John Scagliotti and Andrew Kopkind’s love story is a picture of the raunchy gay ’70s. John was living in Boston and his roommate, Charley Shively (a writer, history professor, and collective member with the occasional newspaper Fag Rag), told him about this part of the Fens, a public park near Fenway Park ballfield, where men would go to cruise. Charley was older, John just barely legal.
“I was into older guys,” Scagliotti told me. He was amazed to learn that Charley would go get his cock sucked from 2 to 3 p.m. most days in the park (even in winter) and decided to try it. He didn’t want to run into Charley, so he went down to the Fens around 5, when the professional men were getting off work. He was basically a kid in a candy store.
One day a tall, beautiful man followed him into the park. “I was down on my knees, adoring him,” Scagliotti said, looking pleased. And then this tall drink of water grabbed him under his armpits and pulled him up to face level, saying one word: “Cops!”
The police were there to bust up the orgy, so Scagliotti and the tall fellow and about seventy-five others went skittering every which way, out of this brushy brambly part of the Fens and back toward the street. There were so many men, so much copulating going on, the cops couldn’t catch anyone as they ran for every exit.
“That was funny,” said the handsome mustachioed man. Scagliotti laughed too, if nervously—it was funny. And then the man surprised him, asking, “Wanna go get a cup of coffee?”
He got coffee with New Republic reporter Andrew Kopkind and they were together, Scagliotti says, pretty much from then on.
Scagliotti told me this story in his kitchen in Vermont, on the farm he calls the Kopkind Colony after his late partner. I came to see him after Kerry Gruson suggested it—they had been roommates in Boston in the early 1970s, before she left for Vietnam and her accident. She said I should look up Andy Kopkind, too: a luminary queer writer whose reporting, mostly for The Nation, created an incredible record of twentieth-century social justice movements. So I drove from North Carolina to Guilford, which is in this Vermont version of a holler, a gorgeous topographical dip full of grassy knolls and exposed rocks. John and Andy bought it in the ’70s and transformed the old farm into a writer’s retreat.
I was trying to understand the relationship between journalism and activism. During Scagliotti’s lifetime, coverage of gay issues had transformed dramatically. The reporters who covered queer communities were mostly outside of mainstream newsrooms, working for alternative gay papers, and these papers led the way in covering AIDS. And queer media activism in the form of boycotts, protests, and independent media coverage eventually led to more truth-telling, more probing, and more expansive and just reporting. I wanted to understand how gay journalists had moved queer issues and AIDS from the sphere of deviance into the sphere of legitimate controversy, and how they saw their own work—were they activists, journalists, or both? Traditional “objectivity” has asserted that detachment leads to more accurate storytelling. But what about the moments when connection, rather than detachment, led journalists to stories that were true and important?
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Inside a gorgeous restored barn at the Kopkind Colony, there was a bulletin board covered in pictures of John with Audre Lorde in the ’80s, John with his former producers of the first gay TV show ever, John outside of Stonewall with Andy. John painted this picture for me of gay life when they started out: how outside, how deviant they were as gay men, and how they had to make their own way in journalism.
“Everyone agreed that homosexuals are disgusting and horrible,” he told me through his New England accent and thick salt-and-pepper beard. “They certainly should be put in mental institutions and in hospitals and in jail, and they are child molesters. That was pretty much it, at the time when we started out.”
That first date at the Fens wasn’t Kopkind’s first time getting busted, or near-busted, for cruising. In the early 1960s, he was working for Time magazine in the LA bureau when he got picked up and charged with public indecency. Time didn’t want to fire a great reporter, so they got him to agree to clean himself up—he found a therapist who claimed to help gay people go straight, and Time paid the bill. Apparently the shrink would try to get Kopkind to practice being straight by picking up an airline stewardess or another similarly womanly persona. During the therapy sessions, the male psychologist would play the stewardess, and Andy would have to compliment her and try to act manly and see where it all went. “It worked just fine in the office; not so well in midair,” Kopkind quips in his collection The Thirty Years’ Wars.
Conversion therapy didn’t work, and Kopkind quit Time after just three years and became a writer for the New Republic. This new gig was a breakthrough: on one of his first major assignments, he was sent to Alabama to cover the civil rights movement in Selma, where he first witnessed the movements that transformed him. He became dedicated to the goals of social justice and civil rights shared by the protesters in Selma, even as he continued to work for magazines and papers. He was among the first people to write about Students for a Democratic Society for a national audience. He immersed himself in social justice movements, committed to understanding them from within while also communicating their visions to a larger audience.
“It wasn’t just about civil rights, not just about laws, but about power, and power to the people, power to the community. And they were analyzing the white power structure,” he recalled in his book. “I was still the journalist, but I was part of the movement too.”
Under Kopkind’s mentorship, Scagliotti also shaped himself into a reporter, taking a job producing news with WBCN, a popular rock radio station in Boston. Scagliotti eventually became the news director, and Andy would record commentaries, his chronic stutter mysteriously fading away as he gave sharp one-take speeches on one topic or another. For fun, they developed an hour-long show about gay life that aired on Sunday nights. From 10 to 11 p.m., Scagliotti said, “kids could put their headphones on and go off and listen and feel empowered.” The Lavender Hour was one of the first gay radio shows ever.
As Scagliotti described it, Andy was a shimmery genius and an incredible reporter. He often talked with a stutter, but he mostly didn’t talk; he listened incessantly, and then he could sit down at a typewriter and hammer out something that didn’t even need edits. In photographs, Kopkind looks naughty: a big grin, a skinny cigar, a half-unbuttoned shirt.
“He never even misspelled words,” Scagliotti said. “It was amazing.” I loved the way his gravelly voice turned sweet with these memories—he loved Andy Kopkind, and it was obvious.
He remembered Kopkind being on the phone all day long—with his sources and contacts, people around the country and in Europe, finding out what they were talking about, keying into the zeitgeist. Kopkind was an insightful writer on the topic of the right wing and the far left, a critic of liberal establishments as well as conservative ones, and a careful observer of culture. He was creative, incisive, and strange. He didn’t present himself as a “gay” writer, but after the early ’70s, he was out in his professional life. In the ’70s he began to write regularly for The Nation.
In June 1979, a decade after the Stonewall riots brought gay activism to a mainstream audience, Kopkind wrote a hilariously seething critique of the New York Times’ ongoing refusal to acknowledge gay people as anything other than deviants. “Last winter,” he wrote in the Village Voice, “The New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the city’s ‘renaissance,’ replete with color photographs of all the fashionable features of born-again Gotham: discos, musical comedies, Bloomingdale’s, rehabbed brownstones, warehouse neighborhoods, Deco restaurants, designer boutiques, gourmet kitchens. There was hardly an item on the list that was not tinged with gay sensibility—or created by it. And yet the influence of the new sexual community on the revitalized city was never once mentioned—not even in the coy euphemisms (‘neighborhoods of single adults’) that the genteel press prefers. Gays who read the Times were astounded by the omission.”
Before Stonewall, there was a virtual prohibition on covering gay issues in news media, and that prohibition remained in most mainstream media even after. But the ’70s and ’80s saw the rise of gay alternative media and shows like The Lavender Hour and small-print weeklies filled the gap where straight news refused to go. “Objective” journalism at the time didn’t deal with gay people at all, because they existed in the sphere of deviance. So, the coverage was left to the deviant, “activist” papers and shows—not because it wasn’t true, but because it was socially unacceptable.
“Consciousness changes, huge consciousness changes move the debate line for journalism,” Scagliotti said. During his time with Andy Kopkind, the idea of being gay went from being viewed as a deviant perversion, an impossibility in the world of journalism, to an inevitability, a fact of life even in mainstream media. “That line keeps moving a lot for LGBT people, but very quickly it went from total disgust and invisibility, to some visibility, to a lot of backlash.”
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When I left John Scagliotti and the verdant Kopkind Colony, I drove across Ontario to Michigan for a fellowship researching the history of gay alternative media in an archive called the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. I spent a month digging through volumes of gay newspapers, pamphlets, and publications from the 1980s, looking at how gay papers differed from or were the same as mainstream news media, and how gay people pushed back on coverage they felt misrepresented them. The line of acceptable coverage of LGBT people kept moving. But how had it moved? Who had moved it? I knew journalists had been a part of that movement, that to tell the truth about gay life had required gay journalists taking on the role of media advocates, much as trans writers have done during my lifetime.
Certainly, the sea change in coverage of gay identity didn’t happen as an inevitable result of mainstream journalists seeking the facts about queer lives. Instead, the shift came out of a prolonged struggle. Throughout the 1980s, gay activists protested the New York Times and other newspapers, pushing for more accurate and fair coverage. They organized with their unions to get anti-discrimination protections at places like the Associated Press and the major papers. They wrote outsider articles for gay outlets and ’zines until those outsider stories became stories deemed worth covering in bigger papers. They published the first and most in-depth coverage of AIDS as it became one of the biggest news stories of the century.
These journalist-activists largely rejected “objectivity.” But even as they advocated for factual, contextual reporting, they remained at the margins of journalism.
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A 1949 Newsweek article entitled “Queer People” opened with this line: “The sex pervert, whether a homosexual, an exhibitionist, or even a dangerous sadist, is too often regarded as merely a ‘queer’ person who never hurts anyone but himself.”
In 1956 a Time magazine article quoted author Edmund Bergler from his book Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? “There are no happy homosexuals.”
In December 1963, the New York Times ran a rare cover story about homosexuality, headlined “Growth of Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” It used the words “homosexual” and “deviate” interchangeably, as did much coverage of the time. A 1964 Miami Herald article opened: “Miami’s homosexual world is a sad and frantic place.”
Through most of the twentieth century, gay people were imagined by most news media as an abject group of effeminate men suffering from an embarrassing sexual perversion. Gradually, the “homosexual” became a person, and that person became a member of a community. From the 1960s on, activists pushed hard for new cultural and political space to live openly as gay in the United States. Homosexuality was removed from the list of psychiatric disorders in 1980, and the term “gay” came further into vogue at that time. From the beginning, the news media was seen as one of the most important fronts in this battle: news coverage, and the nature of the coverage, mattered greatly to gay people, who wanted social change and civil rights.
A 1982 publication called Talk Back! The Gay Person’s Guide to Media Action, which I found in the Labadie Collection, provides a window into the developing strategy to change media coverage. The book-length pamphlet begins by breaking down the immediate problems with media coverage, from the perspective of a group of Boston-based activists. They criticize the low placement of gay stories, stereotypes about gay and lesbian people, the tendency to present gay people as isolated phenomena, and the near-total invisibility of lesbians in news coverage. One news media habit is described as “Hitler’s opinion”: reporters would call in a bigot from the Moral Majority or the psychiatric profession for a “balanced” take in any article that mentioned being gay, while presenting gay voices exclusively as subjective and non-expert.
Talk Back! also critiques sensationalism and a formulation they call “the homosexual adjective”: newspapers, which rarely referred to a gay community or even a homosexual community, had no problem asserting the existence of “homosexual murder, homosexual torture, homosexual rape, even, we are told, gay arson.” When a gay person killed someone, it was reported as “homosexual murder”; when a gay person was killed for being gay, it was not reported at all. If journalism is the first draft of history, there was an entire history of anti-gay violence never recorded—instead, we had “gay arson.” The pamphlet also addresses the lack of openly gay representation in newsrooms: “As this book is being written, the San Francisco Chronicle is the only daily newspaper in the U.S. that has actively sought to hire a gay reporter. Few papers have even one openly gay person in their editorial department.”
By way of strategy, Talk Back! suggests developing relationships with local papers, but also warns that reporters may have a hard time working with them. “Those reporters who are sympathetic have probably been harassed for not being ‘objective’ or may be suspected of being gay themselves.” Few workplaces had protections against discrimination for being gay, and reporters who came out or were outed were frequently fired or demoted. It was also widely assumed that a gay reporter could not possibly be “objective” around issues of sexuality. Talk Back! challenges that notion, asserting instead that no one can be objective on the topic. “A reporter’s ability to be ‘objective’ is notoriously affected by numerous subjective factors, and around the issue of sexual orientation there are few neutral opinions.”
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A 1983 undergraduate thesis I found in the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, by Barry Yeoman, named one newspaper in particular as the great pariah of gay people seeking better coverage: the New York Times. “It is difficult to discuss gay news coverage without singling out the Times. More than any other paper, it is cited by gay observers for homophobic journalism,” he wrote. (When I contacted Yeoman, who is now a freelance journalist in North Carolina, he laughed with delight that his NYU undergrad thesis had ended up in an archive, available for study—apparently he’d sold several copies via a written notice in the local gay paper, and these copies have made their way to libraries around the country.)
The New York Times was indeed notorious for its negligent coverage of gay communities, a trend-setter that had largely ignored one of New York’s biggest trends. A gay community paper called the New York Native published a media criticism column in every biweekly issue, which frequently critiqued the Times. The author, David Rothenberg, had a cover story in June 1981: “Homophobia at the New York Times.”
“Lesbians and gay men at the Times are allowed little—if any—positive influence over the paper’s coverage of gay people,” he wrote, noting that he’d reached out to several Times staffers, who were all closeted, afraid of losing status at the paper if they were to be outed. “Needless to say, there is a significant correlation between the closeted status of gay and lesbian Times staffers and the historic inability of that most influential newspaper to deal accurately, honestly, or fairly with our existence.”
An especially unpopular facet of the Times coverage of gay people during this era was its refusal to use the word “gay,” insisting instead on “homosexual” even where it created linguistic awkwardness. And, Rothenberg wrote, the paper looked past huge political developments in its own backyard: “Gays were stunned at the Times coverage of the largest gay march in history. An estimated 100,000 gay men and lesbians gathered in Washington, D.C., on October 14, 1979. The Times ran a short, inside-page story and gave coverage to a handful of born-again homophobes who taunted gays at the march. A week after that event, the paper ran a page-one story about fifty tenants who marched on Washington.”
The October 1982 issue of the New York Native has another damning mention of the Times. An article entitled “Midtown Cops Go Berserk in Gay Bar,” by Andy Humm, is a dramatic description of a group of Black queer people “being savagely beaten by a commando squad of precinct police” after a neighbor called the cops. More than twenty officers descended on Blue’s Bar and terrorized the patrons seemingly unprovoked.
Remarkably, Blue’s Bar was across the street from the offices of the New York Times. Humm reported that the manager of the bar, Lew Olive, called the Times as the police assault was underway, asking them to send a reporter—perhaps one of the ones hanging out at the bar next door. The paper said no one was available. “The next day, Blue’s looked as if it had been bombed,” Humm wrote. The mayor’s office declined to investigate, and there were no arrests. The Times had no story on it the next day, offering only the tiniest bit of coverage a couple of weeks later when there were giant protests over the incident.
When I called him up in 2018, Humm remembered the incident like it happened yesterday—and still held it against the New York Times. “They didn’t like having a trans bar across the street,” he said. “It was a NIMBY thing for them. There were massive demonstrations in the wake of that. It’s something people remember, at least people of a certain age remember, about fighting back. It was the worst raid of a bar since Stonewall, and they busted it up, they smashed it up.”
By 1983 gay activists were calling for a boycott of the New York Times to demand better and more nuanced representation, a change of language from “homosexual” to “gay,” and an end to discrimination against gay journalists. In June of that year, a group of gay activists including Humm met with none other than Sydney Gruson, Kerry Gruson’s father, to register their protest and explain their demands. When nothing came out of the meeting, an out gay reporter at the New York Post (a paper that loves to gossip about its competitors) found out about it and quoted Humm in an article. After the Post article, executive editor Abe Rosenthal himself met with a few of the activists (Humm excluded) and then directed his editors to seek out more stories about gay issues. But given the crisis that was already well underway in the gay community, it may have been too little, too late.
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There were no knights in shining armor or perfect examples of fair news coverage in the early days of the AIDS crisis. As the disease emerged, it was initially confusing, undiagnosed, and untestable—a mysterious interconnected web of deaths that seemed to be primarily affecting gay men. No one knew why, so reporters were faced with many difficult choices about how to characterize the disease, how much to cover it, and what to say about its victims. That said, the gay papers and papers that had gay people working for them drove the coverage of the crisis from the very beginning and played a key role in pressuring more mainstream publications to get on board.
The Gay Community News, published every week in Boston from 1973 until 1992 (and periodically through 1999), is archived at the University of Michigan, and it was a delight to flip through—funny, political, and eclectic. It included wandering features, tight news clips, unpredictable opinion pieces, and sometimes prolonged arguments in the letters over topics ranging from racism to political correctness to porn. GCN covered AIDS thoroughly before the first case even came to Boston, putting the New York Times to shame.
Veterans of the paper went on to be well-known activists and leaders in the community, and I reached out to many of them; the person I contacted with the clearest memory of the early days of AIDS was Larry Goldsmith. He lives in Mexico City now, and we connected by Skype. He became a history professor after his time as a journalist, and he’s whiskered and wire-rimmed and slightly awkward, a nerdy friendly visage, soft-spoken. He was an isolated out gay man in college in the late ’70s, and after he finished school in LA, he described getting in his car and driving clear across the country to Boston—he’d read the Gay Community News and gathered that Boston was a hotbed for political gay people, so he decided to just go. He got off at the wrong exit in Boston and ended up driving through the South End by accident, trying to get to Harvard Square. Looking around at the burned-out houses, Goldsmith wondered if he’d made a mistake.
Two weeks later, he got an interview for a position at GCN as a local reporter. The youthful and energetic staff asked him about objectivity in the interview, did he believe in it? No, he said, there’s no such thing. We try to tell different sides of the story, but there’s always another way of looking. Everything is ideological, he told them. He got the job.
There was a lot to write about: it was the era of vice squads and bar raids, regular reports of anti-queer violence from across the country. GCN covered all of it, from any source they could get it from, week after week. One article details the arrests of thirty men in a bar raid; another, a suicide after a gay man was arrested for cruising; another, a story about a young woman’s parents hiring “deprogrammers” to kidnap and rape her because they believed she was a lesbian. Sometimes the people who beat and killed gay and lesbian people were convicted, but often they were acquitted. Once in a while, a city passed a pro-gay ordinance or shot down an anti-gay one, but just as often, it went the other way.
GCN was housed in a funky office shared with Fag Rag, where John Scagliotti’s old roommate Charley Shively periodically came in to produce an issue of the quixotic paper. By contrast, GCN was busy all day, every day. Goldsmith said they got copies of all the major papers daily and scanned them closely for gay items, even those that had coded language.
Just a few weeks after Goldsmith started at GCN, in June 1981, the team gathered around the cluttered table full of dailies to look at a strange headline in the New York Times: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” Vulnerability to the cancer was a symptom of the disease that later came to be known as AIDS—and this was the first time any of them had heard about it.
“It was hard to take it seriously,” Larry said, grinning sadly, “because it was the New York Times. It was not a place you looked to for accurate news about our community.”
Not long after that, on June 27, 1981, GCN published its first article about the disease. It was four paragraphs based on the same recent CDC report the New York Times had reported on. “While no specific relationship has been demonstrated between these two diseases, it is almost certain that some aspects of the gay male lifestyle . . . link Pneumocystis carinii to the population of gay men,” wrote GCN in a piece with no byline.
Over the following months, he became the reporter to focus on AIDS. He didn’t exactly choose it: his undergrad background in science made him slightly more qualified than his coworkers, and he got subscriptions to the various medical journals and started following the development of the still unexplained disease.
Goldsmith was like most people at Gay Community News—he didn’t last more than a few years due to the constant stress and low pay. In 1982 the GCN and Fag Rag office was burned down—arson was a common anti-gay crime at the time, though the fire remains an unsolved mystery. After the fire, Goldsmith said, and the stress that went with it, nothing was ever the same.
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While gay activists led the way in covering AIDS, the mainstream press and television lagged.
“‘Has the New York Times done it yet?’ is a question writers and correspondents are often asked when they propose stories. A negative response can veto a too-new idea,” James Kinsella wrote in 1989. His book Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media was published in the midst of a still-growing epidemic, and it’s a cutting exposé of the homophobia and negligence that fed into media coverage (and lack of coverage) of the AIDS epidemic. Whether the Times had covered something could indeed sway news judgment at smaller papers as well as TV stations, and the Times wasn’t interested in the AIDS story for years after it began.
At first, the negligence was excusable: the Gay Community News and even the New York Native, which first broke the story of the “gay pneumonia,” didn’t know what to do with the AIDS story when it was a handful of men with a rare pneumonia (that first Native headline, on May 18, 1981: “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded”). But through the end of 1981 the epidemic grew, and quickly. People started dying, and the GCN and the New York Native started paying attention.
The mainstream papers didn’t, and this neglect went on far beyond the window in which “we don’t know enough” was an excuse not to report it. By the end of 1982, nearly 800 people had confirmed cases of AIDS, and the number of people infected was rising exponentially. The death rate for those infected appeared to be above 50 percent. Kinsella found that at that point in the outbreak, the Associated Press had published a total of nineteen stories, UPI (then the other major wire service), ten stories. At the end of 1982, the New York Times had done five stories, none of them on the front page. By way of comparison, in 1982 the Times did four front-page articles, and fifty articles in total, on the Tylenol scare, which killed a total of seven people. The biweekly New York Native had stories on AIDS in almost every issue by the end of that year.
The refusal to cover AIDS at the Times became almost an insistence. In March 1983, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis took over the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Madison Square Garden for a fund-raiser—the largest fund-raiser to date for AIDS victims. Much of the big NYC media covered that event, but not the Times.
Kinsella concluded that despite the “objective” front of the wire services and major papers, relationships, perceptions, and biases mattered. In coverage of AIDS, all of these factors showed through clearly. “For the past decade,” he wrote, “the AIDS story has challenged the ground rules of American journalism. It has forced reporters to acknowledge that their treatment of the news, far from being objective, is often shaped by their personal prejudices and their assumptions about their audience. Such biases are often elusive, but in AIDS reporting, they have taken on exceptional importance.”
Kinsella’s most important conclusion was that, contrary to the common belief that the best coverage of an issue comes from a dispassionate observer, AIDS coverage almost necessitated someone who was close to the issue: “AIDS was discussed most promptly, vigorously, and forthrightly where journalists had direct personal experience with people suffering from the disease.”
He concedes that AIDS was difficult and confusing to cover—the science was unclear for many years, there was no test to confirm infection, and even the name of the disease changed several times. But he’s also clear that many outlets, particularly in the early days, simply didn’t try to keep up with the research into the killer disease. AIDS at first only affected people who were seen as social outcasts, gay people and later IV drug users and Haitians. When the disease was reported in babies, and then later in celebrities, it started to receive some attention. “Every surge of AIDS coverage at almost every newspaper, magazine, or TV and radio station came when the disease seemed to move closer to individual newsmakers or to the people journalists perceive as their audience.”
The gay papers, meanwhile, were watching their audience’s worlds rocked by the trauma of the disease and the soaring death rate. The New York Native covered the epidemic doggedly, with detailed reports about the latest science and continuing critiques from David Rothenberg of the negligent mainstream media. The lagging mainstream media coverage had real effects on the politics: a sense of crisis about the disease was slow to come to Washington, and research wasn’t funded quickly or robustly enough. President Ronald Reagan didn’t say “AIDS” publicly until September 1985, at which point the death toll was in the thousands and included Reagan’s personal friend Rock Hudson. The gay papers published nearly constantly about the dearth of funds for AIDS research, and they weren’t ignored—but they couldn’t have the impact that the New York Times would, had it decided to focus on the stories of the AIDS crisis during the early years.
“By 1986, some reporters in the mainstream media admitted to watching the gay press for tips on the epidemic,” wrote Kinsella. “Scores of journalists across the country . . . said they regularly read the Native or other gay publications. Gay journalists had become more professional during the AIDS crisis. They had to, because reporters for publications like the Advocate and the Native were now covering the life-and-death story of the decade.”
Here, decisions about newsworthiness were truly life-and-death. People close to the epidemic saw it, while others did not.
“People died and nobody paid attention because the mass media did not like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about stories that involved gay sexuality,” wrote Randy Shilts, a gay reporter who covered AIDS for over a decade at the San Francisco Chronicle. A controversial figure in his own right, he ultimately wrote the definitive history of AIDS in the 1980s, And the Band Played On.
Gradually, and thanks in part to the work of reporters like Shilts and the media activists who pushed from the outside, the coverage did come: the New York Times did an about-face in the late ’80s after Abe Rosenthal retired as editor and Max Frankel took over. The paper started covering the epidemic more seriously, asking questions of government officials and telling the stories of patients. In 1988 Rosenthal himself, who had been known as a homophobe, called AIDS “the story of the decade.”
The shift at the Times became even more evident in 1990, when a longtime reporter and editor, Jeffrey Schmalz, was diagnosed with AIDS after he collapsed suddenly in the Times newsroom—at this point, he also came out as gay. Somewhat shockingly, his editors decided to assign him to write about the epidemic, developing an AIDS beat for the first time in the paper’s then ten-year history of covering AIDS. Schmalz died three years later at thirty-nine.
The year before he died, Schmalz wrote about the meaning of his own assignment for the Times: “Now I see the world through the prism of AIDS. I feel an obligation to those with AIDS to write about it and an obligation to the newspaper to write what just about no other reporter in America can cover in quite the same way.” Covering one’s own community, he felt, was “the cutting edge of journalism.” A cutting edge, certainly, for the Times, though the gay papers had been doing it for decades.
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What happens when the personal, the connected, and the empathic actually bring us closer to stories that are true?
“That concept of the personal, that moment of discovering that you are part of this as opposed to just an observer, is a very important moment,” John Scagliotti said to me, almost immediately after I sat down in his kitchen. I knew what he meant: since I had come out as queer at age twelve, becoming identified with a political struggle over my own identity, I hadn’t really known the feeling of being “just an observer,” and had always felt myself in conflict with a world that claimed there was such a thing as being truly separate and detached.
But that concept of the personal isn’t about whether or not one is gay and covering a gay story, or an AIDS victim covering an AIDS story. It’s not just about identity, but about the broader question of whether and how one is implicated in the stories we tell. And of course, all of us are implicated, in one way or another. Those who realized that the AIDS crisis could touch their own lives were more likely to write about it; ignorance of the risk it posed was not so much an “objective” stance as a clueless one, influenced by the privilege of distance. Sometimes it isn’t detachment, but the opposite of detachment—connection and closeness—that gets us closer to the truth.
When a gunman killed forty-nine gay people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub early on a Sunday morning in 2016, I was one of the people who was out at a bar that night too—happy to be queer in New York, a dream I’d had for much of my life. The next morning, I remember the creeping realization of what had happened and who it had happened to; it was flashing on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, taking form in guarded words of mourning from my friends. Of course I knew someone who knew someone who was at Pulse; it felt like we all did. On Monday I called in sick to grieve, and a few weeks later I was in Orlando myself, interviewing people through their grief and heavy drinking, taking a surreal walk through the burgeoning public memorial, the sadness tight in my bones.
I’ve since quit drinking, but at the Parliament House, the seedy gay motel and bar where I was staying in Orlando, I drank myself silly with a couple of people who had just come from another memorial. They had fresh tattoos of a rainbow-colored sound wave showing a pulse, a heartbeat. I knew that I couldn’t wrap my mind around their loss, but I felt connected to it. My stories for Marketplace were burning with my desire to show what this community had been through.
That concept of the personal, that awareness that I was a part of the story, was driving me, as it so often does—to deeper coverage, to more sensitive stories, and to new ideas. On my second night in Florida, I recorded people at a Gay Pride March, the choked sounds of sobbing during a silent vigil for the Pulse victims and the beating of endless techno and margarita-enhanced laughter as the night went on. I ended that night dancing, wild and alone, in a rowdy crowd of queer people of all genders. It felt brave to be out there so soon after Pulse, and it was a reminder that the concept of the personal is also with us when we’re just dancing and drinking.
Andy Kopkind died of cancer in 1994, and not long before his death, he reflected on the changes wrought by the gay movement in his lifetime.
“What has changed the climate in America is the long experience of gay struggle, the necessary means having been, first, coming out, and second, making a scene,” he wrote for The Nation in 1993. I love this idea of making a scene, and it feels clear that sometimes it is journalists who must make a scene—our mission of truth-telling mixing with a mission to advocate for ourselves and our communities. And yet, when journalists do this, we are accused—usually by other journalists—of being activists instead of journalists, propagandists instead of truth-tellers. Why the dichotomy, when history shows so clearly that you can be both?
“Truth can be propaganda. And that doesn’t make it not true,” John Scagliotti said, just before I left the Kopkind Colony. Indeed, sometimes we tell truths with a goal, a particular orientation, even truths that are meant to persuade: people told stories about the AIDS crisis and gay life to try to access necessary resources, change public minds, and stop people from dying. And that’s one way to make a scene: tell a true story that others aren’t quite ready to hear, help force something from the sphere of deviance into the zone of legitimate debate and controversy. It may seem biased—it may be biased—but it’s not the same as abandoning factual, rigorous journalism.
It struck me that maybe we need to stop talking about “bias” and even “propaganda” as if these are in themselves the problem with news media today. In the search for bias, we typically end up simply critiquing meanings we don’t like. This is a punishing cycle with few benefits, I think, for the critics or the criticized. I know that if you look for bias in our news media, you will find it. But in pretending to be objective, we ignore the implications of our subjectivity, refusing to acknowledge that it matters who is making the news.