual, or however you want to put it? Speaking as a biographer, I think it’s absurd not to be frank about such matters. Regardless of a person’s wishes, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed, and when the person in question is important, it’s no less important to tell the truth, insofar as it’s known or can be determined. I once read a long, posthumously published biography of the American composer Samuel Barber in which the words “homosexual” and “gay” were nowhere to be found, even though everybody in the music business knew perfectly well that Barber was gay (and even though the author had written at length about a goodly number of his lovers). That’s just crazy.
At the same time, though, I think biographers–and writers of obituaries–should be careful about engaging in the sort of idiot reductionism one typically finds in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography.” What Sontag said in that interview is worth taking to heart–and not just in her own case. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was definitely a complicated woman, too complicated to be summed up in a single word. So am I. So are you.