I was talking with an old friend today who is, as a rule, very thoughtful, intelligent and considered in her opinions, and the subject of David Bowie came up. She wondered aloud whether Bowie’s reported ambisexuality affected his marriage to his wife Iman. Did they have an open marriage?
My emotional reaction to this line of thought was surprisingly intense. I said that to me this was not a legitimate topic for conversation. It’s none of our business, I said, what a public person does in their private life.
My friend countered that it was legitimate, because Bowie’s art was so intertwined with questions of sexual ambiguity and provocation. When such issues are so central to a public person’s work, it is legitimate, she asserted, to examine how those questions relate to that person’s own life.
I realize, I told her, that mine is a minority opinion in today’s culture, but I have a number of hyper-famous friends, people who regularly get stopped on the street by well intentioned fans. And perhaps that makes my perspective unusual.
Because I know, firsthand, that their artfully constructed persona is generally not the actual person. When you stop a famous person on the street and you address them as though they are the character they’ve created, you are actually engaging in a mistake, an unintended crossing of boundaries.
In reality, people who create highly outgoing or flamboyant characters, and then play those characters on stage or on screen, are often nothing at all like the character they’ve invented. Their real selves, the ones that may be quiet or shy or thoughtful or sad, comes out only in their real life — their private life.
Yes, if you stop them on the street they will usually be polite, and indulge you because they know you mean well. But the person you are actually talking to is more often than not nothing at all like the image you’ve been seeing on screen, or have read about in the gossip pages. They are somebody else entirely.
So no, for me it is not legitimate to talk about a public person’s private life based on the persona they’ve created in their art. I suspect that most people are never going to agree with me on this.