I Blame Elton John. It's Easy, and It's Fun.

Remember when Susan Sontag's NYT obituary barely mentioned Annie Liebowitz? Patrick Moore sure does, plus a similar omission in the LA Times, and in his LA Times editorial, he's rather perturbed by it all:

Sontag's reticence is surely part of why the two Timeses neglected this part of her life. But she didn't deny these relationships. And given that obituaries typically cite their subjects' important relationships, shouldn't the two best newspapers in the country have reported at least her most recent one, with Leibovitz, as well as her marriage, which ended in 1958?

Unfortunately, while Moore makes a lot of assertions, he doesn't back them up very well. He lists the female lovers chronicled in Sontag's unauthorized bio, for example, then declares, "Sontag's lesbian relationships surely affected her work and our understanding of it." His evidence for this? "Two of Sontag's most famous essays dealt with issues associated with homosexuality." Now, granted, it's not like the Times gave him a lot of space to lay out an argument, but just because Moore says "I believe that her intellectual accomplishments are even more compelling when one understands how her sexuality informed them" doesn't make it so, and knowing who she slept with isn't the same as understanding how her sex life informed her work. For that matter, the idea that she "had vital, loving relationships with some of the most fascinating and creative women of her day" is full of unproven adjectives...

But while we're on the subject of queer identity, let's consider Moore's assertion that "in a 1995 New Yorker profile, Sontag outed herself as bisexual, familiar code for 'gay.'" Now, granted, there are quite notorious examples of public figures who spent years telling the world they were bisexual in order to obscure a more distinctly homosexual preference. Putting those cases aside, the idea that "bisexual" is simply "familiar code" for "gay," rather than an equally valid self-identification, is one of the more tired tropes used by gay public intellectuals. Maybe Sontag really was a "quasi-closeted" lesbian--but it's equally possible that she might have seen herself as somebody who was capable of sexual relationships with men and women but chose, after a youthful marriage, to concentrate her emotional energies into other women. There's a full spectrum of possibilities, and we'll probably never know which truly best describes Sontag's personal life. Casting this as an all-or-nothing issue the way Moore does, however, doesn't necessarily help promote a genuine understanding of her work so much as it enables gay activists to add another celebrity to the team.

In other latecoming Sontag eulogies, Joan Acocella recalls, " There was almost nothing she felt she couldn’t do, nothing she wasn’t planning to do, very soon." And after everybody else with a personal connection to the deceased has paid their tributes elsewhere, Salon finally comes up with somebody who ate sushi with Sontag once and received "a mortifying initiation into New York literary life."