Felix Salmon

Tim Cook is now the most powerful gay man in the world. This is newsworthy, no? But you won’t find it reported in any legacy/mainstream outlet. And when the FT‘s Tim Bradshaw did no more than broach the subject in a single tweet, he instantly found himself fielding a barrage of responses criticizing him from so much as mentioning the subject. Similarly, when Gawker first reported Cook’s sexuality in January, MacDailyNews called their actions “petty, vindictive, and just plain sad.”

But surely this is something we can and should be celebrating, if only in the name of diversity — that a company which by some measures the largest and most important in the world is now being run by a gay man. Certainly when it comes to gay role models, Cook is great: he’s the boring systems-and-processes guy, not the flashy design guru, and as such he cuts sharply against stereotype. He’s like Barney Frank in that sense: a super-smart, powerful and non-effeminate man who shows that being gay is no obstacle to any career you might want.

One of the issues here is that most news outlets cover Cook as part of their Apple story, and Cook’s sexuality is irrelevant to his role at Apple. And so the other story — the fact that the ranks of big-company CEOs have just become significantly more diverse — is being overlooked and ignored. And that’s bad for the gay and lesbian community more broadly.

The institution of the closet is one of fear — one where people would rather be ignored than noticed, because they fear the negative repercussions of being known to be gay. It’s an institution which Cook, like any gay man born in 1960, knows at first hand. But now the risk of being ignored is bigger in the other direction: if the world can’t see gay men and women in all their true diversity, if the only homosexuals they know of are the flamboyant ones on TV, then that only serves to perpetuate stereotypes.

As the Apple story moves away from being about Steve Jobs and becomes much more about Tim Cook, we’re going to see a lot of coverage of Cook, the man. He is, after all, not just one of the most powerful gay men in the world; he’s one of the most powerful people in the world, period. The first instinct of many journalists writing about Cook will be to ignore the issue of his sexuality. It’s not germane to his job, they’re only writing about him because of the job he holds, and therefore they shouldn’t write about it.

On top of that, Cook is not exactly open about his sexuality, and Apple has never said anything about it. Cook’s formative years, professionally speaking, were the 12 years he spent at IBM between 1982 and 1994 — and at that company, in those days, coming out was contraindicated from a career-development perspective. Mike Fuller, a gay VP at IBM, told the Advocate in 2001 that he knew “IBM employees who worked for the company in the 1980s who told me they left IBM because they weren’t comfortable coming out at work”; this comes as little surprise. After all, the years that Cook spent at straight-laced IBM coincided with the height of the AIDS panic, when people were worried about sharing toilet seats with homosexuals. It would be hard to come out at any company in that kind of atmosphere.

But thankfully we’ve moved a very long way from those days. Homosexuality is no longer something shameful, to be coy or secretive about — especially not when you’ve risen to the very top of your profession. In fact, it’s incumbent upon a public-company CEO not to be in the closet.

Four years ago — a long time itself, in the history of gay rights and public acceptance thereof — John Browne resigned as CEO of BP under a shameful cloud. The reason for his downfall was not that he was gay, but rather that he was in the closet. As I explained at the time, in trying desperately to remain comfortably in the closet, he ended up lying repeatedly to the UK High Court – and that is why he had to resign.

Back then, there were no public-company CEOs on Out magazine’s gay power list; this year, Cook topped the list even before he became CEO of Apple. Keeping his sexuality a secret is no longer an option. And so the press shouldn’t treat it as though it’s something to be avoided at all costs. There’s no ethical dilemma when it comes to reporting on Cook’s sexuality: rather, the ethical dilemma comes in not reporting it, thereby perpetuating the idea that there’s some kind of stigma associated with being gay. Yes, the stigma does still exist in much of society. But it’s not the job of the press to perpetuate it. Quite the opposite.

Update: For a better and more heartfelt version of this post, read Joe Clark from back in February: “When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures,” he writes, “you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth.”

Now this is what we really need on a Friday afternoon: a Bob Rubin sex scandal!

It’s all based on a whopping 3,500-word blog entry from Iris Mack, who had a long relationship with Bob Rubin which involved hundreds of phone calls, a few dates, the occasional “cuddle” — and no sex.

The post itself leaves the question of whether or not sex occurred slightly ambiguous, but I’ve cleared the matter up with Moe Tkacik, who helped Mack write the story, and the fact is that although Rubin clearly wanted sex, he never got it.

Mack says that Rubin behaved like a “bratty teenager”, and that she finally got disgusted enough with him to go public after she watched his dreadful performance in front of the FCIC. But not before this:

“Do you want to go upstairs and…cuddle?”

So that’s what this is about. For a moment I was totally speechless and had to dig into my Harvard trained PhD brain to figure out what the hell he meant by “cuddling”! What can I say; once a teetotaling math geek, always a bit slow to pick up on signals from the menfolk. So the former Treasury Secretary had a “crush” on me! And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands everywhere sort of like an octopus. But as soon as the thought entered my mind — the former Treasury Secretary has his tongue down my throat?! — I came to my senses a bit and awkwardly went back home before we both got too carried away. This is to say, I said to myself that there would be no other former Treasury Secretary appendages entering any other of my orifices.

Rubin’s reputation has been in tatters for a while now, but that doesn’t stop him from having a lot of influence in the White House. I suspect that’s going to change now that no one’s going to be able to look at him without thinking of him jetting down to Miami on a booty call — and then failing to close the deal.

Meanwhile, Rubin’s professional reputation should be hurt by this, too:

It was a hellish season back at the Citigroup office; a few days after that first call a powerful analyst had put out a damning report all but declaring Citigroup insolvent, some regulators were already calling to break up the bank and the disgraced CEO Chuck Prince was negotiating his golden parachute.

But none of this seemed to require Bob Rubin to actually do very much. On November 1 he called me four times as I was leaving for a conference in Raleigh; first while I was packing, then in the cab to the airport, then again before I went through security, then again when I was supposed to land. When I had to put the phone away he acted like a little kid who’d been told it was bedtime, and said he would call me again when I got to my destination.

“Don’t you have work to do, Mr. Chairman?” I joked during our third call.

“I’m the chairman of the executive committee,” he specified.

“What the hell does that mean?” By then I was confused.

“It means the word ‘chairman’ is in the title and I get paid very handsomely, but I don’t have any actual managerial responsibilities.” He seemed pleased.

“Well excuse moi,” I shot back. “Nice work if you can get it!”

Three days after this chat, Prince resigned, forcing Bob Rubin to add an additional chairmanship — of the board — to his business cards. But he kept calling me all the while.

Of course, Rubin is retired now — although his Hamilton Project is still going on. I wonder how he’ll deal with this the next time he goes into his office there.

Now that it’s obvious that Tiger Woods has had affairs, why would he pay millions of dollars to buy silence from the “Tiger lilies”?

What’s the marginal cost to Tiger of the publication of explicit details about an affair, over and above the cost of the revelation of that affair in the first place?

How did Tiger (and, presumably, his lawyers) arrive at the amount of money by which he would increase his wife’s prenup in the wake of the revelations?

What mechanism is responsible for the fact that as soon as one lily emerges, the rest all tumble out into the open? What credible signal can a bar girl send to a celebrity of Tiger’s magnitude that she won’t sell her salacious story for millions or effectively blackmail him? And is there some kind of unspoken pact between Las Vegas bar girls and their clientele that no one should ever be the first to be outed, but that there’s no shame in being the third or fifth? Or is it just that it becomes easier to sell your story in the midst of a feeding frenzy like the one we’re seeing right now?

Then there’s the tabloids: wouldn’t they pay more for the first kiss-and-tell story than for the fourth? Do they, too, get caught up in the frenzy? Or does the frenzy itself increase the value of these stories?

Enquiring minds want to know!

(Picture: REUTERS/Danny Moloshok)