Comments Elsewhere

I think you are reading too much into it.

The ruling doesn’t indicate that Dworkin’s brief singled out the description of her as a lesbian as libelous (indeed the ruling says she doesn’t challenge that description in her brief). I’d have to see the appellate briefs (which may be out there, but which I can’t find on the Internet) to know for sure, but it looks pretty likely that Dworkin identified the whole passage as libelous, and that the four claims considered by the court were what the judge parsed out as the statements of fact contained in the passage, not anything that Dworkin singled out. It’s a short passage, and the claim that she’s a lesbian is contained in a single adjective rather than so much as a whole sentence, so it would have been hard to complain about a libel in it without including the sentence in which she is described as a lesbian—even if the description of her as a lesbian is not what she was calling libelous.

Andrea was, incidentally, openly a lesbian, as she attests not only in her address but also e.g. in her memoir, Heartbreak and in numerous interviews. (John Stoltenberg’s essay about living with Andrea recounts how the editor of the New York Times Style page refused to allow the writer to identify them as gay and lesbian, as they had asked to be identified, in 1985.) You might think that the fact that they thought of each other as “life partners” and “in love” with each other tends to disqualify her as a lesbian and him as gay. Without prying unnecessarily into their sex lives, this at least seems like good reason to think that they were intensely romantically connected. But that’s only true if you think that “lesbian” means “a woman only romantically involved with other women” and gay means “a man only romantically involved with other men.” Some people use the words that way and other people don’t; it’s important, if nothing else, to know that a lot of women in the lesbian and radical feminist communities in the 1970s didn’t use the word that way. So it’s not weird or unusual that Andrea Dworkin would describe herself that way.