During her 10 years as a famous person, Lindsay Lohan has worn a dizzying number of public masks. She began as a Disney tween queen and a box-office lure. That unravelled soon enough, as she became another wounded, doomed celebrity girl careening through the tabloid world: Lohan the despondent daughter of reckless parents, the on-the-set monster destroying her career and holding up expensive productions, the luckless dater whose boyfriends and hook-ups trash-talked her and did her no good, the cocaine-and-alcohol-fuelled road menace who seemed to be rehab-resistant.
But lately, there's been another twist in the Lohan saga that the mainstream gossip media her unofficial biographers have been feeding to their readers in regular doses.
The cogs in the celebrity news machine have been regularly publishing reports about her relationship with DJ Samantha Ronson. From all the happy and seemingly sober appearances they kiss, hug, hold hands, shop for groceries it appears to be a romantic one. Neither Lohan nor Ronson has spoken to the media about their relationship, and not surprisingly, Lohan's publicist would not comment nor make Lohan herself available, writing in an email that Lohan ''wants to keep her private life private''. (Ronson likewise did not respond to a request for comment made through her website.)
Yet the celebrity magazines have kept the stories coming. Mainstream editors used to be squeamish to the point of erasure when it came to unconfirmed same-sex relationships. Unless a star was willing to say, ''Yep, I'm gay,'' as Ellen DeGeneres so openly did on the cover of Time magazine in 1997, most publications generally have employed their own form of don't ask/don't tell when covering gay or bisexual celebrities who have not come out via media release or some other explicit declaration.
While many celebrities have stopped hiding their same-sex relationships, the media have not until Lohan followed suit. Michael Musto, an openly gay columnist for the Village Voice, who has never engaged in that kind of self-censorship, has noticed a change. As Musto sees it, we've reached a moment in which the Lohan-Ronson pairing can be reported as a fact because people have, you know, eyes.
''Traditionally, the media has been as interested in closeting celebrities as the celebrities themselves have been,'' Musto says. ''I've read things in gossip columns that would never go there in the past and realised, 'Wow, they're going there now.' They don't consider gay a dirty thing any more. And it's very cool.''
Jared Shapiro, the editor of Life & Style, says that the Lohan-Ronson story has presented a unique set of issues for celebrity magazines. ''Why is this couple different than every other couple?'' Shapiro says. ''We know they're not friends we know they're in love, we know they're dating. Major movie star! Gay, question mark? Bisexual, question mark? Um.''
For Shapiro, those questions are just the first stop, and his magazine devoted its most recent cover to them, asking, ''Is Lindsay Gay?'' Before that, Shapiro says, the magazine had chosen to ''follow their step-by-step,'' which is fairly easy because they are out so often. In a sense stories about the doings of ''LoRo,'' as they've been called, are just standard celebrity-gossip fare. And yet, as Shapiro says, there is undeniably a larger issue looming over each story.
He returns to the rhetorical to ponder the question: ''At what point do we editorialise and say why we think this is important?''
None of the other weekly magazines or gossip columns seems to have reached the point of what-does-it-all-mean analysis, either. Each has used the same template for this relationship as they do week after week for, say, ''Eva and Tony'' or ''Nicole and Keith'': ''Lindsay Lohan turns 22 with Samantha Ronson at her side'' read the headline of a People.com story from this month.
On the cover of its July 14 issue, Star offered ''Lindsay & Samantha: inside their hot romance'' to its readers; and on its ''Love Notes'' page June 30, US Weekly asserted that ''those close to the pair call it love'' under the headline ''Lindsay & Samantha: this is for real.''
Still, the facts can't be pushed aside. There has been no official acknowledgment from Team Lohan or Team Ronson, for that matter that the relationship is Sapphic. So to discuss it looks a lot like outing, which is, to paraphrase Wikipedia, publicising homosexual behaviour without their consent.
No less an authority than Bonnie Fuller, the former editor of US and Star and numerous other publications, who is both credited and blasted for creating the current gossip world, says, ''I don't think we've ever been in the business of outing celebrities at celebrity news weeklies.''
Hmm. Perhaps, then, it's more complicated than calling the Lohan-Ronson coverage an evolved form of outing.
Maybe, with fame culture and its routine privacy invasions having brought us to a state of flux about what secrets a celebrity is entitled to, long-held anti-outing stances are crumbling.
There are other, more subtle factors at work in the case of Lohan, of course. This is, in tabloid terms, an over-covered (former, one hopes) disaster who has entered into a same-sex relationship. After all the dirt they've dished on her, why would the gossip mill back off now?
There's also the reality that the mainstream celebrity media must compete furiously to survive, and Lohan and Ronson are dating in a public way, with much photographic evidence. It would be surprising if they did not scuttle the old rules to be able to document this latest Lohan chapter. And there's yet another open question: do editors assume that their readers are, at this point in history, largely accepting of and possibly even interested in gay relationships? (At least when it's two women?)
Perez Hilton, whose website perezhilton.com regularly exposes perceived inconsistencies and hypocrisies in famous people and institutions, also has found himself wondering about this subject. ''I've been fascinated by the reluctance of anyone in the mainstream media to talk on the record about the issue,'' Hilton says. ''Most of these big media organisations still to this day have an unwritten policy against, quote, 'outing' people.
''What's especially interesting to me is that the publication that first jumped on the Lindsay-and-Samantha relationship bandwagon ... is People magazine. And People magazine, of all the celebrity weeklies, is the tamest, the most celebrity-friendly and the most by-the-book. I'm fascinated by why they're doing it. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, it's just surprising to me.''
So why won't People or US magazine or the New York Post's ''Page Six'' say why Lohan and Ronson's relationship is different than other same-sex celebrity relationships that they ignore? ''Maybe because they have no good explanation for it,'' Hilton says.
Hilton and Musto have a far easier time keeping track of their editorial standards because they both do believe in outing. Musto, who was the first person to report in tandem with ''Page Six'' that DeGeneres and Anne Heche were dating, has been writing about closeted gay celebrities for many years. ''It might seem shocking, but there were days when Ellen and Rosie [O'Donnell] and Boy George and George Michael were not out, and I was running pieces about them being gay,'' he says.
It wasn't always easy. ''I did get vilified in the old days,'' Musto says, sounding wistful. ''Like I was considered a lunatic.''
The day after her birthday party at Teddy's at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Lohan called Ryan Seacrest's radio show and said she would like to spend the next year ''being with the person that I care about'', among other gender-neutral phrasings that Seacrest uncharacteristically didn't ask her to elaborate on. Is Lohan getting closer to more specific nouns and pronouns, particularly if one of the celebrity magazines will pay her a big cheque to do so, as has been rumoured?
Life & Style's Shapiro says that whatever happens in the future, covering Lohan-Ronson has been a relief.
''This relationship, I will be honest with you, is a breath of fresh air for Lindsay Lohan coverage,'' he says. ''None of us want to be writing about the train wreck that Lindsay Lohan was. We don't want to see her back in rehab, that doesn't do anyone any good. We love that she's with Sam Ronson and that she's happy Lindsay looks better than ever.''
And perhaps that perceived happiness on Lohan's part, perhaps, but more important among the celebrity editors and reporters who cover her offers another clue about why this story has unfolded as openly as it has. ''People want to get emotionally involved in this stuff, that's why they buy the magazines and read this stuff they want to be taken away,'' Shapiro says. ''When it's Lindsay and Sam, it's like, 'Oh, they found each other.'''