Perhaps you missed it because you have a life, but celebrated American journalist Gay Talese found himself in the outrage buzzsaw last week when the 84-year-old author failed to quickly state that he was influenced by scads of amazing lady-writers. Oh my, the tears that were shed! The garments torn! How dare the author of "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"—which was published, chronologically speaking, about midway through Mad Men, just to give you a point of reference—not have a handy-dandy list of lady-authors that he could pay homage to at a moment's notice! How dare he suggest that he thought that female authors tended to write on subjects he himself did not cover?
How dare he be, you know, an 84-year-old man.
It was the sort of dumb, easy Internet outrage that comes and goes. No biggie, whatever. Gotta feed the beast. Gotta make that #content.
I bring this up because people don't seem nearly as upset that, you know, Gay Talese not only abetted a dude who bought a hotel for the purpose of spying on its guests while they were having sex, he actively participated in said spying. No, really!
I saw what Foos was doing, and I did the same: I got down on my knees and crawled toward the lighted louvres. Then I stretched my neck in order to see as much as I could through the vent, nearly butting heads with Foos as I did so. Finally, I saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below, engaged in oral sex. Foos and I watched for several moments, and then Foos lifted his head and gave me a thumbs-up sign. He whispered that it was the skiing couple from Chicago.
Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head. I realized my carelessness only when Foos grabbed me by the neck and, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats. The couple below saw none of this: the woman’s back was to us, and the man had his eyes closed.
So, just to be clear, a journalist found out about a guy engaging in systematic sexual misconduct with his female (and male!) hotel guests, did nothing about it for decades, indeed he participated in said sexual misconduct, and is now publishing a book about it.
Oh, also, the guy who owned the hotel may have watched a murder go down and did nothing to aid the still-breathing victim when he saw her assaulted by her drug-dealer boyfriend:
One afternoon, Foos saw the man in Room 10 sell drugs to a few young boys. This incensed him. He wrote in the journal, "After the male subject left the room that afternoon, the voyeur entered his room. . . . The voyeur, without any guilt, silently flushed all the remaining drugs and marijuana down the toilet." He had flushed motel guests’ drugs several times before, with no repercussions.
This time, the man in Room 10 accused his girlfriend of stealing the drugs. The journal continues:
After fighting and arguing for about one hour, the scene below the voyeur turned to violence. The male subject grabbed the female subject by the neck and strangled her until she fell unconscious to the floor. The male subject, then in a panic, picked up all his things and fled the vicinity of the motel.
The voyeur . . . without doubt . . . could see the chest of the female subject moving, which indicated to the voyeur that she was still alive and therefore O.K. So, the voyeur was convinced in his own mind that the female subject had survived the strangulation assault and would be all right, and he swiftly departed the observation platform for the evening.
Foos reasoned that he couldn’t do anything anyway, "because at this moment in time he was only an observer and not a reporter, and really didn’t exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned."
The next morning, a maid ran into the motel office and said that a woman was dead in Room 10. Foos wrote that he immediately called the police. When officers arrived, he gave them the drug dealer’s name, his description, and his license-plate number. He did not say that he had witnessed the murder.
Talese, reading about this many years later, also did nothing (until the voyeur who was his subject dissolved their confidentiality agreement): he didn't pass on this info to the cops or anything.
I dunno, maybe I'm weird, but I think that all of this is about a billion times worse than not just saying "Joan Didion" when asked "who were the women who write who were most, who have inspired you most" and moving on. Like, maybe this should be a thing that sparks a serious discussion about Talese's career? Not only about his partaking in an obviously illegal and immoral activity in the pursuit of a story, but also about the fact that he just kind of throws his hands up in the air when his source's facts don't really add up? Dates that don't work out, cops who say they have no record of the murder the voyeur claims to have seen?
And, of course, there's the question we must ask of ourselves: Are we not voyeurs also for having read the piece? Have we transgressed some moral bound? Are we re-victimizing these people all over again, like those who watched Erin Andrews dance around her hotel room naked or gawked at nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton?
Granted, one would have to spend the half-hour reading Talese's piece instead of the half-minute reading a tweet about how he said something that didn't hew to the day's pieties and then another half-minute signaling that you were also upset that an 84-year-old male writer thinks like your average 84-year-old male writer. The barrier to outrage over "The Voyeur's Hotel" is certainly higher.
But still. Even after all this time, I find the Internet's priorities to be annoyingly skewed.