XOXO, Gossip Guys

When Gossip Girl finally unveiled the identity of its titular girl, fans were shocked. Dan Humphrey? The straightest, whitest, most Elliott Smith-listening, Brooklyn soft boy of all time? Aside from the plot holes the reveal opened up, it just defied logic to imagine the Moleskine enthusiast firing off b*tchy little missives from his Blackberry. Or did it?

Historically, gossip has been seen as the domain of the women and gay men — those who don’t inherently have power and have to learn to navigate the world in craftier ways. (See: Sex and the City’s Stanford Blatch’s defense of the sacred gossip bond between the girls and the gays: “We all judge. It’s our hobby. Some people do arts and crafts — we judge.”) But recently, straight white guys are proving to be just as judgey and gossipy as the rest of us, if not more. Dan Humphreys, as far as the eye can see.

Take Jason Isaacs, who, after having a career-revitalizing arc on this season of The White Lotus, spent the subsequent press cycle making sure what happened in Thailand… didn’t stay in Thailand. “It was a theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp: you couldn’t avoid one other,” the 61-year-old told The Guardian. “There were alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.” Or Brian Cox, whose on-the-record sh*t-talking is nearly as masterful as his Shakespearean acting. The 78-year-old self-proclaimed “loudmouth” has repeatedly alluded to on-set tensions over co-star Jeremy Strong’s famously intense acting prep (“Well, it’s not good for the ensemble. It creates hostility,” he told The Guardian), and published withering criticisms of all sorts of public figures in his 2022 memoir, including a memorable jab at Steven Seagal: “[Seagal has] Donald Trump syndrome of thinking himself far more capable and talented than he actually is, seemingly oblivious to the fact that an army of people are helping to prop up his delusion.”

It’s not just Hollywood. Gossip has infiltrated everywhere from the Vatican (where you know the the recent conclave was Mean Girls-for-cardinals, à la the Oscar-winning film) to the Oval Office (or, at the very least, the “Winter White House,” where Trump has been known to throw around classified documents like dollar bills at a strip club). Or as writer Ryan Petersen recently put it on X: “Love that everyone is spiritually gay now…every straight guy wants to spill tea.”

Case in point: Restaurateur Keith McNally’s Instagram account, where nothing and no one is off-limits. “It was only after my stroke in 2016, when ironically I lost 80% of my voice, that I began being more vocal,” the 73-year-old tells me over email. In his younger years, he never would have dreamed of posting diatribes about punk poet laureate Patti Smith (“unbelievably rude to the servers”); Jeff Bezos’ bride-to-be, Lauren Sánchez (“revolting-looking”); or even the 2003 Christmas classic Love Actually (“it’s the kind of sentimental schlock that only a third-rate English director could pull off”). But that’s all a mere amuse-bouche compared to his recent memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, where he really lets it rip. “I don’t think that taking an interest in gossip, as I unfortunately do, is a sign of unseriousness,” McNally says. “If my book works at all it’s because it’s a mix of dead seriousness and observations of utter absurdity.”

McNally is more forthcoming about his habit than most. Research shows that men and women gossip at the same rate, but men have a way of rebranding their hearsay. It’s not tawdry gossip, it’s “oppo,” “intel,” “a scoop.” Particularly when working in and around the media industry, they’re able to chalk it up to business savvy rather than simple pettiness. Broadway critic Michael Riedel — who spent nearly three decades writing for the New York Post — argues the line between current events and the rumor mill has always been razor-thin. “News is something that people in power don’t want to see in print, and that’s gossip,” says the 58-year-old. “Now, you can class it up and you can say, ‘Well, I’m reporting on the Pentagon or some terrible war in Afghanistan,’ but your job is still to dig around.”

“Men can be stealthy about it in a way that women can’t get away with,” says former Vanity Fair Deputy Editor Dana Brown. At the magazine, Brown watched his male colleagues successfully trade their gossip for usable scoops. Meanwhile, Deadline founder Nikki Finke was dubbed “Hollywood’s most reviled reporter,” all for reporting what gossipy businessmen let slip. “All her sources were middle-aged men,” Brown says. “She would sit there and call all these producers, moguls, and Jeffrey Katzenberg types.”

Men can be stealthy about it in a way that women can’t get away with.

Those types are also having b*tch sessions among themselves. A recent New York magazine profile on the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Zaslav, 65, revealed that he’s part of a regular Zoom call where former Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter,75; Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson,72; Goodfellas screenwriter Nick Pileggi,92; and others convene to kibitz. Ken Auletta, an 83-year-old New Yorker journalist who is also a participant in Zas’s Zoom, admits they often toe the line between gossip and general discourse — particularly about Trump and his family, a subject where the lines between politics and palace intrigue are increasingly blurred. “‘What do Ivanka’s friends really think of her?’ That would be gossipy,” he offers as an example.

Auletta has a theory about why men middle-aged and older can’t resist taking part. “In terms of gossip, I don’t want to overgeneralize, but I think what happens as some people get older is that their career is on the wane and they’re not at their peak performance and fame,” Auletta says. “A combination of vanity, envy, and anger takes place where people may gossip more because they’re very susceptible to hurt and feel the world has passed them by.”

On the flip side, a juicy item can also be your ticket out of has-been purgatory. “Good gossip makes you relevant, and, as embarrassing as it is to admit, we’re all concerned with our place in the world and social standing,” says Brown, whose memoir, Dilettante, offered up a lifetime’s supply of the goods. “I’m in my f*cking 50s. I’m essentially dead, over-the-hill at this point in my life. So any attempt to seem cool and like I’m connected in any way is like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’” Gossip, he adds, “is capital: social capital, career capital. It’s a pissing contest.”

And who has more of a monopoly on amassing capital (or pissing contests) than a straight white guy? Especially when there’s always some other straight white guy around to protect them from any real trouble. Take McNally. If it were up to him, there’d be even more dirt in his barn-burner of a memoir. “It wasn’t through discretion that I didn’t write the name of the celebrity I had a fling with,” he says. “My publisher’s lawyer forced me not to write the name.” To which I say, please, ignore your counsel!