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.
•
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