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“The Internet and the blogosphere are parallel universes to the mainstream media,” observes Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley. Ordinarily, the rumor would have been confined to cyberspace speculations. “It’s the talk of the set,” Friendly Spy wrote, “thanks to the fact said cast member wants to give The Advocate the exclusive-the editor is a close friend of the star-before announcing it to the rest of the media.” Within 30 minutes DataLoungers were certain this cast member was Marcia Cross, a notion the Friendly Spy all but confirmed in several teasing follow-up posts designed to goad on the guesswork to keep the thread alive.
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During sweeps, wrote the self-styled spy, a cast member of ABC’s Desperate Housewives was planning on coming out in The Advocate. It was at that moment that someone going by the name Your Friendly Spy at ABC posted an item on, a gay-themed message board infamous for its no-holds-barred gossip forums.
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By the time Desperate Housewives star Cross, who plays buttoned-up Bree Van De Kamp with such captivating aplomb, found herself explaining that she wasn’t a lesbian on The View on February 8 (the show aired the next day), she was at the center of a perfect storm of rumor-turned-“fact.” In its own way, the path of this hurricane is a fascinating microcosm of our celebrity-crazed culture, our rabid passion for sex-drenched secrets, and the tension between the forbidden and the fascinating that’s fanned by a White House obsessed with “the gays.” It all started on Tuesday, February 1, at 1:34 p.m. What’s remarkable about this particular rumor is that it crossed over into the mainstream media with lightning speed but without an ounce of verification. But until now such innuendos have always been under the radar, blips considered major only by hard-core media junkies. The Advocate has weathered countless invented tales of celebrities coming out on its cover, from Debbie Reynolds to Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Gossip about Hollywood and political players regularly screams out from the supermarket tabloids, and entire Web sites are devoted to outing allegedly closeted celebrities and elected officials. Speculations about who’s secretly gay are not new. And yet in the course of one frantic week in February that rumor spread like wildfire, from the spark of one anonymous Internet posting on a gay gossip site to a worldwide deluge of mainstream media reports-the force of which led, inevitably, to Cross’s public denial on The View. Reports to the contrary are completely false. In case you were confused by the cover of this magazine, let’s be completely clear: Neither Marcia Cross nor anyone who works with her has ever been in contact with The Advocate about coming out in these pages.