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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 1987)
The Straight Stuff How the mainstream press sees it B Y W . C . M c R A E he media had a picnic during the opening month of the National Museum o f Women in the Arts. The museum, brainchild of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay, opened in Wash ington with a permanent collection of 500 works by women since the 16th century, and an inaugural exhibition on American women’s art from 1830-1930. The press hounded out feminists who thought the works not “ feminist” enough, and male art critics who thought the works not pro fessional enough. This left media anchor- people the happy task, a la Koppel (thesis/ antithesis/synthesis), of cheerfully con cluding that the museum is an idea whose time has come. In a generally admirable article in Vogue, critic Barbara Rose adds another consideration to the debate: crafts. How, she frets between the lines, will men ever take women’s painting and sculpture seriously if it is housed with quilts and bead work? The whole notion of “ crafts” strikes me as inherently sexist: If an un trained male artist whittles, it is folk, or primitive, art and therefore collectible. If an untrained female artist tats lace, it is craft, and relegated to second hand stores. T IDS and parents of gays was the subject of an article in last month’s Psychology Today. Researchers surveyed 402 members of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and came up with pretty unsurprising results (71 % of the parents fear their child might “ catch’ [sic] AIDS). The article, complete with graphics of a crying mother, and two men arm-in-arm, whose shadow spells A-I-D-S, is mainly a collection of survey Findings — cold statistics stacked end to end. But the article paints a pretty chilling portrait of our parents. Most parents revealed that they went through the five proxy stages of mourning — from shock to acceptance — when they first discovered their children’s sexual orientation; they re-experienced the same anxieties after the “ AIDS outbreak” ; and presumably they will go through the same steps of mourning when and if we die of AIDS. Who would have thought our folks were such throughfares of psycho/ social constructs? The question remains, though, that if AIDS is not a gay disease, why shouldn’t all parents be equally con cerned? If parents felt differently about their gay children with AIDS than they do about their straight children with AIDS, then there would be a story. A he cultural jungle drums were boom ing that the Baby M case had great relevance for the future of the family, motherhood, and therefore America (drum roll). In general, the main stream press held its finger to the wind and decided the legal claim of Stem Pere was ascendant. It was left to ritual iconoclasts like the Village Voice to promote the mysterious obligation of motherhood by championing Whitehead Mere. It was hard, finally, to decide what, if any, sig nificance the case had. It seemed, start to finish, an exercise in classism, a rich- rents-poor story. My perplexity arose in trying to decide: What’s politically correct here? Is there a feminist perspective in this T case ? It was difficult to sympathize with either side when the New York Times re ported the wrangling over who has the book and movie rights to Baby M’s story. nd speaking of miniseries, did any one else fall for the same trompe I’oeil as I? For a headline about “ Televangelist Ministeries’’ I propheti cally read “ Televangelist Miniseries.” With Jimmy and Tammy Bakker’s sex- drugs-and-merger scandal now opening up to include allegations (from fellow evangelists, of course) of Jimmy’s gay way with boys, the eventual miniseries will have to be aired on cable to avoid the censor. But after all, the greater the sin, the greater the salvation. A BS stopped its self-censorship on positive gay themes long enough to air a one hour mid-afternoon special, directed at a high school audi ence, on the subject of gay youth. As part of its CBS Schoolbreak series, on March 31 the network broadcast “ What if I’m gay?” It was a generally positive, if not uplifting, treatment of the confusion of a male athlete who faces personal and social trauma as he acknowledges his sexual orientation. On distant British shores, the BBC canceled Mates, a two-part drama on the subject of teenage gay life, due to pres sure from the Thatcher government. The Times o f London reports that Mates was to have aired as part of the BBC’s School TV educational series. C he New Republic, in one of its occa sional win-a-subscription contests, recently queried: If the Reagan administration, despite its protestings, al lowed the Iranamuck story to leak out, what must this smokescreen hide that’s really going on behind the scenes in Washington? National Public Radio (NPR) may well win the contest and the subscription with its April 9th story on the gay leadership of the National Endow ment for the Preservaton of Liberty (NEPL), a cover organization for cash running to the Nicaraguan Contras. NPR revealed that the principal fund-raisers for the Reagan administration’s illegal war in Nicaragua are widely-known gay men in Washington; that NEPL leaders, such as Carl “ Spits” Channell, diverted money from the funds collected to male compa nions; and that Oliver North worked very closely with the group. They even had a code name for North, “ Green,” though NPR allowed the listener to ponder whether he was so called for his money, his beret, or his sexual ineptitude. What is germane here is the response of the media. To my knowledge, the story did not break immedi ately in any of the major dailies, and only some days later was picked up by the Wash ington Post and the Baltimore Sun. Moreover, the story itself was accompa nied by hand-wringing on the part of the reporter, Frank Browning. He said that he didn’t think it was improper to report on the sexual preferences of the NEPL organizers. The story was legitimate journalism, he said, because the adminis tration, which is publicly hostile to gays, and certainly has the support of rabid homophobes, knowingly used a largely gay organization to head one of its most secret initiatives. NPR and Browning need not have worried: The inner Reagan circle has always included gay men, though in dictments for perjury have broken up the gang a bit of late. he New York Times reported that President Reagan and Prime Minis ter Chirac of France have reached an agreement ending the row between the US and France concerning who “ owns” the AIDS virus. France’s Pasteur Institute had alleged in a lawsuit that Robert Gallo of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in essence filched the virus from samples gi ven by the French to the CDC, and then claimed the virus discovery was his, and by extension, America’s. The agreement acknowledges a dual French and Ameri can role in the discovery of HIV, with most of the royalties from the resulting blood test being funneled into a new foundation for AIDS research and education. The Pasteur Institute agreed to drop its suit. However, earlier this year, the British T New Scientist (2/12/87) effectively tried the suit in its pages. The results ought to be required reading for anyone interested in AIDS research, and will astonish anybody concerned with the integrity of our medi cal establishment. The New Scientist pro duces evidence that Gallo and his cohorts at the CDC all but stole the virus from the French researchers by refusing to ack nowledge that Gallo’s HTLV-3 is almost certainly derived from the LAV viruses obtained from the French. Equally troub ling is the picture painted of the shifty ineptitude of Gallo himself. The road to Gallo’s appropriation, as the New Scientist clearly details, was lined with greed and pettiness. It is no coinci dence that Gallo sleazed to his position under this administration: He merely takes his place among the other opportunists who have risen to the top under Reagan. And it’s not just medical ethics that were compromised. The New Scientist es timates that Gallo’s tergiversations have cost about a year of AIDS research. • € MCOR€ FLOW€ R9 PLANTS - FLOWERS - GIFTS à ‘When the occasion matters... call Encore. Call 287-6342 Delivery Anywhere Visa & Mastercard Accepted 4120 N.E. Sandy Boulevard - Next to the Hollywood Theater T Being lesbian and gay is not the issue... the real issue is drugs and alcohol. If drugs and alcohol are causing a problem in your life we can help. Right Stepjs a chemical dependency treatment program that can help you take a step in the right direction, o r v r v ^ i f\ r\ r o ciiusmd, 800-221-9053 . 621-3201 Inside Oregon call collect 17645 N.W. St. Helens Road Portland. OR 97231 sw Just Out. 7. May. 1987