The Straight Stuff
How the mainstream press sees it
B Y
W
C.
M c R A E
oice Booth, columnist in This Week
magazine, aimed her March 4 rightist
harumphing at HB 2325, Oregon’s
gay rights bill. Booth, who seems to be
former Portland mayor Frank Ivancie in
drag, lathered herself up about the legisla
ture’s inattention to her personal agenda.
On jobs: “ We’ve asked for help on the
economy. We need jobs, we’ve said. Do
something. So what do they do? They
come up with gay-rights legislation. Fine.
Swell. Lots of jobs in that.’’ What the
Imperial We misses is that, for 10-15 per
cent of the Portland homes that This Week
intrudes upon weekly, the gay rights bill is
a jobs bill.
To discontinue This Week distribution at
your address, call 620-4121 and ask for
circulation. But be patient, it may take
months to free your home of this menace.
J
ast month’s story about organized
religion and gays is this month's story
on priests and AIDS following an
“ Up Close and Personal” journalistic
logic of personalizing religion into priests
and foreshortening gays into, well, AIDS.
Priests with AIDS stories have appeared in
most major dailies and are being reprised
now in the weeklies. The story plays well
because the association of priests with
AIDS discredits the priesthood at the same
L
time that the association legitimizes
AIDS. From between the lines comes a
plaintive plea for understanding and gay
rights.
These stories about the Cloistered be
coming the Political almost all ignore
nuns. The press uses the AIDS association
to draw conclusions about the sex lives of
all the men and women of the cloth. Why
such a discussion wasn’t prompted by the
Lesbian Nuns remains a mysery.
riter David Leavitt called it “ the
love that dare not speak its
name’’: friendships between
gay men and straight women. Last
month. Gentlemen’s Quarterly stopped
squirming long enough to print a story on
the subject. The story — of course written
by a woman — is the First I recall where
GQ even acknowledges that gays exist,
which is pretty astonishing considering
what GQ is and who reads it.
GQ must have a larger gay readership
than all the gay papers and magazines in
the world combined, a situation not un
realized by its advertisers. While the arti
cle by Laura Furman is predicable enough
— it’s all, “ Oh, what nice clothes; my,
such manners; and who made the quiche?”
stuff — her final paragraphs reveal her real
“ gay” concern: AIDS, “ I can no longer
afford the luxury of glamorizing [her gay
friend’s) life . . . Now I see the boundary
between us as a minefield, across which I
W
C a n ’t B elieve
keep an eye on my friend.” Fag Hag, get
thee behind me.
n fact, one of the editors of GQ is
pictured in Vanity Fair's two-page
photo memorium of arts and entertain
ment types who have died of AIDS.
Typically for Vanity Fair, even the road to
AIDS is paved with name-dropping, and
one could certainly view the photos and
the long accompanying story as merely a
voyeuristic “ how the good die young”
story. But the story transcends its classist
context, and becomes a moving testimony.
We’re at least spared the mawkish decep
tion of Liberace.
I
ou may have naively thought that if
a gay person were to run for elected
office, then the gay press would do
everything in its power to promote the
candidate. Wrong.
The candidacy of Harry Britt, the
openly gay supervisor from San Francisco,
for California’s fifth congressional seat is
proving that San Francisco gay politics is
easily as Byzantine as anything Chicago
could serve up.
Coming Up!, a San Francisco gay
Y
SofiAiâticated
newspaper, has endorsed Britt’s principle
opponent, Nancy Pelosi, who is a major
fundraiser for the California Democratic
Party but has no elected parliamentary ex
perience. Coming Up! editor Kim
Corsaro, busily tossing garlands, invests
Pelosi with almost superpolitical powers:
“ [Pelosi] is responsible for replacing
Strom Thurmond as chair of Judiciary.
Jesse Helms got his comeuppance from
Pelosi when he lost the chair of Foreign
Relations.” Makes you kind of wonder
how Pelosi could have done all that from
an unelected position in San Francisco,
doesn’t it?
Corsaro scolds Britt for being “ simply
in over his head,’ ’ and assembles lots of off
the record grumbling about Britt from gays
and lesbians, all of whom are portrayed as
resignedly supporting the “ incompetent”
Britt. Coming Up! thus promotes itself as
all the more principled for speaking out
and having the integrity of breaking rank.
It must be difficult using a word proces
sor when you’re shaking your own hand.
The New York Native has also drawn a
bead on Britt, but for being too progres
sive. Britt has truck with the Democratic
Socialists of America, and views “ his ties
to the Democratic Party in the most nomi
nal of terms.”
Whatever Britt’s merits, we’re left with
the unsightly vision of the gay press abas
ing itself deliriously each time a main
stream politician agrees not to quarantine
us, while lashing out at a gay candidate
who might presume to be good enough to
join the mainstream. Of course, nothing
looks so principled to its partisans as
factionalism.
•
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