Self-definitions vary. Behavioral periods in subjects' lives vary too. We don't unbecome what we've become, but, perhaps, we're able to add to it. There are times, however, when those additions we make don't come fast enough to suit nosey-pokers who already think they know who we are.

Such a nosey-poker is the Paparazzi Historian Martin Duberman who has just accomplished, on the eve of a great artist's opening (September 19) at the Guggenheim, what he evidently believes central to that artist's output, namely that it is homoeroticism that lacks the label "historian" Duberman wants to put on it.

Duberman's outing of the famed 72-year old artist occurred in Sunday's New York Times (The New Season/ Art, page 89). Somehow, I suspect that the historian wrote his piece prior to the paparazzi-plagued death of Diana because he writes: "No clear boundaries exist any longer between the 'public' and the 'private'; just watch any show like 'Oprah'. Moreover, those who strive for celebrity surely now recognize that in the process they surrender a portion of their privacy."

I never thought I'd live to see the day when a distinguished historian cited Oprah as an excuse to do a very questionable outing.

The man Duberman outs once had a wife. He also has had offspring. He may approach his own labeling differently, in fact, than Mr. Duberman does.

Having myself been at the receiving end of Dubermanesque scholarship, I can safely report that Martin Duberman is the last individual to whom I'd tell any secret, or give any slant. In my experience he ranks as the Kitty Kelly of historic research. (See Reviews, GayToday Archives, Stonewall).

Had Duberman (who for two decades attempted to cure his homosexuality in shrinks' offices) better reconciled the two professions he claims as his own—playwriting and history—deciding which it was to be--I'd have known less irritation, perhaps, than I now do as I watch him decide for a living legend just what that legend essentially means.

In a self-serving screed, the historian disputes—in academia's dullest tones—Susan Sontag's reflection that to reduce art to its content is to tame it, to make it manageable. Clearly, such a reflection stands in the way of what Duberman manages to do—introducing himself as he does as The Historian as Outer.

He describes the artist he outs as "Now 72, and still working in the fevered, effervescent spirit of the newest boy in town."

To support his thesis Duberman utilizes Jill Johnson, a former art writer for the Village Voice, a woman who as Gregory Battcock, a real art critic, confided to me, had made a three-decade old pact with him that they would make mention of each other in articles. When Ms. Johnson outed herself in the Voice, there were lesbians who wondered then if it was not her idea of a publicity stunt.

And a publicity stunt is what Mr. Duberman has given us, wrapped in his penchant for being ever-so-politically correct. Thus, he presents us with (in another burst of his typical masochistic-mistake-making) his need to go outing a major living artist on the eve of his retrospective. Couldn't Mr. Duberman have found some other way of establishing himself in gay history?

I'd hoped that he had. In his memoir, CURES, he gave what I have long considered the most profound and memorable event in his own life, and since he himself admitted it had happened, it seems to me that we should honor the historian appropriately for the honest tenor of his confession.

The lasting image, I explained in a review of CURES, was Duberman's description of how he went about his home, doing professorial duties, with his penis in a glass of warm water, taking seriously a doc's bogus advice on how to remove herpes.

Now that's an historic confession, worthy of the name.

I hope that officialdom thinks to give Martin Duberman another historian-sort-of-prize, a Paparazzi Pizza, perhaps, or maybe a statue, modest enough to hide his butt, but with his penis poking through boxer shorts into a glass.

Just as the philosopher Diagones is remembered from ancient times for having lived naked in a barrel, so history books 2,000 years hence should record the name Duberman, an historian so anxious to be noticed that he not only outed famous living people, but admitted in his memoir to walking about with his penis stuck in a glass of warm water!

If I were to select someone to do the needed historic research on a living person, it would not be Martin Duberman. After he spelled the name of my co-author incorrectly in his unmemorable mini-review of my first book, managing at the same time to mistake our title as well, I inadvertently sullied his reputation in a blast at the flash-quick Times (1972) treatment of gay books, writing that he was "slipshod."

This, I can tell you, was a word that the historian Duberman, who had just then emerged from the shrinks' offices, found disturbing. He brought up my chiding some 20 years later in CURES, but—not having learned the first time— he repeated the errors he'd made in his New York Times book review, the same mis-spellings, mis-titles.

But "slipshod" is not a sufficient description of Duberman's historicisms. In my experience, he has also been malicious, and thus, as he bursts onto the scene to interpret art for a semi-closeted art legend's work, it seems only fitting that I should call attention once again to his vulgar misuse of a letter I wrote (dated April 1, 1965) and in which he attempted to sully not only my reputation in a footnote (page 287, Stonewall), but that of Franklin Kameny's and Richard Inman's as well.

The letter, quoted only in part, is available for anyone's perusal in Nichols' papers at The New York Public Library. Its clear it was intended as an April Fools joke, and, in fact, the words "April Fools Day" appear directly under the letter's April 1 date, and the letter, if read in full, is quite funny. But malicious Mr. Duberman (in his hardback edition of Stonewall) used it deliberately and maliciously. True, he made a semi-retraction—begrudgingly—in the paperback edition, but its insufficient, as he puts the word "joke" in quotation marks, as though he himself doesn't believe its just that.

Suffice it to say, if Outing is to have any meaningful future, Martin Duberman isn't the guy to give it that future. With his latest selfish bid for attention in the September 7 Times, he's just really a bad ad for the practice, and this ad is running high profile at exactly the wrong time.