Luke Evans - not as gay as previously believed Options

[carbuncle]

Luke Evans (actor) is currently fully protected due to a dispute about Evans' sexuality. There seems to be no question that Evans is openly gay, just about whether or not WP says he is gay. Although WP was happy to label Jay Brannan as gay for years despite his objections, this seems to be going to the other extreme as can be seen in this BLP noticeboard thread.

It has hit the blogs already here:

• Hollywood’s Next Big Action Star Is Gay
• Is Luke Evans Gay? Publicist Tries to Get His Story Straight
• Action Star Luke Evans Doesn’t Realize His Gay Past Is All Over The Internets

This should be interesting...

This post has been edited by carbuncle:

[Pwok]

Someone alerted me to the Luke Evans dust-up. It is similar to one that I was involved with a few years ago concerning Matt Sanchez, a gay porn actor and prostitute who became involved in far right-wing politics, up to and including appearances on Fox News. When Sanchez's past was exposed, he admitted the porn (kinda hard to avoid that), but claimed he'd never been homosexual and gave contradictory statements about his prostitution. It all wound up in a big Wikipedia fight, the outcome being that Sanchez's porn career was minimized (from more than 45 films to only four listed), with any mention of his well-documented career as a prostitute censored from Wikipedia. Those facts remain censored today. Because of Wikipedia's stance, which involved their breaking their own rules, I created a website that preserves the accurate record.

With respect to Luke Evans, two issues matter. One is Wikipedia's disregard for both fact and its own rules. This critical problem is at the heart of Wikipedia's lack of credibility. No reputable university will allow a student or faculty member to cite Wikipedia as a source, and in popular culture Wikipedia's approach to facts -- that facts are what people agree to call facts -- is appropriate the subject of derision and satire. The other issue is the particulars of this particular actor. Is he gay? Was he gay? Do we care?

I'll dispense with the latter issue first. I never heard of Luke Evans until three days ago. I haven't spent any time looking up career. I haven't even Googled his photo. It's probably because celebrities don't wow me. But the cultural reality is that the private lives of public figures have always been relevant to millions of people, and that certainly includes their sex lives. This is especially true in Hollywood, where the sexuality of its actors, both public and private, has been central to casting and promotion decisions from the very beginning of that industry. Beyond that, in Evans's case, his apparent desire to "rebrand" himself as heterosexual raises a wider set of issues concerning the status of homosexuality and homosexuals in today's culture. This includes the motion picture business, where the so-called "bearding" of actors has been practiced for a very long time, including in the present. Others can disagree, and I'll probably regard their objections as ignorant, laughable, or both, depending on how phrased. But as it concerns Wikipedia's treatment of Evans, my opinion and your opinion of these issue is really beside the point. What counts is whether Wikipedia can be trusted to respect facts and/or its own editing rules. And on those scores, the current dust-up shows that Wikipedia is just as rotten as it ever was. I'd argue (and have argued here) that this goes right to the core of the Wikipedia concept, which is that facts have no independent existence but can be determined by consensus. Once you accept that pernicious idea, then nothing else can be trusted.

In 2002, Evans gave an interview to The Advocate, a well-established gay magazine, discussing his same-sex orientation. In 2004, he gave another interview to something called "Gaydar Nation," a U.K.-based online publication, containing an explicit discussion of his homosexuality. In the same year, he gave a third interview to QX, another U.K.-based Internet gay site, in which he discussed his homosexuality. These three interviews are facts. Also a fact is that Wikipedia's guidelines on the topic of "notability" forbid its use in judging the content of an article. "Notability" is to be applied to the topic, not the contents. Yet, in the Wikipedia justification for censoring facts about both Luke Evans now, and Matt Sanchez some years back, their editors have used "notability" to exclude facts from the articles. This is really only to be expected from an enterprise that begins with the idea that facts have no independent validity. Once you've done that, it's barely a baby step to ignore your own stated rules. As an aside, it's not necessary for Wikipedia's article to say whether or not Evans "is" or "was" gay. What the article should include, though, is references to his two interviews in which he discussed his sexuality in detail.

So, while Luke Evans and his (or his publicists', or both) attempts to "re-closet" himself are trivial, for now, and mainly the subject of guffaws, they nevertheless do once again shine a light on Wikipedia, a fact-free pseudo-"encyclopedia" where decisions are made by roving bands of children, without regard to what might be true, or what that organization holds out as its own processes. This is why Wikipedia is hollow at the core, and can never be trusted.

This post has been edited by Pwok: