How about, he shouldn't have been asked about it in an interview.

I think it's a perfectly appropriate response. "We've heard you're a fag, care to comment?" "I've slept with guys, I've slept with women, if you feel the need to slap a label on that, screw off, I'm not playing that game."

He could have declined to comment.

Why should he have to? I think his message is, "I should be able to be honest about my sexuality without people trying to force me to 'pick sides' or be an activist, or stake my claim to one community or another." Why does he have to either be in the closet or "out, loud, and proud!" Why can't he just be out and a freaking normal member of society that isn't required to take ownership of labels that other people want to put on him?

So when you go to enroll your child in religious school and you are asked if the child is Jewish, are you going to parse out everything in Judaism you have taught the child to honor or ignore and then tell the administrator to draw his/her own conclusions but otherwise f*ck off?

I should add that my gripe in this area extends beyond the gay community. It's true for EVERYTHING. No one's allowed to just excel anymore. They have to excel AND be a representative for some label or another.

What does that have to do with anything?

As I understood him previously, GD's disagreement extended beyond abusing the "privacy" of a public figure to the wisdom of labels in general. On this point, I agree with SM that such labels--be they labels of religion, sexuality or political affiliation--can be useful to broadly generalize about a person's viewpoints and sympathies.

I also think in Butler's case there's the point that refusing to be labeled suggests that there's something to apologize for or be embarrassed about. My dad used to tell the story about how during WWII training, some other soldier asked if he was a Jew. To which my dad replied, "Yeah," and went about what he was doing. The other guy said that my dad was the first Jew that he got a straight answer from without a lengthy history and endless qualifications.

This is not to say that the guy's question was appropriate, or that my father ever had much use for his religion.

Yes, I overstated my case a bit by saying "only". But in the context of the interview, and whether he was his response was "verbal gymnastics", I find his refusal to engage the question refreshing.

I am not suggesting he be limited to the binary options of closeted or "out, loud, and proud". What am I saying is this verbal dancing around the subject is just silly. If there's a word to describe something, use it. He doesn't have to make up stories or manufacture complicated new terms for something that already exists. If you and I were having dinner and I asked you to pass the crushed boiled tubers intermingling with churned dairy fat, would you not look at me strangely and wonder why I didn't ask you to pass the mashed potatoes?