Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Secret Lives: Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz

Public figures often trade celebrity for privacy, but Susan Sontag and Annie Liebovitz wanted both. They met in 1989. Leibovitz was taking Sontag's portrait for AIDS and Its Metaphors, Sontag's latest book. At first, Leibovitz was intimidated by Sontag, but the two had their phenomenal early successes in common. Sontag published Notes on Camp at thirty-one and Against Interpretation at thirty-three. Her essays, novels, polarizing statements, and photogenic appearance made her a media personality, one of America's only public intellectuals.

Leibovitz was famous for photographing celebrities. At twenty-one she sold her first picture (of Allen Ginsberg) to Rolling Stone and three years later became the magazine's chief photographer. Her famous images include a naked John Lennon curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono (the photo session occurred several hours before Lennon was murdered); Demi Moore, nude and seven months pregnant; and Whoopi Goldberg, submerged in a bath of milk.

Sontag, who explored the primacy and force of the image in On Photography, began a relationship with Leibovitz, who was working at Vanity Fair by this time. The two kept apartments on the same block in the West Village, but neither spoke frankly about their relationship, taking pains to describe it in nonsexual terms. When Sontag died of leukemia in 2004, most obituaries, including the New York Times', made no mention of her fifteen-year relationship with Leibovitz.

Public outcry ensued. Daniel Okrent, public editor of the Times, issued a statement about the omission. "[We] could find no authoritative source who could confirm any details of a relationship." His statement continued, "Some might say that such safely accurate phrases as 'Ms. Sontag had a long relationship with Annie Leibovitz' would have sufficed, but I think anything like that would not only bear the unpleasant aroma of euphemism, but would also seem leering or coy."

The gay press disagreed. In the Gully, an online magazine that describes its audience as "the global lgbt community," Michael Bronski wrote, "What does it mean to set yourself up as an arbiter of moral issues, plumbing the intersections of public action and personal responsibility even as you avoid discussing vital, personal issues?" This article and others suggest that Sontag, though a fierce opponent of war, proponent of civil liberties, and admirer of gay aesthetics, feared that publicly identifying herself as a lesbian would diminish her appeal to a still-homophobic majority culture.

--Mary Rechner

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities